2021 Would Be a Great Time to Audit the Fed

Gone are the days of the Federal Reserve hiding in the shadows. Now it’s a woke central bank fighting for climate and racial justice. Progressives must not fall for this but instead team up with the populist right to audit the Fed and demand transparency.

Let the healing begin! If it is going to be President Joe Biden a couple months from now, then there will be all the more incentive for antiestablishment Democrats to join forces with populist Republicans. What better issue than auditing the Federal Reserve System?

There is strong precedent for progressives and the populist right to unite around an “Audit the Fed” movement. In early 2009, Congressman Ron Paul introduced the Federal Reserve Transparency Act, which garnered 320 House cosponsors by the summer of 2010.

Since then, the antiestablishment factions of both parties have grown and at least one of the 2009 House cosponsors now holds a Senate seat. Audit the Fed has passed the House on three occasions, so it could see as much or more success this coming session.

Another development over the last eleven years is the Fed’s evolving public image. Before Ron Paul’s 2008 presidential run, the central bank lurked in near-total darkness. Two thousand nine was a breakout year for its public relations campaign, and the Fed has failed to return to its prior obscurity.

Now the secretive power center larps as a super–social justice warrior, fighting for climate and racial justice, the top pet issues of the progressive left. Many grassroots progressives expressed their distaste for Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, but even those who held their noses to vote for them shouldn’t feel at all obliged to apologize for the Fed’s virtue signaling.

Meanwhile, inflationary monetary policy most harms those people and communities whom the progressive left claims to champion. Saving becomes more difficult or impossible, while prices of goods rise.

All the more reason for the Fed to adopt the likeness of a woke institution. Just as it has blamed “irrational exuberance” for boom-bust cycles, it can now blame systemic racism or climate change for poor economic growth that’s actually fueled by its own monetary policy.

This week, the Fed officially sought membership in the Network for Greening the Financial System, an assemblage of central banks and other international forces that “support the transition toward a sustainable economy” for the sake of the climate.

This past summer, Fed chairman Jerome Powell promised to improve “diversity” within the Fed’s structure. Will the new friendlier, kinder, and woker Federal Reserve System win the trust of progressives or irk them for stealing their thunder and undermining their vision?

Most Americans already don't trust the Fed, especially Democrats, people forty-nine and under, and those making less than $50,000 a year. Those would be natural progressive constituencies.

https://mises.org/wire/2021-would-be-great-time-audit-fed

Pompeo Passes Torch to Biden Admin Touting a Fundamentally Realigned Globe

ABU DHABI—As the Trump administration finishes its final weeks in office, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo opened up about his two-and-a-half years as America’s top diplomat, telling the Washington Free Beacon that the incoming Biden administration will inherit a fundamentally realigned globe.

During an interview with the Free Beacon in Abu Dhabi, where Pompeo was finishing the final stop in a 7-country, 10-day jaunt—likely his last major tour in office—Pompeo pulled the curtain back on his efforts to align the globe against adversarial regimes such as China and Iran.

Many of the Trump administration’s signature foreign policy achievements—from crushing the Iranian regime with sanctions to moving the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem—were met with fierce pushback from world leaders, as well as Democrats and sometimes Republicans in Congress. Pompeo was quickly billed by the American press as dangerous—criticism that Pompeo says is devoid of reality.

Take his latest trip, for instance: Pompeo stopped in France, Turkey, Israel, Georgia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia. From these places he generated headlines for offending world leaders and leaning into a hardline pro-Israel, anti-Iran foreign policy that the Biden administration is more than likely to buck. Pompeo says, however, the policies laid down by the Trump administration—be it the administration’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital or its tight-knit relationship with Gulf Arab nations—will reverberate well into President-elect Joe Biden’s first term in office.

"These were just facts that everyone knew but refused to acknowledge and we ripped the band-aids, said these are the right things to do, and we got America and the Middle East in a better place," Pompeo said. "I think the American people get it. I think the people in Europe get it. I know the people throughout the Middle East get it, that this realism … rests on a set of foundations that are unassailable."

https://freebeacon.com/national-security/pompeo-passes-torch-to-biden-admin-touting-a-fundamentally-realigned-globe/