Federal Reserve Act Quotes

This [Federal Reserve Act] establishes the most gigantic trust on earth. When the President (Woodrow Wilson) signs this bill, the invisible government of the monetary power will be legalized....the worst legislative crime of the ages is perpetrated by this banking and currency bill.

Money is not an invention of the state. It is not the product of a legislative act. Even the sanction of political authority is not necessary for its existence. Certain commodities came to be money quite naturally, as the result of economic relationships that were independent of the power of the state.

Von Pein’s family was a little known, but highly influential entity within American banking circles. Banking Royalty, some called it. His grandfather had been one of the chief orchestrators of the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, which effectively took ownership of the bank from the American people.

Almost as an article of faith, some individuals believe that conspiracies are either kooky fantasies or unimportant aberrations. To be sure, wacko conspiracy theories do exist. There are people who believe that the United States has been invaded by a secret United Nations army equipped with black helicopters, or that the country is secretly controlled by Jews or gays or feminists or black nationalists or communists or extraterrestrial aliens. But it does not logically follow that all conspiracies are imaginary. Conspiracy is a legitimate concept in law: the collusion of two or more people pursuing illegal means to effect some illegal or immoral end. People go to jail for committing conspiratorial acts. Conspiracies are a matter of public record, and some are of real political significance. The Watergate break-in was a conspiracy, as was the Watergate cover-up, which led to Nixon’s downfall. Iran-contra was a conspiracy of immense scope, much of it still uncovered. The savings and loan scandal was described by the Justice Department as “a thousand conspiracies of fraud, theft, and bribery,” the greatest financial crime in history. Often the term “conspiracy” is applied dismissively whenever one suggests that people who occupy positions of political and economic power are consciously dedicated to advancing their elite interests. Even when they openly profess their designs, there are those who deny that intent is involved. In 1994, the officers of the Federal Reserve announced they would pursue monetary policies designed to maintain a high level of unemployment in order to safeguard against “overheating” the economy. Like any creditor class, they preferred a deflationary course. When an acquaintance of mine mentioned this to friends, he was greeted skeptically, “Do you think the Fed bankers are deliberately trying to keep people unemployed?” In fact, not only did he think it, it was announced on the financial pages of the press. Still, his friends assumed he was imagining a conspiracy because he ascribed self-interested collusion to powerful people. At a World Affairs Council meeting in San Francisco, I remarked to a participant that U.S. leaders were pushing hard for the reinstatement of capitalism in the former communist countries. He said, “Do you really think they carry it to that level of conscious intent?” I pointed out it was not a conjecture on my part. They have repeatedly announced their commitment to seeing that “free-market reforms” are introduced in Eastern Europe. Their economic aid is channeled almost exclusively into the private sector. The same policy holds for the monies intended for other countries. Thus, as of the end of 1995, “more than $4.5 million U.S. aid to Haiti has been put on hold because the Aristide government has failed to make progress on a program to privatize state-owned companies” (New York Times 11/25/95). Those who suffer from conspiracy phobia are fond of saying: “Do you actually think there’s a group of people sitting around in a room plotting things?” For some reason that image is assumed to be so patently absurd as to invite only disclaimers. But where else would people of power get together – on park benches or carousels? Indeed, they meet in rooms: corporate boardrooms, Pentagon command rooms, at the Bohemian Grove, in the choice dining rooms at the best restaurants, resorts, hotels, and estates, in the many conference rooms at the White House, the NSA, the CIA, or wherever. And, yes, they consciously plot – though they call it “planning” and “strategizing” – and they do so in great secrecy, often resisting all efforts at public disclosure. No one confabulates and plans more than political and corporate elites and their hired specialists. To make the world safe for those who own it, politically active elements of the owning class have created a national security state that expends billions of dollars and enlists the efforts of vast numbers of people.

Knowledge by itself is not power, but it holds the potential for power if we use it a s a guide for action. Truth will always be defeated by tyranny unless the people are willing to step forward and put their lives into the battle. The future belongs, not to ideas, but to people who act on those ideas.

