“
Most Americans have no real understanding of the operation of the international money lenders. The accounts of the Federal Reserve System have never been audited. It operates outside the control of Congress and manipulates the credit of the United States
”
”
Barry M. Goldwater
“
If the federal government is an addict, then the Federal Reserve System is its enabler.
”
”
Thomas E. Woods Jr. (Real Dissent: A Libertarian Sets Fire to the Index Card of Allowable Opinion)
“
The financial system has been turned over to the Federal Reserve Board. That board administers the finance system by authority of a purely profiteering group. The system is private, conducted for the sole purpose of obtaining the greatest possible profits from the use of other people's money.
”
”
Charles A. Lindbergh
“
The Federal Reserve system is unlike any other in the world; it is a crazy genetic mashup of different animals, part private bank and part government agency.
”
”
Christopher Leonard (The Lords of Easy Money: How the Federal Reserve Broke the American Economy)
“
Privilege implies exclusion from privilege, just as advantage implies disadvantage," Celine went on. "In the same mathematically reciprocal way, profit implies loss. If you and I exchange equal goods, that is trade: neither of us profits and neither of us loses. But if we exchange unequal goods, one of us profits and the other loses. Mathematically. Certainly. Now, such mathematically unequal exchanges will always occur because some traders will be shrewder than others. But in total freedom—in anarchy—such unequal exchanges will be sporadic and irregular. A phenomenon of unpredictable periodicity, mathematically speaking. Now look about you, professor—raise your nose from your great books and survey the actual world as it is—and you will not observe such unpredictable functions. You will observe, instead, a mathematically smooth function, a steady profit accruing to one group and an equally steady loss accumulating for all others. Why is this, professor? Because the system is not free or random, any mathematician would tell you a priori. Well, then, where is the determining function, the factor that controls the other variables? You have named it yourself, or Mr. Adler has: the Great Tradition. Privilege, I prefer to call it. When A meets B in the marketplace, they do not bargain as equals. A bargains from a position of privilege; hence, he always profits and B always loses. There is no more Free Market here than there is on the other side of the Iron Curtain. The privileges, or Private Laws—the rules of the game, as promulgated by the Politburo and the General Congress of the Communist Party on that side and by the U.S. government and the Federal Reserve Board on this side—are slightly different; that's all. And it is this that is threatened by anarchists, and by the repressed anarchist in each of us," he concluded, strongly emphasizing the last clause, staring at Drake, not at the professor.
”
”
Robert Anton Wilson (The Golden Apple (Illuminatus, #2))
“
The whole system is overseen by the government-created Federal Reserve System, which presides over a system-wide cartel.
”
”
Thomas E. Woods Jr. (Real Dissent: A Libertarian Sets Fire to the Index Card of Allowable Opinion)
“
More intriguingly, in poll after poll, when Americans are asked what public institutions they most respect, three bodies are always at the top of their list: the Supreme Court, the armed forces, and the Federal Reserve System. All three have one thing in common: they are insulated from the public pressures and operate undemocratically. It would seem that Americans admire these institutions, preciselly because they lead rather than follow.
”
”
Fareed Zakaria (The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad)
“
The accepted version of history is that the Federal Reserve was created to stabilize our economy. One of the most widely-used textbooks on this subject says: "It sprang from the panic of 1907, with its alarming epidemic of bank failures: the country was fed up once and for all with the anarchy of unstable private banking."23 Even the most naive student must sense a grave contradiction between this cherished view and the System's actual performance. Since its inception, it has presided over the crashes of 1921 and 1929; the Great Depression of '29 to '39; recessions in '53, '57, '69, '75, and '81; a stock market "Black Monday" in '87; and a 1000% inflation which has destroyed 90% of the dollar's purchasing power.24
”
”
G. Edward Griffin (The Creature from Jekyll Island: A Second Look at the Federal Reserve)
“
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.
”
”
Eustace Clarence Mullins (The Secrets Of The Federal Reserve)
“
A prohibition on the hoarding or possession of gold was integral to the plan to devalue the dollar against gold and get people spending again. Against this background, FDR issued Executive Order 6102 on April 5, 1933, one of the most extraordinary executive orders in U.S. history. The blunt language over the signature of Franklin Delano Roosevelt speaks for itself: I, Franklin D. Roosevelt . . . declare that [a] national emergency still continues to exist and . . . do hereby prohibit the hoarding of gold coin, gold bullion, and gold certificates within the . . . United States by individuals, partnerships, associations and corporations.... All persons are hereby required to deliver, on or before May 1, 1933, to a Federal reserve bank . . . or to any member of the Federal Reserve System all gold coin, gold bullion and gold certificates now owned by them.... Whoever willfully violates any provision of this Executive Order . . . may be fined not more than $10,000 or . . . may be imprisoned for not more than ten years. The people of the United States were being ordered to surrender their gold to the government and were offered paper money at the exchange rate of $20.67 per ounce. Some relatively minor exceptions were made for dentists, jewelers and others who made “legitimate and customary” use of gold in their industry or art. Citizens were allowed to keep $100 worth of gold, about five ounces at 1933 prices, and gold in the form of rare coins. The $10,000 fine proposed in 1933 for those who continued to hoard gold in violation of the president’s order is equivalent to over $165,000 in today’s money, an extraordinarily large statutory fine. Roosevelt followed up with a
”
”
James Rickards (Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Global Crisis)
“
It is ironic that the Great Depression was produced by government but was blamed on the private enterprise system. The Federal Reserve System explained in its 1933 annual report how much worse things would have been if the Federal Reserve had not behaved so well, yet the Federal Reserve was the chief culprit in making the depression as deep as it was. So the government produced the depression, the private enterprise system got blamed for it, and there was a tremendous change in attitudes.
”
”
Milton Friedman (Why Government Is the Problem (Essays in Public Policy Book 39))
“
Beyond the speculative and often fraudulent froth that characterizes much of neoliberal financial manipulation, there lies a deeper process that entails the springing of ‘the debt trap’ as a primary means of accumulation by dispossession. Crisis creation, management, and manipulation on the world stage has evolved into the fine art of deliberative redistribution of wealth from poor countries to the rich. I documented the impact of Volcker’s interest rate increase on Mexico earlier. While proclaiming its role as a noble leader organizing ‘bail-outs’ to keep global capital accumulation on track, the US paved the way to pillage the Mexican economy. This was what the US Treasury–Wall Street–IMF complex became expert at doing everywhere. Greenspan at the Federal Reserve deployed the same Volcker tactic several times in the 1990s. Debt crises in individual countries, uncommon during the 1960s, became very frequent during the 1980s and 1990s. Hardly any developing country remained untouched, and in some cases, as in Latin America, such crises became endemic. These debt crises were orchestrated, managed, and controlled both to rationalize the system and to redistribute assets. Since 1980, it has been calculated, ‘over fifty Marshall Plans (over $4.6 trillion) have been sent by the peoples at the Periphery to their creditors in the Center’. ‘What a peculiar world’, sighs Stiglitz, ‘in which the poor countries are in effect subsidizing the richest.
