The Quango and the Collapse

Submitted by Steve Brown…

“Dear Member of Congress,

By commissioning Wall Street behemoth BlackRock to manage its corporate debt purchase program the Federal Reserve has outsourced bail-outs to a key component of Wall Street’s corruption, where there is no potential for BlackRock to do the right thing.

Because there is so little known about the SMCCF and the PMCCF corporate credit facilities and how they will operate, the Federal Reserve must publish full details of all contracts managed by BlackRock. Since the Fed quango is using these acronym programs to obfuscate and make their operations opaque,  Congress must require the Fed to publish full details of the contracts including the current and future investment process operated by BlackRock. Congress must be prepared to confront Mr Mnuchin and his cronies too, with some hope to divulge explicit investment program details.

The Fed chairman and Treasury secretary must testify before Congress about these BlackRock-managed programs, including provision of stated goals where changes, additions, or amendments to the programs must be publicly revealed, and Congress must publicly televise the hearings. The Fed must detail conflict of interest policies and procedures and audit BlackRock to ensure it abides by them, where a list of individuals executing the IMC (Investment Management Control) by BlackRock is mandatory. And under Congressional oversight the Fed must reveal any inevitable effort by BlackRock to profit by and promote its own investment products by these programs.

Companies impacted by this pandemic have seen their credit rating downgraded making them ineligible for federal corporate debt programs, where fossil fuels and the energy sector have been hardest hit.  Note that small and large oil companies alike have seen rising bankruptcies and the coal industry is in terminal decline.  The oil services sector has been in decline for years too and must inevitably wind down when shale resources evaporate and climate concerns intensify. Supporting inefficient industries with QE cash subsidized by the public via the Fed’s purchase of junk bonds is not only immoral but criminally corrupt.

Congress must prevent the Federal Reserve from purchasing junk bonds to bail-out these losing industries and their cronies, as well as predatory hedge fund managers and failed private equity firms who have defaulted on their poorly run corporate scams.  In a true market economy, failing industries are allowed to fail and not bailed-out by the privately held quango known as the Federal Reserve, via its out-sourced MMT scam trades as subsidized by public funds.

In other words, Congress must ensure that the Fed’s deal with BlackRock is not a bailout for doomed-to-fail industries which results in greater loss for implicated financial counterparties. Such action will only highlight the corruption at the heart of the US financial system where the United States is now the most corrupt nation globally.  (For example, most Wall Street share buybacks were financed by public QE cash resulting from the last financial crash.)

The Federal Reserve has been co-opted by the US Treasury and the Treasury is being run by one of the most dangerous and notorious predatory Oligarchs of the US financial collapse – the 2008-2009 collapse that disgraced the United States monetary system in the eyes of the world. Secretary Mnuchin and Mr Trump have weaponized the dollar with the pending failure of the US dollar as global reserve currency, now more imminent than ever.

Note that the Federal Reserve is not an independent Central Bank. The Federal Reserve has been co-opted by the US Treasury- Executive branch and there is no reason for any quasi-governmental function to exist when the Fed’s operations are dictated by the US Treasury secretary and president. Now the people of the United States have been forcibly coerced into an MMT monetary nightmare with zero recourse. As such, the Federal Reserve must be forced to wind down when its crony-predatory bail-outs (again) fail and plunge the US monetary system into chaos now that the Fed and Treasury have effectively merged.

Should the US economy ever get back on track, Congress must support a resilient green agenda to handle shocks to the financial system from loss of employment. Building clean industries and new infrastructure in the United States to get off fossil fuels should be a top priority, to promote full employment and reduce reliance on foreign capital and globalist subversion.

The management of clean green-oriented industry to rebuild US infrastructure is paramount and Congress must not leave the financing of such to a crony-capital predator like BlackRock. Thus Congress should undertake stringent oversight of this infrastructure program to prevent BlackRock from skimming, or otherwise gaming these programs.

Companies seeking bailout funds or other rescue funds must not be eligible for corporate bond-buying or allowed to buy back their shares with taxpayer-subsidized MMT funds. The American people must be informed about BlackRock’s role, fully overseen and regulated. Thus a financial Inspector General must be re-appointed as soon as possible and a financial oversight committee created — free from Executive or Treasury interference — with the power to prosecute via a newly empowered SEC.

In closing, we trust that you and your staff are well aware that the people are of course watching and waiting to see how US Congress will act to represent them in this crisis, instead of representing the far less than 1% per usual.  For the Fed/Treasury to hand out trillions to newly bankrupt trillionaires will only result in a much more serious crisis this time (than experienced ten years ago) perhaps resulting in civil unrest and ever deeper societal and political decline.

Sincerely,

Steve Brown”

NB:  The above is a complete rewrite of a “Friends of the Earth” campaign letter to Congress, regarding BlackRock

Steve Brown is the author of “Iraq: the Road to War” (Sourcewatch) editor of “Bush Administration War Crimes in Iraq” (Sourcewatch) “Trump’s Limited Hangout” and “Federal Reserve: Out-sourcing the Monetary System to the Money Trust Oligarchs Since 1913”; Steve is an antiwar activist, a published scholar on the US monetary system, and has appeared as guest contributor to Fort Russ News, Lew Rockwell Report, SOTT, and Strategika51. Twitter: @newsypaperz