The Federal Reserve may claim to be fighting inflation, but Rep. Thomas Massie joins Glenn to make the case that the Fed is also CAUSING the inflation. Between all the money printing, interest rate changes, and bank bailouts, the Fed is toppling the U.S. dollar, Massie argues. And while you’re suffering, the big banks are getting richer. So, because of this, the Fed has got to go! But what would replace the Fed? Massie gives his top choice …

Transcript

Below is a rush transcript that may contain errors

GLENN: There is somebody that I really respect, that is doing something that absolutely has to happen. You want to fix the country, we must abolish the Federal Reserve right now.

And representative Thomas Massie is on the phone with me now.

Hi, Thomas, how are you?

THOMAS: Hey, Glenn. Thanks for covering this topic. It really needs to happen.

We're done nibbling around the edges. I've introduced the bill to audit the fed for a decade.

We're past that, and we have to end it.

GLENN: Yeah. So explain to people, what the fed is, is what it has been doing lately. It's our central bank. And it has nothing to do with the federal government.

It is a private corporation. Correct?

THOMAS: Yeah. Let me just explain what's happened under Jerome Powell. And I hate to pick on him, but he's the fed chairman right now. And under him, we've seen 25 percent of the value of the dollar, disappear.

Meanwhile, during COVID, the investment bankers, and the Wall Street bankers. Had their best year ever in 2020.

And we hit 7 percent inflation. During COVID.

Thanks to the fed.

They are -- and then let me just tell you about Jerome Powell's background. Because it's indicative of the kind of people that worked there.

He started out as an attorney, and he went into investment banking. Then he went to Treasury. Then he left Treasury. And went into banking.

And investment banking. And it was Barack Obama who put him on the federal Board of Governors.

And then it was Trump who elevated him to chairman, and then it was Biden who renominated him.

This guy is the Uniparty person, who makes the investment bankers rich and everybody else poor in this country.

GLENN: But it's also -- people need to understand, the president can't just nominate anybody, or appoint anybody.

The -- the Federal Reserve -- so all of the -- what is it, seven or eight banks?

The biggest banks. We are not even allowed to know who they are, which is incredibly un-American and leads to all kinds of corruption. They get together, and they say to the president. Here are a few names, that we'll accept. You pick from one of them. Right?
THOMAS: Right. And then when that guy takes the job, who do you think he goes out to have dinner with every night?

I mean, there's this argument that we want our monetary policy to be independent of Congress or the executive branch. But it's a falsehood, that it's independent right now. It's not independent at all.

I mean, Jerome Powell lobbies Congress and the White House to engage in more fiscal stimulus. And then they're working.

I mean, when the Treasury gets their debt monetized by the fed. You think that's an independent thing?

No. That's a carefully orchestrated dance. That's what they've done recently. There's three ways you can get money for the government to spend.

You can either tax the people and get money back. Or you can borrow the money. Or you can just create it out of thin air.

And what they did during COVID, is they created trillions of dollars out of thin air.

And this is -- Congress is to blame as well. Congress spent those trillions of dollars. It's the fed that enabled it. And it's the fed that pulls it off.

GLENN: And it's also the fed.

This is what kills me. You know, they said that, you know, in 2008, these banks were too big to fail. And we have to stop that.

And everything Congress did made these banks stronger and bigger, and hurt the small banks that are not part of the Federal Reserve system, so to speak.

They're not on -- you know, they're not one of the owners of the fed. And it seems to me, Thomas, that every time something is done, the American people are the ones that lose, and the banks get the money. They get richer. And in the end, it's going to be those, however.

What is it? Five or six or eight banks, that make up the fed. Do you know?

THOMAS: I don't know the number.

GLENN: We don't even know the number.

So whatever the number is, those guys are going to be the ones that are currently holding our debt.

Now, as I understand it, whoever holds debt, you have to pay that debt. And I have had bankers tell me. Glenn, we don't have to worry about the debt.

Do you know what just our national parks are worth?

And so we will pay whatever it is they want, we'll have to give that to the banks.

Which will mean, it's a transfer of wealth from the people, to these big banks. It's just obscene.

THOMAS: Yeah. And they have no intention of selling the national parks, by the way. They are just going to take it out of our (inaudible), that's what they're going to do.

And, listen, to your first point there. The fed acts like they're the firefighters, but they are the arsonists.

GLENN: Yes, they are.

THOMAS: They kept rates low. They had easy money for banks to get.

For so long. That the banks, you know, they just assumed it was always going to be that way. You had a few that failed. They came in.

And, well, they failed because the fed then came in. Which whiplashed and raised rates, quicker than they ever raised them before.

And the banks were kind of in this one model. Then the fed comes and does triage on them.

The fed starts out as the arsonist. Then they come in and too the fire fighting by raising rates. Then they come in and bail out the couple of banks last year.

So they are causing the problems that they come in and allegedly solve. But I think we're almost to a point now, where they're running out of levers, where the rubber bands that attach their levers to our macro economy are stretched as far as they are stretched.

Because right now, they're not really in control of interest rates. They might like to think they can lower the interest rate to stimulate the economy again. But the problem is. When they recently put treasuries out for auction. The sovereign funds. In the other countries that oftentimes buy our debt. Said, you know what, that four and a half percent. I don't think that's a good bargain.

I'm not going to buy those. I need a higher interest rate.

GLENN: Would you honestly.

If you had -- you were in charge of a bank. Or you were making loans as a private individual. And you had somebody who came in and ran their life, the way our Congress runs our country, what kind of interest rate would you demand from them, that you would think it's worth taking the risk for that?

THOMAS: Yeah.

