George Selgin, March 15, 2021
Ron Paul and Our Big, Fat Fed
https://www.cato.org/blog/ron-paul-our-big-fat-fed

Selgin writes:
By the time the Great Recession ended, the Fed’s balance sheet was more than four times as large as it was in mid‐2008. And now...it has doubled in size yet again, to just shy of $7.6 trillion.

And Ron Paul is partly responsible for it.

Every dollar the Treasury puts into the TGA reduces the banks’ combined reserve balances by one dollar. It follows that, whatever level of reserve balances the Fed considers necessary to keep its “abundant reserve” or floor system functioning smoothly and otherwise achieve its macroeconomic objectives, preserving that level requires a Fed balance sheet that’s X dollars bigger for every X dollars in the TGA account. So, when the Treasury stuffed $1.8 trillion into that account, the Fed had to compensate by arranging to add $1.8 trillion more to its portfolio than it might have added otherwise.

[Talking about old Eccles, long ago:]
Eccles went on to explain that the direct‐purchase authority was “in effect, merely an overdraft privilege with the Reserve banks—a line of available credit for use if needed,” without which “the Treasury would feel obliged to carry much larger cash balances.”

As The New York Times explained on March 31, 1979, a temporary debt ceiling of $798 billion was scheduled to revert, after midnight, to what had been its “permanent” level of just $400 billion. As part of its effort to avoid breaching the ceiling before Congress could raise the ceiling again, the Treasury took advantage of the Fed’s direct purchase authority to borrow $3 billion from the Fed. To do so, it

"first redeemed $3 billion of securities from the Exchange Stabilization Fund, which is utilized to buy foreign currencies to bolster the dollar. This lowered the national debt by that amount, enabling the Treasury to arrange a loan from the Federal Reserve. Such loans are included under the $798 billion ceiling."

One of the hawks who severely disapproved of this maneuver was Ron Paul...
[The "overdraft" expired for good two years later.]

Not Paul’s Fault
What Paul couldn’t have anticipated was the Fed’s October 2008 decision to begin paying interest on bank reserves. That decision once again made it profitable for the Treasury to favor TGA balances over TT&L balances.
[
My (Mac's) comments:
Selgin gives this, rather mercenary, reason for the Treasury stopping storing its money in private banks and banking once again primarily with the Fed. I had presumed the real reason was as a sort of balance to the Fed's excess reserves post 2008 system, or just as a result of that system that it didn't matter much and so they just did it that way, but either way, the result is as Selgin discusses it. But the withdrawal of the (in the scheme of things, small) "overdraft" direct purchase authority meant the Treasury was keeping extra ready cash--and due to the interest on reserves (the Treasury gets paid interest by the Fed?!?!!), Selgin claims, that extra cash went out of the economy and into to the traditional anti-bank account of the Federal Reserve System, the TGA. Now that the TGA acts as an anti-account, withdrawing, not adding money supply to the economy, it forces the interest rate obsessed Fed to do Open Market Ops, hoovering up Treasury Bonds (Selgin calls Treasury Bonds held by the Fed, "the Fed’s balance sheet.")in exchange for the plentiful reserves it was adding to the banking system.

(Now, the Treasury doesn't use it's Federal Reserve System so-called "account" the way the other account holders do. The other account holders loan their money out on the interbank lending market. The Treasury abstains from this, when "banking" with the Fed--so any money that goes into the Treasury General Account is money the banks no longer have access to until it is spent fiscally. So not just the Fed, but the Treasury, when so-called "banking" with the Fed acts as an "anti-bank.")
]

Reposting Good Old Malcolm Roberts
By Anna Von Reitz


Some people are pithy and gracious trouble-makers for those who deserve trouble, and they just keep going at it for their entire lives. Meet Malcolm Roberts and I quote his words of wisdom especially for our British, Irish, Scottish, Welsh, Aussie, Canadian and other former-Commonwealth friends:

"Did the Medical Countermeasures Consortium run #COVID? The Australian, American, British & Canadian #military forces formed this consortium to dominate COVID response. Australia joined the consortium in 2012 under the Labor-Gillard government. A military-pharmaceutical apparatus linking the USA, Australia, Canada and the UK. Operation Warp Speed: The US Department of Defense signed the first contract between the US government and #Pfizer for the purchase of US$11 billion dollars worth of #vaccines. We know our Therapeutic Goods Administration (#TGA) did not review stage 2/3 trial data and instead relied on the US FDA, which took Pfizer's word for how the trials went! Pfizer committed systemic fraud during its trials, which has come out now through whistle-blowers' testimony and in the release of Pfizer's own data. Pfizer, it seems, gave the US government the vaccine they asked for. It was developed using #gainoffunction research in conjunction with #Wuhan in #China and, of course, #AnthonyFauci. The military-pharmaceutical in action. These are matters to be dealt with in a Royal Commission. The Royal Commission that was promised by the Albanese government. Call a Royal Commission into COVID now!"