They call themselves conservatives but that’s not it, either. They don’t want to conserve what we now have. They’d rather take the country backwards – before the 1960s and 1970s, and the Environmental Protection Act, Medicare, and Medicaid; before the New Deal, and its provision for Social Security, unemployment insurance, the forty-hour workweek, and official recognition of trade unions; even before the Progressive Era, and the first national income tax, antitrust laws, and Federal Reserve. They’re not conservatives. They’re regressives. And the America they seek is the one we had in the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century.

Our financial system is a false one and a huge burden on the people . . . This Act establishes the most gigantic trust on earth." —Congressman Charles Augustus Lindbergh, Sr.

The Tenth Amendment recognizes the States' jurisdiction in certain areas. States' Rights means that the States have a right to act or not to act, as they see fit, in the areas reserved to them. The States may have duties corresponding to these rights, but the duties are owed to the people of the States, not to the federal government. Therefore, the recourse lies not with the federal government, which is not sovereign, but with the people who are, and who have full power to take disciplinary action. If the people are unhappy with say, their State's disability insurance program, they can bring pressure to bear on their state officials and, if that fails, they can elect a new set of officials. And if, in the unhappy event they should wish to divest themselves of this responsibility, they can amend the Constitution.

President Theodore Roosevelt had created the bureau in 1908, hoping to fill the void in federal law enforcement. (Because of lingering opposition to a national police force, Roosevelt’s attorney general had acted without legislative approval, leading one congressman to label the new organization a “bureaucratic bastard.”) When White entered the bureau, it still had only a few hundred agents and only a smattering of field offices. Its jurisdiction over crimes was limited, and agents handled a hodgepodge of cases: they investigated antitrust and banking violations; the interstate shipment of stolen cars, contraceptives, prizefighting films, and smutty books; escapes by federal prisoners; and crimes committed on Indian reservations.

The phone rang. It was a familiar voice. It was Alan Greenspan. Paul O'Neill had tried to stay in touch with people who had served under Gerald Ford, and he'd been reasonably conscientious about it. Alan Greenspan was the exception. In his case, the effort was constant and purposeful. When Greenspan was the chairman of Ford's Council of Economic Advisers, and O'Neill was number two at OMB, they had become a kind of team. Never social so much. They never talked about families or outside interests. It was all about ideas: Medicare financing or block grants - a concept that O'Neill basically invented to balance federal power and local autonomy - or what was really happening in the economy. It became clear that they thought well together. President Ford used to have them talk about various issues while he listened. After a while, each knew how the other's mind worked, the way married couples do. In the past fifteen years, they'd made a point of meeting every few months. It could be in New York, or Washington, or Pittsburgh. They talked about everything, just as always. Greenspan, O'Neill told a friend, "doesn't have many people who don't want something from him, who will talk straight to him. So that's what we do together - straight talk." O'Neill felt some straight talk coming in. "Paul, I'll be blunt. We really need you down here," Greenspan said. "There is a real chance to make lasting changes. We could be a team at the key moment, to do the things we've always talked about." The jocular tone was gone. This was a serious discussion. They digressed into some things they'd "always talked about," especially reforming Medicare and Social Security. For Paul and Alan, the possibility of such bold reinventions bordered on fantasy, but fantasy made real. "We have an extraordinary opportunity," Alan said. Paul noticed that he seemed oddly anxious. "Paul, your presence will be an enormous asset in the creation of sensible policy." Sensible policy. This was akin to prayer from Greenspan. O'Neill, not expecting such conviction from his old friend, said little. After a while, he just thanked Alan. He said he always respected his counsel. He said he was thinking hard about it, and he'd call as soon as he decided what to do. The receiver returned to its cradle. He thought about Greenspan. They were young men together in the capital. Alan stayed, became the most noteworthy Federal Reserve Bank chairman in modern history and, arguably the most powerful public official of the past two decades. O'Neill left, led a corporate army, made a fortune, and learned lessons - about how to think and act, about the importance of outcomes - that you can't ever learn in a government. But, he supposed, he'd missed some things. There were always trade-offs. Talking to Alan reminded him of that. Alan and his wife, Andrea Mitchell, White House correspondent for NBC news, lived a fine life. They weren't wealthy like Paul and Nancy. But Alan led a life of highest purpose, a life guided by inquiry. Paul O'Neill picked up the telephone receiver, punched the keypad. "It's me," he said, always his opening. He started going into the details of his trip to New York from Washington, but he's not much of a phone talker - Nancy knew that - and the small talk trailed off. "I think I'm going to have to do this." She was quiet. "You know what I think," she said. She knew him too well, maybe. How bullheaded he can be, once he decides what's right. How he had loved these last few years as a sovereign, his own man. How badly he was suited to politics, as it was being played. And then there was that other problem: she'd almost always been right about what was best for him. "Whatever, Paul. I'm behind you. If you don't do this, I guess you'll always regret it." But it was clearly about what he wanted, what he needed. Paul thanked her. Though somehow a thank-you didn't seem appropriate. And then he realized she was crying.

