House Financial Services Committee Chairman and Massachusetts Democratic Congressman Barney Frank believes that Texas Congressman Ron Paul's HR 1207, which is a bill to audit the Federal Reserve, will pass the house.
'Here’s what we plan to do: I want to restrict the powers of the Federal Reserve in a number of ways. First of all, they will be the major losers of power if we’re successful, as I believe we will be, setting up that, uh, financial product protection committee,' Congressman Barney Frank said in front of a group during a town hall meeting in the state of Massachusetts.
House Resolution 1207 has a majority of co-sponsors (282) in the House of Representatives and all Republicans have signed on.
S. 604, which is the Senate version of HR 1207, has 23 co-sponsors. Even though Frank disagrees that the Federal Reserve is one of the causes of a devalued United States dollar, as a lot of the proponents of the bill state, he still believes in transparency in the Federal Reserve.
'The Federal Reserve is now charged with protecting consumers. They were supposed to do sub-prime mortgage restricted … Congress in 1994 gave the Federal Reserve the power to adopt rules to ban bad sub-prime mortgages. … They have the power to ban credit card abuses. They have the power to do most of it. They, under Greenspan, did nothing. Under Bernanke, they started to do things, but only after Congress started, when I became chairman of the [House Financial Services Committee], we began to act on these things: Sub-prime mortgages, credit cards, overdraft … And after we started, the Fed did. So, that’s why one of the reasons why in the new consumer protection agency we will take away from the Federal Reserve the power to do consumer protection.'
'Under section 13.3 of the Federal Reserve Act, they can lend money to whoever they want. We are going to curtail that lending power. We are going to put some constraints on it.'
Auditing the Federal Reserve has gained support in both Washington and among the general public. A recent
survey shows that three in four Americans want an audit and transparency of the Fed.
The former Governor of New York Eliot Spitzer was on
MSNBC in mid-summer and called the Federal Reserve a 'ponzi scheme' and 'an inside job.' Former 2008 Democratic Presidential Candidate and Ohio Congressman
Dennis Kucinich has said. 'The Federal Reserve is no more federal than Federal Express.'
Economic analysts like
Jim Rogers,
Peter Schiff and others have called for the end of America's Central Bank.
Barney Frank concluded, 'Finally, we are going to subject them to a complete audit. I’ve been working with Ron Paul, the main sponsor of that bill. He believes that we don’t want to have the audit appear as if it is influencing monetary policy because that would be inflationary … One of the things that will show you is what the Federal Reserve buys and sells. That will be made public, but not instantly. If it were instant, you would have a lot of people trading off that and it would have too much impact on the market. Again, Ron agrees with that. So, we will probably have that data released after a time period of several months — enough time so it won’t be market sensitive.'
