When we see that Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street banks are donating to both the Romney and Obama campaigns, what we need to read is that the FED is donating to these campaigns.
Most people do not understand that the Fed is a private corporation, whose stocks are (or were: we have no way of knowing) sold on an invitation basis only to banks on an Approved list. It is a corporation that operates to the benefit of the shareholders, which is to say the banks comprising it.
The exact membership is secret. Even though the Fed controls our money supply, and thus the value of our money, and the value of our work and production, we know next to nothing about it. This is farcical.
What is clear, though, is that they are perfectly fine with either Obama or Romney. They are also, therefore, with the United States continuing to borrow hundreds of billions of dollars every month. After all, they are the ones doing much of the loaning, generally with created money.
As I think about it, when you create money, if you loan it to banks, it is inflationary. This because the banks loan out 90% of it, then 81% of it, and so on. If you want to make big money without creating inflation, you need some entity that can suck it up and use it. That entity is the United States Government.
Effectively, then, money is being transferred from the taxpayer, via the Fed, to the government, in the form of eventual, if mild, inflation, and the member banks of the Fed are making large amounts of money on this process.
I may be in error on this, but I suspect the reality is close to this.
More generally, I would like to offer the definition of the Fed as: a private corporation consisting of large banks, which is operated by and for the benefit of the banks, and whose principle activity is transferring wealth from American citizens to itself on an as-needed basis.
Think about this with me. When the Fed uses its Open Market buying power to create money, it adds to the money supply. This is inflationary, and thus constitutes a wealth transfer. When it uses the Discount Window to create money, it underwrites the process of fractional reserve banking, which itself is inflationary, and thus constitutes wealth transfer.
It is a Goebbelsian triumph of these nearly infinitely rich banks that they have kept up this fraud for nearly 100 years. All of us are the poorer for it.