”
”
David Harvey (A Brief History of Neoliberalism)
“
The job of the Federal Reserve is “to know when to remove the punch bowl at the party.” Under Alan Greenspan’s leadership its motto became “let’s all get drunk and see what happens.” It is now the morning after and the world will be dealing with Greenspan’s hangover for the next several decades.
”
”
Said Elias Dawlabani (MEMEnomics: The Next Generation Economic System)
“
In the same mathematically reciprocal way, profit implies loss. If you and I exchange equal goods, that is trade: neither of us profits and neither of us loses. But if we exchange unequal goods, one of us profits and the other loses. Mathematically. Certainly. Now, such mathematically unequal exchanges will always occur because some traders will be shrewder than others. But in total freedom—in anarchy—such unequal exchanges will be sporadic and irregular. A phenomenon of unpredictable periodicity, mathematically speaking. Now look about you, professor—raise your nose from your great books and survey the actual world as it is—and you will not observe such unpredictable functions. You will observe, instead, a mathematically smooth function, a steady profit accruing to one group and an equally steady loss accumulating for all others. Why is this, professor? Because the system is not free or random, any mathematician would tell you a priori. Well, then, where is the determining function, the factor that controls the other variables? You have named it yourself, or Mr. Adler has: the Great Tradition. Privilege, I prefer to call it. When A meets B in the marketplace, they do not bargain as equals. A bargains from a position of privilege; hence, he always profits and B always loses. There is no more Free Market here than there is on the other side of the Iron Curtain. The privileges, or Private Laws—the rules of the game, as promulgated by the Politburo and the General Congress of the Communist Party on that side and by the U.S. government and the Federal Reserve Board on this side—are slightly different; that’s all. And it is this that is threatened by anarchists, and by the repressed anarchist in each of us,
”
”
Robert Shea (The Illuminatus! Trilogy: The Eye in the Pyramid/The Golden Apple/Leviathan)
“
[Hyperinflation is] not going to happen in this country, will never happen... [The Fed putting so much money into the system is] not going to create the risk of hyperinflation in the future. We have a strong independent Federal Reserve with a very strong mandate from the Congress, and they will do what's necessary to keep inflation low and stable over time.
”
”
Timothy F. Geithner
“
I strongly support liquidating the corporation that is the Federal
Reserve and returning to a monetary system based on a marketproduced
precious metal, like gold, which is represented by a currency
printed and managed by the U.S. Treasury Department as stipulated
by our Constitution. The assets currently owned by the Fed should
be liquidated and parceled out on a pro-rata basis to its creditors. All we need is the will.
”
”
Ziad K. Abdelnour (Economic Warfare: Secrets of Wealth Creation in the Age of Welfare Politics)
“
A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is concentrated. The growth of the Nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men ♦ ♦ *, We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated Governments in the civilised world — no longer a Government by free opinion, no longer a Government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a Government by the opinion and duress of small groups of dominant men.
”
”
Woodrow Wilson (The New Freedom: A Call For the Emancipation of the Generous Energies of a People)
“
The only healthcare available to Native people living on reservations is provided by the Indian Health Service (IHS), an operating division within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services that’s consistently rated as the worst healthcare provider in America. IHS is also grossly underfunded: in 2016, Congress allotted $4.8 billion for IHS, which came out to approximately $1,297 per person. For comparison, each inmate in the federal prison system receives an average of about $6,973 in healthcare each year.
”
”
Alice Wong (Disability Visibility : First-Person Stories from the Twenty-first Century)
“
The Department of Justice had become known as the Department of Easy Virtue. In 1924, after a congressional committee revealed that the oil baron Harry Sinclair had bribed the secretary of the interior Albert Fall to drill in the Teapot Dome federal petroleum reserve—the name that would forever be associated with the scandal—the ensuing investigation lay bare just how rotten the system of justice was in the United States. When Congress began looking into the Justice Department, Burns and the attorney general used all their power, all the tools of law enforcement, to thwart the inquiry and obstruct justice.
”
”
David Grann (Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI)
“
If all the bank loans were paid, no one could have a bank deposit, and there would not be a dollar of coin or currency in circulation. This is a staggering thought. We are completely dependent on the commercial Banks. Someone has to borrow every dollar we have in circulation, cash or credit. If the Banks create ample synthetic money we are prosperous; if not, we starve. We are absolutely without a permanent money system. When one gets a complete grasp of the picture, the tragic absurdity of our hopeless position is almost incredible, but there it is. It is the most important subject intelligent persons can investigate and reflect upon. It is so important that our present civilization may collapse unless it becomes widely understood and the defects remedied very soon.” Robert H Hemphill, credit manager of Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, 1934
”
”
Andy Zaltzman (Does anything eat bankers?: And 53 Other Indispensable Questions for the Credit Crunched)
“
In the February 9, 1935, issue of the Saturday Evening Post, an article appeared written by Frank Vanderlip. In it he said: Despite my views about the value to society of greater publicity for the affairs of corporations, there was an occasion, near the close of 1910, when I was as secretive—indeed, as furtive—as any conspirator.... I do not feel it is any exaggeration to speak of our secret expedition to Jekyll Island as the occasion of the actual conception of what eventually became the Federal Reserve System.... We were told to leave our last names behind us. We were told, further, that we should avoid dining together on the night of our departure. We were instructed to come one at a time and as unobtrusively as possible to the railroad terminal on the New Jersey littoral of the Hudson, where Senator Aldrich's private car would be in readiness, attached to the rear end of a train for the South.... Once aboard the private car we began to observe the taboo that had been fixed on last names. We addressed one another as "Ben," "Paul," "Nelson," "Abe"—it is Abraham Piatt Andrew. Davison and I adopted even deeper disguises, abandoning our first names. On the theory that we were always right, he became Wilbur and I became Orville, after those two aviation pioneers, the Wright brothers.... The servants and train crew may have known the identities of one or two of us, but they did not know all, and it was the names of all printed together that would have made our mysterious journey significant in Washington, in Wall Street, even in London. Discovery, we knew, simply must not happen, or else all our time and effort would be wasted. If it were to be exposed publicly that our particular group had got together and written a banking bill, that bill would have no chance whatever of passage by Congress.
