“From Sea to Shining Sea” is only a reference to geography.  The concentration of money and its control is embedded in the arrangement among the Federal Reserve, the big banks, and the federal government. 

George Gilder in his book The Scandal of Money poses this question.

Why does Wall Street keep recovering after recessions but the economy seemingly never does?

The personnel stream between Wall Streeters and positions in government is well documented.  Perhaps they just know each other from summers at Martha’s Vineyard.

With the apparent arrangement in which the Federal Reserve, now in the eighth year of emergency action, can self-authorize new powers for itself, the once free market has taken on a perpetually managed condition.  And there are those who are loving it.

As Friedrich Hayek noted in Road to Serfdom, the decisions of central planners intentionally aid one group and harm another.  Gilder comments:

The Fed prices it at zero interest rates, allegedly to stimulate economic growth. But whenever something is free, it's distributed by queue, and only the privileged, connected people in the front of the line get any, not the innovators who create growth and opportunity for Main Street.

And who is watching?  When the fraud protection forces of this administration catch someone, it becomes an embezzlement exercise rather than an enforcement of law.  Fines are extracted to keep the miscreants out of jail, and money ends up in slush funds for pet projects of the administration.  Though the House of Representatives controls the “purse strings,” the watchdog agencies extract funds for whimsical disbursement outside congressional oversight.  Gilder continues:

And Wall Street? The once powerful engine of capitalism has been nationalized by the Obama bureaucracies feeding on fines and fees. (See AT’s “Fining the Banks” ) We've had a covert socialist coup in Washington and it must be reversed or the free enterprise engine of growth and opportunity is in jeopardy.

The Federal Reserve, as Mr. Gilder notes, is a “god that has failed.”  They have pushed on the “string” with a bulldozer, and the results are paltry.  They seek even more control and greater efforts.  The certitude of the central bankers is final, in their minds.

Like all command economies, the Fed is failing to spur growth. This failure has become so obvious that leading economists such as Ken Rogoff of Harvard and former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers now advocate the abolition of cash, so that interest rates can go below zero, meaning that through the Federal Reserve, the government can steal your savings without your representatives in Congress having to take political responsibility for levying a tax. (see AT’s “Negative Rates Resemble Theft”)

The central bankers have painted themselves into the corner, and they ask for more paint.  In their attempt to iron out business cycles, they perhaps have created one massive cycle – one that will not be cyclical, gentle, and palliative, thus ridding the market of excesses, but rather one of systemic proportions.

This is the first recovery in decades when small business jobs are actually shrinking. All the expansion is coming from the closed loop economy between the Fed, the bureaucracies and the big banks.

The “closed loop” economy running from Wall Street to Constitution Avenue is a direct result of the incestuous arrangement between the federal government and Wall Street.  As the whistleblower in the Madoff case mentioned, “why would anyone at the SEC turn anyone in for violations?  They are all waiting for a job on Wall Street.”

So as the Federal Reserve self-expands its own powers, as central planners from the Ivy League wish to do away with cash because they can’t control cash, and the “closed loop economy” still pads the proper pockets, nothing will change.  Central Planners will be certain their theories are correct, decisions will be made to hurt some and help others, and those in the “closed loop” will be separate from what remains of the national economy, the one that stretches “from sea to shining sea.”