100th Anniversary Of The Federal Reserve, Will You Celebrate

Maybe by the 200th anniversary the penny will finally be gone!!

I guess when you get everything fro free or paid for by the tax payers you lose touch of how meaningless change really is now aside from collecting. Even a lot of toll roads now you need more than change to get through the toll.

Must have been nice back in the old days when everything you carried was actually capable of purchasing something

Celebrate 100 yrs of the fed, seriously... celebrate?!?

Grrrrrr... bunch of humans!
I think that the "thin air" argument is exaggerated. It does take /some/ work to pump out trillions of dollars.
I think that the problem is actually in the acceptance of old dollars as legal tender. In theory it's a great idea because it gives more faith to the dollar, that it will always be accepted even 50-100 years later. What's gone is the ability to exchange those dollars for tangible assets, that is, dollars in a precious form. But either way, a paper dollar has work behind it just as silver dollars do. I think that the difference is that paper money is "infinite" so that incredible wars can be funded and fought (Vietnam, Iraq, and every other US intervention in Latin America and the Middle East) and eventually justified through fear. Enemies are defeated by knowing them and connecting with them in the social world, not by throwing bombs at them.

Tell that to our new record breaking level of debt that last 4 years.

If our money had been backed by precious metals, the massively mismanaged amounts of money spent for (historically proven as failure concept) failed "stimulus" would not have been there to waste.

The only work involved in this faux political move was the working of the presses to print the money. It was during a rubber stamp legislative era.

I think Libertad has a point, the federal reserve cannot print as much money as they want without the government issuing more and more bonds. I think if they printed another 2-3 trillion or so dollars the treasury market would take a hit and the government would have to raise interest rates. This would absolutely sink our economy, because the government would have to raise interest rates on mortgages, in addition to raising the total national debt. This would have a cumulative effect, inflation may rise to 10% (even in the fed's twisted calculation)compounding the problem. This is in addition to our very complicated fractional reserve banking system that is constantly multiplying our total money supply by lending more and more money both publicly and privately. So... In other words, the fed should not print more money until the stimulus + QE 1 and QE 2 has been completely spent, (A large amount of it is still in the accounts of the large banks that were bailed out). But... If the fed doesn't print more money, there is no way that the net GDP is going to be positive for the coming year. The reason the economy has been growing lately is purely the dollar's value going down, not the total amount of wealth created going up. So the fed has got itself in a catch 22. Thankfully, the dollar has been exceptionally strong lately due to investors bailing out of the stock and commodity markets. This may influence the fed's decision on whether or not to make a true QE 3. (not the sly quantitative easing that has been going on recently.)So all in all I think I agree with libertad's premise bot not his conclusion, central banks are dangerous because the entire economy is in the hands of either the government, or a state sponsored monopoly.I'm not sure which is worse (sorry about not making paragraphs didn't realize my rant was so long)