I’d say that the Treasury is really responsible for the minting and regulation of coinage and money supply. It never made sense to make up this private cartel of banks to loan our own money to us for interest.

For what it’s worth, I’d say have the US count up its precious metals stores (gold, silver, platinum, heck even copper), figure out how much it’s worth. That’s how much money we can back up. The rest (debts, t-bills, etc) would be defaulted on. We could even be sold bold as to revalue metals, i.e. gold is $900/oz but $1200 nu-dollars are worth an ounce of gold, fully redeemable. At least we’d be in a state where we couldn’t print money we didn’t have.

Or we could hijack the IMF and world bank and just rob them

Yeah, I know these would be dreadfully unpopular or impossible to implement. I don’t envy the next occupant of the White House. Jimmy Carter had tried to get things righted only 5 years after Nixon defaulted on our gold backed paper, it was a huge mess, and he has been villified since. No matter how you look at it, there needs to be strong medicine administered and we can’t dither too much on the patient’s wailing.

to anonymous at 8:22

After we “liquidate” the FED, what do we do for a monetary system in this country?
Who will be responsible for monetary and currency policy?
Who will pick up the job of employing Americans and keeping inflation in check?
Just wondering if you have any ideas on that?

to anonymous at 2:05

I agree completely about abolishing the debt.
My Dad, who lived through the great depression, going to work at 14, used to remind me, a bunch.
The day before the crash, everyone had their job, everyone had their home, their food, their pride.
Everything that existed did so because of the labor of the American people. They built it with their blood, sweat and tears.

All of a sudden, there were no jobs, there was no money, there was no food and all those good laboring American workers were shit.
On the bread lines.
How could that happen?
Who was in control of what to allow such despair to rule the land?
Not the workers.
Not the voters.
Who?
The answer he found was whomever it was that controlled whatever remaining value there was to the financial system as that system crashed.
fugem.

There needs to be a lot more open discussion about this. Why not let Bear Sterns, et al, fail, if they don’t run their businesses better? What message do you send by bailing them out?

It’s easy. The message is that you can sell investment instruments that are essentially bogus and make enormous personal bonus’s with impunity. So why not do it? So what if the fiscal structure of the company collapses,you get your bonus. Venality and greed are major players in this crisis, and they are largely ignored.

Last, these rescues ignore the role of venality and greed in creating these problems. People earned enormous bonus’s by selling essentially bogus investment instruments.

But much more important, is letting people die because of money Come on people, are we not more evolved than this.

My vote is to make everything free in cost, but your labor is required.