It seems to be the case that though there exist a great many monetary and fiscal tools, many Republicans believe that all the ones that aren't spending cuts are either directly opposed to the Lord's will or the brainchildren of Lenin (or both, I suppose).

The Federal Reserve has been around for a while. Why is it suddenly such a political issue?

Bankers are just as bad as the politicians. They are all part of the same class and share the same world-view.

Bankers are as 'independent' as the politicians. Both of them are part of problem.

Guillotine the lot of 'em!

@matt

Foxy, before conrete evidence broke about phone hacking and the bandwagon started to role, Labour said nothing at all about it. However, I remember phone hacking was well known back in 2002.

With the sexing up of the treasury forecasts is it a case of "Here we go again" - Milliband waiting for a new bandwagon before doing anything? He could be supporting the OBR (BTW which was set up because it was widely known the Treasury had been manipulated by Gordon and Balls). I know you dont like the OBR - we could go be back to the good old days where corruption did not exist because the government turned a blind eye to it when it was not perpetrating it.

On the contrary - lets remember not long ago the governor of our Bank of England was telling everyone concerned that banks should become more boring. I take this to mean in terms of basic simple accountability first ie where something can actually be counted in a way that everyone can understand.

This letter strikes me as a reasonable statement of the usual concerns. We've heard them all before anyway. Personally I tend to see the difficulties expressed here in terms of a paradigm clash - how can we reconcile or even endow the traditional conservative ways and means with the necessary evangelical type intervention? When this on the face of it ( ie common, reasonable accountability ) might seem to come from out of nowhere.

You're right Indu Pendent. The whole Treasury was suborned by Balls into producing false data and not one civil servant could reveal the truth such was his reign of terror.

Thank God you've exposed this cesspit of corruption.

indu don't interact with fox he'll only start confusing the budget deficit with the national debt, then just make up rambling facts unsupported by any evidence. Actually he's a fictious cartoon character I've created from an orwellian future who views are best summed up as "Labour Good, Tory Bad".

Given US long run interest rates are at post war lows the problem with the economy does not seem to be the cost of finance.

Businesses are holding back investing due to expectations of low returns on future investment. This is due to low expected growth and fiscal uncertainty, with a 10% deficit, its likely US taxes will rise at some point without any blueprint for how the government will balance the economy businesses clearly face the risk of higher taxes on future profits.

The aim of operation twist is to lower long term interest rates. But interest rates aren't the problem the problem is a lack of short term demand combined with medium & long term fiscal uncertainty.

Operation twist will be as effective as curing a diabetic with chemotherapy. LOL.