Gresham’s Law has a sobering graphical history of the Federal Reserve System’s assets from 1915 to 2012. Here’s Tom Gresham’s introduction:
Here we present a history of the Fed in charts. As you’ll surely glean from the below — the Fed has degenerated from a by and large passive institution (dealing only in high-quality self-liquidating commercial paper and gold) to an active pursuant of junk, an enabler of wars, a ‘benevolent’ combatant of the depressions of its own creation, a central planner of employment & prices and of course a forgiving friend to inconvenient market follies.
The first graph, showing the entire 97-year history, is a hockey stick if there ever was one. And unlike Mann’s bogus global warming hockey stick, it’s not based on jiggering the data.
There are only two possible endgames: default or devaluation of the currency. My money’s on the latter.