How Right-Wing Libertarians, John Birchers and Conspiracy Freaks Are Trying to Hijack OWS

[AdHocSolver]

2. The Federal Reserve is run by and for the big banks.

The Fed is the enabler of the boom and bust cycles in the stock market and the real estate markets.

The Fed does its job for the "banksters" by keeping interest rates artificially low to bank depositors, giving essentially free money to insiders to speculate with, all the while charging comparatively high interest rates to credit card holders and "legitimate" borrowers.

Add to this the current increases in transaction fees to bank customers, and depositors wind up paying the banks for the privilege of having savings, checking, and money market accounts.

A little arithmetic example. A bank pays 0.2 percent interest on a money market account while charging 14 percent interest on a credit card balance. The bank is getting interest 70 times greater than what they are paying for the use of the money.

Considering that a few years ago, banks were paying 2 percent interest on customers' deposits, banks are currently making out like bandits.

The Fed determines what interest the banks pay. They do NOT set the interest rates for depositor accounts so low to aid the US economy. The big banks are not lending the money to small businesses to expand.

When the Glass-Steagall Act was repealed, it again became legal for the so-called investment banks to buy or merge with commercial banks, the kind that ordinary people deal with. Investment banks are Wall Street banks. Now it is legal for "investment" banks to use depositors' money to set up hedge funds, speculate, and have unlimited amounts of "free" money to run Ponzi schemes in the stock market.