While the world breathlessly awaits the outcome of this week’s FOMC meeting—will the Federal Reserve raise interest rates or won’t it?—one thing is clear regardless: the Fed is driving the U.S. into a 2nd depression in order to carry out its one and only remit now that America’s ability to produce real jobs has been reduced to ash, namely, propping up criminal banks with multi-trillion-dollar giveaways.

Meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee on June 23–24, 2009

June 2009 FOMC presentation materials

While the world breathlessly awaits the outcome of this week’s FOMC meeting—will the Federal Reserve raise interest rates or won’t it?—one thing is clear regardless: the Fed is driving the U.S. into a 2nd depression in order to carry out its one and only remit now that America’s ability to produce real jobs has been reduced to ash, namely, propping up criminal banks with multi-trillion-dollar giveaways.

What’s so disturbing about the fatal path that the Fed has been on for 7 years is that it’s one the Fed went down before, when—by its own admission—it extended and deepened the Great Depression in the late 1930s with a foolhardy policy that jacked up total reserves and destroyed bank lending. In the words of Janet Yellen, “[t]he economy plunged back into depression.” (6/23/09 tr. at p. 175)

That’s curious, because exactly the same dynamic is at work now, as total reserves have skyrocketed since 2008 in perfect dollar-for-dollar tandem with a plunge in lending. The effect on the birth- and death rates of new and existing businesses, respectively, has been catastrophic.

And what has propelled total reserve balances into the stratosphere? Why, it’s the Fed’s fateful decision to pay banks interest for holding money with the Fed–money provided by none other than the Fed itself when it printed $1.73 trillion and handed it to the bustout banks in exchange for worthless mortgage-backed securities. The Fed pulled nearly exactly the same stunt in 1936-37 when it suddenly required banks to maintain higher reserves at the Fed. In both cases, the Fed’s diversion of monies away from the economy proved disastrous. It remains to be seen whether the Fed will need another world war to cover up its ruinous acts.

BestEvidence’s newest film, “They Come from Planet Klepto,” undertakes an intensive examination of the transcript and exhibits from the Fed’s June 2009 FOMC meeting held during the first few critical months of the most ambitious monetary experiment of all time, which the Fed falsely swore was temporary in nature.

As it turns out, the Federal Reserve never intended to unwind the radical balance sheet expansion it began 7 years ago at all, as one of the central purposes of the Fed programs—aside from enabling broke banks to erect an illusion of solvency big enough to justify bonuses—was to cover up the very Wall Street crimes that caused the meltdown of 2008 in the first place.

“Planet Klepto” distinguishes itself from many other worthy efforts along the same lines in its granular treatment of untrammeled criminality driving Federal Reserve policy by lavishing attention on the Fed’s own words, charts, documents, projections, speeches, papers, spreadsheets and data.

Viewers are urged to consider the implications of the Federal Reserve’s proven willingness to prop up, at all costs, the criminal banks controlling it. If criminal giveaways aren’t out of bounds, what’s to stop takeaways when the next meltdown hits?