Project 2025: Scrap the Fed

Their Ultimate Plan to Control All the Money

An overlooked chapter of Project 2025 as outlined on kitco.com, a precious metals firm’s website, explores Project 2025’s ideas concerning the Federal Reserve and who should control dollar oversight policy. They intend to reinstate the gold standard to back the U.S. dollar and abolish the Federal Reserve with its twin tasks of controlling inflation and keeping unemployment low. 

They plan to privatize the Fed’s oversight of monetary policy. Imagine what Trump's policy would demand and how accountable he would be with that control. What could possibly go wrong? 

Kitco’s published article is lengthy. In pertinent part, it states:

Project 2025 proposes a very different vision for the U.S. dollar. Indeed,project-2025s-mandate-for-leadership-the-conservative-promise of Project 25 calls for the outright elimination of the Federal Reserve – and the complete privatization of the currency regime – with the gold standard presented as a partial victory to that end. (Their bold face.) Its author is Paul Winfree, who served as Trump’s deputy assistant to the President for domestic policy, Deputy Director of the Domestic Policy Council, and Director of Budget Policy.

“Gold bugs,” as gold standard fans are called, have been demanding a return to the gold standard for decades, thinking that doing so will cure inflation. Given their passion, an important question is How Much Gold Has Been Mined? | World Gold Councilgold.org. The answer is that all the gold mined throughout human history if melted down into one great cube would measure 22 meters per side, or 73 feet per side. Per side, that total would be about 1 and 1/5th the size of a bowling alley, which is 62.8480 feet long. Gold bugs are known to invest in gold. Imagine the windfall such a policy would create for them.

The U.S. does not own all the gold in the world. Central banks in China, India, and other countries have busily bought gold for the last several years. The U.S. still has the largest store of gold, and as of July 31, 2024, the Treasury holds 261,498,926.24 troy ounces of gold, valued at a little over $11 billion. Investopedia provides a brief history of the gold-standard in its August 9, 2024 web edition. If traded on the spot market at $2,600 per troy ounce, the U.S. Treasury’s holdings would total $679,897,208,224. 

Despite the gold bugs’ ardor, I found no history of any effort to corner the gold market. However, Texas’s Hunt Brothers cornered the silver market on March 27, 1980, when it reached an intraday high of $50 and promptly fell that same day to about $10 per troy ounce sending the commodities markets into panic. The Hunt Brothers took huge losses, building up a debt of over a billion dollars as they missed their margin call. This warns of the inherent dangers of privatizing the Fed’s activities. 

Moreover, the gold standard is intended to stabilize the dollar as it sets the value of gold to limit dollar printing, denying the overseer the flexibility to deal with emergencies, market downturns, recessions, and war. With its relative lack of flexibility, those hardest hit would be the poor and the middle class. It is events that control dollar stability, not what backs the dollar, and it takes agile experts with the leeway to control money printing to meet emergencies as we saw in 2008. 

Ben Bernanke, then head of the Fed, supplied all the dollars to needed to banks at .25% to get out of that hole but the politicians failed to capitalize on his efforts. No bankers were held accountable for that massive fraud. Instead, the executives gave themselves huge bonuses supplied by Bernanke. As we saw after that meltdown, leaving private parties to control monetary policy incentivizes dangerous mischief that would cost, as always, taxpayers.

More recently, the continuing Republican tax cuts of this century to the very rich usually go into the stock market and do nothing to help the overall economy. Those tax cuts helped to accumulate the yawning wealth inequality that continues to build. Since 1981, $50 trillion has been redistributed upward to the top 10% from the bottom 90%. 

Outside the U.S., another caution is that the BRICs bloc, chaired by Trump’s boss, Putin, has started their reserve currency, abolishing the dollar as the sole global reserve currency. The BRICs countries are Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Iran, Egypt, Ethiopia, and the United Arab Emirates. Many speculate that the Saudis want to end pricing their oil in U.S. dollars which would cause prices at home to rise creating more inflation. 

In addition to the $5 trillion debt and recession economists predict that Trump will incur if elected, the future at home further dims without fostering a robust program bringing home the manufacturing capabilities that he promised but never delivered.

Biden started and delivered the rehoming of manufacturing. Harris/Walz will likely continue his programs and add their own. With their election, Project 2025 goes back into the vault to reemerge if and when the billionaire bros backing a Republican Party, as it is structured today, returns to power.

A better outlook would result if Project 2025 was the only book to be burned.