The Treasury, the Fed, and Gold

Last week, two experts on the Treasury and the Fed gave a very interesting talk about the two entities' balance sheets. This is especially timely as the President is talking about applying the "leftover" TARP money to a new stimulus venture, and the Treasury is about to vote federal employees an unconscionable pay raise.

This conference was sponsored by the Cleveland-Marshall Libertarians and the Cleveland-Marshall Federalist Society and was called "U.S. Monetary and Fiscal Policy: Going Exponential."


[Thanks to Mathwarehouse.com for the image.]

Just to give you a taste, the following are excerpts from a good review by Kevin Lovach, the Co-Editor in Chief of The Gavel, CSU Ohio:

"[Walker] Todd is a former C-M professor who served as an officer of the Federal Reserve Banks of Cleveland and New York. He joined Case Western Reserve University Professor Emeritus William Pierce in analyzing the Federal Reserve’s monetary policies and federal deficit spending. Pierce served previously as Chair of the Case Economics Department and is a former Libertarian Party gubernatorial candidate.

"Stressing his view that the problems stem from Washington, D.C. and the banking-heavy northeast, Todd said 'the existing Federal Reserve leadership needs to be booted out.' He quipped, 'I’d like to see the Board of Governors hanged first, the New York Fed hanged second, Boston hanged third.'

"Pierce put federal deficit spending for the 2009 fiscal year at 9.9-percent, a figure topped only by spending during and immediately after World War II. He argued that while the economy can handle deficits of three-percent of gross domestic product 'forever,' anything substantially higher 'becomes real money.'"

For the whole review, see Page 9 of The Gavel for December 2009, which you can download at this Cleveland State University page:

The Gavel

To see the conference in its entirety, go to the following page and click on the links. They are around nine minutes each and well worth your time if you want to understand the problems and implications surrounding our exploding national debt and the current precarious Fed balance sheet. They also mention gold as a safe haven and discuss the few other options around.

U.S. Monetary and Fiscal Policy: Going Exponential