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@IandE4Life - Steve Gibbs | Family Wealth Expert
@iluminatibot The art of banking is always to take from those who have little and give to those who already have much. https://t.co/M5tiE1oK5v
reSee.it AI Summary
I've been exploring the origins and impact of the Federal Reserve, tracing back to a secretive meeting on Jekyll Island in 1910 where powerful bankers devised a plan that reshaped America's financial landscape. This system has led to rising costs of living, wealth disparity, and a cycle of bailouts that benefits the elite while ordinary people struggle. The Fed's policies have created a scenario where saving is punished, and risk-taking is rewarded. Understanding this history is crucial as it affects every aspect of our lives today, raising questions about potential reforms and our financial future.
@IandE4Life - Steve Gibbs | Family Wealth Expert
🧵 The Federal Reserve: The Most Important Story You've Never Been Told Ever wonder why your grandparents could afford a house on one income, but you can't? Why do prices keep rising but your paycheck doesn't keep up? Why does the American dream feel more like a fantasy? It all traces back to a "duck hunting trip" that changed America forever.
@IandE4Life - Steve Gibbs | Family Wealth Expert
The year is 1910. Picture a private island off Georgia's coast called Jekyll Island. It is a place frozen in time; ancient Native American grounds have become playgrounds for America's richest families. But something happening here will shape the next century of human history.
@IandE4Life - Steve Gibbs | Family Wealth Expert
Six of America's most powerful bankers are sneaking onto this island separately. They're using fake names, arriving at different times, and avoiding being seen together. Two even completely changed their identities. The secrecy is intense—and for good reason. What they're planning would outrage every American if word got out.
@IandE4Life - Steve Gibbs | Family Wealth Expert
These were the super bankers. We've got Charles Norton running First National Bank, Frank Vanderlip heading National City Bank, Henry Davidson as JP Morgan's right-hand man, A.P. Andrew fresh from Treasury and Harvard, Benjamin Strong Jr from Bankers Trust, and Paul Warburg, heir to a German banking dynasty. Plus, Senator Nelson Aldrich is there to provide the government's blessing.
@IandE4Life - Steve Gibbs | Family Wealth Expert
Why all the cloak-and-dagger? Americans hated central banks with good reason. We'd already killed three of them, and Andrew Jackson's biggest boast was destroying the last one. The banking system was wild—imagine 30,000 currencies floating around the country. It makes today's crypto market look organized. Banks were failing left and right, but at least the gold standard kept things real—maybe too real for some powerful people's taste.
@IandE4Life - Steve Gibbs | Family Wealth Expert
Their timing was perfect. 1907 had just seen a massive banking panic. A San Francisco earthquake had triggered a chain of bank failures across the country. The system was melting down. But for our "duck hunters," this crisis wasn't a disaster—it was an opportunity—the perfect excuse to overhaul the entire American financial system.
@IandE4Life - Steve Gibbs | Family Wealth Expert
You know how in Dune everyone fights over spice - that magical substance that powers their universe? Our world's version is credit. It lets you pull resources from the future into today, amounting to pure financial alchemy. And these guys were about to build the biggest spice harvester ever created: The Federal Reserve.
@IandE4Life - Steve Gibbs | Family Wealth Expert
The genius was in the branding. Nobody would support another "central bank." But "Federal Reserve"? That sounds official and government-like. "Federal" suggests oversight, while "Reserve" implies safety, which is pure marketing gold. The meeting stayed secret for FIVE YEARS. When Vanderlip finally spilled the beans in a newspaper, their creation was already up and running.
@IandE4Life - Steve Gibbs | Family Wealth Expert
Today, that small group's creation has become something beyond their wildest dreams. The Fed owns $9 trillion in assets—it's the biggest player in the mortgage market and the biggest owner of government debt, and it creates money with simple keystrokes. In 2024, its Chairman told the President straight up he couldn't be fired. No other agency can overrule it.
@IandE4Life - Steve Gibbs | Family Wealth Expert
Want to see their power in action? Look at housing. They've pumped so much money into mortgages that house prices shot up 42% in just two years. Rents jumped 24% nationwide. The typical mortgage payment doubled from $1,404 to $2,408 in one year. A whole generation is locked out of homeownership while the Fed plays monopoly with real houses.
@IandE4Life - Steve Gibbs | Family Wealth Expert
The human cost of this system is brutal, and the stories are heartbreaking. Take the brother of one man in Get Based's film- a successful real estate broker who lost everything in 2008. He spent a decade couch surfing, battling depression, unable to rebuild. Why? Because when the Fed's bubbles pop, regular folks take the hit while the big players get bailouts.
@IandE4Life - Steve Gibbs | Family Wealth Expert
Speaking of bailouts, it's the Fed's favorite game. When banks make crazy bets that blow up, the Fed prints rescue money. You pay for it through inflation, watching your dollars buy less and less while the banks keep their profits. Then they do it all again. They call it "too big to fail," but it's become a creature too big to exist.
@IandE4Life - Steve Gibbs | Family Wealth Expert
Think about your parents' or grandparents' time. One income could support a family. People could save money and get ahead. A regular job could buy a typical house. Not anymore. The Fed's policies have created the worst wealth gap since the French Revolution. They're not just stealing your money - they're stealing your time, your future, your ability to build the life your parents had.
@IandE4Life - Steve Gibbs | Family Wealth Expert
The Fed supposedly has two jobs: keeping prices stable and maximizing employment. But as Griffin lays out in his book The Creature from Jekyll Island, this dual mandate is part of the problem. How can you trust an institution that can't achieve its basic goals, operates like a private club for bankers, enables endless wars through money printing, and destabilizes the system it's meant to protect?
@IandE4Life - Steve Gibbs | Family Wealth Expert
The modern banking drama would shock those original Jekyll Island plotters. Zero interest rates punish savers while speculators get rich. Money printing has gone wild - that $9 trillion Fed balance sheet would've been unimaginable in 1910. They're even trying to push climate policy now. Talk about mission creep.
@IandE4Life - Steve Gibbs | Family Wealth Expert
And it gets weirder. The Fed now pays banks NOT to lend money to regular people. They call it "interest on excess reserves," but really, it's just another way to funnel money to Wall Street while Main Street struggles. The numbers are staggering - we're talking about $3.1 trillion sitting idle, up seventyfold since 2007.
@IandE4Life - Steve Gibbs | Family Wealth Expert
But here's the really wild part—there are solutions. Free banking worked great in the 1800s. From 1824 to the 1850s, America had the "Suffolk System," where banks kept each other honest. No bailouts were needed. The gold standard meant money couldn't be printed out of thin air. Banks had to be responsible without the Fed's easy money and bailouts.
@IandE4Life - Steve Gibbs | Family Wealth Expert
Winfree's research shows we have options: We could return to commodity-backed money, implement a fixed growth rule for the money supply, or at least limit the Fed to focusing solely on price stability. But who fights these reforms tooth and nail? The very institutions profiting from the current system.
@IandE4Life - Steve Gibbs | Family Wealth Expert
The incentives in this system are completely upside down. Save money? Watch it lose value. Work hard? Watch prices rise faster than your paycheck. Be prudent? Get punished by inflation. Take crazy risks? Get bailed out. It's like they've created an empire that rewards everything we used to consider dangerous and sinful.
@IandE4Life - Steve Gibbs | Family Wealth Expert
Jefferson warned there were two ways to enslave a nation: by the sword or by debt. Those Jekyll Island "duck hunters" chose debt. They created a system where money is made from nothing, debt is forever, work buys less every year, and your future gets harder while the connected get richer.
@IandE4Life - Steve Gibbs | Family Wealth Expert
This isn't ancient history - it's your life right now. Every dollar in your pocket, every price you pay, every rent check you write, every loan you take, every job you work, every dream you defer... it all traces back to those "duck hunters" on Jekyll Island.
@IandE4Life - Steve Gibbs | Family Wealth Expert
Think about it: What started with six men pretending to hunt ducks became the most powerful institution in history. A private meeting on an island created a system that touches every aspect of our lives. They've built an empire of debt that would make ancient Rome blush.
@IandE4Life - Steve Gibbs | Family Wealth Expert
And now you know the story that connects it all: why your savings lose value, why your rent keeps rising, why your parents had it more manageable, and why the system seems rigged. Because, in many ways, it is. The question isn't whether the Fed affects your life - it's in every aspect. The real question is: what are we going to do about it?
@IandE4Life - Steve Gibbs | Family Wealth Expert
Want to learn more? Dive into these sources: - "How The Federal Reserve Secretly Enslaved The World" by Get Based @getbasedtv gives the raw human impact - The "Creature from Jekyll Island" exposes the whole historical plot - Paul Winfree's @paulwinfree Federal Reserve analysis lays out the reform options The story sounds too wild to be fiction - but it's too important to ignore. /end
@IandE4Life - Steve Gibbs | Family Wealth Expert
THE MONEY MASTERS | HOW INTERNATIONAL BANKERS GAINED CONTROL OF AMERICA William T. Still An excellent 3.5 hour documentary on the history of money, The Federal Reserve, the takeover of the Rothschilds & Private Central Banks. https://t.co/S89L40njaB
Video Transcript AI Summary
Here's what's happening in America: we're drowning in debt because of a debt-based banking system controlled by private bankers. The Federal Reserve, deceptively named, is a private entity manipulating our money for profit, not public interest.
Since 1913, Congress has granted it a monopoly over our currency, leading to economic instability. The solution? Education and action. We must reclaim the power to issue our money, as figures like Franklin and Lincoln once did.
This isn't radical; it's restoring the issuing power to the people. Reform involves paying off the debt with debt-free U.S. notes, abolishing fractional reserve banking, and repealing the Federal Reserve Act, returning monetary power to the Treasury.
Full Transcript
Speaker 0: What's going on in America today? Why are we over our heads in debt? Why can't the politicians bring debt under control? Why are so many people, often both parents now, working at low paying, dead end jobs and still making do with less? What's the future of the American economy and way of life?
Why does the government tell us inflation is low when the buying power of our paychecks is declining at an alarming rate? Only a generation ago, bread was a quarter, and you could get a new car for 1995.
Speaker 1: The problem is that since 1864, we've had a debt based banking system. All our money is based on government debt. We cannot extinguish government debt without extinguishing our money supply. That's why talk of paying off the national debt without reforming our banking system is an impossibility. That's why the solution does not lie in discussing the size of the national debt, rather it lies in reforming our banking system.
This is the Federal Reserve headquarters in Washington. It sits on this very impressive address right on Constitution Avenue, right across from the Lincoln Memorial. But is it federal? Is it really part of the United States government? Well, what we're about to show you is that there's nothing federal about the Federal Reserve, and there are no reserves.
The name is a deception created back before the Federal Reserve Act was passed in 1913 to make Americans think that America's Central Bank operates in the public interest. The truth is that the Federal Reserve is a private bank owned by private stockholders and run purely for their private profit.
Speaker 2: That's exactly correct. The Fed is a privately owned for profit corporation, which, again, has no reserves, at least no reserves available to back up the Federal Reserve notes, which is our common currency.
Speaker 3: Oh, absolutely. The Federal Reserve is neither federal and has doubtful reserves. It's a private bank that is owned by member banks, and it was chartered under the guise of deceit by an act of congress in 1913.
Speaker 1: If there's still any doubt whether the Federal Reserve is a part of the US government, check your local telephone book. In most cities, it is not listed in the blue government pages. It is listed in the business white pages right next to Federal Express, another private company. But more directly, US courts have ruled time and time again that the Fed is a private corporation. Why can't Congress do something about the Fed?
Most members of congress just don't understand the system, and the few who do are afraid to speak up. For example, initially, a veteran congressman from Chicago asked us if he could be interviewed for this video. However, both times our camera crew arrived at his office to do the interview, this was all we were able to film. The congressman never appeared and eventually decided he no longer wanted to participate. But a few others in congress have been bolder over the years.
Here are three quick examples. In 1923, representative Charles a Lindbergh, a republican from Minnesota and father of the famed aviator Lucky Lindy, put it this way: 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. One of the most outspoken critics in Congress of the Fed was the former chairman of the House Banking and Currency Committee during the Great Depression years.
Lewis T. McFadden, Republican of Pennsylvania, said in 1932, 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.
Senator Barry Goldwater was a frequent critic of the Fed. 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.
Speaker 3: The Federal Reserve really, even though it is not part of the federal government, it is more powerful than the federal government. It's more powerful than the president, the congress, and the courts. Now a lot of people challenge me on that, but let me prove my case. The Federal Reserve determines what the average person's car payment is going to be, what their house payment is going to be, and whether they have a job or not. And I submit to you that that's total control.
And the Federal Reserve is the largest single creditor of the United States government. What does Proverbs tell us? The borrower is servant to the lender.
Speaker 1: What one has to understand is that from the day the constitution was adopted right up to today, the folks who profit from privately owned central banks, as Madison called them the money changers, have fought a running battle for control over who gets to print America's money. Why is who prints the money so important? Think of money as just another commodity. If you have a monopoly on a commodity that everyone needs, everyone wants, and nobody has enough of, there are lots of ways to make a profit and also exert tremendous political influence. That's what this battle is all about.
Throughout the history of The United States, the money power has gone back and forth between congress and some sort of privately owned central bank. The founding fathers knew the evils of a privately owned central bank. First of all, they had seen how the privately owned British central bank, the Bank of England, had run up the British national debt to such an extent that parliament had been forced to place unfair taxes on the American colonies. In fact, as we'll see later, Ben Franklin claimed that this was the real cause of the American Revolution. Most of the founding fathers realized the potential dangers of banking and feared bankers' accumulation of wealth and power.
Jefferson put it this way.
Speaker 0: I sincerely believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people to whom it properly belongs.
Speaker 1: That succinct statement of Jefferson is in fact the solution to all our economic problems today. It bears repeating: the issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people to whom it properly belongs.' James Madison, the main author of the Constitution, agreed. Interestingly, he called those behind the central bank scheme money changers. Madison strongly criticized their actions.
Speaker 0: History records that the money changers have used every form of abuse, intrigue, deceit, and violent means possible to maintain their control over governments by controlling money and its issuance.
