Exclusive – Sen. Rand Paul: Auditing the Fed Should Be a ‘Simple Thing’

Auditing the Fed should be a “simple thing,” Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) said during a discussion on Breitbart News Daily this week.

When asked if his father’s dream of auditing the Fed can come true, Paul said, “Yeah, you know, you would think that would be the simple thing.”

“He talked about auditing it, but he also talked about ending it, you know. And so some of the people say, ‘Oh, we don’t even want to audit it, just end it.’ But we have trouble even getting the votes to audit,” he explained.

“We get most of the Republicans. So the last time I had a vote on this, I think I got all but three Republicans, and then I got two or three Democrats. And there is a right, left thing on this that might come together eventually, but it’s been hard, you know. It’s been difficult. And you’d think an audit would be simple, because an audit really isn’t changing policy. It’s done after the fact, but it would let us know what’s going on,” the senator said.

“And I’ll give you an example of what we discovered recently. You know, we had an investigation – my committee, Homeland Security – and we discovered that the Fed is paying big banks $188 billion in interest. Well, they never did this before 2010, but they’re paying $188 billion in interest annually. So that’s about 10 percent of our deficit if they don’t pay the banks this money. Historically, this went back to the Treasury, so it’s actually — a 10-percent offset on last year’s debt would occur, but instead it’s going to very wealthy bankers in New York. And then we also discovered that 40 percent of it’s going to foreign banks,” the Kentucky senator said.

“So you would think that — and this is a good argument for why we would audit the Fed — so we would know what they’re doing. And I think most people, and really we have a coalition of people from the right and the left that are upset about enriching already wealthy banks in New York and around the world,” he added.