”
”
G. Edward Griffin (The Creature from Jekyll Island: A Second Look at the Federal Reserve)
“
The Federal Reserve The Federal Reserve Bank was founded in 1913. Most people think that this bank is an American Federal Company. That is just as wrong as the conviction that the Bank of England belongs to the British Crown or to the whole of England. The Federal Reserve is in the hands of the Rothschilds and company. In his speech before the Senate, on December 15, 1987, Senator Jesse Helms said: “The principal instrument of the control over the American economy and money is the Federal Reserve System.” The Federal Reserve has a monopoly over the expenditure of the dollar as a world currency and determining the interest rate, and it disposes of a lot more monopolies. How does the Federal Reserve Bank operate? Suppose the United States government needs a couple of billion dollars for its expenses that cannot be paid with taxes income. At that moment it addresses the Federal Reserve Board. Then government bonds for the needed billion dollars are printed in the Bureau of Printing and Engraving. After these bonds are handed over to the bankers of the Federal Reserve, the board grants a loan to the government in the amount of the bond issue. The Federal Reserve draws interest from the government from the day the bonds are delivered. From that day on the government is allowed to draw checks against the Federal Reserve for the amount of the bonds. What are the consequences of this incredible transaction? The government simply saddles the people with a billion dollar debt to the Federal Reserve Bank, apart from the interest on interest that also has to be paid by “ordinary people”. What does the Federal Reserve have to say about “their” money? “Neither paper currency nor deposits have value as commodities. Intrinsically, a dollar bill is just a piece of paper, deposits merely book entries.”[76] When the Federal Reserve needs new, or more, currency to transact its business, it takes the bonds over to the United States Treasury for safekeeping and asks the Treasury Department for the billions of dollars of new currency it needs. The Bank is accommodated on condition that it will pay the printing bill. It only pays for the expenditure costs of the banknotes, which are no more than a mere 500 dollars for ink and paper!
”
”
Robin de Ruiter (Worldwide Evil and Misery - The Legacy of the 13 Satanic Bloodlines)
“
SINCE the financial crisis, it has become commonplace to argue that banks should be run as utilities, not casinos. At least in terms of their financial performance, that seems to be happening. In 2006, the eight American banks that regulators have since labelled “globally systemically important” generated casino-like profits, with returns on equity of 30% on average, according to Oliver Wyman, a consultancy. They are currently managing less than 11%, and there is worse to come: the Federal Reserve recently announced plans to oblige them to raise extra capital. By one calculation that would reduce their return on equity to little over 8%, other things being equal—a lower return than America’s water companies make. And other things are unlikely to be equal. American regulators continue to biff big banks with blistering fines. Then there is the requirement that banks produce “living wills”, explaining how they could be wound down if disaster strikes: the regulators have rejected every single “will” they have received so far as too flimsy. Making banks easier to close down will probably leave them even less profitable.
”
”
Anonymous
“
How is money created? An example: You buy a house or take out a mortgage on the excess value of your property. You want 200,000 Dollars. The following happens. The bank’s computer adds these virtual numbers - because that is what they are - to your bank account, and then you have to bleed for the next 30 years, WITH INTEREST. The bank attached a fictional number to your name and for 30 years you need to work to pay the money back. The bank didn’t build your house, nor did it pay for the materials. That was done by people like you and me. They too have to pay, because they also have a mortgage. And when you die, your kids will have to pay taxes on your estate. Often, they have to take out a mortgage of their own to do so[74]. Another example of how banks create money out of nothing: You go to the bank to lend 1,000 Dollars. One year later, you have to pay 1,100 Dollars back, including interest. The additional 100 Dollars come from fellow citizens, for instance in the form of wages or profit sharing. In other words, the extra 100 Dollars come from society. This can only happen when the total amount of money in circulation increases. That increase – inflation – is created when the bank creates more money. In other words: “Interest payments are a direct way to create money.” All the money that exists comes from the bank. This remarkable phenomenon has been described as follows by Mr. Robert Hemphill, Credit Manager of the Federal Reserve Bank in Atlanta: “If all the bank loans were paid, there would not be a dollar in circulation. This is a staggering thought. We are completely dependent on the commercial banks. Someone has to borrow every dollar we have in circulation, cash, or credit. If the banks create ample synthetic money we are prosperous; if not, we starve. We are absolutely without a permanent money system. When one gets a complete grasp of the picture, the tragic absurdity of our hopeless situation is almost incredible - but there it is.”[75]
”
”
Robin de Ruiter (Worldwide Evil and Misery - The Legacy of the 13 Satanic Bloodlines)
“
Your committee is satisfied from the proofs submitted ... that there is an established and well defined identity and community of interest between a few leaders of finance ... which has resulted in great and rapidly growing concentration of the control of money and credit in the hands of these few men.... Under our system of issuing and distributing corporate securities the investing public does not buy directly from the corporation. The securities travel from the issuing house through middlemen to the investor. It is only the great banks or bankers with access to the mainsprings of the concentrated resources made up of other people's money, in the banks, trust companies, and life insurance companies, and with control of the machinery for creating markets and distributing securities, who have had the power to underwrite or guarantee the sale of large-scale security issues. The men who through their control over the funds of our railroad and industrial companies are able to direct where such funds shall be kept, and thus to create these great reservoirs of the people's money are the ones who are in a position to tap those reservoirs for the ventures in which they are interested and to prevent their being tapped for purposes which they do not approve.... When we consider, also, in this connection that into these reservoirs of money and credit there flow a large part of the reserves of the banks of the country, that they are also the agents and correspondents of the out-of-town banks in the loaning of their surplus funds in the only public money market of the country, and that a small group of men and their partners and associates have now further strengthened their hold upon the resources of these institutions by acquiring large stock holdings therein, by representation on their boards and through valuable patronage, we begin to realize something of the extent to which this practical and effective domination and control over our greatest financial, railroad and industrial corporations has developed, largely within the past five years, and that it is fraught with peril to the welfare of the country.3 Such was the nature of the wealth and power represented by those six men who gathered in secret that night and travelled in the luxury of Senator Aldrich's private car.
”
”
G. Edward Griffin (The Creature from Jekyll Island: A Second Look at the Federal Reserve)
“
These policies would come back to haunt Europe in the aftermath of the 2008 collapse. Instead of the vigorous, countercyclical fiscal, monetary, and debt relief policies called for in the wake of a 1929-scale crash, Europe’s institutions promoted austerity reminiscent of the post–World War I era. The debt and deficit limits of Maastricht precluded strong fiscal stimulus, and the government of Angela Merkel resisted emergency waivers. Germany, an export champion, which in effect had an artificially cheap currency in the euro, profited from other nations’ misery. Germany could prosper by running a large export surplus (equal to almost 10 percent of its GDP), but not all nations can have surpluses. The European Central Bank, which reported to nineteen different national masters that used the euro, had neither the tools nor the mandate available to the US Federal Reserve. The ECB did cut interest rates, but it did not engage in the scale of credit creation pursued by the Fed. The Germans successfully resisted any Europeanizing of the sovereign debt of the EU’s weaker nations, pressing them instead to regain the confidence of capital markets by deflating. Sovereign debt financing by the ECB went mainly to repay private and state creditors, not to rekindle growth. Thus did “fortress Europe,” which advocates and detractors circa 1981 both saw as a kind of social democratic alternative to the liberal capitalism of the Anglo-Saxon nations, replicate the worst aspects of a global system captive to the demands of speculative private capital. The Maastricht constitution not only internalized those norms, but enforced them. The dream of managed capitalism on one continent became a laissez-faire nightmare—not laissez-faire in the sense of no rules, but rather rules structured to serve corporations and banks at the expense of workers and citizens. The fortress became a brig. There was plenty to criticize in the US response to the 2008 collapse—too small a stimulus, too much focus on deficit reduction, too little attention to labor policy, too feeble a financial restructuring—but by 2016, US unemployment had come back down to less than 5 percent. In Europe, it remained stuck at more than 10 percent, with all of the social dynamite produced by persistent joblessness.