Speaker 1: The battle over who gets to issue our money has been the pivotal issue throughout the history of The United States. Wars are fought over it. Depressions are caused to acquire it. Yet after World War one, this battle was rarely mentioned in newspapers or history books. Why?
By World War one, the money changers with their dominant wealth had seized control of most of the nation's press. Throughout US history, this battle over who gets the power to issue our money has raged. In fact, it's changed hands back and forth eight times since 1764, yet this fact has virtually vanished from public view for over three generations behind a smokescreen emitted by Fed cheerleaders in the media. Until we stop talking about deficits and government spending and start talking about who controls how much money we have, it's all just a big shell game, a complete and utter deception. It won't matter if you pass an ironclad amendment to the constitution mandating a balanced budget.
Our situation is only going to get worse until we root out the cause at its source. What's the solution for our national problem? First of all, education. That's what this video presentation is all about. But secondly, we must act.
We must take back the power to issue our own money. Issuing our own money is not a radical solution. I want to stress that. It's the same solution used at different points in US history by men like Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Martin Van Buren, and Abraham Lincoln. So to sum it up, in 1913 Congress gave an independent central bank, deceptively named the Federal Reserve, a monopoly over issuing America's money, and the debt generated by this quasi private corporation is what is killing the American economy.
Though the Federal Reserve is now the most powerful central bank in the world, it was not the first. So where did this idea come from? To really understand the magnitude of the problem, we have to travel back to Europe. Just who are these money changers James Madison spoke of? In the bible two thousand years ago, Jesus drove the money changers from the temple.
It was the only time Jesus used force during his ministry. What were money changers doing in the temple? When Jews came to Jerusalem to pay their temple tax, they could only pay it with a special coin, the half shekel of the sanctuary. This was a half ounce of pure silver about this size. It was the only coin around at that time which was pure silver and of assured weight without the image of a pagan emperor.
Therefore, to Jews, the half shekel was the only coin acceptable to God. But these coins were not plentiful. The money changers had cornered the market on them. Then they raised the price, just like any other commodity, to whatever the market would bear. In other words, money changers were making exorbitant profits because they held a virtual monopoly on money.
The Jews had to pay whatever they demanded. To Jesus, this totally violated the sanctity of God's house. But the money changing scam did not originate in Jesus' day. Two hundred years before Christ, Rome was having trouble with money changers. Two early Roman emperors had tried to diminish the power of the money changers by reforming usury laws and limiting land ownership to 500 acres.
They were both assassinated. In forty eight BC, Julius Caesar took back the power to coin money from the money changers and minted coins for the benefit of all. With this new plentiful supply of money, he built great public works projects. By making money plentiful, Caesar won the love of the common man, but the money changers hated him. Some believe this was an important factor in Caesar's assassination.
One thing is for sure. With the death of Caesar came the demise of plentiful money in Rome. Taxes increased as did corruption. Just as in the case of America today, usury and debased coin became the rule. Eventually, the Roman money supply was reduced by 90%.
As a result, the common people lost their lands and their homes, just as is about to happen soon in America. With the demise of plentiful money, the masses lost confidence in the Roman government and refused to support it. Rome plunged into the gloom of the dark ages. A thousand years after the death of Christ, money changers, those who loan out and manipulate the quantity of money, were active in medieval England. In fact, they were so active that acting together they could manipulate the entire English economy.
These were not bankers per se. The money changers generally were the goldsmiths. They were the first bankers because they started keeping other people's gold for safekeeping in their vaults. The first paper money was merely a receipt for gold left at the goldsmith. Paper money caught on because it was more convenient than carrying around a lot of heavy gold and silver coins.
Eventually goldsmiths noticed that only a small fraction of the depositors ever came in and demanded their gold at any one time. Goldsmiths started cheating on the system. They discovered that they could print more money than they had gold, and usually no one would be the wiser. Then they could loan out this extra money and collect interest on it. This was the birth of fractional reserve banking.
That is loaning out many times more money than you have assets on deposit. Deposit. So if a thousand dollars in gold were deposited with them, they could loan out about $10,000 in paper money and draw interest payments on it, and no one would ever discover the deception. By this means, goldsmiths gradually accumulated more and more wealth and used this wealth to accumulate more and more gold. Today, this practice of loaning out more money than there are reserves is known as fractional reserve banking.
Every bank in The United States is allowed to loan out at least 10 times more money than they actually have. That's why they get rich on charging let's say 8% interest. It's not really 8% per year which is their income, it's 80%. That's why bank buildings are always the largest in town. But does that mean that all interest or all banking should be illegal?
Hardly. In the Middle Ages, canon law, the law of the Catholic Church, forbade charging interest on loans. This concept followed the teachings of Aristotle and Saint Thomas Aquinas. They taught that the purpose of money was to serve the members of society to facilitate the exchange of goods needed to lead a virtuous life. Interest, in their belief, hindered this purpose by putting an unnecessary burden on the use of money.
In other words, interest was contrary to reason and justice. Reflecting church law in the Middle Ages, Europe forbade charging interest on loans and made it a crime called usury. As commerce grew and therefore opportunities for investment arose in the late Middle Ages, it came to be recognized that to loan money had a cost for the lender, both in risk and in lost opportunity. So some charges were allowed, but not interest per se. But all moralists, no matter what religion, condemn fraud, oppression of the poor, and injustice is clearly immoral.
As we will see, fractional reserve lending is rooted in a fraud, results in widespread poverty, and reduces the value of everyone else's money. The ancient goldsmiths discovered that extra profits could be made by rowing the economy between easy money and tight money. When they made money easier to borrow, then the amount of money in circulation expanded. Money was plentiful. People took out more loans to expand their businesses, But then the money changers would tighten the money supply.
They would make loans more difficult to get. What would happen? Just what happens today. A certain percentage of people could not repay their previous loans and could not take out new loans to repay the old ones. Therefore, they went bankrupt and had to sell their assets to the goldsmiths for pennies on the dollar.
The same thing is still going on today. Only today, we call this rowing of the economy up and down the business cycle. Like Julius Caesar, King Henry the first of England finally resolved to take the money power away from the goldsmiths about November. Henry could have used anything as money, seashells, feathers, or even yak dung, as is often done in remote Tibetan provinces. But he invented one of the most unusual money systems in history.
It was called the tally stick system.
Speaker 4: Here I have one of the few surviving examples of this form British money, which lasted seven twenty six years until 1826, a tally stick. The tally system was adopted to avoid the monetary manipulation of the goldsmiths.
Speaker 1: Tally sticks were money fabricated out of sticks of polished wood. Notches were cut along one edge of the stick to indicate the denominations.
Speaker 4: Then the stick was split lengthwise through the notches so that both pieces, still had a record of the notches.
Speaker 1: The king kept one half to protect against counterfeiting. Then he would spend the other half into the economy and they would circulate his money. This particular tally stick is huge. It represented ÂŁ25,000. 1 of the original stockholders in the Bank of England purchased his original shares with this stick.
In other words, he bought shares in the world's richest and most powerful corporation with a stick of wood. It's ironic that after its formation in 1694 the Bank of England attacked the tally stick system because it was money outside the power of the money changers just as King Henry had wanted it to be.
Speaker 4: Why do people accept sticks of wood for money? That's a great question. Throughout history, people traded anything they thought had value and used as money. You see, the secret is that money is only what people agree on to use as money. What's our paper money today?
It's really just paper. But here's the trick. King Henry ordered that tally sticks had to be used to pay the king's taxes. This built in demand for tally sticks immediately made them circulate and be accepted as money. And they worked well.
In fact, no other form of money has worked so well for so long as tally sticks.
Speaker 1: Keep in mind, the British Empire was built under the tally stick system. The tally stick system succeeded despite the fact that the money changers constantly attacked it by offering the metal coin system as competition. In other words, metal coins never went completely out of circulation, but tally sticks hung on because they were good for the payment of taxes. Finally, in the fifteen hundreds, King Henry the eighth relaxed the laws concerning usury and the money changers wasted no time reasserting themselves. They quickly made their gold and silver money plentiful for a few decades.
But when Queen Mary took the throne and tightened the usury laws again, the money changers renewed the hoarding of gold and silver coins, forcing the economy to plummet. When Queen Mary's sister, Queen Elizabeth I, took the throne, she was determined to regain control over English money. Her solution was to issue gold and silver coins from the public treasury and take the control over the money supply away from the money changers. Although control over money was not the only cause of the English revolution in 1642, religious differences fuelled the conflict, monetary policy played a major role. Financed by the money changers, Oliver Cromwell finally overthrew King Charles, purged the parliament, and put the king to death.
The money changers were immediately allowed to consolidate their financial power. The result was that for the next fifty years, the money changers plunged Great Britain into a series of costly wars. They took over a square mile of property in the centre of London known as the City Of London. This area today is still known as one of the three predominant financial centres of the world. Conflicts with the Stuart Kings led the money changers in England to combine with those in The Netherlands to finance the invasion of William of Orange who overthrew the Stuarts in 1688 and took the English throne.
By the end of the sixteen hundreds, England was in financial ruin. Fifty years of more or less continuous wars with France and Holland had exhausted her. Frantic government officials met with the money changers to beg for the loans necessary to pursue their political purposes. The price was high, a government sanctioned privately owned bank which could issue money created out of nothing. It was to be the modern world's first privately owned central bank, the Bank of England.
Although it was deceptively called the Bank of England to make the general population think it was part of the government, it was not. Like any other private corporation, the Bank of England sold shares to get started. The investors, whose names were never revealed, were supposed to put up 1 and a quarter million British pounds in gold coin to buy their shares in the bank, but only ÂŁ750,000 was ever received. Despite that, the bank was duly chartered in 1694 and started out in the business of loaning out several times the money it supposedly had in reserves, all at interest. In exchange, the new bank would loan British politicians as much of the new currency as they wanted as long as they secured the debt by direct taxation of the British people.
So legalization of the Bank of England amounted to nothing less than legal counterfeiting of a national currency for private gain. Unfortunately, nearly every nation now has a privately controlled central bank using the Bank of England as the basic model. Such is the power of these central banks that they soon take total control over a nation's economy. It soon amounts to nothing but a plutocracy, rule by the rich. It would be like putting control of the army in the hands of the mafia.
The danger of tyranny would be extreme. Yes. We need central banks. No. We do not need them in private hands.
The central bank scam is really a hidden tax. The nation sells bonds to the central bank to pay for things it does not have the political will to raise taxes to pay for. But the bonds are purchased with money the central bank creates out of nothing. More money in circulation makes your money worth less. The government gets as much money as it needs and the people pay for it in inflation.
The beauty of the plan is that not one person in a thousand can figure it out because it's usually hidden behind complex sounding economics gibberish. With the formation of the Bank of England, the nation was soon awash in money. Prices throughout the country doubled. Massive loans were granted for just about any wild scheme. One venture proposed to drain the Red Sea to recover gold supposedly lost when the Egyptian army drowned pursuing Moses and the Israelites.
By 1698, government debt grew from the initial 1 and a quarter million pounds to ÂŁ16,000,000. Naturally, taxes were increased and then increased again to pay for all of this. With the British money supply firmly in their grip, the British economy began a wild roller coaster series of booms and depressions, exactly the sort of thing a central bank claims it is determined to prevent.
Speaker 5: There are two things which I think are intrinsic not just to the Bank of England, but central banking generally. The first is an involvement in the formulation of monetary policy with the specific objective of achieving monetary stability.
Speaker 1: However, since the Bank of England took control, the British pound has rarely been stable. Now let's take a look at the role of the Rothschild family, the family said to be the wealthiest in the world. You're gone. This is Frankfurt, Germany. 50 Years after the Bank of England opened its doors, a goldsmith named Amshall Moses Bauer opened a coin shop, a counting house in 1743.
And over the door, he placed a sign depicting a Roman eagle on a red shield. The shop became known as the Red Shield Firm or in German Rothschild. When his son, Amschel Meyer Bauer, inherited the business, he decided to change his name to Rothschild. Amshall soon learned that loaning money to governments and kings was more profitable than loaning to private individuals. Not only were the loans bigger, but they were secured by the nation's taxes.
Mayor Rothschild had five sons. He trained them all in the skills of money creation, then sent them out to the major capitals of Europe to open branch offices of the family banking business. His first son, Amsho Mayer, stayed in Frankfurt to mine the hometown bank. His second son, Solomon, was sent to Vienna. His third son, Nathan, was clearly the most clever.
He was sent to London at age 21 in 1798, a hundred years after the founding of the Bank of England. His fourth son, Carl, went to Naples, and his fifth son, Jacob, went to Paris. In 1785, Mayor Amshel moved his entire family to this larger house, a five story dwelling he shared with the Schiff family. This house was known as the Green Shield. The Rothschilds and the Schiffs would play a central role in the rest of European financial history and in that of The United States.
The Rothschilds broke into dealings with European royalty here at Williamshall, the palace of the wealthiest man in Germany. In fact, the wealthiest monarch in all Europe, Prince William Of Hesse Cassel. At first, the Rothschilds were only helping William speculate in precious coins. But when Napoleon chased Prince William into exile, he sent ÂŁ550,000, a gigantic sum at that time, to Nathan Rothschild in London with instructions for him to buy consols, British government bonds, also called government stock. But Rothschild used the money for his own purposes.
With Napoleon on the loose, the opportunities of wartime investments were nearly limitless. William returned here sometime prior to the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. He summoned Rothschild and demanded his money back. The Rothschilds returned William's money with the interest the British consuls would have paid him had the investment actually been made. But the Rothchilds kept all the past profits they had made using William's money.
Nathan Rothschild later bragged that in the seventeen years he'd been in England, he'd increased his original ÂŁ20,000 stake given to him by his father by 2,500 times. By cooperating within the family, the Rothschild soon grew unbelievably wealthy. By the mid eighteen hundreds, they dominated all European banking and were certainly the wealthiest family in the world. They financed Cecil Rhodes, making it possible for him to establish a monopoly over the diamond and gold fields of South Africa. In America, they financed the Harriman's and railroads, the Vanderbilt's and railroads and the press, and Carnegie and the steel industry, among many others.