KEYNESIAN ECONOMICS AND STIMULUS Keynesian economics is based on the notion that unemployment arises when total or aggregate demand in an economy falls short of the economy’s ability to supply goods and services. When products go unsold, jobs are lost. Aggregate demand, in turn, comes from two sources: the private sector (which is the majority) and the government. At times, aggregate demand is too buoyant—goods fly off the shelves and labor is in great demand—and we get rising inflation. At other times, aggregate demand is inadequate—goods are hard to sell and jobs are hard to find. In those cases, Keynes argued in the 1930s, governments can boost employment by cutting interest rates (what we now call looser monetary policy), raising their own spending, or cutting people’s taxes (what we now call looser fiscal policy). By the same logic, when there is too much demand, governments can fight actual or incipient inflation by raising interest rates (tightening monetary policy), increasing taxes, or reducing its own spending (thus tightening fiscal policy). That’s part of standard Keynesian economics, too, although Keynes, writing during the Great Depression, did not emphasize it. Setting aside the underlying theory, the central Keynesian policy idea is that the government can—and, Keynes argued, should—act as a kind of balance wheel, stimulating aggregate demand when it’s too weak and restraining aggregate demand when it’s too strong. For decades, American economists took for granted that most of that job should and would be done by monetary policy. Fiscal policy, they thought, was too slow, too cumbersome, and too political. And in the months after the Lehman Brothers failure, the Federal Reserve did, indeed, pull out all the stops—while fiscal policy did nothing. But what happens when, as was more or less the case by December 2008, the central bank has done almost everything it can, and yet the economy is still sinking? That’s why eyes started turning toward Congress and the president—that is, toward fiscal stimulus—after the 2008 election.

Central banks across the globe have been hesitant to recognize bitcoin as a form of money, and Tuesday’s vanishing act isn’t helping. Mt. Gox “reminds us of the downside of decentralized, unregulated currencies,” said Campbell Harvey, a professor at the Duke University Fuqua School of Business who specializes in financial markets and global risk management. “There is no Federal Reserve or IMF to come to the rescue. There is no deposit insurance.” However, Campbell said, Mt. Gox’s disappearance “doesn’t mean the end of the road” for bit-coin and other virtual currencies.

Reich would soon back a request from Angelo Mozilo, Countrywide’s white-haired, unnaturally tanned CEO. Mozilo wanted an exemption from the Section 23A rules that prevented Countrywide’s holding company from tapping the discount window through a savings institution it owned. Sheila and the FDIC were justifiably skeptical, as was Janet Yellen at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, in whose district Countrywide’s headquarters were located. Lending indirectly to Countrywide would be risky. It might well already be insolvent and unable to pay us back. The day after the discount rate cut, Don Kohn relayed word that Janet was recommending a swift rejection of Mozilo’s request for a 23A exemption. She believed, Don said, that Mozilo “is in denial about the prospects for his company and it needs to be sold.” Countrywide found its reprieve in the form of a confidence-boosting $2 billion equity investment from Bank of America on August 22—not quite the sale that Janet thought was needed, but the first step toward an eventual acquisition by Bank of America. Countrywide formally withdrew its request for a 23A exemption on Thursday August 30 as I was flying to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, to speak at the Kansas City Fed’s annual economic symposium. The theme of the conference, chosen long before, was “Housing, Housing Finance, and Monetary Policy.

