Romney or Obama?

[barbrolie]

It has stock, it pays dividends, the fact the stock is different from regular publicly traded stock and is only open to a select group doesn't change anything.

It does. The "dividend" is a reimbursement of sorts. It is not a distribution of profit. That is a big difference.

I didn't say it was the exact same as regular private business, I said it is quasi private, it governs monetary policy independently of the executive or legislative branches of government, the government holds none of its stock which is entirely held by private banks. You can fudge around with this all you like but the fact is that monetary policy is not controlled by the elected government.

There is good reason for the elected government to not control monetary policy. Otherwise right before elections, guess who will be printing money?

You are right in that the job of the fed, amongst other things, is to maintain profitability and sustainability of the private banking systems. And even though you didn't mention it, it is true that 6 out of the 9 board members of the Federal Reserve Bank are chosen by private banks. But these members do not have an influence on the monetary policy, which comes from the Fed.

The government owns no stock because the Fed doesn't hold any government security. Since the stock is essentially a receipt saying "we received your money, thanks" the government doesn't need to hold stock.

The damn thing was set up to be quasi private, you can go read the premises for setting it up.

And that's not to even start on the conflicts of interests that are apparently taken as wrote with the fed.

You are partially right. It was set up to be largely independent of "government" and it was expected that it would work closely with private banks. Doesn't make it private. It is still very much a public institution that maintains the health of the fiscal system by setting and executing monetary policy. And if you view the recent recession as a result of bad fiscal policy, it isn't. It was a failure of federal oversight on the financial system, not bad macroeconomics on the part of the Fed.