In fact, during World War I, J. P. Morgan was thought to be the richest man in America. But after his death, it was discovered that he was actually only a lieutenant of the Rothschilds. Once Morgan's will was made public, it was discovered that he owned only 19% of JPMorgan companies.
By 1850, James Rothschild, the heir of the French branch of the family, was said to be worth 600,000,000 French francs, 1 hundred and 50 million more than all the other bankers in France put together. He built this mansion called Ferrier, just East of Paris. Wilhelm The First on scene had exclaimed, kings couldn't afford this. It could only belong to a Rothschild. Another nineteenth century French commentator put it this way.
There is but one power in Europe, and that is Rothschild. There is no evidence that their predominant standing in European or world finance has changed. Now let's take a look at the results the Bank of England had produced on the British economy and how that later was the root cause of the American Revolution. By the mid seventeen hundreds, the British Empire was nearing its height of power around the world. But Britain had fought four costly wars in Europe since the creation of their privately owned central bank, the Bank of England.
The cost had been high. To finance these wars, the British parliament here had borrowed heavily from the bank. By the mid seventeen hundreds, the government's debt here in Britain was a hundred and ÂŁ40,000,000, a staggering sum for those days. Consequently, the British government embarked on a program of trying to raise revenues from their American colonies in order to make their interest payments to the bank. But in America, it was a different story.
The scourge of a privately owned central bank had not yet hit. This is Independence Hall in Philadelphia, where the Declaration of Independence and Constitution were signed. In the mid seventeen hundreds, pre revolutionary America was still relatively poor. There was a severe shortage of precious metal coins to trade for goods, so the early colonists were forced to experiment with printing their own homegrown paper money. Some of these experiments were successful.
Franklin was a big supporter of the colonies printing their own paper money. In 1757, Franklin was sent to London. He ended up staying for the next eighteen years here, nearly until the start of the American Revolution. During this period, the American colonies began to issue their own money. Called colonial scrip, the endeavor was very successful.
It provided a reliable medium of exchange, and it also helped to provide a feeling of unity between the colonies. Remember, colonial scrip was just paper money, debt free money printed in the public interest and not backed by gold or silver coin. In other words, it was a totally fiat currency. One day, officials of the Bank of England asked Franklin how he would account for the newfound prosperity of the colonies. Without hesitation, he replied.
Speaker 0: That is simple. In the colonies, we issue our own money. It is called colonial scrip. We issue it in proper proportion to the demands of trade and industry to make the products pass easily from the producers to the consumers. In this manner, creating for ourselves our own paper money, we control its purchasing power, and we have no interest to pay to no one.
Speaker 1: This was just common sense to Franklin, but you can imagine the impact it had on the Bank of England. America had learned the secret of money, and that genie had to be returned to its bottle as soon as possible. As a result, parliament hurriedly passed the Currency Act of 1764. This prohibited colonial officials from issuing their own money and ordered them to pay all future taxes in gold or silver coins. In other words, it forced the colonies on a gold or silver standard.
For those who still believe that a gold standard is the answer for America's current monetary problems, look what happened to America after that. Writing in his autobiography, Franklin said
Speaker 0: In one year, the conditions were so reversed that the era of prosperity ended and a depression set in to such an extent that the streets of the colonies were filled with unemployed.
Speaker 1: Franklin claims that this was even the basic cause for the American Revolution. As Franklin put it in his autobiography
Speaker 0: The colonies would gladly have borne a little tax on tea and other matters had it not been that England took away from the colonies their money, which created unemployment and dissatisfaction. The inability of the colonists to get the power to issue their own money permanently out of the hands of George the third and the international bankers was the prime reason for the revolutionary war.
Speaker 1: By the time the first shots were fired in Lexington, Massachusetts on 04/19/1775, the colonies had been drained of gold and silver coin by British taxation. As a result, the continental government had no choice but to print money to finance the war. At the start of the revolution, the US money supply stood at $12,000,000. By the end of the war, it was nearly 500,000,000. As a result, the currency was virtually worthless.
Shoes sold for $5,000 a pair. Colonial scrip had worked because just enough was issued to facilitate trade. As George Washington lamented, a wagonload of money will scarcely purchase a wagonload of provisions. Today, those who support a gold backed currency point to this period during the revolution to demonstrate the evils of a fiat currency. But remember, the same currency had worked so well twenty years earlier during times of peace that the Bank of England had parliament outlawed.
Towards the end of the revolution, the Continental Congress meeting here at Independence Hall grew desperate for money. In 1781, they allowed Robert Morris, their financial superintendent, to open a privately owned central bank. Incidentally, Morris was a wealthy man who had grown wealthier during the revolution by trading in war materials. Called the Bank of North America, the new bank was closely modeled after the Bank of England. It was allowed to practice fractional reserve banking.
That is, it could lend out money it didn't have, then charge interest on it. If you or I were to do that, we would be charged with fraud, a felony. The bank's charter called for private investors to put up $400,000 worth of initial capital. But when Morris was unable to raise the money, he brazenly used his political influence to have gold deposited in the bank, which had been loaned to America by France. He then loaned this money to himself and his friends to reinvest in shares of the bank.
And like the Bank of England, the bank was given a monopoly over the national currency. Soon the dangers became clear. The value of American currency continued to plummet. So four years later, in 1785, the bank's charter was not renewed. The leader of the effort to kill the bank, William Findley of Pennsylvania, explained the problem this way.
Quote, this institution, having no principle but that of avarice, will never be varied in its object to engross all the wealth, power, and influence of the state. The men behind the Bank of North America, Alexander Hamilton, Robert Morris, and the bank's president, Thomas Wiling, did not give up. Only six years later, Hamilton, then secretary of the treasury, and his mentor, Morris, rammed a new privately owned central bank through the new congress. Called the first bank of The United States, Thomas Wiling again served as the bank's president. The players were the same, only the name of the bank was changed.
In 1787, colonial leaders assembled in Philadelphia to replace the ailing Articles of Confederation. As we saw earlier, both Thomas Jefferson and James Madison were unalterably opposed to a privately owned central bank. They had seen the problems caused by the Bank of England. They wanted nothing of it. As Jefferson later put it if the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and the corporations which grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.
During the debate over the future monetary system, another one of the founding fathers, Gouverneur Morris, castigated the motivations of the owners of the Bank of North America. Gouverneur Morris headed the committee that wrote the final draft of the constitution. Morris knew the motivations of the bank well. Along with his old boss, Robert Morris, Gouverneur Morris and Alexander Hamilton were the ones who had presented the original plan for the Bank of North America to the Continental Congress in the last year of the revolution. In a letter he wrote to James Madison on 07/02/1787, Gouverneur Morris revealed what was really going on.
Speaker 0: The rich will strive to establish their dominion and enslave the rest. They always did. They always will. They will have the same effect here as elsewhere if we do not, by the power of government, keep them in their proper spheres.
Speaker 1: Despite the defection of Gouverneur Morris from the ranks of the bank, Hamilton, Robert Morris, Thomas Wiling, and their European backers were not about to give up. They convinced the bulk of the delegates to the Constitutional Convention to not give Congress the power to issue paper money. Most of the delegates were still reeling from the wild inflation of the paper currency during the revolution. They had forgotten how well colonial scrip had worked before the war. But the Bank of England had not.
The money changers could not stand to have America printing her own money again. So the constitution is silent on the matter. This grievous defect left the door wide open for the money changers just as they had planned. In 1790, less than three years after the constitution had been signed, the money changers struck again. The newly appointed first secretary of the treasury, Alexander Hamilton, proposed a bill to the congress calling for a new privately owned central bank.
Coincidentally, that was the very year that Amschel Rothschild made his pronouncement from his flagship bank in Frankfurt. Let me issue and control a nation's money, and I care not who writes the laws.
Speaker 0: Alexander Hamilton was a tool of the international bankers, and he wanted to create the US Bank, the BUS, or the Bank of the United States, and did so.
Speaker 1: Interestingly, one of Hamilton's first jobs after graduating from law school in 1782 was as an aide to Robert Morris, the head of the Bank of North America. In fact, the year before, Hamilton had written Morris a letter saying, a national debt, if it is not excessive, will be to us a national blessing. A blessing to whom? After a year of intense debate, in 1791, Congress passed the bill and gave it a twenty year charter. The new bank was to be called the First Bank of the United States or BUS.
Here we are in front of the first bank of the United States in Philadelphia. The bank was given a monopoly on printing US currency even though 80% of its stock would be held by private investors. The other 20% would be purchased by the US government. But the reason was not to give the government a piece of the action. It was to provide the capital for the other 80% owners.
As with the old Bank of North America and the Bank of England before that, the stockholders never paid the full amount for their shares. The US government put up their initial $2,000,000 in cash, then the bank, through the old magic of fractional reserve lending, made loans to its charter investors so they could come up with the remaining $8,000,000 of capital needed for this risk free investment. Like the Bank of England, the name of the Bank of the United States was deliberately chosen to hide the fact that it was privately controlled. And like the Bank of England, the names of the investors in the bank were never revealed. Many years later, it was a common saying that the Rothschilds were the power behind the old Bank of the United States.
The bank was sold to Congress as a way to bring stability to the banking system and eliminate inflation. So what happened? Over the first five years, the US government borrowed $8,200,000 from the Bank of the United States. In the same five year period, prices rose by 72%. Jefferson, as the new secretary of state, watched the borrowing with sadness and frustration, unable to stop it.
Speaker 0: I wish it were possible to obtain a single amendment to our constitution taking from the federal government the power of borrowing.
Speaker 1: Millions of Americans feel the same way today. They watch in helpless frustration as the federal government borrows economy into oblivion. So although it was called the first bank of The United States, it was not the first attempt at a privately owned central bank in this country. As with the Bank of North America, the government put up most of the cash to get this private bank going, then the bankers loaned the money to each other to buy the remaining stock in the bank. It was a scam plain and simple, and they wouldn't be able to get away with it for long.
But first, we have to travel back to Europe to see how a single man was able to manipulate the entire British economy by obtaining the first news of Napoleon's final defeat. Here in Paris, the Bank of France was organized in 1800 just like the Bank of England. But Napoleon decided France had to break free of debt, and he never trusted the Bank of France. He declared that when a government is dependent upon bankers for money, the bankers, not the leaders of the government, are in control.
Speaker 0: The hand that gives is above the hand that takes. Money has no motherland. Financiers are without patriotism and without decency. Their sole object is gain.
Speaker 1: Back in America, unexpected help was about to arrive. In 1800, Thomas Jefferson narrowly defeated John Adams to become the third president of The United States. By eighteen o three, Jefferson and Napoleon had struck a deal. The US would give Napoleon three million dollars in gold in exchange for a huge chunk of territory west of the Mississippi River, the Louisiana Purchase. With that $3,000,000, Napoleon quickly forged an army and set off across Europe, conquering everything in his path.
But the Bank of England quickly rose to oppose him. They financed every nation in his path reaping the enormous profits of war. Prussia, Austria, and finally Russia all went heavily into debt in a futile attempt to stop Napoleon. Four years later, with the main French army in Russia, Thirty year old Nathan Rothschild, the head of the London office of the Rothschild family, personally took charge of a bold plan to smuggle a much needed shipment of gold right through France to finance an attack by the Duke of Wellington from Spain. Nathan later bragged at a dinner party in London that it was the best business he'd ever done.
Little did he know that he would do much better business in the near future. Wellington's attacks from the South and other defeats eventually forced Napoleon to abdicate, and Louis the eighteenth was crowned king. Napoleon was exiled to Elba, a tiny island off the coast of Italy, supposedly exiled from France forever. While Napoleon was in exile on Elba temporarily defeated by England with the financial help of the Rothschilds, America was trying to break free of its central bank as well. In 1811, a bill was put before congress to renew the charter of the Bank of the United States.
The debate grew very heated, and the legislatures of both Pennsylvania and Virginia passed resolutions asking congress to kill the bank. The press corps of the day attacked the bank openly, calling it a great swindle, a vulture, a viper, and a cobra. Oh, to have an independent press once again in America. A congressman named PB Porter attacked the bank from the floor of congress, saying if the bank's charter was renewed, congress, quote, will have planted in the bosom of this constitution of Viper, which one day or another will sting the liberties of this country to the heart, close quote. Prospects didn't look that good for the bank.
Some writers have even claimed that Nathan Rothschild warned that The United States would find itself involved in a most disastrous war if the bank's charter were not renewed. But it wasn't enough. When the smoke had cleared, the renewal bill was defeated by a single vote in the house and was deadlocked in the senate. By now, America's Fourth President, James Madison, was in the White House. Remember, Madison was a staunch opponent of the bank.
His vice president, George Clinton, broke a tie in the senate and sent the bank into oblivion. Within five months, England attacked The US, and the war of eighteen twelve was on. But the British were still busy fighting Napoleon, and so the war of eighteen twelve ended in a draw in 1814. Though the money changers were temporarily down, they were far from out. It would take them only another two years to bring back their bank bigger and stronger than ever.
But now let's return to Napoleon because nothing else in history more aptly demonstrates the ingenuity of the Rothschild family than their control of the British stock market after Waterloo. In 1815, a year after the end of the war of eighteen twelve in America, Napoleon escaped his exile and returned to Paris. French troops were sent out to capture him, but such was his charisma that the soldiers rallied around their old leader and hailed him as their emperor once again. In March of eighteen fifteen, Napoleon equipped an army which Britain's Duke Of Wellington defeated less than ninety days later at Waterloo. Some writers claim Napoleon borrowed ÂŁ5,000,000 from the Bank of England to rearm, but it appears these funds actually came from the Ouvard banking house in Paris.
Nevertheless, from about this point on, it was not unusual for privately controlled central banks to finance both sides in a war. Why would a central bank finance opposing sides in a war? Because war is the biggest debt generator of them all. A nation will borrow any amount for victory. The ultimate loser is loaned just enough to hold out the vain hope of victory, and the ultimate winner is given enough to win.
