by Chris Martenson, Peak Prosperity:

Perhaps I should start with a disclaimer of sorts. Yes, I realize that the people working at the Federal Reserve, as well as the other central banks around the world, are just people. Like the rest of us, they have egos, fears, worries, hopes, and dreams. I’m sure pretty much all of them go home each night believing they are basically good and caring individuals, doing important work.

But they’re destroying America. They might have good intentions, but they are working with bad models. Ones that lead to truly horrible outcomes.

One of the chief failings of central banks is that they are slaves to an impossible idea; the notion that humans are free to pursue perpetual exponential economic growth on a finite planet. To be more specific: central banks are actually in the business of promoting perpetual exponential growth of debt.

But since growth in credit drives growth in consumption, the two are concepts are so intimately linked as to be indistinguishable from each other. They both rest upon an impossibility. Central banks are in the business of sustaining the unsustainable which is, of course, an impossible job.

I can only guess at the amount of emotional energy required to maintain the integrity of the edifice of self-delusion necessary to go home from a central banking job feeling OK about oneself and one’s role in the world. It must be immense.

I rather imagine it’s not unlike the key positions of leadership at Easter Island around the time the last trees were being felled and the last stone heads were being erected. “This is what we do,” they probably said to each other and their followers. “This is what we’ve always done. Pay no attention to those few crackpot haters who warn that in pursuing our way of life we’re instead destroying it.”

The most compassion I can drum up for central bankers right now is to observe that they really do have an impossible job; and their training has been simply too narrow and dogmatic for them to detect the gaping, obvious flaws in their world views. They never studied energy resource issues. Nor did they have to take any behavioral psychology classes that would have explained to them how deeply unfair economic practices are socially corrosive. Nor any history classes that would expose how such actions proved ruinous when they were applied in previous societies.

But here we are. The fact that the central bankers are either accidentally ignorant or purposely too lazy to explore the wider world of ideas is not one you can ignore any longer. Real consequences are coming and there’s no ducking them. We’re all in this big canoe of life together and the Fed and our political officials are exhorting us to paddle faster towards the roaring falls ahead.

You need to understand this. If you want to have any chance of navigating the future successfully, you have to understand what they are doing, how they are doing it, and why it will fail. If you don’t take the time to sort out the mechanisms and implications…well, good luck. You’re going to need it.

For those who prefer to rest their future prospects on Knowing instead of (misplaced) Hoping, read on.

How The Fed Gives Billions Of US Taxpayer Money To Foreign Banks

Out of many truly maddening sins committed by the Fed, perhaps the most glaring of late is its practice of handing billions and billions of dollars of US taxpayer money to big foreign banks.

I explain the process in this short video:

The summary of the video is this: the Fed is now paying interest on so-called ‘excess reserves’ held at the Fed. Those ‘excess reserves’ include a huge chunk of money held there by foreign banks who are only too happy to receive 1% on their holdings from the Fed given that their own central banks are paying 0%, or even negative rates.

The money that the Fed pays these foreign banks is deducted from the amount remitted to the US Treasury at the end of each fiscal year.

It’s this simple: foreign banks are being paid billions of US taxpayer dollars and not one single person in the US got to vote for or approve of that action.

Let me repeat that: billions and billions of US taxpayer money is being sent to boost the profits of foreign banks. And there’s not a single thing a voting citizen can do about it.

Read More @ PeakProsperity.com