[PaulDavisThe1st]

> To name just one of Graeber's essential lies: he makes the claim that Federal Reserve issuing American debt is privately controlled

From a short piece of writing from the St. Louis Fed itself, linked to in another comment below:

>The Federal Reserve Banks are not a part of the federal government, but they exist because of an act of Congress.

Now, we could quote the next few lines too, for a bit more context:

> So is the Fed private or public? The answer is both. While the Board of Governors is an independent government agency, the Federal Reserve Banks are set up like private corporations.

Clearly, it's a rather unique institution that makes arguments that it is privately controlled or not rather harder to resolve.

But that also means that this is not "an essential lie" by Graeber. He has elided some of the complexity in favor of what he sees as a more important truth, without saying something that it categorically false.

[cynicalkane]

American debt is issued entirely by Congress and the Treasury, and its monetization controlled by the Fed's Board of Governors, which is appointed by the government and independently operated. There's no means of control over these two things outside the U.S. government. There's also the FOMC, but this is relatively unessential such that it's unlikely to be related to whatever "essential truth" Graeber has in mind. In particular, they don't set monetary policy but do whatever the Board of Governors orders in that regard.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

I wasn't making an argument about the behavior of the Fed.

You stated that Graeber had told "an essential lie" in claiming that the Fed was privately controlled. I quoted from the St. Louis Fed. their own text which (a) confirms that it is not part of the government (b) it's complicated.

I don't really give a damn about the argument on whether the Fed is or is not part of the government; what I care about is people claiming that someone is lying when they are not.

[cynicalkane]

The point is issuance of American debt, and the Fed's role in it, is not privately controlled, neither in fact or in essence. Saying otherwise is an obvious lie in both senses.

[thoughtstheseus]

Just a financial plumbing nitpick. The TREASURY issues debt, not the Federal Reserve. Everyone agrees the Treasury is part of the federal government.

[zzbzq]

This dispute might originate deeper into Graeber's other work on debt in "Debt: The first 5000 years." In common parlance, Treasury Bonds are the debt. But, in Graeber's theory of debt, the currency itself is also debt.