”
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Robert Kuttner (Can Democracy Survive Global Capitalism?)
“
The Federal Reserve System had been established to prevent what actually happened. It was set up to avoid a situation in which you would have to close down banks, in which you would have a banking crisis. And yet, under the Federal Reserve system, you had the worst banking crisis in the history of the United States
”
”
Alan Ebenstein (The Indispensable Milton Friedman: Essays on Politics and Economics)
“
We have, in this country, one of the most corrupt institutions the world has ever known. I refer to the Federal Reserve Board. This evil institution has impoverished the people of the United States and has practically bankrupted our government. It has done this through the corrupt practices of the moneyed vultures who control it.
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”
Louis T. McFadden
“
The central bank is an institution of the most deadly hostility existing against the Principles and form of our Constitution. I am an Enemy to all banks discounting bills or notes for anything but Coin. If the American People allow private banks to control the issuance of their currency, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the People of all their Property until their Children will wake up homeless on the continent their Fathers conquered.” -Thomas Jefferson (this describes where we are at today under the Federal Reserve) “The few who understand the system will either be so interested in its profits or be so dependent upon its favours that there will be no opposition from that class, while on the other hand, the great body of people, mentally incapable of comprehending the tremendous advantage that capital derives from the system, will bear its burdens without complaint, and perhaps without even suspecting that the system is inimical to their interests.” -The Rothschild brothers of London, writing to associates in New York, 1863.
”
”
J. Micha-el Thomas Hays (Rise of the New World Order: The Culling of Man)
“
Beginning in the 1980s, government, including presidents, Congress, and the Federal Reserve, gave us three decades of reduced regulation of the financial industry. Leverage, easy money, and “financial engineering” then brought a series of asset bubbles and threats to the stability of the financial system itself.
”
”
Edward O. Thorp (A Man for All Markets: From Las Vegas to Wall Street, How I Beat the Dealer and the Market)
“
The deals hatched in sleepless sessions at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York or at Treasury were no different. They were products of their moment.
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”
Andrew Ross Sorkin (Too Big to Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System from Crisis — and Themselves)
“
I cannot say enough good things about Ben Bernanke and Tim Geithner, then president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, who were true partners.
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Henry M. Paulson Jr. (On the Brink: Inside the Race to Stop the Collapse of the Global Financial System - With a Fresh Look Back Five Years After the 2008 Financial Crisis)
“
I held regular meetings with Tim Geithner and Federal Reserve Board chairman Ben Bernanke, knowing that in a crisis we would have to work together smoothly.
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”
Henry M. Paulson Jr. (On the Brink: Inside the Race to Stop the Collapse of the Global Financial System - With a Fresh Look Back Five Years After the 2008 Financial Crisis)
“
When in trouble, commercial banks could turn to the Federal Reserve as their lender of last resort.
”
”
Henry M. Paulson Jr. (On the Brink: Inside the Race to Stop the Collapse of the Global Financial System - With a Fresh Look Back Five Years After the 2008 Financial Crisis)
“
trying to get the Federal Reserve or Treasury to bear the risk of any losses resulting from any government assistance.
”
”
Henry M. Paulson Jr. (On the Brink: Inside the Race to Stop the Collapse of the Global Financial System - With a Fresh Look Back Five Years After the 2008 Financial Crisis)
“
Within the Fed, officials were fully aware of the strains on the financial system - the hoarding of currency, the growing problem of bank failures, the reluctance of banks to lend, prices falling at a rate of 20 percent per annum. Somehow they were unable to put all these pieces of the jigsaw puzzle together. At the Federal Reserve Board, Meyer pressed for a more aggressive policy and even Adolph Miller, who with his natural contrarian streak, seemed to end up so often in the minority, joined him. But the Board was legally powerless to initiate action.
”
”
Liaquat Ahamed (Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World)
“
Benjamin Strong was, as always, battling on two fronts—with his health and with his colleagues within the Federal Reserve System.
”
”
Liaquat Ahamed (Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World)
“
The Federal Reserve System was created by Congress on December 23, 1913, and began operating on November 16, 1914. Twelve regional banks were set up across the country to provide liquidity to their regions. The state of Missouri was lucky enough to be granted two district banks in their state (St. Louis and Kansas City) because, well, the Speaker of the House was from Missouri. All federally chartered banks were required by law to become members.
”
”
Scott E.D. Skyrm (The Repo Market, Shorts, Shortages, and Squeezes)
“
In 2020, 68.1% of U.S. mortgage loans were originated by non-banks; they were instead initiated by mortgage loan companies. What do you need a bank for? Remember in the movie,[4] “If I write a loan on a Friday afternoon, it’s sold to a big [investment] bank by Monday lunch.” The financial system changed very little from 1914 to 1980, but think about how much it changed from 1980 to today. The Federal Reserve was originally designed to provide liquidity to banks. That’s it. Back then, a financial institution could be a bank, trust company, credit union, or Savings and Loan. I can’t even list all of the different types of financial institutions there are today. Back then, the financial instruments were mortgage loans, corporate loans, stocks, bonds, and commercial paper. Did I miss anything? Once again, I can’t even list all of the different types of financial instruments today.
”
”
Scott E.D. Skyrm (The Repo Market, Shorts, Shortages, and Squeezes)
“
It's not called Federal Reserve Funds. The money doesn’t belong to the Federal Reserve. It’s never called "Fed Funds" with capital "F’s." Officially, the market is called “federal funds,” though it’s often referred to as “fed funds,” and sometimes called just “funds.” But the “f” is never capitalized. The overnight federal funds rate was the benchmark short-term interest rate for a long time. Way back when, banks dominated the financial system, the overnight inter-bank rate anchored short-term interest rates.
”
”
Scott E.D. Skyrm (The Repo Market, Shorts, Shortages, and Squeezes)
“
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.
”
”
Ben S. Bernanke (The Courage to Act: A Memoir of a Crisis and Its Aftermath)
“
what happens when crucial decisions not just about individual lives but even about collective matters like the Federal Reserve’s interest rate are made by unfathomable algorithms? Human voters may keep choosing a human president, but wouldn’t this be just an empty ceremony? Even today, only a small fraction of humanity truly understands the financial system.
”
”
Yuval Noah Harari (Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI)
“
Most of the world today is still under the illusion that the American dollar, that is the Federal Reserve dollar, belongs to the United States for the people by the people but is in fact a private money system of the Global Elite.
”
”
Bruce Cyr (After The Warning 2016)
“
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.