Besides, such loans are usually conditioned upon the guarantee that the victor will honor the debts of the vanquished. This is the Waterloo Battlefield about 200 miles northeast of Paris in what today is Belgium. Here, Napoleon suffered his final defeat, but not before thousands of French and Englishmen gave their lives on a steamy summer day in July of eighteen fifteen. Right over there, on June 4000 French troops met 67,000 troops from Britain and other European nations. The outcome was certainly in doubt.
In fact, had Napoleon attacked a few hours earlier, he would probably have won the battle. But no matter who won or lost back in London, Nathan Rothschild planned to use the opportunity to try to seize control over the British stock and bond market and possibly even the Bank of England. Rothschild stationed a trusted agent, a man named Rothworth, on the north side of the battlefield closer to the English Channel. Once the battle had been decided, Rothworth took off for the channel. He delivered the news to Nathan Rothschild a full twenty four hours before Wellington's own courier.
Rothschild hurried to the stock market and took up his usual position in front of an ancient pillar. All eyes were on him. The Rothschilds had a legendary communications network. If Wellington had been defeated and Napoleon was loose on the continent again, Britain's financial situation would become grave indeed. Rothschild looked saddened.
He stood there motionless, eyes downcast. Then suddenly he began selling. Other nervous investors saw that Rothchild was selling. It could only mean one thing. Napoleon must have won, Wellington must have lost.
The market plummeted. Soon everyone was selling their consoles, their British government bonds, and prices dropped sharply. But then Rothschild started secretly buying up the consoles through his agents for only a fraction of their worth hours before. Myths, legends, you say? 100 later, the New York Times ran a story which said that Nathan's grandson had attempted to secure a court order to suppress a book with this stock market story in it.
The Rothschild family claimed the story was untrue and libelous, but the court denied the Rothschild's request and ordered the family to pay all court costs. What's even more interesting about this story is that some authors claim that the day after the Battle of Waterloo, in a matter of hours, Nathan Rothschild came to dominate not only the bond market but the Bank of England as well. Whether or not the Rothschild family seized control of the Bank of England, the first privately owned central bank in a major European nation and the wealthiest, one thing is certain, by the mid-eighteen hundreds the Rothschilds were the richest family in the world bar none. They dominated the new government bond markets and branched into other banks and industrial concerns. In fact, the rest of the nineteenth century was known as the age of the Rothschilds.
Despite this overwhelming wealth, the family has generally cultivated an aura of invisibility. Although the family controls scores of industrial, commercial, mining, and tourist corporations, only a handful bear the Rothschild name. By the end of the nineteenth century, one expert estimated that the Rothschild family controlled half the wealth of the world. Whatever the extent of their vast wealth, it is reasonable to assume that their percentage of the world's wealth has increased since then. But since the turn of the century, the Rothschilds have cultivated the notion that their power has somehow waned even as their wealth increases.
Meanwhile, back in Washington in 1816, just one year after Waterloo and Rothschild's alleged takeover of the Bank of England, the American Congress passed a bill permitting yet another privately owned central bank. This bank was called the second bank of the United States. The new bank's charter was a copy of the previous banks. The US government would own 20% of the shares of the bank. Of course, the federal share was paid by the treasury up front into the bank's coffers.
Then through the magic of fractional reserve lending, it was transformed into loans to private investors who then bought the remaining 80% of the shares. Just as before, the primary stockholders remained a secret. But it is known that the largest block of shares, about one third of the total, were sold to foreigners. As one observer put it, it is certainly no exaggeration to say that the second bank of the United States was rooted as deeply in Britain as it was in America. So by 1816, some authors claim the Rothschilds had taken control over the Bank of England and backed a new privately owned central bank in America as well.
After twelve years of manipulations of The US economy on the part of the second bank of the US, the American people had had just about enough. Opponents of the bank nominated a dignified senator from Tennessee, Andrew Jackson, the hero of the battle of New Orleans to run for president. This is his home, the Hermitage. No one gave Jackson a chance initially. The bank had long ago learned how the political process could be controlled with money.
To the surprise and dismay of the money changers, Jackson was swept into office in 1828. Jackson was determined to kill the bank at the first opportunity and wasted no time in trying to do so. But the bank's twenty year charter didn't come up for renewal until 1836, the last year of his second term if he could survive that long. During his first term, Jackson contented himself with rooting out the bank's many minions from government service. He fired 2,000 of the 11,000 employees of the federal government.
In 1832, with his reelection approaching, the bank struck an early blow, hoping Jackson would not want to stir up controversy. They asked Congress to pass a renewal bill four years early. Naturally, Congress complied, then sent it to the president for signing. But Jackson weighed in with both feet. Old Hickory, never a coward, vetoed the bill.
His veto message is one of the great American documents. It clearly lays out the responsibility of the American government towards its citizens, rich and poor.
Speaker 0: It is not our own citizens only who are to receive the bounty of our government. More than 8 millions of the stock of this bank are held by foreigners. Is there no danger to our liberty and independence in a bank that in its nature has so little to bind it to our country? Controlling our currency, receiving our public monies, and holding thousands of our citizens independence would be more formidable and dangerous than a military power of the enemy. If government would confine itself to equal protection and, as heaven does its rains, shower its favor alike on the high and the low, the rich and the poor, it would be an unqualified blessing.
In the act before me, there seems to be a wide and unnecessary departure from these just principles.
Speaker 1: Later that year, in July 1832, Congress was unable to override Jackson's veto. Now Jackson had to stand for reelection. Jackson took his argument directly to the people. For the first time in US history, Jackson took his presidential campaign on the road. Before then, presidential candidates stayed at home and looked presidential.
His campaign slogan was Jackson and no bank. The National Republican Party ran senator Henry Clay against Jackson. Despite the fact that the bankers poured over $3,000,000 into Clay's campaign, Jackson was reelected by a landslide in November of eighteen thirty two. Despite his presidential victory, Jackson knew the battle was only beginning. The hydra of corruption is only scotched, not dead, said the newly elected president.
Jackson ordered his new secretary of treasury, Louis McLean, to start removing the government's deposits from the second bank and start placing them in state banks. But McLean refused to do so. Jackson fired him and appointed William j Dewayne as the new secretary of the treasury. Dewayne also refused to comply with the president's requests, and so Jackson fired him as well and then appointed Roger b Taney to the office. Taney did withdraw government funds from the bank starting on 10/01/1833.
Jackson was jubilant. I have it chained. I'm ready with screws to draw every tooth and then the stumps, but the bank was not yet done fighting. Its head, Nicholas Biddle, used his influence to get the senate to reject Taney's nomination. Then in a rare show of arrogance, Biddle threatened to cause a depression if the bank was not rechartered.
Speaker 0: This worthy president thinks that because he has scalped Indians and imprisoned judges, he is to have his way with the bank, he is mistaken.
Speaker 1: Next, in an unbelievable fit of honesty for a central banker, Biddle admitted that the bank was going to make money scarce to force congress to restore the bank.
Speaker 0: Nothing but widespread suffering will produce any effect on congress. Our only safety is in pursuing a steady course of firm restriction, and I have no doubt that such a course will ultimately lead to restoration of the currency and the recharter of the bank.
Speaker 1: What a stunning revelation. Here was the pure truth revealed with shocking clarity. Biddle intended to use the money contraction power of the bank to cause a massive depression until America gave in. Unfortunately, this has happened time and time again throughout US history and is about to happen again in today's world. Nicholas Biddle made good on his threat.
The bank sharply contracted the money supply by calling in old loans and refusing to extend new ones. A financial panic ensued followed by a deep depression. Naturally, Biddle blamed Jackson for the crash, saying that it was caused by the withdrawal of federal funds from the bank. Unfortunately, his plan worked well. Wages and prices sagged.
Unemployment soared along with business bankruptcies. The nation quickly went into an uproar. Newspaper editors blasted Jackson in editorials. The bank threatened to withhold payments, which then could be made directly to key politicians for their support. Within only months, congress assembled in what was called the panic session.
Six months after he had withdrawn funds from the bank, Jackson was officially censured by a resolution which passed the senate by a vote of 26 to 20. It was the first time a president had ever been censured by congress. Jackson lashed out at the bank. You are a den of vipers. I intend to route you out, and by eternal god, I will route you out.
America's fate teetered on a knife edge. If congress could muster enough votes to override Jackson's veto, the bank would be granted another twenty year monopoly or more over America's money, time enough to consolidate its already great power. Then a miracle occurred. The governor of Pennsylvania came out supporting president Jackson and strongly criticized the bank. On top of that, Biddle had been caught boasting in public about the bank's plan to crash the economy.
Suddenly, the tide shifted. In April of eighteen thirty four, the House of Representatives voted one thirty four to 82 against rechartering the bank. This was followed up by an even more lopsided vote to establish a special committee to investigate whether the bank had caused the crash. When the investigating committee arrived at the bank store in Philadelphia, armed with a subpoena to examine the books, Biddle refused to give them up, nor would he allow inspection of correspondence with congressmen relating to their personal loans and advances he'd made to them. He also refused to testify before the committee back in Washington.
On 01/08/1835, Jackson paid off the final installment on the national debt, which had been necessitated by allowing the banks to issue currency for government bonds rather than simply issuing treasury notes without such debt. He was the only president to ever pay off the debt. A few weeks later on 01/30/1835, an assassin by the name of Richard Lawrence tried to shoot president Jackson, but by the grace of God, both pistols misfired. Lawrence was later found not guilty by reason of insanity. After his release, he bragged to friends that powerful people in Europe had put him up to the task and promised to protect him if he were caught.
The following year, when its charter ran out, the second bank of the United States ceased functioning as the nation's central bank. Biddle was later arrested and charged with fraud. He was tried and acquitted, but died shortly thereafter while still tied up in civil suits. After his second term as president, Jackson retired here to the hermitage outside of Nashville to live out his life. He is still remembered here for his determination to kill the bank.
In fact, he killed it so well that it took the money changers seventy seven years to undo the damage. When asked what his most important accomplishment had been, Jackson replied, I killed the bank. Unfortunately, even Jackson failed to grasp the entire picture and its root cause. Although Jackson had killed the central bank, the most insidious weapon of the money changers, fractional reserve banking, remained in use by the numerous state chartered banks. This fueled economic instability in the years before the civil war.
Still, the central bankers were out, and as a result, America thrived as it expanded westward. During this time, the principal money changers struggled to regain their lost centralized power, but to no avail. Then finally, they reverted to the old central bankers formula, war to create debt and dependency. If they couldn't get their central bank any other way, America could be brought to its knees by plunging it into a civil war just as they had done in 1812 after the first bank of the United States was not rechartered. One month after the inauguration of Abraham Lincoln, the first shots of the American Civil War were fired here at Fort Sumter, South Carolina on 04/12/1861.
Certainly slavery was a cause for the Civil War, but not the primary cause. Lincoln knew that the economy of the South depended upon slavery, and so before the civil war, he had no intention of eliminating it. Lincoln had put it this way in his inaugural address only one month earlier.
Speaker 0: I have no purpose directly or indirectly to interfere with the institution of slavery in the states where it now exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.
Speaker 1: Even after the first shots were fired here at Fort Sumter, Lincoln continued to insist that the civil war was not about the issue of slavery.
Speaker 0: My paramount objective is to save the Union, and it is not either to save or destroy slavery. If I could save the union without freeing any slave, I would do it.
Speaker 1: So what was the civil war all about? There were many factors at play. Northern industrialists had used protective tariffs to prevent the Southern states from buying cheaper European goods. Europe retaliated by stopping cotton imports from the South. The Southern states were in a double financial bind.
They were forced to pay more for most of the necessities of life while their income from cotton exports plummeted. The South was angry. But there were other factors at work. The money changers were still stung by America's withdrawal from their control twenty five years earlier. Since then, America's wild cat economy had made the nation rich, a bad example for the rest of the world.
The central bankers now saw an opportunity to split the rich new nation, to divide and conquer by war. Was this just some sort of wild conspiracy theory at the time? Well, let's take a look at what a well placed observer of the scene had to say at the time. His name was Otto von Bismarck, chancellor of Germany, the man who united the German states a few years later. The division of The United States into federations of equal force was decided long before the civil war by the high financial powers of Europe.
These bankers were afraid that The United States, if they remained as one bloc and as one nation, would attain economic and financial independence which would upset their financial domination over the world. Within months after the first shots here at Fort Sumter, the central bankers loaned Napoleon the third of France, the nephew of the Waterloo Napoleon, Two Hundred And Ten Million Francs to seize Mexico and station troops along the southern border of The US taking advantage of their war to violate the Monroe Doctrine and return Mexico to colonial rule. No matter what the outcome of the civil war, a weakened America heavily indebted to the money changers would open up Central And South America once again to European colonization and domination. The very thing America's Monroe Doctrine had forbade in 1823. At the same time, Great Britain moved 11,000 troops into Canada and positioned them menacingly along America's northern border.
The British fleet went to war alert should their quick intervention be called for. Lincoln knew he was in a double bind. That's why he agonized over the fate of the union. There was a lot more to it than just differences between the North and the South. That's why his emphasis was always on union and not merely the defeat of the South.
But Lincoln needed money to win. In 1861, Lincoln and his secretary of treasury, Salmon p Chase, went to New York to apply for the necessary loans. The money changers, anxious to see the union fail, offered loans at 24 to 36% interest. Lincoln said thanks, but no thanks, and returned to Washington. Lincoln sent for an old friend, colonel Dick Taylor of Chicago, and put him on the problem of financing the war.
During one meeting, Lincoln asked Taylor what he discovered. Taylor put it this way. Why, Lincoln, that is easy. Just get Congress to pass a bill authorizing the printing of full legal tender treasury notes And pay your soldiers with them and go ahead and win your war with them also. When Lincoln asked if the people of The United States would accept the notes, Taylor said, the people or anyone else will not have any choice in the matter if you make them full legal tender.
They will have the full sanction of the government and be just as good as any money as Congress is given that express right by the constitution. So that's exactly what Lincoln did. In eighteen sixty two, sixty three, he printed up $450,000,000 worth of the new bills. In order to distinguish them from other banknotes in circulation, he printed them in green ink on the backside. That's why the notes were called greenbacks.
