It is the most powerful federal agency you’ve never heard of -- and lawmakers from both parties on Thursday vowed to keep abreast of its astonishing growth and rein it in, if necessary. Since when has anything in Washington ever been reined in? The government is a gold digger and the tax payer is the 90 year old on life support. I think drunken sailors practice more restraint than the federal government does.
The Office of Financial Research, or OFR, was created by the Dodd-Frank financial services overhaul that President Obama signed into law in July 2010. Technically housed under the Treasury Department, the agency has until now received its funding not from the Congress, but directly from the Federal Reserve. This last statement is amazing. A government agency housed under the Federal Reserve is absurd to begin with since the Federal Reserve is a private bank. Funding for government agencies is supposed to be controlled and authorized by congress not a private bank.
Starting in July, the OFR Fiscal Year 2013 budget, estimated at $158 million, will be funded entirely through assessments -- also known as taxes -- on bank-holding firms with consolidated assets worth at least $50 billion.
If the Federal Reserve can collect taxes, I'm sorry a branch of a private bank can collect taxes. I know what I am going to do. I am going to start a private bank and start loaning money to the Federal Government at lower rates than the Federal Reserve does now. Good news banks I am only going to charge half of what the other guys have been charging you, not only that I am giving away free pens. Did the Federal Reserve ever give you bank CEOs free pens?
But as became clear at Thursday’s hearing by the House Financial Services Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, a close reading of the law the president signed provides no limit on the growth of OFR’s budget, nor on the taxes the agency can impose on big banks to fund it.
“We’ll call you on it,” said Rep. Michael Capuano, D-Mass., warning what would happen if he and his colleagues see the agency growing too large. Why is it allowed to grow in the first place?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Orwell
The agency’s official mission is to collect financial data and funnel it to another Dodd-Frank creation: the Financial Stability Oversight Council. These agencies were designed with the idea of preventing another systemic shock of Lehman Brothers magnitude. The same bozos that helped create the 2008 financial meltdown are behind this. Why should we trust this new legislation? If President Clinton and a few others would have some insight when he was still in office about who should own a home and who should not the chances of 2008 would have been greatly reduced maybe even eliminated.
“You're able to tax corporations without any oversight by the U.S. Congress,” said Rep. Steve Pearce, R-New Mex. “Our Constitution is pretty clear, and so if we're a little scratchy on our side, just understand it's because you're conducting things that we feel like are completely unconstitutional.” Don't you just love that line? Man up buddy and take care of business, don't be a jelly fish.
Leon
Images: Yahoo Images
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