Ron Paul | The Libertarian Institute

The Threat of a Digitized Currency

by Ron Paul | Jul 28, 2020 | Economics, Featured Articles

If some Congress members get their way, the Federal Reserve may soon be able to track many of your purchases in real time and share that information with government agencies. This is just one of the problems with the proposed “digital dollar” or “fedcoin.” Fedcoin was initially included in the first coronavirus spending bill. While the proposal was dropped from the final version of the bill, there is still great interest in fedcoin on Capitol Hill. Some progressives have embraced fedcoin as a way to provide Americans with a “universal basic income.” Both the Senate Banking Committee and the...

How Fed Policy Could Cause More Riots

by Ron Paul | Jul 16, 2020 | Economics, Featured Articles

Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell and San Francisco Fed President Mary Daly both recently denied that the Federal Reserve’s policies create economic inequality. Unfortunately for Powell, Daly, and other Fed promoters, a cursory look at the Fed’s operations shows that the central bank is the leading cause of economic inequality. The Federal Reserve manipulates the money supply by buying and selling government securities. This means that when the Fed decides to pump money into the economy, it does so by putting it in the pockets of wealthy, and oftentimes politically-connected, investors who...

The Federal Reserve is Getting Desperate

by Ron Paul | Jun 22, 2020 | Economics, Featured Articles

In a sign that the Federal Reserve is growing increasingly desperate to jump-start the economy, the Fed’s Secondary Market Credit Facility has begun purchasing individual corporate bonds. The Secondary Market Credit Facility was created by Congress as part of a coronavirus stimulus bill to purchase as much as 750 billion dollars of corporate credit. Until last week, the Secondary Market Credit Facility had limited its purchases to exchange-traded funds, which are bundled groups of stocks or bonds. The bond purchasing initiative, like all Fed initiatives, will fail to produce long-term...

Will Coronavirus End the Fed?

by Ron Paul | Apr 1, 2020 | Economics, Featured Articles, Justice, Libertarianism

September 17, 2019 was a significant day in American economic history. On that day, the New York Federal Reserve began emergency cash infusions into the repurchasing (repo) market. This is the market banks use to make short-term loans to each other. The New York Fed acted after interest rates in the repo market rose to almost 10 percent, well above the Fed’s target rate. The New York Fed claimed its intervention was a temporary measure, but it has not stopped pumping money into the repo market since September. Also, the Federal Reserve has been expanding its balance sheet since September....

Like Freedom? Then You Won’t Like the FREEDOM Act

by Ron Paul | Mar 24, 2020 | Featured Articles, Justice

Last Monday, a bipartisan group of Senators and a coalition including libertarian and progressive activists thwarted a scheme to ram through the Senate legislation renewing three provisions of the USA FREEDOM Act (previously known as the USA PATRIOT Act). The bill had already been rushed through the House of Representatives, and most expected it to sail through the Senate. But, instead, Senate leadership had to settle for a 77-day extension. Senate leadership was also forced to allow consideration of several amendments at a later date. Included is Sen. Rand Paul’s amendment that would forbid...

Trump’s Betrayal of Julian Assange

by Ron Paul | Feb 24, 2020 | Criminal Justice, Featured Articles

One thing we’ve learned from the Trump Presidency is that the “deep state” is not just some crazy conspiracy theory. For the past three years we’ve seen that deep state launch plot after plot to overturn the election. It all started with former CIA director John Brennan’s phony “Intelligence Assessment” of Russian involvement in the 2016 election. It was claimed that all 17 US intelligence agencies agreed that Putin put Trump in office, but we found out later that the report was cooked up by a handful of Brennan’s hand-picked agents. Donald Trump upset the Washington apple cart as...

Trump’s Budget: More Warfare, Slightly Less Welfare

by Ron Paul | Feb 20, 2020 | Economics, Featured Articles

Listening to the howls from Democrats and the applause from Republicans, one would think President Trump’s proposed fiscal year 2021 budget is a radical assault on the welfare state. The truth is that the budget contains some minor spending cuts, most of which are not even real cuts. Instead they are reductions in the “projected rate of growth.” This is the equivalent of saying you are sticking to your diet because you ate five chocolate chip cookies when you wanted to eat ten. President Trump’s plan reduces the Department of Education’s budget by nearly 8 percent, leaving the department...

Democrats Ignore Trump’s Real Violations

by Ron Paul | Feb 11, 2020 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy, Politics

This week the latest Democratic Party attempt to remove President Trump from office – impeachment over Trump allegedly holding up an arms deal to Ukraine – flopped. Just like “Russiagate” and the Mueller investigation, and a number of other attempts to overturn the 2016 election. We’ve had three years of accusations and investigations with untold millions of dollars spent in a never-ending Democratic Party effort to remove President Trump from office. Why do the Democrats keep swinging and missing at Trump? They can’t make a good case for abuse of power because they don’t really oppose...