With this new money, Lincoln paid the troops and bought their supplies. During the course of the war, nearly $450,000,000 worth of greenbacks were printed at no interest to the federal government. Lincoln understood who was really pulling the strings strings and what was at stake for the American people. This is how he explained his rationale.
Speaker 0: The government should create, issue, and circulate all the currency and credit needed to satisfy the spending power of the government and the buying power of consumers. The privilege of creating and issuing money is not only the supreme prerogative of government, but it is the government's greatest creative opportunity. By the adoption of these principles, the taxpayers will be saved immense sums of interest. Money will cease to be mastered and become the servant of humanity.
Speaker 1: A truly incredible editorial in the London Times explained the central bankers' attitude towards Lincoln's greenbacks.
Speaker 0: If this mischievous financial policy, has its origins in North America, shall become endurated down to a fixture, then that government will furnish its own money without cost. It will pay off debts and be without debt. It will have all the money necessary to carry on its commerce. It will become prosperous without precedent in the history of the world. The brains and wealth of all countries will go to North America.
That country must be destroyed, or it will destroy every monarchy on the globe.
Speaker 1: The scheme was effective. So effective that the next year, 1863, with federal and confederate troops beginning to mass for the decisive battle of the civil war and the treasury in need of further congressional authority to issue more greenbacks, Lincoln allowed the bankers to push through the National Bank Act. These new national banks would operate under a virtual tax free status and collectively have the exclusive monopoly power to create the new form of money, banknotes. Though greenbacks continued to circulate, their numbers were not increased. But most importantly, from this point on, the entire US money supply would be created out of debt by bankers buying US Government bonds and issuing them for reserves for banknotes.
As historian John Kenneth Galbraith explained it
Speaker 0: In numerous years following the war, the federal government ran a heavy surplus. It could not, however, pay off its debt, retire its securities because to do so meant there would be no bonds to back the national banknotes. To pay off the debt was to destroy the money supply.
Speaker 1: Later in 1863, Lincoln got some unexpected help from czar Alexander the second of Russia. The czar, like Bismarck in Germany, knew what the international money changers were up to and had steadfastly refused to let them set up a central bank in Russia. If America survived and was able to remain out of their clutches, the czar's position would remain secure. If the bankers were successful at dividing America and giving the pieces back to Great Britain and France, both nations under control of their central banks, eventually, they would threaten Russia again. So the czar gave orders that if either England or France actively intervened and gave aid to the South, Russia would consider such action as a declaration of war.
He did the same with part of his Pacific fleet and sent them to port in San Francisco. Lincoln was reelected the next year, eighteen sixty four. Had he lived, he would surely have killed the national bank's money monopoly extracted from him during the war. On 11/21/1864, he wrote a friend the following.
Speaker 0: The money power preys upon the nation in times of peace and conspires against it in times of adversity. It is more despotic than monarchy, more insolent than autocracy, more selfish than bureaucracy.
Speaker 1: Shortly before Lincoln was murdered, his former secretary of treasury, Salmon p Chase, bemoaned his role in helping secure the passage of the National Banking Act only one year earlier.
Speaker 0: My agency in promoting the passage of the National Banking Act was the greatest financial mistake in my life. It has built up a monopoly which affects every interest in the country.
Speaker 1: On April after his second inauguration and just five days after Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox, Lincoln was shot by John Wilkes Booth at Ford's Theatre. Bismarck, Chancellor of Germany, lamented the death of Abraham Lincoln.
Speaker 0: The death of Lincoln was a disaster for Christendom. There was no man in The United States great enough to wear his boots. I fear that foreign bankers with their craftiness and torturous tricks will entirely corrupt the exuberant riches of America and use it systematically to corrupt modern civilization. They will not hesitate to plunge the whole of Christendom into wars and chaos in order that the earth should become their inheritance.
Speaker 1: Bismarck well understood the money changers' plan. Allegations that international bankers were responsible for Lincoln's assassination surfaced in Canada Seventy Years later in 1934. Gerald g McGeer, a popular and well respected Canadian attorney, revealed this stunning charge in a five hour speech before the Canadian House of Commons blasting Canada's debt based money system. Remember, it was 1934, the height of the Great Depression, which was ravaging Canada as well. McGeer had obtained evidence deleted from the public record provided to him by Secret Service agents at the trial of John Wilkes Booth, after Booth's death.
McGeer said it showed that Booth was a mercenary working for the international bankers. According to an article in the Vancouver Sun of 05/02/1934
Speaker 0: Abraham Lincoln, the martyred emancipator of the slaves, was assassinated through the machinations of a group representative of the international bankers who feared The United States President's national credit ambitions. There was only one group in the world at that time who had any reason to desire the death of Lincoln. They were the men opposed to his national currency program and who had fought him throughout the whole civil war on his policy of greenback currency.
Speaker 1: Interestingly, McGeer claimed that Lincoln was assassinated not only because international bankers wanted to reestablish a central bank in America, but because they also wanted to base America's currency on gold, gold they controlled. In other words, put America on a gold standard. Lincoln had done just the opposite by issuing US notes, greenbacks, which were based purely on the good faith and credit of The United States. The article quoted McGeer as saying
Speaker 0: They were the men interested in the establishment of the gold standard and the right of the bankers to manage the currency and credit of every nation in the world. With Lincoln out of the way, they were able to proceed with that plan and did proceed with it in The United States. Within eight years after Lincoln's assassination, silver was demonetized and the gold standard money system set up in The United States.
Speaker 1: Not since Lincoln has The US issued debt free United States notes. These red sealed bills, which were issued in 1963, were not a new issue from president Kennedy, but merely the old greenbacks reissued year after year. In another act of folly and ignorance, the 1994 Regal Act actually authorized the replacement of Lincoln's greenbacks with debt based notes. In other words, greenbacks were in circulation in The United States until 1994. Why was silver bad for the bankers and gold good?
Simple. Because silver was plentiful in The United States. It was very hard to control. Gold was and always has been scarce. Throughout history, it has been relatively easy to monopolize gold, but silver has historically been 15 times more plentiful.
With Lincoln out of the way, the money changers' next objective was to gain complete control over America's money. This was no easy task. With the opening of the American West, silver had been discovered in huge quantities. On top of that, Lincoln's greenbacks were generally popular. Despite the European Central Bankers' deliberate attacks on greenbacks, they continued to circulate in The United States, in fact, until a few years ago.
According to historian w Cleon Skousen
Speaker 0: Right after the civil war, there was considerable talk about reviving Lincoln's brief experiment with the constitutional monetary system. Had not the European Money Trust intervened, it would have no doubt become an established institution.
Speaker 1: It is clear that the concept of America printing her own debt free money sent shock waves throughout the European central banking elite. They watched with horror as Americans clamored for more greenbacks. They may have killed Lincoln, but support for his monetary ideas grew. On 04/12/1866, nearly one year to the day of Lincoln's assassination, congress went to work at the bidding of the European Central Banking interests. It passed the contraction act authorizing the secretary of the treasury to begin to retire some of the greenbacks in circulation and thereby contract the money supply.
Authors Theodore R. Thorin and Richard F. Warner explained the results of the money contraction in their classic book on the subject, the truth in money book.
Speaker 0: The hard times which occurred after the civil war could have been avoided if the greenback legislation had continued as president Lincoln had intended. Instead, there were a series of money panics, what we call recessions, which put pressure on congress to enact legislation to place the banking system under centralized control. Eventually, the Federal Reserve Act was passed on 12/23/1913.
Speaker 1: In other words, the money changers wanted two things, the reinstitution of a central bank under their exclusive control, and two, an American currency backed by gold. Their strategy was twofold. First of all, cause a series of panics to try to convince the American people that only centralized control of the money supply could provide economic stability. And secondly, remove so much money from the system that most Americans would be so desperately poor that they either wouldn't care or would be too weak to oppose the bankers. In 1866, there was $1,800,000,000 in currency in circulation in The United States, about $50.46 per capita.
In 1867 alone, half a billion dollars, 5 hundred million dollars, was removed from The US money supply. Ten years later, in 1876, America's money supply was reduced to only 600,000,000. In other words, two thirds of America's money had been called in by the bankers. Only $14.60 per capita remained in circulation. Ten years later, the money supply had been reduced to only $400,000,000, even though the population had boomed.
The result was that only $6.67 per capita remained in circulation, a 760% loss in buying power over twenty years. Today, economists try to sell the idea that recessions and depressions are a natural part of something they call the business cycle. The truth is our money supply is manipulated now just as it was before and after the civil war. How did this happen? How did money become so scarce?
Simple. Bank loans were called in, and no new ones were given. In addition, silver coins were melted down. In 1872, a man named Ernest Said was given a hundred thousand pounds, about $500,000, by the Bank of England and sent to America to bribe necessary congressmen to get silver demonetized. He was told that if that was not sufficient to draw an additional hundred thousand pounds or as much more as was necessary.
The next year, congress passed the coinage act of 1873, and the minting of silver dollars abruptly stopped. In fact, representative Samuel Hooper, who introduced the bill in the house, acknowledged that mister Sad actually drafted the legislation. But it gets even worse than that. In 1874, Sad himself admitted who was behind the scheme.
Speaker 0: I went to America in the winter of eighteen seventy two, seventy three authorized to secure, if I could, the passage of a building monetizing silver. It was in the interest of those I represented, the governors of the Bank of England, to have it done. By 1873, gold coins were the only form of coin money.
Speaker 1: But the contest over control of America's money was not yet over. Only three years later in 1876, with one third of America's workforce unemployed, the population was growing restless. People were clamoring for a return to the greenback money system of president Lincoln or a return to silver money, anything that would make money more plentiful. That year, congress created the United States Silver Commission to study the problem. Their report clearly blamed the monetary contraction on the national bankers.
Interesting because it compares the deliberate money contraction by the national bankers after the civil war to the fall of the Roman Empire.
Speaker 0: The disaster of the dark ages was caused by decreasing money and falling prices. Without money, civilization could not have had a beginning. And with a diminishing supply, it must languish and unless relieved, finally perish. At the Christian era, the metallic money of the Roman Empire amounted to $1,800,000,000. By the end of the fifteenth century, it had shrunk to less than $200,000,000.
History records no other such disastrous transition as that from the Roman Empire to the dark ages.
Speaker 1: Despite this report by the Silver Commission, Congress took no action. The next year, eighteen seventy seven, riots broke out from Pittsburgh to Chicago. The torches of starving vandals lit up the sky. The bankers huddled to decide what to do. They decided to hang on.
Now that they were back in control to a certain extent, they were not about to give it up. At the meeting of the American Bankers Association that year, they urged their membership to do everything in their power to put down the notion of a return to greenbacks. The ABA secretary, James Buell, authored a letter to the members which blatantly called on the banks to subvert not only congress but the press.
Speaker 0: It is advisable to do all in your power to sustain such prominent daily and weekly newspapers, especially the agricultural and religious press, as will oppose the greenback issue of paper money, and that you will also withhold patronage from all applicants who are not willing to oppose the government issue of money. To repeal the act creating banknotes or to restore to circulation the government issue of money will be to provide the people with money and will therefore seriously affect our individual profits as bankers and lenders. See your congressman at once and engage him to support our interests that we may control. Legislation.
Speaker 1: As political pressure mounted in congress for change, the press tried to turn the American people away from the truth. The New York Tribune put it this way on 01/10/1878. The capital of the country is organized at last, and we will see whether congress will dare to fly in its face. But it didn't work entirely. On 02/28/1878, congress passed the Sherman Law, allowing the minting of a limited number of silver dollars ending the five year hiatus.
This did not end gold backing of the currency, however, nor did it completely free silver. Previous to 1873, anyone who brought silver to the US Mint could have it struck into silver dollars free of charge. No longer. But at least some money began to flow back into the economy again. With no further threat to their control, the bankers loosened up on loans, and the post civil war depression was finally ended.
Three years later, the American people elected republican James Garfield president. Garfield understood how the economy was being manipulated. As a congressman, he had been chairman of the appropriations committee and was a member of banking and currency. After his inauguration, he slammed the money changers publicly in 1881. Whoever controls the volume of money in any country is absolute master of all industry and commerce.
And when you realize that the entire system is very easily controlled one way or another by a few powerful men at the top, you will not have to be told how periods of inflation and depression originate. Unfortunately, within a few weeks of making this statement, on July second of eighteen eighty one, president Garfield was assassinated. The money changers were gathering strength fast. They began a periodic fleecing of the flock, as they called it, by creating economic booms followed by further depressions so they could buy up thousands of homes and farms for pennies on the dollar. In 1891, the money changers prepared to take the American economy down again, and their methods and motives were laid out with shocking clarity in a memo sent out by the American Bankers Association, the ABA, an organization in which most bankers remembers.
Notice that this memo called for bankers to create a depression on a certain date three years in the future. According to the congressional record, here's how it read in part. On 09/01/1894, we will not renew our loans under any consideration. On September 1, we will demand our money. We will foreclose and become mortgagees in possession.
We can take two thirds of the farms West Of The Mississippi and thousands of them East Of The Mississippi as well at our price. Then the farmers will become tenants as in England. These depressions could be controlled because America was on the gold money standard. Since gold is scarce, it's one of the easiest commodities to manipulate. People wanted silver money legalized again so they could escape the stranglehold the money changers had on gold money.
People wanted silver money reinstated, reversing mister Said's act of 1873 by then called the crime of '73. By 1896, the issue of more silver money had become the central issue in the presidential campaign. William Jennings Bryan, a senator from Nebraska, ran for president as a democrat on the free silver issue. At the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, he made an emotional speech which won him the nomination entitled crown of thorns and cross of gold. Though Bryan was only 36 years old at the time, this speech is widely regarded as the most famous oration ever made before a political convention.
In the dramatic conclusion, Brian said
Speaker 0: We will answer their demand for our gold standard by saying to them, you shall not press down upon the brow of labor of this crown of thorns. You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.
