Will post more later, just want to get the most important stuff down…
Basically, I visited the Fed branch in Denver. There, I found out several things:
If we got rid of the fed, there would be chaos, since people need one currency, according to the people there. Also, they say savings are good in the long run, but people need to spend right now! Wait, they dodged my question, do savings or spending promote economic growth.
The inflation was caused by oil and food prices, and this deflation is now caused by decreasing prices. Wait a second…
There were bubbles in specific industries, most notably housing and manufacturing. Wait, how does this correlate with Keynesian economics?
The fed provides financial stability. They make sure that the banks are behaving as they should be.
The fed serves the public, by helping the banks out, they say.
The economic “experts” cannot predict boom-bust cycles, even though austrian economists can see them years into the future. They say it is like predicting the weather.
The fed, apparently, needs high amounts of security.
The fed has people who sit around all day maintaining the dollar bills and managing checks (although they are switching to a different system for this). They have really expensive machines to do this work. Wait, couldn’t private industries do this?
The fed will never admit that they cause the boom-bust cycle, just mentioning that perhaps Greenspan had something to do with it. They instead had a presentation that it was these risky mortgage-backed securities. Which at the end (ironically) suggested people to save.