Over the Top Fed Actions Feed Conspiracy Thinking

That kind of behavior is only going to make the conspiracy theorists even cozier. When you already think the Fed has made a serious living from doing everything from transferring public wealth to private hands to signing off on the assassination of John F. Kennedy, you're not going to start thinking better of them when they offload billions onto Bear Stearns, which is a securities firm and not a bank at all. You're not going to get the opposition to stop parroting the usual party lines about the Fed being a privately owned bank that screws Americans by charging interest or compromises the overall interests of the United States by unconstitutionally printing up money like it was going out of style. You're only going to further invigorate them.

That, my friends, is known as reality.