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”
John Coleman (The Conspirator's Hierarchy: The Committee of 300)
“
Analysis predating [Milton] Friedman's gave a different answer to question of the Fed's policy errors [during the Great Depression] and new scholarship is validating the old wisdom. It now appears that Friedman will be merely an interlude between the sounder analysis of economists contemporary to the Great Depression and those who have rediscovered their insights. --Jeff Herbener
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”
David Howden (The Fed at One Hundred: A Critical View on the Federal Reserve System)
“
Jim Cramer’s Mad Money is one of the most popular shows
on CNBC, a cable TV network that specializes in business
and financial news. Cramer, who mostly offers investment
advice, is known for his sense of showmanship. But few
viewers were prepared for his outburst on August 3, 2007,
when he began screaming about what he saw as inadequate
action from the Federal Reserve:
“Bernanke is being an academic! It is no time to be an
academic. . . . He has no idea how bad it is out there.
He has no idea! He has no idea! . . . and Bill Poole? Has
no idea what it’s like out there! . . . They’re nuts! They
know nothing! . . . The Fed is asleep! Bill Poole is a
shame! He’s shameful!!”
Who are Bernanke and Bill
Poole? In the previous chapter we
described the role of the Federal Reserve System, the U.S. central bank.
At the time of Cramer’s tirade, Ben
Bernanke, a former Princeton professor of economics, was the chair
of the Fed’s Board of Governors,
and William Poole, also a former
economics professor, was the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of
St. Louis. Both men, because of
their positions, are members of the
Federal Open Market Committee,
which meets eight times a year to
set monetary policy. In August
2007, Cramerwas crying outforthe
Fed to change monetary policy in
order to address what he perceived
to be a growing financial crisis.
Why was Cramer screaming at the Federal Reserve
rather than, say, the U.S. Treasury—or, for that matter, the
president? The answer is that the Fed’s control of monetary policy makes it the first line of response to macroeconomic difficulties—very much including the financial crisis
that had Cramer so upset. Indeed, within a few weeks the
Fed swung into action with a dramatic reversal of its previous policies.
In Section 4, we developed the aggregate demand
and supply model and introduced the use of fiscal policy
to stabilize the economy. In Section 5, we introduced
money, banking, and the Federal Reserve System, and
began to look at how monetary
policy is used to stabilize the
economy. In this section, we
use the models introduced in
Sections 4 and 5 to further
develop our understanding of
stabilization policies (both fiscal and monetary), including
their long-run effects on the
economy. In addition, we introduce the Phillips curve—a
short-run trade-off between
unexpected inflation and unemployment—and investigate
the role of expectations in the
economy. We end the section
with a brief summary of the
history of macroeconomic
thought and how the modern
consensus view of stabilization
policy has developed.
”
”
Margaret Ray (Krugman's Economics for Ap*)
“
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.
”
”
Ben S. Bernanke (The Courage to Act: A Memoir of a Crisis and Its Aftermath)
“
Three questions divided reformers: Who should issue the new currency? To what degree should the system be centralized? And should bankers or politicians be in control?
”
”
Roger Lowenstein (America's Bank: The Epic Struggle to Create the Federal Reserve)
“
Also the Federal Reserve System was again safe and sound. A couple of hours after Kennedy’s death, the new President Johnson’s first official action in office was ordering the state printing office in Washington D.C. to stop printing anymore Kennedy-appointed state notes and remove the notes already in circulation. With the assistance of the Federal Reserve System the circulated money was intercepted from transfer and destroyed. American society and the rest of the world never noticed this. Since then not a single president has ever risked undermining the power of the Federal Reserve System.
”
”
Robin de Ruiter (Worldwide Evil and Misery - The Legacy of the 13 Satanic Bloodlines)
“
March 2012, a month before Charlie found his investors, the Federal Reserve had held a daylong conference about consumer-payment systems at which there was a lot of grousing about the fact that despite all the technological innovation going on in the world, the infrastructure for moving money around the country was still based on technology from the 1960s and 1970s. The Automated Clearing House, or ACH, which facilitated payments between bank accounts, was created in the 1970s and had not changed much since; this helped explain why bank transfers took at least a day to go through. For most Americans, the easiest and fastest way to send money to a friend or family member was still the old-fashioned paper check. This problem was not just in the United States. A week before New York Tech Day, the Canadian government announced the launch of a new digital currency effort, called Mint Chip, that it hoped would spur innovation in payments.
”
”
Nathaniel Popper (Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money)
“
It is understood that the Bank need not relinquish the bonds it holds, but will continue to collect interest on them. The Bank then loans the new printed currency into circulation to anyone who can provide it with satisfactory collateral. In less than twenty years the Federal Reserve brought the money system, banks, exchanges and economy to utter ruin.[77] Every dollar in circulation in the United States is a borrowed dollar and pays its toll of interest to the Illuminati bankers. Nearly eleven trillion dollars in debt has been created since 1913. The American people cannot even pay the interest! Every month more than two billion dollars interest has to be paid. It is madness that a government hands over so much power to a private bank that is not controlled by anybody. A power that can create money out of nothing! Why the United States borrow its own money, based on its own credit, at interest, from private bankers? Please bear in mind the fact that the founding fathers made sure that provisions were made by the Constitution for an honest and debt free money system. In part Article 1, Section 8, Paragraph 5 of the Constitution states: “Congress shall have power to coin money and regulate the value thereof.” It is most evident that by this provision, Congress alone should be the money-creating agency of the nation.[78] Although the Constitution has been set aside through the intrigue and power of the Illuminati, the Congress of the United States is authorized by the Constitution to do as Abraham Lincoln did in order to finance the Civil War, to-wit: “issue the money required against the credit of the nation, debt-and interest free”. Lincoln didn’t want to borrow money from the Rothschilds and Co. The interest rate set by the banks was twenty-eight percent. For Lincoln Article 1, Section 8, Paragraph 5 was sufficient authority to disregard the powerfully entrenched bankers. So, in spite of the greedy bankers’ protests he caused to have printed in the Bureau of Printing and Engraving a total of $450,000,000 of honest money, constitutionally created on the credit of the nation.
”
”
Robin de Ruiter (Worldwide Evil and Misery - The Legacy of the 13 Satanic Bloodlines)
“
The political and financial network of the Federal Reserve Bank has created a worldwide financial system, in which all private and central banks cooperate. Their objective is to control the economies of all separate countries of the world. The main objective, however, is to let the governments bury themselves in debts so there will be no other way out than to obey the commands of the banks. Hardly any government completely sees through this tactic. They easily let themselves be led to the slaughter.
”
”
Robin de Ruiter (Worldwide Evil and Misery - The Legacy of the 13 Satanic Bloodlines)
“
The Federal Reserve System is a legal private monopoly of the money supply operated for the benefit of the few under the guise of protecting and promoting the public interest.
”
”
Anonymous
“
President John F. Kennedy, like Lincoln, attempted to curtail the bankers by diminishing the power of the Federal Reserve. In June 1963, he issued $4.2 billion in United States Notes through the U.S. Treasury rather than the Federal Reserve System and also took steps to shift power away from the wealthy corporate elite. According
”
”
Jim Marrs (Our Occulted History: Do the Global Elite Conceal Ancient Aliens?)
“
The game begins when the Federal Reserve System allows commercial banks to create checkbook money out of nothing.
