The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the gentleman from Texas (Mr. PAUL) is recognized for 5 minutes.
2011 Ron Paul 3:1
Mr. PAUL.
Mr. Speaker, in the last several weeks, there have been several articles published by officials from the Federal Reserve system. This is a little bit unusual because they are critical of anybody who criticizes them and are critical of me in particular. In these articles, they are trying to discredit anybody who disagrees with their policies, and they are very defensive of this.
2011 Ron Paul 3:2
They have argued the case that they should have total secrecy. In this total secrecy, I claim they have tremendous power to do the things that they want to do, and it has only been recently that the American people and this Congress have awakened to this. Although we did not get a full audit of the Fed last year, we did get a partial audit of the emergency funding, but still the Fed’s argument is they have to have total independency while the American people believe there should be transparency.
2011 Ron Paul 3:3
The Fed’s argument is that they literally are the saviors of the economy, that they came in as an emergency when the markets were crashing, and that they were able to rescue the entire world economy by their injection of hundreds of billions, if not trillions, of dollars.
2011 Ron Paul 3:4
The fallacy of all this is that they may have rescued some banks and that they may have rescued some big businesses, but they didn’t rescue the American people. The consequence of all this has been high unemployment, people losing their houses, and people who can’t pay their mortgages.
2011 Ron Paul 3:5
So, in their claim that they prevented a deep depression, they prevented a depression for some very wealthy, well-connected people on Wall Street, who were making a lot of money anyway in the bubble period of time. Now the people who are suffering the most are the average people, who have had to suffer the consequence of the Federal Reserve policies. This is a policy that punishes the innocent people and that actually rewards the guilty people and the people who were the beneficiaries.
2011 Ron Paul 3:6
You know, the very people who are claiming that they have solved all of our problems are the very ones who created the problems, and they never
once predicted the trouble that was coming. There were numerous economists from around the country, especially the free-market Austrian economists, who predicted and explained the housing bubble—that it was coming and that there would be a collapse; but the people at the Federal Reserve, who now are claiming they solved all our problems, never once said that we could be in trouble.
2011 Ron Paul 3:7
When asked, they said, No, there’s no housing bubble. Where do you get all this?
2011 Ron Paul 3:8
So now we are supposed to believe everything they tell us. They created it. They didn’t tell us there was trouble coming, and now they’ve solved all of the problems, and we are not supposed to question this. If we do, then we’re going to be on the receiving end of severe criticism.
2011 Ron Paul 3:9
The conclusion of many of these articles has been that they want to deflect the concentration on the Federal Reserve. They will say that, yes, there still are problems, but they’re all on the Congress, that it has nothing to do with them. They save us from ourselves, and they take care of us. They create good times and take care of us when we are in bad times.
2011 Ron Paul 3:10
The whole thing is they claim that our deficits are a problem—and I agree with them on that. The deficits are a problem. But, if you think about it, why do the deficits get run up? We as Members of Congress—this whole Congress for decades on decades—have run up deficits to pay for welfare programs and warfare. Endless spending. We tax the people until we can’t tax anymore. We borrow, and there is a limit on borrowing or your interest will rates go up.
2011 Ron Paul 3:11
Guess who monetizes the debt and enables the Congress to continue this spending. It’s the Federal Reserve. They are the ones who literally facilitate the deficit financing.
2011 Ron Paul 3:12
So, for them to turn around and say it’s all the blame of the Congress, they are absolutely being disingenuous. It is the Federal Reserve and a monetary system that encourages runaway deficits, runaway spending, runaway militarism, and runaway welfarism.
2011 Ron Paul 3:13
The Fed, over the years, has had two mandates: to have price stability and full employment. Well, think about the price stability. Did they have price stability with the NASDAQ stocks back in the year 2000 that collapsed when that bubble developed? Have they had steady prices, price stability with medical care costs or housing costs or education costs? No, absolutely none. Today, bond prices are sky high. We have a bond bubble going on right now, and it’s the result of Federal Reserve policy, but they don’t want you to think and talk about that.
2011 Ron Paul 3:14
And the full employment mandate, I mean, just think of it; the government, our government, Labor and Statistics admits there is 9.5 percent unemployment. And then they say, well, if you count more people who are partially unemployed, it’s 17 percent. But if you have a free market approach and count everybody who’s unemployed, our unemployment rate is 23 percent. That’s why the American people are feeling lousy about what’s going on, even though Wall Street once again is making money. The banks are making money, they’re repaying their bills, but it’s all because of a collusion between the Federal Reserve System, the banks, and the large corporations while the people are still unemployed.
2011 Ron Paul 3:15
Congress has a proper responsibility, and it is oversight. It was never meant for the Federal Reserve to have free rein and not have any oversight whatsoever. And we have to realize this whole issue of central banking is not a new issue; it was here from the very beginning. Hamilton and Jefferson argued about it; Jefferson and Jackson and many others were absolutely opposed to central banking. So it’s not a new issue, but there is no authority in the Constitution that grants this right to have a central bank and to create money out of thin air just to accommodate the politicians.
2011 Ron Paul 3:16
We have a right and an obligation and a responsibility for oversight of the Federal Reserve, and our responsibility is to look at bad policy. The Federal Reserve is responsible for the inflation in the business cycle, the unemployment. It is up to us to do something about it and look into it, first to look into it and understand it because then it will be realized that we need to have more oversight.
2011 Ron Paul 3:17
Right now there is tremendous support; in the last Congress we had 320 Members of this House who supported an audit of the Fed. So we’re making progress here. It annoys the Federal Reserve. For the first time in their history, they’ve hired a PR agency and lobbyists to lobby for their position. So they know they are under the gun as far as people are waking up and realizing that the Federal Reserve has been responsible for so much havoc that we’ve had in this country. I think it is our responsibility to continue to look at the Fed and find out how they have caused so much trouble.
