Zerohedge has the details on the Federal Reserve’s plans to spy on the economically astute:
Two weeks ago, the media’s heart went aflutter when it learned that the president had borrowed a page right out of ole’ Joe McCarthy’s communist witch hunt book with the launch of Attack Watch. The response by everyone, even fans of Obama, was immediate and brutal. Yet where Obama took about 24 hours to crash and burn, someone else has stepped in with a far stealthier method of ferreting out the traitors amongst us: none other than our old friends, the Federal Reserve Bank of the United States, which in a Request for Proposals filed to companies that are Fed vendors, is requesting the creation of a “Social Listening Platform” whose function is to “gather data from various social media outlets and news sources.” It will “monitor billions of conversations and generate text analytics based on predefined criteria.” The Fed’s desired product should be able to “determine the sentiment [ED:LOL] of a speaker or writer with respect to some topic or document”… “The solution must be able to gather data from the primary social media platforms – Facebook, Twitter, Blogs, Forums and YouTube. It should also be able to aggregate data from various media outlets such as: CNN, WSJ, Factiva etc.” Most importantly, the “Listening Platform” should be able to “Handle crisis situations, Continuously monitor conversations, and Identify and reach out to key bloggers and influencers.” Said otherwise, the Fed has just entered the counterespionage era and will be monitoring everything written about it anywhere in the world.
I could save them the trouble and expense of spying on the world with a simple summary: Everyone who understands the U.S. central banking system despises the Fed and understands that it is an organization that was created to inflate the money supply and funnel money to the banks. And while investors once feared its influence over the financial markets, no one fears it anymore because Chairman Bernanke’s predictions are uniformly wrong, his policies have uniformly failed, and the shortcomings of the its debt currency are becoming obvious even to non-economists.
On the other hand, perhaps Helicopter Ben is simply looking for hot investment tips. Obviously his investment strategy hasn’t been working out so well.