”
”
Anonymous
“
Kanjorski claims to be repeating an account of events given to him by US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Fed Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke: On Thursday [18 September], at 11 a.m. the Federal Reserve noticed a tremendous draw-down of money-market accounts in the US; [money] to the tune of $550 billion was being drawn out in the matter of an hour or two. The Treasury opened up its window to help and pumped a $105 billion in the system and quickly realized that they could not stem the tide. We were having an electronic run on the banks. They decided to close the operation, close down the money accounts and announce a guarantee of $250,000 per account so there wouldn’t be further panic out there. If they had not done that, their estimation is that by 2 p.m. that afternoon $5.5 trillion would have been drawn out of the money-market system of the US; [this] would have collapsed the entire economy of the US, and within 24 hours the world economy would have collapsed. It would have been the end of our economic system and our political system as we know it.10
”
”
Robert Skidelsky (Keynes: The Return of the Master)
“
I worked for one of those who pushed back against the majority. He was the lone member of the FOMC who voted against the professor’s theories at that fateful meeting. He fought the good but lonely fight, and I, in my capacity as trusted adviser, waged many a battle with him. But the sad truth is we lost the people’s war. In a world rendered unsafe by banks that were too big to fail, we came to understand the Fed was simply too big to fight. I wrote this book to tell from the inside the story of how the Fed went from being lender of last resort to savior—and then destroyer—of America’s economic system.
”
”
Danielle DiMartino Booth (Fed Up: An Insider's Take on Why the Federal Reserve is Bad for America)
“
Had the Federal Reserve System never been established, and had a similar series of runs started, there is little doubt that the same measures would have been taken as in 1907—a restriction of payments.
”
”
Milton Friedman (Free to Choose: A Personal Statement)
“
Called before Congress during the ongoing implosion of Wall Street in October 2008, Greenspan, his upper lip visibly quivering, admitted that he was shocked to discover a defect in his free-market model of the economic system. He didn’t acknowledge, however, that there was nothing free market about the Fed and its fixing of interest rates.
”
”
Danielle DiMartino Booth (Fed Up: An Insider's Take on Why the Federal Reserve is Bad for America)
“
New global financial system Precisely for that same reason in August of 2011, Neil Keenan set up a meeting attended by a group of finance representatives from 57 different nations that came together off the coast of Monaco to discuss the foundation of a new global financial system, as a way of bringing down these Khazarians with their Central Banking and NWO-plans. Countries attending included Russia, China, Switzerland, The Netherlands, Brazil, Venezuela and many others, including various large power players; such as the ‘white hat’ faction (non-NWO) from The Pentagon and CIA. The East has most of the world’s gold and the documentation to legally bring down the corrupt institutions that have been illegally using the global collateral accounts. This ‘alliance’ decided to begin creating the new gold and asset-backed financial system. With this meeting heralded as the “shot heard around the world” for those “in the know”, several other nations joined later and have signed the Memorandum of Acknowledgment of this Agreement, which brought the alliance to a total of 182 participating countries. The Alliance Now, it should be clear that indeed there is a growing ‘alliance’ that is taking down the fraudulent banking cabal. Neil Keenan is about to open the global collateral accounts, which indeed is what all of the financial and political happenings on this planet have been about along– that is, ensuring complete control and the attempt to maintain secrecy over the global collateral accounts. Neil Keenan is about to do what JFK and Sukarno were close to accomplishing in 1963: the release of the global collateral accounts to completely transform the world for the better. The collateral gold assets lent to Kennedy, would have allowed him to use these assets /accounts to issue America’s own gold-backed currency ‘Treasury Notes,” that would have allowed America to break away from the false US Corporation and Federal Reserve - crime cartel - and further dismantle the rogue FBI, CIA agencies. If Kennedy and Sukarno had been successful, America would have been freed from the debt-based bondage system and the secret, Deep State government in 1963. This would also have freed the G20 nations that were being controlled by their respective central banking systems. And it also would have cancelled the unfair Bretton Woods Agreement.
”
”
Peter B. Mayer (THE GREAT AWAKENING (PART TWO): AN ENLIGHTENING ANALYSIS ABOUT WHAT IS WRONG IN OUR SOCIETY)
“
Assassination of John F. Kennedy Neil recalls that when John F. Kennedy returned home from his last meeting with President Sukarno in Indonesia relating to efforts to establish a new US financial system – at that time, JFK already had two strikes against him. Firstly, Kennedy returned West Papua from the Dutch to the Indonesians; thereby alienating Big Oil and corporate magnates that had significant control over strategic locations also known for their gold deposits. Secondly, Kennedy overlooked the deception with regards to his very own Vice President, Lyndon Johnson who was receiving all the information relating to the proceedings in Indonesia that he was forwarding to his cabal handlers, including the dissolution of both the CIA and the Federal Reserve Banks. This directly led to John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963. - Both Presidents Kennedy and Sukarno were working on numerous projects to make their nations stronger and greater; but one such project in particular was the new American financial system; eliminating all privately-owned Federal Reserve and Central Bank FIAT currency printing – and returning the power of issuance of the nation’s currency to the government itself. 406
”
”
Peter B. Mayer (THE GREAT AWAKENING (PART TWO): AN ENLIGHTENING ANALYSIS ABOUT WHAT IS WRONG IN OUR SOCIETY)
“
called monetary policy. Fiscal policy is set by Congress, but the president has some control, too. Monetary policy is run almost entirely by government officials at the Federal Reserve System, the most powerful of whom, the Board of Governors, are appointed by the president for fourteen-year terms; the chair and vice chair are appointed by the board for four-year terms.
”
”
Jessamyn Conrad (What You Should Know About Politics . . . But Don't: A Nonpartisan Guide to the Issues That Matter)
“
The Federal Reserve central banking system of the United States is a destructive organization. Freethinkers and anarchists seek to abolish it. In their minds, the Fed has maintained a death grip on society for far too long. It has led to myriad economic calamities. Luckily, technology now exists to push humanity into the next epoch by upending the current state of monetary despotism. The tools to propel an economic reformation have arisen from underground capitalism, online shadow markets, and the fringes of society. This new tool, or technology, is referred to as cryptocurrency.
”
”
Sterlin Lujan (Dignity & Decency: Rhapsodic Musings of a Modern Anarchist)
“
Moreover, stable prices foster saving and capital formation, because when the risk of erosion of asset values resulting from inflation—and the need to guard against such losses—are minimized, households are encouraged to save more and businesses are encouraged to invest more. (Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System 2009)
”
”
George Selgin (Money: Free and Unfree)
“
It was curious that just as Federal Reserve officials were publicly disparaging gold’s role in the monetary system, the president felt the need to mention gold to the Congress as a confidence booster. Despite disparagement of gold by academics and central bankers, gold has never fully lost its place as the bedrock of global finance.