We have reached the point where even some of the central institutions have been forced to admit, however quietly, that this is indeed the case. In America, the Federal Reserve floated a plan for mass mortgage relief in the summer of 2012, only to discover the political class was simply unwilling to consider it. For a while, even the IMF, under Dominique Strauss-Kahn, began trying to reposition itself as the conscience of global capitalism, issuing warnings that if the economy continues on the present course, some kind of crash is inevitable, and the next time, no bailout is likely to be forthcoming: the public simply will not stand for it, and as a result, everything really will come apart. “IMF Warns Second Bailout Would ‘Threaten Democracy,’ ” reads one headline.16 (Of course by “democracy” they mean “capitalism.”) Surely it means something that even those who feel they are responsible for keeping the current global economic system running, who just a few years ago acted as if they could simply assume the current system would be around forever, are now seeing apocalypse everywhere.

The twin threats of deforestation and fire prompted the private and public sectors to act. Large firms like Weyerhaeuser began fire prevention programs and invested in sustainable yield research. The federal government instituted measures to conserve the nation's forests in 1891 with passage of the Forest Reserves Act. Under the leadership of President Grover Cleveland and later President Theodore Roosevelt, the federal government set aside 12.5 million acres in forest reserves in Washington, more than 25% of its total land mass.

Those who obeyed the Act, also known as the Thomas Amendment, received the standard current rate of exchange, $20.66 per gold ounce, in paper money issued by the Federal Reserve. In exchange the Fed received gold certificates from the US Treasury.

Stonewalling requests from Congress to find details about what junk mortgages and other “toxic waste” the Federal Reserve was accepting in exchange for its swaps, Chairman Bernanke claimed that politicians had no right to know how the public purse was being put at risk. Bloomberg filed a Freedom of Information Act request, and nearly three years later, in July 2011, the Government Accountability Office provided Senator Bernie Sanders with a report detailing $16 trillion of Fed loans and swaps. It revealed how the officers of Wall Street’s leading banks who sat on the New York Federal Reserve Board gave their own firms the fortune of a century to tide them over. As

The Federal Reserve Act was passed by Congress in 1913 while most of its members were on Christmas vacation giving all powers to this newly created central bank to issue legal tender and regulate the money supply as it saw fit.

no progress was made on the tension arising from the U.S. dollar’s status as both the national currency of the United States and the global reserve currency, that is, the currency used for most international transactions, which required most countries to keep a store of it on hand. The U.S. Federal Reserve thus acted as both the country’s and the world’s central bank; the problem in the eyes of many resulted from the fact that the world had no oversight or control over the U.S. central bank or U.S. economic policy more broadly.

The moment was highly polarizing. Populists agitated for an income tax, tariff reform, regulation of railroads, and direct election of U.S. senators (who were chosen by the legislatures). Workers erupted in sometimes violent strikes—notably, the Pullman strike of 1894, which halted much of the nation’s rail traffic and led to rioting and acts of sabotage, and was ultimately suppressed by federal troops.

The Gam-St. Germain Act allowed the thrifts to lend an amount of money equal to the appraised value of real estate rather than the market value. It wasn't long before appraisers were receiving handsome fees for appraisals that were, to say the least, unrealistic.

When the Fed makes a loan, taking securities or bank loans as collateral, the recipient of the loan deposits the funds in a commercial bank. The bank in turn adds the funds to its reserve account at the Fed. When banks hold substantial reserves, they have little need to borrow from other banks, and so the interest rate that banks charge each other for short-term loans—the federal funds rate—tends to fall. But the FOMC targets that same short-term interest rate when making monetary policy. Without offsetting action, our emergency lending—by increasing the reserves that banks held at the Fed—would tend to push down the federal funds rate and other short-term interest rates. Since April, we had set our target for the federal funds rate at 2 percent—the right level, we thought, to balance our goals of supporting employment and keeping inflation under control. We needed to continue our emergency lending and at the same time prevent the federal funds rate from falling below 2 percent. Thus far, we had successfully resolved the potential inconsistency by selling a dollar’s worth of Treasury securities from our portfolio for each dollar of our emergency lending. The sales of Treasuries drained reserves from the banking system, offsetting the increase in reserves created by our lending. This procedure, known as sterilization, allowed us to make loans as needed while keeping short-term interest rates where we wanted them.

