The Bush administration did stop filling the reserve in 2002 when it helped the oil industry. Now they should do it to help the consumer.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
The Federal Reserve's job is to do the right thing, to take the long-run interest of the economy to heart, and that sometimes means being unpopular. But we have to do the right thing.
Across the country, people are willing to tighten their belts and sacrifice. The president should ask the oil industry to do the same.
The biggest issue I have with the CFPB is that I don't believe that they should be funded out of profits from the Federal Reserve.
If you told Exxon or Lukoil that, in order to avoid wrecking the climate, they couldn't pump out their reserves, the value of their companies would plummet.
And let the Fed sell bonds to bring bank reserves back down to required reserve levels, so we have restraint on bank lending and bank issuances of liability.
If Congress wanted to intervene with the Federal Reserve, well, we created the Federal Reserve. We could uncreate it. But would you want Congress regulating the money supply? We'd have drowned in inflation, or gone bankrupt, decades ago.
Our focus is on ensuring America has the strongest economy in the world for the next 100 years and to do that, we need to get to the role of the Federal Reserve and we need to get it right.
Opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge stands to not only increase the United States' oil reserves by nearly 50 percent, but it will create thousands of good U.S. jobs.
Our Strategic Petroleum Reserve is there for a natural disaster or some other catastrophe.
To pump up consumer or government demand would force interest rates up and asset prices down, possibly by enough to destroy more jobs than are created.