”
”
James Rickards (The Death of Money: The Coming Collapse of the International Monetary System)
“
But this work paled in comparison to the force and impact of A Monetary History of the United States. What had begun as a favor to Arthur Burns had become a book that would turn the conventional wisdom of academic economists, policy-makers, and politicians alike upside down. The American Historical Review put it simply: “This is one of the most important books of our time.”39 Friedman and Schwartz presented voluminous data on nearly a century of U.S. history; but beyond piling up facts, they also advanced a theory of how money worked in the economy. How did money affect business cycles? Friedman and Schwartz had an answer they considered definitive: money mattered. It was the hidden force behind the ups and downs, the breadlines and the bubbles. Friedman knew the book would make an impact. He knew it was the best work he had ever done, or would ever do. He knew that for all his deviationist politics, for all the force of Keynesian assumption, for all the habitual scorn heaped upon the quantity theory of money, their book would have to be answered. It would compel conversation. The book’s centerpiece was its stunning analysis of the Great Depression. Friedman and Schwartz’s data showed a precipitous 33 percent decline in the quantity of money during what they called “the great contraction.” They convincingly argued that this lack of money transformed an unremarkable dip in the business cycle into a crisis of global proportions. Here was a provocative new explanation for a disaster that continued to cast its shadow across the century. But threaded through the economic argument was another thesis. In 1914, the United States had created a central bank system designed expressly to stabilize the economy. As the lender of last resort, the Federal Reserve Board could have opened the spigots and flooded the economy with cash. Why did it fail to do so?
”
”
Jennifer Burns (Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative)
“
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.
”
”
Charles Wheelan (Naked Money: A Revealing Look at Our Financial System)
“
Through Strong’s influence, the Federal Reserve System would prove far more of a boon than a threat to Morgans.
”
”
Ron Chernow (The House of Morgan: An American Banking Dynasty and the Rise of Modern Finance)
“
In 1836, President Andrew Jackson, infuriated by the tactics of the bankers who were attempting to persuade him to renew the charter of the Second Bank of the United States, said, "You are a den of vipers. I intend to rout you out and by the Eternal God I will rout you out. If the people only understood the rank injustice of our money and banking system, there would be a revolution before morning.
”
”
Eustace Clarence Mullins (The Secrets Of The Federal Reserve)
“
Easygoing, thoughtful, and without ego, Don was a Federal Reserve System veteran.
”
”
Ben S. Bernanke (The Courage to Act: A Memoir of a Crisis and Its Aftermath)
“
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.
”
”
Ben S. Bernanke (The Courage to Act: A Memoir of a Crisis and Its Aftermath)
“
No other issue would create more debate, disagreement, feuds, and confusion within the Federal Reserve System than what to do about the stock market.
”
”
Liaquat Ahamed (Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World)
“
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.
”
”
Daniele Ganser (USA: The Ruthless Empire)
“
ECCLES: That is what our money system is. If there were no debts in our money system, there wouldn't be any money.
”
”
Eustace Clarence Mullins (The Secrets Of The Federal Reserve)
“
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.
”
”
David Graeber (Debt: The First 5,000 Years)
“
The global financial crisis was caused by excesses of the liberal system of regulations and the belief that a completely free market will allow enormous innovation and allocate capital to the most profitable enterprises with the highest returns. Once the Federal Reserve Chairman decided it was not necessary to regulate derivatives and supervise them, the fuse was lit. Once you find that you can mash up a lot of good and bad assets in one bundle and pass on your risk all around Europe and other parts of the world, you have started something like a Ponzi scheme which must come to an end sometime…The business of a person in a financial institution is to make the biggest profit for himself, so just condemning the bankers and the profit takers does not make sense. You have allowed these rules, and they work within these rules.
”
”
Graham Allison (Lee Kuan Yew: The Grand Master's Insights on China, the United States, and the World (Belfer Center Studies in International Security))
“
CONCLUSION: THE CENTRAL BANKER AS JUDGE This breakdown of the Ulysses/punch-bowl function of the Federal Reserve doesn’t mean that separating some of the Fed’s functions from the day-to-day of electoral politics is unnecessary in the face of deflationary, rather than inflationary, pressures. In fact, the very opposite could be true: if there is a partisan movement in favor of economic policies that could result in a deflationary spiral, we would face the Great Depression redux. Keeping the power to trigger such a consequence away from partisan politics seems like a desirable goal for the institutional design of central banks. But it also requires a different theoretical frame. It may be that the frame for independence is one that we already widely accept in society: judicial independence. The U.S. Constitution gives the federal judiciary life tenure and effective budgetary independence (that is, while they can’t print their own money or raise it independent of congressional appropriations, the Congress cannot constitutionally lower judicial salaries). The reason is so that, to the fullest extent possible, any determinations that favor politicians occur either because the law compels it or because the judge and the politician share the same worldview. The idea that the judge is currying favor with the politician in hopes of further appointment or out of fear of getting her salary removed are taken off the table. It’s not a perfect system, but it is one that most recognize as an important balance between democratic values (the politician gets to appoint the judges from the polity) and some degree technocratic, objective judgment (the judges decide the cases, not the politicians).26 The crisis and the reactions to unconventional monetary policy suggest that the Fed is often performing a delicate adjudicative function, not a simply technocratic one. The problem with the technocratic, Ulysses-contract view of central banking are the two fractured constituencies mentioned above. While most economists have endorsed the Fed’s approach to postcrisis monetary policy, the “technocratic” view has been far from uniform. And, again, the populists aren’t clearly clamoring for prosperity by way of inflation, contra that Ulysses/punch-bowl view. At least in a crisis, and arguably in other times as well, the central bank isn’t
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”
Peter Conti-Brown (The Power and Independence of the Federal Reserve)
“
In the post-Butler system, in order to meet the desired federal spending, taxes are raised, and debts, deficits, and government spending balloon. When these traditional sources of money fail, the government simply prints more money through the Federal Reserve. This inflates our fiat currency, distorts the natural ups and downs of the business cycle and recessions, and increases the divide between the wealthy (who store their wealth in non-fiat assets) and the middle and lower classes.
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”
Oliver DeMille (1913)
“
For fifty years, the federal government had regulated where airlines could fly and what they could charge, down to the tiniest details: the price of a cocktail, the rental cost of a movie headset. Suddenly removing these restrictions unleashed a tidal wave of S-type loonshots, small shifts in strategy. Those changes were not glamorous. They were kind of nerdy: a frequent flier program, a new system of flying through hubs rather than flying direct, a computerized reservation system for travel agents. P-type loonshots—jet engines, jumbo planes—make headlines. Small changes in strategy are barely noticed. Deregulation, for a brief moment, let the faint, hidden light from S-type loonshots shine through.