In 1913, after a lengthy study, Congress and President Woodrow Wilson passed the Federal Reserve Act, which created the Federal Reserve System to act as the nation’s central bank.

I was always puzzled by the combination of Dodd’s apparently high personal regard for me and his willingness to blast the Federal Reserve, as if I had had nothing to do with the Fed’s decisions and policies.

To this day, the Federal Reserve Act allows the Fed to create money and lend it to the US government at interest. “When necessary, the Federal Reserve prints dollar bills like the company Hakle prints toilet paper,” Walter Wittmann, who taught economics at the University of Fribourg, once commented dryly in Switzerland. In being able to raise or lower interest rates, the Fed controls the course of the economy. This enormous privilege of the Fed has been criticized over and over because the member banks of the Federal Reserve System and their owners are private companies that have gained enormous power through this privilege of being able to create money, thus controlling the money supply.

The Federal Reserve, funded by earnings on our securities portfolio, remained open.

Easygoing, thoughtful, and without ego, Don was a Federal Reserve System veteran.

In that respect, it seemed to me, the Federal Reserve was behind the times.

J.P. Morgan created artificial panic used as excuse to pass Federal Reserve Act. Morgan was instrumental in pushing U. S. into WWI to protect his loans to British government. He financed Socialist groups to create an all-powerful centralized government which international bankers would control at the apex from behind the scenes. After his death, his partners helped finance the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia.

It is not the responsibility of the Federal Reserve—nor would it be appropriate—to protect lenders and investors from the consequences of their financial decisions.

For me personally and for the entire Fed, Don’s retirement was a great loss. He is an outstanding economist and a wise policymaker, admired and trusted by colleagues throughout the Federal Reserve System and at central banks around the world.

the borrower’s collateral had to be sound enough that the Federal Reserve could reasonably expect full repayment.

In terms of job security, I was moving in exactly the wrong direction: from a job with lifetime tenure, to a job as Federal Reserve governor that carried a fourteen-year term,

In all crises, there are those who act and those who fear to act. The Federal Reserve, born of the now little-known Panic of 1907, failed its first major test in the 1930s. Its leaders and the leaders of other central banks around the world remained passive in the face of ruinous deflation and financial collapse. The result was a global Great Depression, breadlines, and 25 percent unemployment in the United States, and the rise of fascist dictatorships abroad. Seventy-five years later, the Federal Reserve—the institution that I have dedicated the better part of my adult life to studying and serving—confronted similar challenges in the crisis of 2007–2009 and its aftermath. This time, we acted.

In the words of Disraeli, “elected governments seldom govern” and the personages who controlled the strings are far different from the politicians the citizens elected. From that point on, God’s plan for mankind, social and economic interaction for the benefit of all was trashed. In its place arose a brutal structure that looted man of his substance, his possessions, his liberty and his freedom by the most hideously malicious acts of aggression through which mankind became utterly oppressed. The Christian teaching that man was created by God with a higher purpose, notably to serve Him, with a spiritual nature that made this possible, was destroyed by the interaction that started with Cain murdering Abel. Since that moment on, murder, whether it was an individual, (like the murder of Congressman Louis T. McFadden, Chairman of the House Banking Committee for daring to expose the Federal Reserve Banking system) or mass murder, through wars such as the horrible First World War, became the instrument whereby these evil men enforced their rule. They mouthed pious platitudes and even put on an appearance of Christianity, but in their secret chambers and in their enclaves, they hurled invective at God the Father and his Son, Jesus Christ. Such is the nature of the beast with which we contend and with whom we are locked in battle in the year of our Lord, 2006. The “Elect” (and here I include the present U.S. administration in the hands of President G.W. Bush) does not believe that they are bound by Moral Law. While the “300” rule as they most assuredly do, man can never be secure in his person, his liberties and his property, witness the country of Iraq as one example.

