I and many other people keep screaming that the private banking cartel known as the Federal Reserve System is an absolute insanity hoisted on us by robber-barons and progressives at the beginning of the 20th century.  Think about it, a private bank prints our money, loans it to us, and then charges us insane amounts of interest.  How freakin’ crazy is that?  I could have sworn that a Founding Father or two were completely against the idea of a central bank…

Now that same private banking cartel just made a record profit last year on the backs of Americans due to a collapsing banking industry because of a housing market bubble they allowed to grow.  Are You Ready To Abolish The Fed?  I know what it means to get rid of the central bank, but do you? No more credit card for the government.

Fed earned $45 billion in 2009: report

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The Federal Reserve made record profits in 2009 and will return $45 billion to the Treasury, after its efforts to prop up the economy created a windfall for the government, the Washington Post reported.

The $45 billion reflects the highest earnings in the 96-year history of the U.S. central bank, the newspaper reported on its website late on Monday. The figure was obtained by calculations based on public documents, the Post said.

The Fed funds itself from its own operations and returns its profits to the Treasury. The largest previous refund to the Treasury was $34.6 billion in 2007, the Post said.

The report said much of the Fed’s higher earnings were sparked by the central bank’s aggressive program of buying bonds to push interest rates down and stimulate growth.

“By the end of 2009, the Fed owned $1.8 trillion in U.S. government debt and mortgage-related securities, up from $497 billion a year earlier,” the newspaper reported. It said interest income on the investments was a major source of Fed profits.

Even though it had reported billions of dollars of decline in the value of loans made to bail out investment bank Bear Stearns and insurer American International Group, the Fed received $4.7 billion in interest payments from those loans in 2009, the Post said.