Donald Trump wants to audit the Federal Reserve, criticizes Ted Cruz for missing key vote

The Federal Reserve may have a new enemy in Donald Trump.

The Republican frontrunner and billionaire real estate mogul sent out a tweet Monday encouraging an audit of the United States central bank, while chastizing Texas Senator Ted Cruz.

Here is the tweet:

“It is so important to audit The Federal Reserve, and yet Ted Cruz missed the vote on the bill that would allow this to be done.”

It is so important to audit The Federal Reserve, and yet Ted Cruz missed the vote on the bill that would allow this to be done.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 22, 2016

Trump has been vehemently criticizing the Fed and in particular Fed Chair Janet Yellen. He has said that Yellen is purposely keeping interest rates near zero in order to ensure the Democrats win the White House, and noted that if rates to hike significantly then it would pop the current economic bubble (SEE: Donald Trump wants U.S. economic bubble to pop before he becomes president).

“Right now, we have the low rates,” Trump told Bloomberg News last summer. “In terms of real estate, if I want to develop … from that standpoint I like low interest rates. From the country’s standpoint, I’m just not sure it’s a very good thing, because I really do believe we’re creating a bubble.”

He added in a separate interview late last year with The Hill that Yellen is “keeping the economy going, barely.”

“You know who gets hurt the most? People who practice the American dream and did what should have been the right way — the people that went through 40 years of their life and saved a hundred dollars every week [in the bank],” Trump said. “They worked all their lives to save and now what happens is they’re being forced into an inflated stock market and at some point they’ll get wiped out.”

When it comes to Cruz, he missed a key vote in the Senate, though he has helped the Audit the Fed legislation make the necessary moves in Washington. It should be noted, however, that his vote would have been inconsequential because it died 53 to 44, and pretty much fell short of the 60 votes needed for consideration.

Nonetheless, this may have proved to be a big mistake for Cruz, who has been trying to court libertarian Republican voters, which are those who supported Ron Paul in 2008 and 2012.

The London Guardian writes:

“However, by skipping the vote on auditing the Fed, Cruz risks jeopardizing some of the credibility he has built in [the libertarian] faction of the Republican party. Auditing the Federal Reserve has long been an animating cause of Paul and his supporters and it has taken on major symbolic significance.”

Here is what’s inside the Audit the Fed bill:

(1) the guidance given by the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System to independent consultants retained by the supervised financial institutions regarding the procedures to be followed in conducting the file reviews;

(2) the factors considered by independent consultants when evaluating loan files;

(3) the results obtained by the independent consultants pursuant to those reviews;

(4) the determinations made by the independent consultants regarding the nature and extent of financial injury sustained by each homeowner as well as the level and type of remediation offered to each homeowner; and

(5) the specific measures taken by the independent consultants to verify, confirm, or rebut the assertions and representations made by supervised financial institutions regarding the contents of loan files and the extent of financial injury to homeowners.

The latest polls suggest that Trump is still leading in most states, and it’s comes down to Marco Rubio and Cruz for the second spot.

–AM