GLENN: I mean, it would be easy. Easy in the double digits. And most likely in the mid-double digits for me.

THOMAS: Yeah. And the other thing is then, we try to inflate our debt down.

In other words, we devalue our currency.

So it changes the impact, of let's say the nominal price of our debt in gold, if you can find some outside reforms.

So the Treasury kind of likes inflation. It kills the little guy. It's -- the big guys don't care. Because like we saw during COVID. They just reprice everything on Wall Street. Then the other assets, the fed will prop up by buying them. So they make sure the rich people can survive during inflation.

The poor people can't. Or even the middle class can't. Because you don't have these sort of financial instruments that everybody else has. That the fed takes care of.

And so it -- then the fed is -- when they cause inflation. They solve a little bit of the debt problem.

But the problem is: We're getting to a point, where it's not going to work anymore.

For a while, we had inflation, that was greater than the interest rate, that we were paying on the debt.

So you can see actually -- people will take your debt at those low interest rates, and inflation is that high. You should probably take on more debt. I hate to say it.

They're wising up in the world.

Now, here is something else that happens.

The US dollar is the world currency.

We've mucked with it. But not so much that people don't want it yet.

GLENN: Yet. Yet.

THOMAS: And when you want to. Everybody likes to do their transactions in dollars. But to do a transaction in dollars, you have to hold dollars. So the whole world is holding dollars.

So when we devalue the dollar. We're not just taxing our own people.

We're taxing the entire world. We're kind of like the credit card gets 3 percent of all the transaction at the gas station. We get that 3 percent if we create 3 percent more money every year. Which we typically do. But the rest of the world is getting tired of being used that way. They're tired of our transaction fees. I.e. inflation.

And when they start using alternate forms of money to do their transactions. Or holding different assets in their own sovereign wealth funds. Then we're not going to be able to do that trick, on anybody, except for US citizens.

GLENN: You know --

THOMAS: Again, this is all coming to a head.

GLENN: Thomas, I said this a while back.

Probably 15 years ago.

When this actually happens. We are going to be labeled. Because no politician, in any other country, is going to take responsibility for their own fiscal madness.

Everybody is going to blame it on the United States.

Because we were greedy. Grotesque. And took on so much debt.

That we devalued the dollar. And it's going to affect the entire world.

And, you know, I relayed it. And I know it's for different reasons in some way.

But I look at the way Germany looked at France. At the end of World War I and the beginning of World War II. Is I think the way the rest of the world is going to look at us. We forced. We didn't. France forced Germany into just devastation.

Where they had to inflate their dollar. I mean, it was horrible. We -- the damage that we are going to do, by destroying our dollar.

I don't think we're going to be very popular in the world.

THOMAS: No. And somebody says, okay. If you get -- they've been asking me, what if you get rid of the fed? What do you replace it with?

That's like saying, if you take out a tumor, what do you replace the tumor with?

Then the serious answer is we go back to stable currency.

The government can't manipulate.

You would -- I would prefer to have a gold standard ready.

GLENN: Me too. So I have been told. This is what a serious, serious banker at the fed level has said to me.

Glenn, the reason why we had to get rid of the gold standard. Is at first, we wanted the great society and the Vietnam War. Couldn't afford it.

But there's not enough gold to build and live at the level the world lives, right now.

It -- we had to play funny money. And everybody is in on it. We can't go to a gold standard. Because there's just not enough gold.

Do you buy that?

THOMAS: Well, there's enough gold to do honest transactions.

But you're right. There's not enough gold to do the funny money and to fund all of these wars, for instance. That we've engaged in.

You know, typically, when the government tries to leave some kind of standard that they've been on.

It's because they have to finance a war. And nobody wants to consume enough of their debt to finance the war. So they go off the standard.

Yeah. You can't monetize your own debt. Once you get into that model.

You can't create the funny money. It's real money.

It's hard money. And that's what we should go back to.

And we shouldn't replace the fed with anything. It's Keynesian economics. The whole premise, I know a lot of Republicans may disagree with me. And they may think we need a federal reserve bank.

And that we need to control inflation. But that's the whole notion of Keynesian economics.

That you could create prosperity by tweaking the -- the interest rates and the money supply. And that the free market doesn't have enough signals and feedback. Doesn't react quickly enough. That you can have some experts in an ivory tower.

That need to be turning off to make our lives better. The reality is, the people in the ivory tower, they're investment bankers. They came from investment banking. They're going back to investment banking. They still got ties to it.

And they're tweaking it enough to help their buddies and to keep this going, until the music stops. Which is --

GLENN: So you have introduced HR24 as well, which is the Federal Reserve Transparency Act, to audit the federal reserve. And the act to abolish it. You have a lot of cosponsors. Any chance that this even gets passed, our own House Speaker?

THOMAS: Well, probably not this speaker. But we've got -- not under this Speaker, but under previous Speakers, we have passed Audit the Fed in the House. They've never brought it up in the Senate, or not passed it in the Senate. But yet, people like Bernie Sanders, who sponsored Audit the Fed when he was in the House, then he gets to the Senate and he won't even sponsor it.

But we've got to end it. So we have enough cosponsors. And enough votes to pass audit the fed. It hasn't happened in this Congress. It should happen in this Congress. But, by the way, if it were really part of the government. You could do a FOIA on it. But try FOIA-ing the federal reserve.

GLENN: You can't. You can't.

Thomas, quickly, how can people help?

THOMAS: Yeah.

So the HR number is 8421 for ending the Federal Reserve. We have 22 cosponsors right now. We need more cosponsors. Ask your congressmen to cosponsor end the fed. HR8421.

GLENN: Thomas, thank you very much.