Yes, what a good idea, Malcolm. Time to roast some Pfizer buns over charcoal and follow up with investigation into the activities of the Wellcome Trust which has been a Perpetrator of medical crimes since the 1850s and the Pirbright Institute as well.

Covid isn't "just" an American or Chinese problem.

The true genesis of the current malady started in Britain well-over a hundred years ago and simply manifested as this particular viral bioweapon now.

All the hateful racist and elitist ideas and prejudices embodied by Lord Pirbright, Henry Wellcome and Cecil Rhodes --- and all the money they left in their endowments --- have provided the seedbed of this current genocide and its development since the 1960's.

Time to get to the bottom of the dog pile. A Royal Commission to flame-broil the US Perpetrators, and a Congressional Special Committee to roast their British counterparts.

What say you, people of the world? Shall we stop the Good Cop - Bad Cop nonsense, and dig out the root of this evil once and for all?

----------------------------

See this article and over 4300 others on Anna's website here: www.annavonreitz.com

Tenth Amendment Center, Mike Maharrey's specific concerns over the national debt are on the surface quite narrow and could easily be addressed with simple work-arounds.

If the specific problem is, that "we'll end up spending ninety percent of our working hours laboring just so government can pay its debts and daily expenses," I propose the following work-arounds:

1. Permanently suspend the debt ceiling: the public then, would never have to pay a dime of taxes again, as all could, from the perspective of the narrow problem he cites, be paid solely by Treasury Bond issuance.

2. The much clearer, and my preferred, actual solution would be simply Congress passing a law prohibiting the issuance by the Treasury of Treasury Bonds. That would require but a few minor additional changes in the law to make it workable. What are those possibilities?
1. Allowing, as in Canada, the Fed to participate in Treasury auctions, but remove the maximums Canada, probably, imposes. Yet Fed. independence suggests nothing would change from the current situation, and if it did, it could then do massive reverse QE on a whim and, perhaps, destroy all the banks but the very biggest (J.P. Morgan et al. ...).
2. *Requiring* the Fed to do QE the entire debt. Again, the FRB "agency" independence reverse QE Damacles'
3. Allow an unlimited so-called "overdraft" on the Treasury account (the TGA) at the Fed. Optics. Optics. You all would still be saying the same old lines...
4. Close the Treasury General Account! The Cato Institute's George Selgin*1 had a similar proposal. He proposed moving The Treasury's money out of the TGA and back to private sector bank accounts (TT&L accounts) again the way it did prior to 2008. That would not be the same as closing the TGA, which would still be needed on the day of actual payout under the system of negative "liability" Treasury dollar payments that "needs" clearance with positive Fed. "reserve" dollars on the evening of the payout (as with banks after a whole day's worth of debit and credit cancellations across the world dollar system that leaves (ideally--except in our frequent financial crashes) but a small residual). The TGA could then be left at a steady near zero with all the enormous swings occuring within its private sector bank accounts, within the private economy, creating but minimal inflows and outflows from and into the non governmental sector as a whole. Just as an example to show something like my idea could, and used to be the norm, be done.

If we closed the TGA altogether, though, well does that change anything? As, its not the existence of a supposedly malevolent three letter agency in this case that has anything to do with the base case: which is that Treasury payments aren't, unlike coin, given equal status with Federal Reserve dollars, but rather are treated as negative money, as liabilities, liabilities that require, as with all private sector bank-to-bank payments, clearance with Fed. reserve dollars. Stephanie Kelton, of course, talks of Treasury payments themselves, pre-clearance, as positive money, as something having an inherent equivalence with Fed. reserves. She treats the need to "pay for" from the direct opposite direction: if one assumes a Treasury payment itself is defacto positive money, not a liability of the state (All the MMT FB group more senior members will leap in to say all dollars are "liabilities," neglecting the whole fact that they have entirely shifted the usage of the word from when it pointed to silver dollar coin, or gold bullion or what have you).--then what could be the purpose of Treasury Bond issuance? Taking Mosler's insight: the re-auction of Treasuries by the Fed. as a monetary tool for the economy as a whole suggests a similar role for the initial issuance of a Treasury Bond by the Treasury: not, then, as a FISCAL tool, but as means of MONETARILY sanitizing fiscal expenditure out of the hands of the banking system by issuing what amounts to accounts in which the non-bank sector can hold its dollars independently from, outside of banking sector accounts.


*1https://www.cato.org/blog/empty-purses-mmt-rhetoric

https://sovren.media/video/the-national-debt-threatens-independence-and-liberty-3202.html

Australian regulator ends ban on off-label use of ivermectin

https://newstarget.com/2023-05-10-tga-ends-ban-off-label-use-ivermectin.html

Australian regulator ends ban on off-label use of ivermectin

https://www.naturalnews.com/2023-05-10-tga-ends-ban-off-label-use-ivermectin.html