Speaker 1: The bankers lavishly supported the Republican candidate, William McKinley, who favored the gold standard. The resulting contest was amongst the most fiercely contested presidential races in American history. Bryan made over 600 speeches in 27 states. The McKinley campaign manufacturers and industrialists to inform their employees that if Bryan were elected, all factories and plants would close and there would be no work. The ruse succeeded.
McKinley beat Bryan by a small margin. Bryan ran for president again in 1900 and in nineteen o eight, but fell short each time. During the nineteen twelve Democratic convention, Bryan was a powerful figure who helped Woodrow Wilson win the nomination. When Wilson became president, he appointed Brian as secretary of state, but Brian soon became disenchanted with the Wilson administration. Brian served only two years in the Wilson administration before resigning in 1915 over the highly suspicious sinking of the Lusitania, the event which was used to drive America into World War one.
Although William Jennings Bryan never gained the presidency, his efforts delayed the money changers for seventeen years from attaining their next goal, a new privately owned central bank for America. Now it was time for the money changers to get back to the business of a new private Central Bank for America. During the early nineteen hundreds, men like JP Morgan led the charge. One final panic would be necessary to focus the nation's attention on the supposed need for a central bank. The rationale was that only a central bank can be prevent bank failures.
Morgan was clearly the most powerful banker in America and a suspected agent for the Rothschilds. Morgan had helped finance John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil empire. He had also helped finance the monopolies of Edward Harriman in railroads, of Andrew Carnegie in steel, and of others in numerous industries. But on top of that, JP Morgan's father, Junius Morgan, had been America's Financial Agent to the British.
After his father's death, JP Morgan took on a British partner, Edward Grenfell, a longtime director of the Bank of England. In fact, upon Morgan's death, his estate contained only a few million dollars. The bulk of the securities most people thought he owned were in fact owned by others. In nineteen o two, president Theodore Roosevelt allegedly went after Morgan and his friends by using the Sherman Antitrust Act to try to break up their industrial monopolies. Actually, Roosevelt did very little to interfere in the growing monopolization of American industry by the bankers and their surrogates.
For example, Roosevelt supposedly broke up the standard oil monopoly, but it wasn't really broken at all. It was merely divided into seven corporations, all still controlled by the Rockefellers. The public was aware of this thanks to political cartoonists like Thomas Nast, who referred to the bankers as the money trust. By nineteen o seven, the year after Teddy Roosevelt's reelection, Morgan decided it was time to try for a central bank again. Using their combined financial muscle, Morgan and his friends were secretly able to crash the stock market.
Thousands of small banks were vastly overextended. Some had reserves of less than 1%, thanks to the fractional reserve principle. Within days, bank runs were commonplace across the nation. Now Morgan stepped into the public arena and offered to prop up the faltering American economy by supporting failing banks with money he manufactured out of nothing. It was an outrageous proposal, far worse than even fractional reserve banking, but Congress let him do it.
Morgan manufactured 200,000,000 dollars' worth of this completely reserve less private money and bought things with it, paid for services with it, and sent some of it to his branch banks to lend out at interest. His plan worked. Soon the public regained confidence in money in general and quit hoarding their currency. But as a result, banking power was further consolidated into the hands of a few large banks. By nineteen o eight, the panic was over, and Morgan was hailed as a hero by the president of Princeton University, a man by the name of Woodrow Wilson.
Speaker 0: All this trouble could be averted if we appointed a committee of six or seven public spirited men like JP Morgan to handle the affairs of our country.
Speaker 1: Economics textbooks would later explain that the creation of the Federal Reserve System was the direct result of the panic of nineteen o seven. Quote, with its alarming epidemic of bank failures, the country was fed up once and for all with the anarchy of unstable private banking, close quote. But Minnesota congressman Charles a Lindbergh senior, the father of the famous aviator Lucky Linde, later explained that the panic of nineteen o seven was really just a scam.
Speaker 0: Those not favorable to the money trust could be squeezed out of business, and the people frightened into demanding changes in the banking and currency laws, which the money trust would bring.
Speaker 1: So since the passage of the National Bank Act of 1863, the money changers had been able to create a series of booms and busts. The purpose was not only to fleece the American public of their property, but to later claim that the banking system was basically so unstable that it had to be consolidated into a central bank once again. After the crash, Teddy Roosevelt, in response to the panic of nineteen o seven, signed into law a bill creating something called the National Monetary Commission. The commission was to study the banking problem and make recommendations to congress. Of course, the commission was packed with Morgan's friends and cronies.
The chairman was a man named senator Nelson Aldrich from Rhode Island. Aldrich represented the Newport, Rhode Island homes of America's richest banking families. His daughter married John D. Rockefeller junior, and together they had five sons. John, Nelson, who would become vice president in 1974, Lawrence, Winthrop, and David, the head of the Council on Foreign Relations and former chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank.
As soon as the National Monetary Commission was set up, senator Aldrich immediately embarked on a two year tour of Europe, where he consulted at length with the private central bankers in England, France, and Germany. The total cost of his trip alone to the taxpayers was $300,000, an astronomical sum in those days. Shortly after his return on the evening of 11/22/1910, some of the wealthiest and most powerful men in America boarded senator Aldrich's private rail car and in the strictest secrecy journeyed to this place, Jekyll Island off the coast of Georgia. With the group came Paul Warburg. Warburg had been given a $500,000 per year salary to lobby for the passage of a privately owned central bank in America by the investment firm Kuhn Loeb and Company.
Warburg's partner in this firm was a man named Jacob Schiff, the grandson of the man who shared the Green Shield House with the Rothschild family in Frankfurt. Schiff, as we'll find out later, was in the process of spending $20,000,000 to finance the overthrow of the czar in Russia. These three European banking families, the Rothschilds, the Warburgs, and the Schiffs, were interconnected by marriage down through the years just as their American banking counterparts, the Morgans, Rockefellers, and Aldriches were. Secrecy was so tight that all seven primary participants were cautioned to use only first names to prevent servants from learning their identities. Years later, one participant, Frank Vanderlip, president of National City Bank of New York and a representative of the Rockefeller family, confirmed the Jekyll Island trip in a 02/09/1935 edition of the Saturday Evening Post.
Speaker 0: I was as secretive, indeed as furtive as any conspirator discovery we knew simply must not happen or else all our time and effort would be wasted. If it were to be exposed that our particular group had got together and written a banking bill, that bill would have no chance whatever. A passage by congress.
Speaker 1: The participants came here to figure out how to solve their major problem, how to bring back a privately owned central bank. But there were other problems that needed to be addressed as well. First of all, the market share of the big national banks was shrinking fast. In the first ten years of the century, the number of US banks had more than doubled to over 20,000. By 1913, only 29 of all banks were national banks, and they held only 57% of all deposits.
As senator Aldrich later admitted in a magazine article
Speaker 0: Before passage of this act, the New York bankers could only dominate the reserves of New York. Now we are able to dominate the bank reserves of the entire country.
Speaker 1: Therefore, something had to be done to bring these new banks under their control. As John D. Rockefeller put it, quote, competition is sin, close quote. Secondly, the nation's economy was so strong that corporations were starting to finance their expansions out of profits instead of taking out huge loans from large banks. In the first ten years of the new century, 70% of corporate funding came from profits.
In other words, American industry was becoming independent of the money changers, and that trend had to be stopped. All the participants knew that these problems could be hammered out into a workable solution, but perhaps their biggest problem was a public relations problem, the name of the new bank. That discussion took place right here in this room, one of the many conference rooms in this sprawling hotel, today known as the Jekyll Island Club Hotel. Aldrich believed that the word bank should not even appear in the name. Warburg wanted to call the legislation the National Reserve Bill or the Federal Reserve Bill.
The idea here was to give the impression that the purpose of the new central bank was to stop bank runs, but also to conceal its monopoly character. However, it was Aldrich, the egotistical politician, who insisted it be called the Aldrich Bill. After nine days at Jekyll Island, the group dispersed. The new central bank would be very similar to the old bank of the United States. It would be given a monopoly over US currency and create that money out of nothing.
How does the Fed create money out of nothing? It's a four step process. But first, a word on bonds. Bonds are simply promises to pay or government IOUs. People buy bonds to get a secure rate of interest.
At the end of the term of the bond, the government repays the bond plus interest, and the bond is destroyed. There are about $3,600,000,000,000 worth of these loans or bonds at present. Now here's the Fed money making process. Step one, the Federal Open Market Committee approves the purchase of US bonds on the open market. Step two, the bonds are purchased by the Fed from whoever is offering them for sale on the open market.
Step three, the Fed pays for the bonds with electronic credits to the seller's bank, which in turn credits the seller's bank account. The trick is that these credits are based on nothing. The Fed just creates them. Step four, the banks use these deposits as reserves. They can loan out over 10 times the amount of their reserves to new borrowers all at interest.
In this way, a Fed purchase of, say, a million dollars worth of bonds gets turned into over $10,000,000 in bank accounts. The Fed, in effect, creates 10% of this totally new money and the banks create the other 90%. To reduce the amount of money in the economy, the process is just reversed. The Fed sells bonds to the public and the money flows out of the purchaser's local bank. Loans must be reduced by 10 times the amount of the sale.
So a Fed sale of a million dollars in bonds results in $10,000,000 less money in the economy. So how does this benefit the bankers whose representatives huddled to Jekyll Island? First, it totally misdirected banking reform efforts from proper solutions. Second, it prevented a proper debt free system of government finance like Lincoln's greenbacks from making a comeback. The bond based system of government finance forced on Lincoln after he created greenbacks was now cast in stone.
Third, it delegated to the bankers the right to create 90% of our money supply based on only fractional reserves, which they then loan out at interest. Fourth, it centralized overall control of our nation's money supply in the hands of a few men. Fifth, it established a central bank with a high degree of independence from effective political control. Soon after its creation, the Fed's great contraction in the early nineteen thirties would cause the Great Depression. This independence has been enhanced since then through additional laws.
In order to fool the public into thinking the government retained control, the plan called for the Fed to be run by a board of governors appointed by the president and approved by the senate. But all the bankers had to do was to be sure their men got appointed to the board of governors. That wasn't hard. Bankers have money, and money buys influence over politicians. Once the participants left Jekyll Island, the public relations blitz was on.
The big New York banks put together an educational fund of $5,000,000 to finance professors at respected universities to endorse the new bank. Woodrow Wilson at Princeton was one of the first to jump on the bandwagon. But the banker's subterfuge didn't work. The Aldrich bill was quickly identified as the banker's bill, a bill to benefit only what became known as the money trust. As congressman Lindbergh put it during the congressional debate
Speaker 0: The Aldrich plan is the Wall Street plan. It means another panic, if necessary, to intimidate the people. Aldrich, paid by the government to represent the people, proposes a plan for the trusts instead.
Speaker 1: Seeing they didn't have the votes to win in congress, the Republican leadership never brought the Aldrich bill to a vote. The bankers quietly decided to move to track two, the democratic alternative. They begin financing Woodrow Wilson as the democratic nominee. As respected historian James Perloff put it, Wall Street Financier Bernard Baruch was put in charge of Wilson's education.
Speaker 0: Baruch brought Wilson to the Democratic party headquarters in New York in 1912, leading him like one would a poodle on a string. Wilson received an indoctrination course from the leaders convened there.
Speaker 1: So now the stage was set. The money changers were poised to install their privately owned central bank once again. The damage president Andrew Jackson had done seventy six years earlier had been only partly repaired with the passage of the National Bank Act during the civil war. Since then, the battle had raged on across the decades. The Jacksonians became the greenbackers who became the hardcore supporters of William Jennings Bryan.
With Bryan leading the charge, these opponents of the money changers, ignorant of Baruch's tutelage, now threw themselves behind democrat Woodrow Wilson. They and Bryan would soon be betrayed. During the presidential campaign, the democrats were careful to pretend to oppose the Aldrich bill. As representative Lewis McFadden, himself a himself a democrat, as well as chairman of the house banking and currency committee explained it twenty years after the fact.
Speaker 0: The Aldrich bill was condemned in the platform. When Woodrow Wilson was nominated, the man who ruled the Democratic Party promised the people that if they were returned to power, there would be no central bank established here while they held the reins of government. Thirteen months later, that promise was broken. And the Wilson administration, under the tutelage of those sinister Wall Street figures who stood behind colonel House, established here in our free country the warm eaten monarchical institution of the King's Bank to control us from the top downward and to shackle us from the cradle to the grave.
Speaker 1: Once Wilson was elected, Morgan, Warburg, Baruch, and company advanced a new plan, which Warburg named the Federal Reserve System. The Democratic leadership hailed the new bill called the Glass Owen bill as something radically different from the Aldrich bill. But in fact, the bill was virtually identical in every important detail. In fact, so vehement were the democratic denials of similarity that Paul Warburg, the father of both bills, had to step in to reassure his paid friends in congress that the two bills were virtually identical.
Speaker 0: Brushing aside the external differences affecting the shells, we find the kernels of the two systems very closely resembling and related to one another.
Speaker 1: But that admission was for private consumption only. Publicly, the money trust trotted out senator Aldrich and Frank Vanderlip, the president of Rockefeller's National City Bank of New York and one of the Jekyll Island 7 to oppose the new Federal Reserve System. Years later, however, Vanderlip admitted in the Saturday Evening Post that the two measures were virtually identical.
Speaker 0: Although the Aldrich Federal Reserve Plan was defeated when it bore the name Aldrich, nevertheless, its essential points were all contained in the plan that finally was adopted.
Speaker 1: As congress neared a vote, they called Ohio attorney Alfred Crozier to testify. Crozier noted the similarities between the Aldrich bill and the Glass Owen bill.
Speaker 0: The bill grants just what Wall Street and the big banks for twenty five years have been striving for, private instead of public control of currency. It, the Glasowan bill, does this as completely as the Aldrich bill. Both measures rob the government and the people of all effective control over the public's money, and best in the banks exclusively the dangerous power to make money among the people scarce or plenty.
