Help please? I can't understand: We are the biggest financiers of our own debt, right?

[patrice]

That debt is financed by selling bonds, to the world, and to ourselves and the U.S. government is the biggest single bond owner.

US Treasury bonds, and hence our ability to pay the bills, are affected by (however it is that) the Federal Reserve sets bond rates.

So, if the Fed makes those rates go up, public debt becomes a better investment.

So public debt financing decisions, the marketing and purchase of US Treasury bonds, is controlled by a PRIVATE banking cartel that ALSO sets rates for the prime bond competitor, Wall Street stocks.

Isn't the solution to this problem to get the control of those interest rates back into public hands, so when public entities buy bonds their expectations regarding those investments make those investments more attractive and that bond market then sustains what we have already decided to spend, instead of "controlling" what we decided to spend AFTER-the-fact, after it has already been appropriated, with these deficit cap fights?

How would it even be possible to have the government, since it IS borrowing from itself, to define those interest rates itself? Wouldn't a policy like that create a more direct relationship between spending and financing that could then drive budget efficiencies and, thus, avoid things like 8 years of no bid, guaranteed cost-plus-15% contracts for War Profiteers?

I'm really not sure that I understand this; please correct me for however I am wrong.

[Skink]

1. You're hurting my brain.

[patrice]

2. Hurting mine too!! My mind keeps coming back to the fact that we're the biggest financiers of

our own debt. So I don't understand why we don't just do whatever WE decide to do with that debt, we're borrowing from ourselves, so why don't we tell ourselves how we want to be paid back?

. . . or something like that.

[Egalitarian Thug]

3. We adopted exactly the economic system the founders hoped to avoid in the early 20th century.

And as with so many horrendous mistakes we have made, it was a series of completely corrupt SCOTUS ruling that made it all possible.

[patrice]

4. And that very system, that disjunct between borrowing : spending, a disjunct due to the MIDDLE MAN,

i.e. the Fed, CAUSES the very problem by means of which it justifies itself.

Bonds, investments in ourselves, COULD be a lot more profitable if it weren't for all of the fucking middle-wo/men with their hands in our pockets.