Ellen Brown
Ellen Brown is an attorney and founder of the Public Banking Institute. She is the author of twelve books, including the best-selling "Web of Debt," and "The Public Bank Solution," which explores successful public banking models historically and globally.
Articles by this author
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Views Thursday, March 04, 2021 Will 2021 Be Public Banking’s Watershed Moment? Just over two months into the new year, 2021 has already seen a flurry of public banking activity. Sixteen new bills to form publicly-owned banks or facilitate their formation were introduced in eight U.S. states in January and February. Two bills for a state-owned bank were introduced in New... Read more |
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Views Thursday, December 03, 2020 Why the Fed Needs Public Banks On November 20, US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin informed Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell that he would not extend five of the Special Purpose Vehicles (SPVs) set up last spring to bail out bondholders, and that he wanted the $455 billion in taxpayer money back that the Treasury had sent... Read more |
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Views Monday, June 22, 2020 Meet BlackRock, the New Great Vampire Squid BlackRock is a global financial giant with customers in 100 countries and its tentacles in major asset classes all over the world; and it now manages the spigots to trillions of bailout dollars from the Federal Reserve. The fate of a large portion of the country’s corporations has been put in the... Read more |
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Views Monday, May 18, 2020 Another Bank Bailout Under Cover of a Virus When the Dodd Frank Act was passed in 2010, President Obama triumphantly declared, “No more bailouts!” But what the Act actually said was that the next time the banks failed, they would be subject to “bail ins”—the funds of their creditors, including their large depositors, would be tapped to cover... Read more |
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Views Sunday, May 03, 2020 Crushing the States, Saving the Banks: The Fed’s Generous New Rules Congress seems to be at war with the states. Only $150 billion of its nearly $3 trillion coronavirus relief package – a mere 5% – has been allocated to the 50 states; and they are not allowed to use it where they need it most, to plug the holes in their budgets caused by the mandatory shutdown. On... Read more |
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Views Friday, April 03, 2020 Was the Fed Just Nationalized? Mainstream politicians have long insisted that Medicare for all, a universal basic income, student debt relief and a slew of other much-needed public programs are off the table because the federal government cannot afford them. But that was before Wall Street and the stock market were driven onto... Read more |
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Views Wednesday, March 11, 2020 The Fed’s Baffling Response to the Coronavirus Explained When the World Health Organization announced on Feb. 24 that it was time to prepare for a global pandemic, the stock market plummeted. Over the following week, the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped by more than 3,500 points, or 10%. In an attempt to contain the damage, the Federal Reserve on... Read more |
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Views Thursday, December 26, 2019 The Key to Solving the Climate Crisis Is Beneath Our Feet The Green New Deal resolution that was introduced into the U.S. House of Representatives in February hit a wall in the Senate, where it was called unrealistic and unaffordable. In a Washington Post article titled “ The Green New Deal Sets Us Up for Failure. We Need a Better Approach ,” former... Read more |
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Views Thursday, December 12, 2019 Paul Volcker’s Long Shadow Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan called Paul Volcker “ the most effective chairman in the history of the Federal Reserve.” But while Volcker, who passed away Dec. 8 at age 92, probably did have the greatest historical impact of any Fed chairman, his legacy is, at best, controversial... Read more |
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Views Thursday, November 07, 2019 Is the Run on the Dollar Due to Panic or Greed? What’s going on in the repo market? Rates on repurchase agreements (“repo”) should be around 2%, in line with the fed funds rate. But they shot up to over 5% on September 16 and got as high as 10% on September 17. Yet banks were refusing to lend to each other, evidently passing up big profits to... Read more |