”
”
Safi Bahcall (Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries)
“
Trick #1 for Farming Humans is the ability to invisibly commit crime. Chapter 1, Page 9, Ring of Gyges Trick #2 for Farming Humans is to allow professionals to create rigged systems or self serving social constructs. Chapter 4, page 28 (Lawyers who serve corporate interests are often incentivized to assist in harming the society to increase their own security. SEC, Bernie Madoff, Corporations as invisible friends, Money laundering assistance) Trick #3 in Farming Humans is making it legal for insider manipulation of public markets for private gain. (Boeing CEO) page 32 Trick #4 for Farming Humans is Justice prefers to look only down…rarely up towards power. Chapter 5, page 33. Trick #5 for Farming Humans is “let us create the nation’s money”. What could go wrong? Found in Chapter 7 on page 38. Trick # 6 in the game of Farming Humans, to create something which gives a few men an elevated status above the rest. Southern Pacific Railroad taxes, to Pacific Gas and Electric deadly California fires, to Boeing aircraft casualties. Paper “persons” cannot be arrested or jailed. Trick #7 for Farming Humans is a private game of money creation which secretly “borrowed” on the credit backing of the public. Chapter 9, page 51. Federal Reserve. Trick #8 for Farming Humans is seen in the removal of the gold backing of US dollars for global trading partners, a second default of the promises behind the dollar. (1971) Chapter 15, page 81 Trick #9 for Farming Humans is being able to sell out the public trust, over and over again. Supreme Court rules that money equals speech. Chapter 16, page 91. Trick #10 for Farming Humans is Clinton repeals Glass Steagall, letting banks gamble America into yet another financial collapse. Chapter 17, page 93. Trick #11 for Farming Humans is when money is allowed to buy politics. Citizens United, super PAC’s can spend unlimited money during campaigns. Chapter 18, page 97. Trick #12 for Farming Humans is the Derivative Revolution. Making it up with lawyers and papers in a continual game of “lets pretend”. Chapter 19, page 105. Trick #13 for Farming Humans is allowing dis-information to infect society. Chapter 20, page 109. Trick #14 for Farming Humans is substitution of an “advisor”, for what investors think is an “adviser”. Confused yet? The clever “vowel movement” adds billions in profits, while farming investors. Trick #15 for Farming Humans is when privately-hired rental-cops are allowed to lawfully regulate an industry, the public gets abused. Investments, SEC, FDA, FAA etc. Chapter 15, page 122 Trick #16 for Farming Humans is the layer of industry “self regulators”, your second army of people paid to “gaslight” the public into thinking they are protected.
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Larry Elford (Farming Humans: Easy Money (Non Fiction Financial Murder Book 1))
“
White therefore wanted to rewrite the rules of the American monetary system to give a revamped Federal Reserve far more discretionary powers than the gold standard could accommodate, and then convince the rest of the world to help make such a new system stick internationally.
”
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Benn Steil (The Battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White, and the Making of a New World Order (Council on Foreign Relations Books (Princeton University Press)))
“
In 1987, President Ronald Reagan appointed Greenspan chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System—a portentous name for the central bank of the United States, usually called, without affection, “the Fed.” By law, the mission of the Fed was, and still is, to maintain the stability of prices while promoting sustainable growth and full employment. The claims behind these goals possessed what I can only describe as a magical quality. They presupposed powers of prophecy and control wholly detached from economic reality. The chairman of the Fed, like the genie in the Arabian Nights, was expected to tame the whirlwind.
”
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Martin Gurri (The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium)
“
But it cannot happen unless private industry is allowed to flourish in a system of free-enterprise. The problem with this option
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”
G. Edward Griffin (The Creature from Jekyll Island: A Second Look at the Federal Reserve)
“
The US’s having a federal debt of $19 trillion or $190 trillion is actually only as relevant as its position in the global power hierarchy. The US will never default as long as it remains a global empire, and all major nations buying US bonds know this deep down. The US can just make it up by way of its central bank, the Federal Reserve, which extends to a financial system with great global power, also ensuring the power of the US dollar. If debts are in dollars, the US simply makes more. Although people often argue that the US is in debt to a private banking cartel (its central bank) and that is a problem in itself, it is really irrelevant in the broad view. The whole thing is mostly a sleight-of-hand arrangement that lets the US government borrow endlessly while the banking system gets special political treatment. No one in the US government and its central bank cartel really cares about US government debt because money is made out of thin air. They only care about public regulation and public perception, not government spending or government debt. In the words of former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan: “The United States can pay any debt it has because we can always print money to do that. So there is zero probability of default.”51
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”
Peter Joseph (The New Human Rights Movement: Reinventing the Economy to End Oppression)
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But across that diversity, they shared such common struggles as dealing with a federal government that had yet to honor one treaty in its entirety, gaining control of the schooling and treatment of their own children, protecting their land from exploitation for oil, uranium, and other resources on it—and much more. For instance, women on reservations suffered the highest rate of sexual assault in the country, yet the non-Native men who were the majority of their assaulters were not subject to tribal police or jurisdiction, and were mostly ignored by the larger legal system.
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Gloria Steinem (My Life on the Road)
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When members of Congress asked about the swaps, Bernanke emphasized that the European banks benefiting from the program also made loans in the United States, so the action could be seen as benefiting the U.S. economy directly. But more fundamentally, he was convinced that the world financial system was so deeply interconnected that Europe’s fortunes were the United States’ fortunes too. “In a way,” a European central banker said later, “we became the thirteenth Federal Reserve district.
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Neil Irwin (The Alchemists: Three Central Bankers and a World on Fire)
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the Army contracts private carriers to handle the overflow. In the Gulf War, they even had to resort to forcing major airline companies to cough up planes to make ends meet, under a compulsive federal system known as the Civilian Reserve Airfleet Program (my favorite government acronym of all time).
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Piers Platt (Combat and Other Shenanigans)
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In less than twenty years the Federal Reserve brought the money system, banks, exchanges and economy to utter ruin.[77] Every dollar in circulation in the United States is a borrowed dollar and pays its toll of interest to the Illuminati bankers. Nearly eleven trillion dollars in debt has been created since 1913.
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Robin de Ruiter (Worldwide Evil and Misery - The Legacy of the 13 Satanic Bloodlines)
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It is understood that the Bank need not relinquish the bonds it holds, but will continue to collect interest on them. The Bank then loans the new printed currency into circulation to anyone who can provide it with satisfactory collateral. In less than twenty years the Federal Reserve brought the money system, banks, exchanges and economy to utter ruin.[77] Every dollar in circulation in the United States is a borrowed dollar and pays its toll of interest to the Illuminati bankers. Nearly eleven trillion dollars in debt has been created since 1913. The American people cannot even pay the interest! Every month more than two billion dollars interest has to be paid. It is madness that a government hands over so much power to a private bank that is not controlled by anybody. A power that can create money out of nothing! Why the United States borrow its own money, based on its own credit, at interest, from private bankers? Please bear in mind the fact that the founding fathers made sure that provisions were made by the Constitution for an honest and debt free money system. In part Article 1, Section 8, Paragraph 5 of the Constitution states: “Congress shall have power to coin money and regulate the value thereof.” It is most evident that by this provision, Congress alone should be the money-creating agency
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Robin de Ruiter (Worldwide Evil and Misery - The Legacy of the 13 Satanic Bloodlines)
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Any individual bank can leverage itself by lending money or buying securities, and thus reducing its cash reserves at the Federal Reserve. However, when they make those loans or buy those securities, they create deposits somewhere else in the financial system, and those deposits result in reserves shifting from the lending bank to the bank that is receiving those deposits.
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Lyn Alden (Broken Money: Why Our Financial System is Failing Us and How We Can Make it Better)