Blaming It All On the Fed

DONALD J. TRUMP, forty fifth president of the United States of America, has generously informed us of the single cause of all America's economic woes, assuming there are any. This, in the era of an administration which pledged to make America great once again, just like it once was but had not recently been, and which, by the president's own admission, has done exactly that, in some mysterious unseen manner unknown to anyone but the chief executive himself and his sycophantic subordinates and followers. There is nothing wrong with the American economy, nothing whatsoever, says the don, other than the chairperson of the Federal Reserve Bank. To some of us, that must comes as news, to most of us, as more pathological presidential drivel, to his supporters, gospel. Trump threatens to fire the Federal Reserve Chairman, which, he has allegedly been advised, surprisingly, by his inner circle, he cannot legally do. The Federal reserve Board, consisting of seven unlucky, browbeaten souls, has raised the prime interest rate three times this past year, for a whopping total of three quarters of one percent, and that, says the billionaire bubble bursting Mr. Trump, is the essence of all problems, of which he has repeatedly told us there are none, the root of all economic evil. Never mind that over a quarter of the nation's wealth is in the hands of one tenth of one percent of the population. Never mind that there are more than forty million Americans in poverty, that worker's wages have barely budged, adjusted for inflation, for forty years. The federal reserve bank is supposed to be independent of all political machinations. That's why it was established as an independent entity. And no, contrary to rumors popular among new age gurus and conspiracy theorists, the fed is most definitely not, repeat not secretly owned and operated by a cabal of European trillionaires and interventionist extraterrestrials. The federal bank, established in 1913 and consisting of twelve interlinked branches scattered across the fruited plain, stabilizes the economy, or supposedly serves that function, when left unmolested by miracle mongers and madmen. Two of the banks are in the great state of Missouri, in Kansas City and St; Louis, because then powerful Missouri Senator James Reed hedged his support for the scheme by insisting that "I don't know what these banks are supposed to do, but my state is going to have two of them." Had the Senator but known the uproar they would cause a century in his future, instigated by a multi billionaire president without much knowledge of the banking industry or monetary policy, he might have been content with one.