I believe that the many administration officials, lawmakers, and regulatory policymakers—and their staffs—who poured a year and a half of prodigious work into the legislation had been guided, knowingly or not, by a simultaneously high-minded and pragmatic sentiment that Woodrow Wilson voiced before he launched the effort that would establish the Federal Reserve System. “We shall deal with our economic system as it is and as it may be modified, not as it might be if we had a clean sheet of paper to write upon; and step by step we shall make it what it should be,” Wilson said in his first inaugural address. Wilson’s words continued to make good sense a century later.

Koch’s oil gathering division delivered a steady flow of cash and profits into the company. This money gave Charles Koch a chance to put his management theories to the test. He encouraged his employees to look for new growth opportunities and to act like entrepreneurs. He wanted to lead by example. In his first years as head of Koch Industries, Charles Koch put together one of the most brilliant and profitable deals in the history of Koch Industries. The deal involved an oil refinery. Since the late 1950s, Fred Koch had owned a minority share in the Great Northern oil refinery outside of Minneapolis, near the Pine Bend Bluffs natural reserve. The other shareholders in the refinery were an oil tycoon named J. Howard Marshall II and the Great Northern Oil Company. In 1969, the refinery didn’t look like a gold mine. Competition in the sector was fierce, with new refineries being put into production monthly. But the Pine Bend refinery, as everyone called it, had a secret source of profits. And this source of profits could be traced to exactly the kind of government intervention that Hayek hated most. In the 1950s, President Dwight Eisenhower capped the amount of oil that could be imported into the United States, in one of the federal government’s many ploys to protect domestic oil drillers. (Imported oil was often cheaper than domestic oil, so US drillers wanted it kept out.) But there was a loophole in that law that allowed unlimited imports from Canada. As it happened, Canada was the primary source of oil processed at the Pine Bend refinery. Pine Bend was one of only four refineries in the nation that was able to buy cheaper imported oil in unlimited quantities, giving it a huge advantage over firms that were forced to buy mostly domestic oil.

In the course of the 1960s, the left adopted almost wholesale the arguments of the right,” observed Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a domestic policy adviser to all three of the decade’s presidents. “This was not a rude act of usurpation, but rather a symmetrical, almost elegant, process of transfer.” Exaggerating for effect—but not to the point of inaccuracy—Moynihan remembered that by decade’s end, “an advanced student at an elite eastern college could be depended on to avow many of the more striking views of the Liberty League and its equivalents in the hate-Roosevelt era; for example that the growth of federal power was the greatest threat to democracy, that foreign entanglements were the work of demented plutocrats, that government snooping (by the Social Security Administration or the United States Continental Army Command) was destroying freedom, that the largest number of functions should be entrusted to the smallest jurisdictions, and so across the spectrum of this viewpoint.”2 Driven primarily by the expanding war in Vietnam, this new current on the left took up individualistic and anti-statist themes that were once the province of the right. Another part of this convergence was the rise of the economics profession. The new economics appeared a success on its own terms; growth had picked up across the Kennedy years. By 1965, GNP had increased for five straight years. Unemployment was down to 4.9 percent, and would soon drop below the 4 percent goal of full employment. As James Tobin reflected, “economists were riding the crest of a wave of enthusiasm and self-confidence. They seemed, after all, to have some tools of analysis and policy other people didn’t have, and their policy seemed to be working.”3 With institutional economics a vanquished force, most economists accepted the tenets of the neoclassical revolution: individuals making rational choices subject to the incentives created by supply and demand. Approaching policy with an economic lens cut across established political lines, which were often the creation of brokered coalitions, habit, or historical precedent. Economic analysis was at once disruptive, since it failed to honor these accidental accretions, and familiar, since it spoke a market language resonant with business-friendly political culture.4 Amid this ideological confluence, Friedman continued his dour rumblings and warnings. Ignoring the positive trends in basic indicators of economic health, from inflation to unemployment to GDP, he argued fiscal demand management was misguided, warned Bretton Woods was about to collapse, predicted imminent inflation, and castigated the Federal Reserve’s basic approach. Friedman’s quixotic quest—and the media attention it generated—infuriated many of his peers. Friedman, it seemed, was bent on fixing economic theories and institutions that were not broken.