Occupy protesters and Tea Party activists both rail against the financial bailouts that benefited Wall Street and the large money center banks at the expense of Main Street where those same banks are foreclosing on peoples' homes. Politicians of left and right, Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul, Paul Ryan and Bernie Sanders, attack the Federal Reserve.
But is the Fed to blame? A forthcoming film, The Bubble, makes that case. While I've only seen the trailer and spoken with some of the people involved with the film, I'm intrigued that the film may have taken some rather esoteric activities and made them comprehensible to a broader audience.
My interview with Tom Woods, the author of the New York Times Best Seller Meltdown. about the film can be seen here.
How many people really understand what it is that the Fed actually does? The Bubble interviewed many of the people who predicted the 2008 crisis and asks that what happens next. The cast of characters includes Ron Paul, Peter Schiff, Jim Rogers, Jim Grant, Marc Faber, Doug Casey, et al.
Like the Occupy and Tea Party movements, they all lay the blame for our financial mess at the feet of the Fed, but they do so with great knowledge and calm reason--the ying for the anti-Fed populists' yang.
The skyrocketing deficits under Presidents Bush (for wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, tax cuts that weren't paid for, expansion of social programs with Medicare Part D, etc.) and Obama (mostly a continuation and extension of Bush's agenda but on the base of a weaker economy) signal a debt crisis that threatens our social safety net and economic well-being.
I'm interested to see what the rest of the film says!