Speaker 1: During the debate on the measure, senators complained that the big banks were using their financial muscle to influence the outcome. There are bankers in this country who are enemies of the public welfare, said one senator. What an understatement. Despite the charges of deceit and corruption, the bill was finally snuck through the senate on 12/22/1913 after most senators had left town for the holidays after having been assured by the leadership that nothing would be done until long after the Christmas recess. On the day the bill was passed, congressman Lindbergh prophetically warned his countrymen that
Speaker 0: This act establishes the most gigantic trust on earth. When the president signs this bill, the invisible government by the monetary power will be legalized. The people may not know it immediately, but the day of reckoning is only a few years removed. The worst legislative crime of the ages is perpetrated by this banking bill.
Speaker 1: On top of all this, only weeks earlier, congress had finally passed a bill legalizing income tax. Why was the income tax law important? Because bankers finally had in place a system which would run up a virtually unlimited federal debt. How would the interest on this debt be repaid? Never mind the principal.
Remember, a privately owned central bank creates the principal out of nothing. The federal government was small then. Up to then, it had subsisted merely on tariffs and excise taxes. No. Just as with the Bank of England, the interest payments had to be guaranteed by direct taxation of the people.
The money changers knew that if they had to rely on contributions from the states, eventually, the individual state legislatures would revolt and either refuse to pay the interest on their own money or at least bring pressure to bear to keep the debt small. It is interesting to note that in 1895, the Supreme Court had found a similar income tax law to be unconstitutional. The Supreme Court even found a corporate income tax law unconstitutional in nineteen o nine. As a result, senator Aldrich hustled a bill for a constitutional amendment allowing income tax through the congress. The proposed sixteenth amendment to the constitution was then sent to the state legislatures for approval, but some critics claim that the sixteenth amendment was never ratified by the necessary three quarters of the states.
In other words, the sixteenth amendment may not be legal. But the money changers were in no mood to debate the fine points. By October of nineteen thirteen, senator Aldrich had hustled the income tax bill through congress. Without the power to tax the people directly and bypass the states, the Federal Reserve bill would be far less useful to those who wanted to drive America deeply into their debt. A year after the passage of the Federal Reserve bill, congressman Lindbergh explained how the Fed created what we have come to call the business cycle and how they use it to their advantage.
Speaker 0: To cause high prices, all the Federal Reserve Board will do will be to lower the rediscount rate, producing an expansion of credit and a rising stock market. Then when businessmen are adjusted to these conditions, it can check prosperity in mid career by arbitrarily raising interest. It can cause the pendulum of a rising and falling market to swing gently back and forth by slight changes in the discount rate or cause violent fluctuations by a greater rate variation. Variation. And in either case, it will possess inside information as to financial conditions and advanced knowledge of the coming change, either up or down.
This is the strangest, most dangerous advantage ever placed in the hands of a special privileged class by any government that ever existed. The system is private, conducted for the sole purpose of obtaining the greatest possible profits from the use of other people's money. They know in advance when to create panics to their advantage. They also know when to stop panic. Inflation and deflation work equally well for them when they control finance.
Speaker 1: Congressman Lindbergh was correct on all points. What he didn't realize was that most European nations had already fallen prey to the central bankers decades or centuries earlier. But he also mentions the interesting fact that only one year later, the Fed had cornered the market in gold. This is how he put it, quote, already, the Federal Reserve Banks have cornered the gold and gold certificates, close certificates, close quote. But congressman Lindbergh was not the only critic of the Fed.
Congressman Lewis McFadden, the chairman of the House Banking and Currency Committee from 1920 to 1931, remarked that the Federal Reserve Act brought about
Speaker 0: A superstate controlled by international bankers and international industrialists acting together to enslave the world for their own pleasure.
Speaker 1: Notice how McFadden saw the international character of the stockholders of the Federal Reserve. Another chairman of the House Banking and Currency Committee in the nineteen sixties, Wright Patman from Texas, put it this way.
Speaker 0: In The United States today, we have in effect two governments. We have the duly constituted government, then we have an independent, uncontrolled, and uncoordinated government in the Federal Reserve System, operating the money powers which are reserved to Congress by the constitution.
Speaker 1: Even the inventor of the electric light, Thomas Edison, joined the fray in criticizing the system of the Federal Reserve.
Speaker 0: If our nation can issue a dollar bond, it can issue a dollar bill. The element that makes the bond good makes the bill good also. The difference between the bond and the bill is the bond lets money brokers collect twice the amount of the bond and an additional 20%, whereas the currency pays nobody but those who contribute directly in some useful way. It is absurd say that our country can issue $30,000,000 in bonds and not $30,000,000 in currency. Both are promises to pay, but one promise fattens the users and the other helps the people.
Speaker 1: Three years after the passage of the Federal Reserve Act, even president Wilson began to have second thoughts about what had been unleashed during his first term in office.
Speaker 0: We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled governments in the civilized world, no longer a government of free opinion, no longer a government by a vote of the majority, but a government by the opinion and duress of a small group of dominant men. Some of the biggest men in The United States in the field of commerce and manufacture are afraid of something. They know that there is a power somewhere so organized, so subtle, so watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive that they had better not speak above their breath when they speak in condemnation of it.
Speaker 1: Before his death in 1924, president Wilson realized the full extent of the damage he had done to America when he confessed, I have unwittingly ruined my government. So finally, the money changers, those who profit by manipulating the amount of money in circulation, had their privately owned central bank installed again in America. The major newspapers which they also owned hailed passage of the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 telling the public that now depressions could be scientifically prevented. The fact of the matter was that now depressions could be scientifically created. Power was now centralized to a tremendous extent.
Now it was time for a war, a really big war. In fact, the first world war. Of course, to the central bankers, the political issues of war don't matter nearly as much as the profit potential, and nothing creates debts like warfare. England was the best example at that time. During the one hundred nineteen year period between the founding of the Bank of England and Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo, England had been at war for fifty six years, and much of the remaining time, she'd been preparing for war.
In World War one, the German Rothschilds loaned money to the Germans, the British Rothschilds loaned money to the British, and the French Rothschilds loaned money to the French. In America, JP Morgan was the sales agent for war materials to both the British and the French. In fact, six months into the war, Morgan became the largest consumer on earth spending $10,000,000 a day. His offices here at 23 Wall Street were mobbed by brokers and salesmen trying to cut a deal. In fact, it got so bad that the bank had to post guards at every door and at the partners' homes as well.
Many other New York bankers made out as well from the war. President Wilson appointed Bernard Baruch to head the war industries board. According to historian James Perloff, both Baruch and the Rockefellers profited by some $200,000,000 during the war. But profits were not the only motive. There was also revenge.
The money changers never forgave the czars for their support of Lincoln during the civil war. Also, Russia was the last major European nation to refuse to give in to the privately owned central bank scheme. Three years after World War one broke out, the Russian revolution toppled the czar and and installed the scourge of communism. Jacob Schiff of Kuhn Loeb and Company bragged from his deathbed that he had spent $20,000,000 towards the defeat of the czar. Money was funneled from England to support the revolution as well.
Why would some of the richest men in the world financially back communism, the system that was openly vowing to destroy the so called capitalism that made them wealthy? Researcher Gary Allen explained it this way.
Speaker 0: If one understands that socialism is not a share the wealth program, but is in reality a method to consolidate and control the wealth, then the seeming paradox of super rich men promoting socialism becomes no paradox at all. Instead, it becomes logical, even the perfect tool of power seeking megalomaniacs. Communism, or more accurately socialism is not a movement of the downtrodden masses, but of the economic elite.
Speaker 1: As w Cleon Scousin put it in his 1970 book, the naked capitalist.
Speaker 0: Power from any source tends to create an appetite for additional power. It was almost inevitable that these super rich would one day aspire to control not only their own wealth, but the wealth of the whole world. To achieve this, they were perfectly willing to feed the ambitions of the power hungry political conspirators who were committed to the overthrow of all existing governments and the establishments of a central worldwide dictatorship.
Speaker 1: But what if these revolutionaries get out of control and try to seize power from the super rich? After all, it was Mao Tse Tung who in 1938 stated his position concerning power. Political power grows out the barrel of a gun. The Wall Street London axis elected to take the risk. The master planners attempted to control revolutionary communist groups by feeding them vast quantities of money when they obeyed and contracting their money supply or even financing their opposition if they got out of control.
Lenin began to understand that although he was the absolute dictator of the new Soviet Union, he was not pulling the financial strings. Someone else was silently in control.
Speaker 0: The state does not function as we desired. The car does not obey. A man is at the wheel and seems to lead it, but the car does not drive in the desired direction. It moves as another force wishes.
Speaker 1: Who is behind it? Representative Lewis T. McFadden, the chairman of the House Banking and Currency Committee throughout the nineteen twenties and into the Great Depression years of the nineteen thirties explained it this way.
Speaker 0: The course of Russian history has indeed been greatly affected by the operations of international bankers. The Soviet government has been given United States treasury funds by the Federal Reserve Board acting through the Chase Bank. England has drawn money from us through the Federal Reserve Banks and has relented at high rates of interest to the Soviet government. The Dniep Satori Dam was built with funds unlawfully taken from the United States Treasury by the corrupt and dishonest Federal Reserve Board and the Federal Reserve Banks.
Speaker 1: In other words, the Fed and the Bank of England at the behest of the international bankers who controlled them were creating a monster, one which would fuel seven decades of unprecedented communist revolution, warfare, and most importantly, debt. In case you think there's some chance that the money changers got communism going and then lost control, In 1992, the Washington Times reported that Russian president Boris Yeltsin was upset that most of the incoming foreign aid was being siphoned off, quote, straight back into the coffers of Western banks in debt service, close quote. No one in his right mind would claim that a war as large as World War one had a single cause. Wars are complex things with many causative factors. But on the other hand, it would also be equally foolish to ignore as a prime cause of World War one those who would profit the most from the war.
The role of the money changers is no wild conspiracy theory. They had a motive, a short ranged self serving motive as well as a long range political motive of advancing totalitarian governments with the money changers maintaining the financial clout to control whatever politician might emerge as the leader. Next, we'll see what the money changers ultimate political goal is for the world. Shortly after World War one, the overall political agenda of the money changers began to be clear. Now that they controlled national economies individually, the next step was the ultimate form of consolidation, world government.
The new world government proposal was given top priority at the Paris Peace Conference after World War one. It was called the League of Nations. But much to the surprise of Paul Warburg and Bernard Baruch, who attended the peace conference with president Wilson, the world was not yet ready to dissolve national boundaries. Nationalism still beats strong in the human breast. For example, Lord Curzon, the British foreign secretary, called the League of Nations a good joke even though it was the stated policy of the British government to support it.
To the humiliation of president Wilson, the US Congress wouldn't ratify the league either. Despite the fact that it had been ratified by many other nations without money flowing from the US treasury, the league died. After World War I, the American public had grown tired of the internationalist policies of democrat Woodrow Wilson. In the presidential election of nineteen twenty, republican Warren Harding won a landslide victory with over 60% of the vote. Harding was an ardent foe of both Bolshevism and the League of Nations.
His election, which opened a twelve year run of Republican presidents in the White House, led to an unprecedented era of prosperity known as the roaring twenties. Despite the fact that the war had brought America a debt 10 times larger than its civil war debt, still the American economy surged. Gold had poured into the country during the war, and it continued to do so afterwards. In the early nineteen twenties, the governor of this bank, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, a man named Benjamin Strong, met frequently with the secretive and eccentric governor of the Bank of England, Montague Norman. Norman was determined to replace the gold England had lost to The US during World War one and return the Bank of England to its former position of dominance in world finance.
On top of that, rich with gold, the American economy might get out of control again just like it had done after the civil war. During the next eight years, under the presidencies of Harding and Coolidge, the huge federal debt buildup during World War one was cut by 38% down to $16,000,000,000, greatest percentage drop in US history. During the election of nineteen twenty, Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge ran against James Cox, the governor of Ohio, and the little known Franklin d Roosevelt, who had previously risen to no higher post than president Wilson's assistant secretary of the navy. After his inauguration, Harding moved quickly to formally kill the League of Nations. Then he quickly moved to reduce domestic taxes while raising tariffs to record heights.
Now this was a revenue policy of which most of the founding fathers would certainly have approved. His second year in office, Harding took ill on a train trip in the West and suddenly died. Although no autopsy was performed, the cause was said to be either pneumonia or food poisoning. When Coolidge took over, he continued Harding's domestic economic policy of high tariffs on imports while cutting income taxes. As a result, the economy grew at such a rate that net revenue still increased.
Now that had to be stopped. So just as they'd done so frequently before, the money changers decided it was time to crash the American economy. The Federal Reserve began flooding the country with money. They increased the money supply by 62% during these years. Money was plentiful.
This is why it was known as the roaring twenties. Before his death in 1919, former president Teddy Roosevelt warned the American people what was going on. As reported in the 03/27/1922 edition of the New York Times, Roosevelt said, these international bankers and Rockefeller Standard Oil interests control the majority of newspapers and the columns of these papers to club into submission or drive out of public office officials who refused to do the bidding of the powerful corrupt clicks which composed the invisible government. Just one day before in the New York Times, the mayor of New York, John Hyland, quoted Roosevelt and blasted those he saw as taking control of America, its political machinery, and its press. The warning of Theodore Roosevelt has much timeliness today.
For the real menace of our republic is this invisible government, which like a giant octopus sprawls its slimy length over city, state, and nation. It seizes in its long and powerful tentacles our executive officers, our legislative bodies, our schools, our courts, our newspapers, and every agency created for the public protection. To depart from mere generalizations, let me say that at the head of this octopus are the Rockefeller Standard Oil interest and a small group of powerful banking houses generally referred to as the international bankers virtually run the United States government for their own selfish purposes. They practically control both parties, write political platforms, make cat's paws of party leaders, use the leading men of private organizations, and resort to every device to place a nomination for high public office, only such candidates as will be amenable to the dictates of corrupt big business. These international bankers and Rockefeller Standard Oil interests control the majority of newspapers and magazines in this country.
Why didn't people listen to such strong warnings and demand that congress reverse its 1913 passage of the Federal Reserve Act? Because remember, it was the nineteen twenties. A steady increase in bank loans contributed to a rising market. In other words, just as it is today, in times of prosperity, no one wants to worry about economic issues. But there was a dark side to all this prosperity.
