The Federal Reserve’s Fiscal Coup: How America’s Central Bank Engineered a Self-Destructing Empire

If you're wondering where your future went—why your mortgage is unaffordable, your savings are worthless, and your taxes keep rising—it’s buried under $4.2 trillion in government IOUs held by a central bank that no longer pretends to play by the rules. The Fed’s Forbidden Balance Sheet In 2008, the Fed was what it was always supposed to be: a lender of last resort, holding a modest $500 billion in Treasurys. Today? Over $4.2 trillion. And if the current trajectory continues, by 2035, it’ll be nearly $10 trillion. That’s not support. That’s domination. The Fed will become the government’s largest creditor—surpassing China, Japan, Wall Street, and Main Street pension funds combined. This isn’t a safety net. It’s a straitjacket. Because when your own balance sheet is stuffed with sovereign liabilities, you can’t raise rates, sell assets, or tighten policy without slashing your own financial throat—and hemorrhaging confidence in the Treasury’s solvency. This isn’t independence. It’s interdependence. And that’s not just bad economics—it’s a constitutional betrayal of fiscal discipline and monetary neutrality. The QE Scam: From Emergency Tool to Permanent Crutch Quantitative easing was sold as a short-term fix after 2008. Instead, it metastasized into a systemic addiction. Every crisis—financial, pandemic, inflationary—became a green light to double down. The Fed now acts less like a steward of price stability and more like a dealer in debt liquidity—ensuring Congress can keep spending while voters are distracted by bread and circuses. And what’s the Fed’s reward? Nearly $835 billion remitted back to the Treasury in the last decade—interest payments that paper over the true cost of U.S. borrowing. It’s a hall of mirrors: the government borrows, the Fed buys, the Fed earns, the Fed pays the government. You think that’s fiscal strength? It’s a Ponzi scheme with a printing press. The Foreign Bank Windfall Post-2008, the Fed adopted tools like Interest on Excess Reserves (IOER) and reverse repo operations—supposedly to manage short-term rates. But let’s follow the money. Since 2022 alone, over $600 billion in interest has been paid—nearly half to foreign banks. Let that sink in. American monetary policy is bleeding hundreds of billions into global institutions while U.S. households choke on 7% mortgages and groceries priced like gold bars. It’s not a conspiracy. It’s worse. It’s the byproduct of a system designed to reward scale and proximity to power, not production or patriotism. The ordinary American? Just collateral damage. The $927 Billion Time Bomb Here’s the kicker: the Fed now sits on $927 billion in unrealized losses. Why? Because it bought low-yield Treasurys with printed cash—and now rates have spiked. To unwind those positions would mean booking those losses and cutting off remittances to the Treasury. So what does the Fed do? It delays. It dithers. It chooses cowardice over clarity. The longer it waits, the deeper the hole gets. But unwinding would trigger a fiscal shock so violent it would tear through the Treasury’s bottom line. So much for independence. So much for transparency. The central bank is cornered—boxed in by the very mechanics it once wielded as a savior. Now, it’s a captive of its own design. Counterarguments Crushed Some still cling to the myth: “The Fed is buying time.” No—it’s buying bonds to subsidize dysfunction. Others say: “These are extraordinary times.” Really? Then why are these ‘extraordinary’ tools now permanent fixtures? Then there’s the technocrat’s favorite dodge: “We’ll unwind gradually.” But gradualism is just delay with a smile. Every day of delay deepens the trap, muffles market signals, and pushes private capital to the sidelines. This Is Not Monetary Policy. It’s Political Insurance. The Fed’s role has mutated—from watchdog to enabler, from regulator to participant. It now props up the very deficits it was once meant to discipline. The founders of central banking—men like Bagehot and Hamilton—warned against precisely this: merging fiscal and monetary authority. It’s the first step toward autocracy masked as efficiency. History agrees. Argentina tried it. Zimbabwe perfected it. Japan is still pretending it works. America’s version just has better branding and a bigger PR budget. Conclusion: From Crisis Fighter to Fiscal Co-Conspirator The tragedy isn’t that the Fed is malevolent. It’s that it’s institutionalized incompetence. It has backed itself into a corner where any effort to normalize rates or shrink the balance sheet would unleash fiscal hell. So it tiptoes. It massages expectations. It prays for a soft landing. But prayer isn’t a policy. And cowardice isn’t a strategy. Unless reforms are forced—ending QE, halting interest on excess reserves, restoring hard barriers between the Fed and Treasury—the entire U.S. monetary architecture risks becoming a hollowed-out relic of pretense and panic. This isn’t just a liquidity trap. It’s a political trap. A credibility trap. A sovereignty trap. And make no mistake: the noose is tightening.

The Federal Reserve’s Fiscal Coup: How America’s Central Bank Engineered a Self-Destructing Empire

Bill Brocius Jun 17

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