Aside from being completely unconstitutional and unnecessary, why is it that the Fed is able to manipulate the money supply such that the dollars you and I work for are cleaved of their real value and inflated at their discretion, with no Congressional oversight? This arbitrarily created new money, helps only those who have the ability to use it before the effects of it are seen on the economy as a whole in the form of inflation and then boom/bust scenarios, namely those organizations and governmental departments most closest to the Fed. The rest of us are left with $/x amount after all the pulp has been sucked dry. Additionally, I hate that the government stands as a 'lender of last resort' when private banks fail when everyone decides to withdraw their money at the same time (in the case of fractional reserves), they can get bailed out by the government... whose money do you think is bailing them out? your tax money, of course... Don't the banks deserve to fail if they've made bad credit decisions? Isn't that what fuels progress, so that competition between banks can happen so that there is something called RISK?
more on this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji_G0MqAqq8

I don't know if the gold standard touted in this movie is the answer, but theres a definate problem here that needs to be fixed.

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"why is it that the Fed is able to manipulate the money supply such that the dollars you and I work for are cleaved of their real value and inflated at their discretion, with no Congressional oversight?"

Congress must never have a hand in managing the money supply. The whole point of the Fed is its impartiality. If you had guys afraid to put the brakes on the economy just because it's an election year, that's quite the conflict of interest.

The Fed's job is to protect the value of money, above all. This may mean encouraging lending, this may mean engineering recession, but in the end it's just to keep money worth money.

Forget about your bank collapsing, the Fed is there to keep the money itself from collapsing. It's terribly scary to have that power anywhere, so a suggestion to automate the process against inflation, take some or all human error out, that I can understand. But managing the money supply can't be a democratic process, whereby we all get representation in what we want: we'll all say we like money, we want more, ignorant of the intricacies of how money is valued, and to what extent this disbursment is damaging the value of the money. Sometimes recession is the only way to maintain the value of money, to manage inflation; and we would never choose recession, we could never endure such a thing by choice, because it's more tangible than suffering inflation.

The ramifications of a failing currency, like clockwork, are unspeakable violence in the streets, sometimes marked by counter-revolutions into war-mongering barbarism. It's a pretty basic human instinct: if what we have is worth nothing, let's go take what they have.

It's for the latter reason that people are reluctant to start pulling blocks out of the Jenga tower that is the Fed. It's been a long time since worldwide economic hardship precipitated an Italian invasion of Ethiopia, a Japanese invasion of China, and a Weimar Germany in which beer cost 4 million marks per glass (France needed those reparations, because it too was hungry).

This video is crazy. "Do you want your money gaining value every year, or losing value every year?" Well, shucks! Didn't realize it was THAT simple! I WANT MORE MONEY, DOG!

Kudos, qbert, it is predictable and likely, that history will repeat, unless something fantstic steps in....like collective head out-of-ass-day-all, at once.........

I beleive the US Constitution states that Congress shall regulate the money supply, not a bunch of theiving bankers. All that gibberish about saving us and the world is just that, gibberish. Propaganda used to frighten eveyone into submission. Follow the trail that starts here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayer_Amschel_Rothschild_family

The fact that the Congress has deteriorated into it's current state of a bunch of asshats does not invalid the law. Those of you who want to blame the current administration for everything should look beyond the tips of your noses and see who has really been calling the shots for a long time. That's why Bushy Sr. and Big Daddy Bill Clinton are such "Buds"; they belong to the same country club and we just keep serving them drinks.

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Inflation is in effect just a hidden tax. It has a strong 'yuck factor' to it, so sentimentalists and the gullible react emotionally.

Rotty -- Congress has the power to regulate money supply (ie, they can force The Fed to do whatever they want), they just realize their own ineptitude in the matters of macro-economics, and choose to defer key decisions to the Fed most of the time

Why would congress give that power away to a private corporation, when they can print money on their own? Certainly congress is capable of setting up a public entity that controls arguably the most powerful element in our society.

The sooner America wakes up to how completely it's been swindled here the better. The lack of public outcry over it is disturbing to me.

While formally The Fed is a "private corporation" in actuality it's a public agency. It's actions are controlled by the board of the governors which are picked by president and confirmed by the Senate. The Congress audits the Fed and can amend it's activities by a statute.

When the elected representatives have direct access to the printing press, like you are suggesting, there's too much temptation to pump out extra cash before the elections to give economy a temporary boost, and let the successors deal with the long term harms of inflation.

A look at the stability of dollar in the last 80 years compared to some currencies where the government would "print money on their own" (Argentina in 2001, Russia in 1998, Zimbabwe now) would show you that a "private corporation" can do a better job managing money supply than elected officials