Businesses expanded and became strung out on credit. Speculation in the booming stock market became rampant. Although everything looked rosy, it was a castle made of sand. When all was in readiness, in April of nineteen twenty nine, Paul Warburg, the father of the Federal Reserve, sent out a secret advisory warning his friends that a collapse and nationwide depression was certain. In August of nineteen twenty nine, the Fed began to tighten money.
It is not a coincidence that the biographies of all the Wall Street giants of that era, John D. Rockefeller, JPMorgan, Bernard Baruch, etcetera, all marvel that they got out of the stock market just before the crash and put all their assets in cash or gold. On 10/24/1929, the big New York bankers called in their twenty four hour broker call loans. This meant that both stockbrokers and customers had to dump their stocks on the market to cover their loans no matter what price they had to sell them for. As a result, the market tumbled, and that day was known as Black Thursday.
According to John Kenneth Galbraith riding in the great crash nineteen twenty nine, at the height of the selling frenzy, Bernard Baruch brought Winston Churchill into the visitors gallery of the New York Stock Exchange here to witness the panic and impress him with his power over the wild events down on the floor. Congressman Lewis McFadden, chairman of the house committee on banking and currency from 1920 to 1931, knew who to blame. He accused the Fed and the international bankers of orchestrating the crash.
Speaker 0: It was not accidental. It was a carefully contrived occurrence. The international bankers sought to bring about a condition of despair here so that they might emerge as rulers of us all.
Speaker 1: But McFadden went even farther. He openly accused them of causing the crash in order to steal America's gold. In February 1931, in the midst of the depression, he put it this way.
Speaker 0: I think it can hardly be disputed that the statesmen and financiers of Europe are ready to take almost any means to reacquire rapidly the gold stock which Europe lost to America as the result of World War one.
Speaker 1: Curtis Dahl, a broker for Lehman Brothers, was on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange the day of the crash. In his 1970 book, FDR, My Exploited Father-in-law, he explained that the crash was triggered by the planned sudden shortage of call money in the New York money market.
Speaker 0: Actually, it was the calculated shearing of the public by the world money powers triggered by the planned sudden shortage of call money in the New York money market.
Speaker 1: Within a few weeks, three billion dollars of wealth simply seemed to vanish. Within a year, forty billion dollars had been lost. But did it really disappear, or was it simply consolidated in fewer hands? And what did the Federal Reserve do? Instead of moving to help the economy out by quickly lowering interest rates to stimulate the economy, the Fed continued to brutally contract the money supply further, deepening the depression.
Between 1929 and 1933, the Fed reduced the money supply by an additional 33%. Although most Americans have never heard that the Fed was the cause of the depression, this is well known among top economists. Milton Friedman, the Nobel Prize winning economist now of Stanford University, said the same thing in a national public radio interview in January of nineteen ninety six. The Federal Reserve definitely caused the Great Depression by contracting the amount of currency in circulation by one third from 1929 to 1933. But the money lost by most Americans during the depression didn't just vanish.
It was just redistributed into the hands of those who had gotten out just before the crash and had purchased gold, which is always a safe place to put your money just before a depression. But America's money also went overseas. Incredibly, as president Hoover was heroically trying to rescue banks and prop up businesses with millions of Americans starving as the Great Depression deepened, millions of dollars were being spent rebuilding Germany from damage sustained during World War one. Eight years before Hitler would invade Poland, Representative Louis McFadden, Chairman of the House Banking and Currency Committee, warned congress that Americans were paying for Hitler's rise to power. After World War one, Germany fell into the hands of the German international bankers.
Those bankers bought her, and they now own her lock, stock, and barrel. They have purchased her industries. They have mortgages on her soil. They control her production. They control all her public utilities.
The international German bankers have subsidized the present government of Germany, and they have also supplied every dollar of the money Adolf Hitler has used in his lavish campaign to build up a threat to the government of Bruning. When Bruning fails to obey the orders of the German international bankers, Hitler is brought forth to scare the Germans into submission. Through the Federal Reserve Board, over 30 billions of dollars of American money has been pumped into Germany. You have all heard of the spending that's taken place in Germany, modernistic dwellings, her great planetariums, her gymnasiums, her swimming pools, her fine public highways, her perfect factories. All this was done on our money.
All this was given to Germany through the Federal Reserve Board. The Federal Reserve Board has pumped so many billions of dollars into Germany that they dare not name the total. Franklin d Roosevelt was swept into office during the nineteen thirty two presidential election. Once Roosevelt was in office, however, sweeping emergency banking measures were immediately announced, which did nothing but increase the Fed's power over the money supply. Then and only then did the Fed finally begin to loosen the purse strings and feed new money out to the starving American people.
At first, Roosevelt railed against the money changers as being the cause of the depression. Believe it or not, this is what he said on 03/04/1933 in his inaugural address. Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men. The money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization. But two days later, Roosevelt declared a bank holiday and closed all banks.
Later that year, Roosevelt outlawed private ownership of all gold bullion ownership of all gold bullion and all gold coins with the exception of rare coins. Most of the gold in the hands of the average American was in the form of gold coins. The new decree was in effect a confiscation. Those who didn't comply risk as much as ten years in prison and a $10,000 fine, the equivalent of a hundred thousand dollars today. Out in small town America, some people didn't trust Roosevelt's order.
Many were torn between keeping their hard earned wealth or obeying the government. Those who did turn in their gold were paid the official price for it, $20.66 per ounce. So unpopular was the confiscation order that no one anywhere in government would take credit for authoring it. No congressman claimed it. At the signing ceremony, president Roosevelt made it clear to all present that he was not the author of it and publicly stated that he had not ever read it.
Even his secretary of the treasury said he'd never read it either, saying it was, quote, what the experts wanted. Roosevelt convinced the public to give up their gold by saying that pooling the nation's resources was necessary to get America out of the depression. With great fanfare, he ordered a new bullion depository built to hold the mountain of gold the US government was illegally confiscating. By 1936, the US bullion depository at Fort Knox was completed. And in January 1937, the gold began to flow into it.
The rip off of the ages was about to proceed. In 1935, once the gold had all been turned in, the official price of gold was suddenly raised to $35 per ounce. But the catch was only foreigners could sell their gold at the new higher price. The money changers who had heated Warburg's note and gotten out of the stock market just before the crash and bought gold at $20.66 per ounce then shipped it to London could now bring it back and sell it back to the government nearly doubling their money while the average American starved. The Fort Knox bullion depository sits here in the middle of the Fort Knox Military Reservation, Thirty miles southwest of Louisville, Kentucky.
This was as close as we were permitted to get to the depository despite years of letters from members of congress to allow our film crew inside. The four acre grounds immediately surrounding the building are guarded by an electrified steel fence, an open moat, and four machine gun armed guard pillbox at the structure's corners. When the gold began arriving on 01/13/1937, there was unprecedented security. Thousands of official guests watched the arrival of a nine car train from Philadelphia guarded by armed soldiers, postal inspectors, secret servicemen, and guards from the US Mint. It was all great theater.
America's gold supply from across the land had been pooled supposedly for the public benefit and then safely tucked into Fort Knox. But all that security would soon be breached by the government itself. Now the stage was set for a really big war, one which would pile up debt far beyond that of World War one.
Speaker 0: For example, in 1944 alone, The US national income was only $183,000,000,000, yet 103,000,000,000 was spent on the war. This was 30 times the spending rate during World War one. In fact, the American taxpayer picked up 55% of the total Allied cost of the war. But equally important, virtually every nation involved in World War two greatly multiplied their debt. In The US, for example, federal debt went from 43,000,000,000 in 1940 up to 257,000,000,000 in 1950, an increase of 598%.
Between 1940 and 1950, Japanese debt swelled 1348%. French debt grew 583%, and Canadian debt soared 417%.
Speaker 1: After the war, the world was now divided into two economic camps, communist command economies on the one hand versus monopoly capitalists on the other, set to fight it out in one perpetual and highly profitable arms race. It was finally time for the central bankers to embark in earnest on their three step plan to centralize the economic systems of the entire world and finally bring about their global government or new world order. The phases of this plan were step one, central bank domination of national economies worldwide. Step two, centralize regional economies through organizations such as the European Monetary Union and regional trade unions such as NAFTA. Step three, centralize the world economy through a World Central Bank, a world money, and ending national independence through abolition of all tariffs by treaties like GATT.
Step one was completed long ago. Steps two and three are far advanced, nearing completion. What about gold? Among central banks, the largest holder of gold is now the IMF. It and central banks now control two thirds of the world's gold supply, giving them the ability to manipulate the gold market.
Remember the money changers golden rule, he who has the gold makes the rules. But before we get into solutions to our problem, let's take a look at what happened to all that gold in Fort Knox. Because if we don't understand that the gold has been stolen, we'll allow ourselves to be stampeded into the wrong solution, a gold backed currency. Most Americans still believe that the gold is still here at Fort Knox. At the end of World War two, Fort Knox contained over 700,000,000 ounces of gold, an incredible 70% of all the gold in the world.
How much remains? No one knows. Despite the fact that federal law requires an annual physical audit of Fort Knox gold, the treasury has consistently refused to conduct one. The truth is that a reliable audit of whatever remains here has not been conducted since president Eisenhower ordered one in 1953. Where did America's gold in Fort Knox go?
Over the years, it was sold off to European money changers at the $35 per ounce price. Remember, this was during a time when it was illegal for Americans to buy any of their own gold from Fort Knox. In fact, there was a very infamous case where the Firestone family set up a string of dummy corporations to purchase Fort Knox gold and keep it in Switzerland, never hitting US shores. They were eventually caught however and successfully prosecuted. Finally, by 1971, all the pure gold had been secretly removed from Fort Knox, drained back to London.
Once the gold was gone from Fort Knox, President Nixon closed the gold window by repealing Roosevelt's Gold Reserve Act of 1934, finally making it legal once again for Americans to buy gold. Naturally, gold prices immediately began to soar. Nine years later, gold sold for $880 per ounce, 25 times what the gold in Fort Knox was sold for. One would think that eventually someone in the government would get wind of what was happening and blow the whistle. The largest fortune in the history of the world, stolen.
Shades of the old James Bond film Goldfinger. Well, as a matter of fact, Ian Fleming, the author of the James Bond series, was head of the British counter intelligence service MI five. Some believe in the intelligence community that he wrote much of his fiction as a warning as many authors of fiction do. If the removal of all the good delivery gold from Fort Knox can be viewed as a deliberate raid on the US treasury, then such an operation might well have been years in the making, namely forty years. Certainly enough time for Fleming to get wind of it and try to prevent it.
So just how did the story of the Fort Knox gold robbery get out? It all started with an article in a New York periodical in 1974. The article charged that the Rockefeller family was manipulating the Federal Reserve to sell off Fort Knox gold at bargain basement prices to anonymous European speculators. Three days later the anonymous source of the story Louise Auchincloss Boyer mysteriously fell to her death from the window of her Tenth Floor apartment in New York. How had missus Boyer have known of the Rockefeller connection to the Fort Knox Gold Heist?
She was the longtime secretary of Nelson Rockefeller. For the next fourteen years, this man, Ed Durell, a wealthy Ohio industrialist, devoted himself to a quest for the truth concerning the Fort Knox gold. He wrote thousands of letters to over 1,000 government and banking officials trying to find out how much gold was really left and where the rest of it had gone. Edith Roosevelt, the granddaughter of president Teddy Roosevelt, questioned the actions of the government in a March 1975 edition of the New Hampshire Sunday News. Allegations of missing gold from our Fort Knox vaults are being widely discussed in European financial circles.
But what is puzzling is that the administration is not hastening to demonstrate conclusively that there is no cause for concern over our gold treasure, if indeed it is in a position to do so. Unfortunately, Ed Durell never did accomplish his primary goal, a full audit of the gold reserves in Fort Knox. It's incredible that the world's greatest treasure has had little accounting or auditing. This goal belonged to the American people, not the Federal Reserve and their foreign owners. One thing is certain, the government could blow all of this speculation away in a few days with a well publicized audit under the searing lights of media cameras.
It has chosen not to do so. One must conclude that they are afraid of the truth such an audit would reveal. What is the government so afraid of? Here's the answer. When president Ronald Reagan took office in 1981, his conservative friends urged him to study the feasibility of returning to a gold standard as the only way to curb government spending.
It sounded like a reasonable alternative, so president Reagan appointed a group of men called the Gold Commission to study the situation and report back to Congress. What Reagan's Gold Commission reported back to Congress in 1982 was the following shocking revelation concerning gold. The US Treasury owned no gold at all. All the gold that was left in Fort Knox was now owned by the Federal Reserve, a group of private bankers as collateral against the national debt. The truth of the matter is that never before has so much money been stolen from the hands of the general public and put into the hands of a small group of private investors, the money changers.
I'm standing in front of the headquarters of the International Monetary Fund located in Washington DC. Across the street right over there is the headquarters of the World Bank. What are these organizations, and who controls them, and most importantly, are they about to create a huge worldwide depression? Let us step back in time for a moment to the aftermath of World War one. People were tired of war.
So under the guise of peacemaking, the international bankers devised a plan to consolidate power even further. Claiming only an international government would stem the tide of world wars, the money changers pushed forward a proposal for world government which stood on three legs. A world central bank to be called the Bank of International Settlements, a world judiciary to be called the world court located in The Hague, The Netherlands, and a world executive and legislature to be called the League of Nations. As president Clinton's mentor, Georgetown Historian Carol Quigley, wrote in his 1966 book, Tragedy and Hope, the powers of financial capitalism had a far reaching plan, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalistic fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert by secret agreements arrived at infrequent meetings and conferences.
The apex of the system was to be the bank for international settlements in Beale, Switzerland, a private bank owned and controlled by the world central banks which were themselves private corporations. Each central bank sought to dominate its government by its ability to control treasury loans, to manipulate foreign exchanges, to influence the level of economic activity in the country, and to influence cooperative politicians by subsequent economic rewards in the business world. Despite intense pressure from the international bankers and the press, a handful of US Senators led by senator Henry Cabot Lodge kept The US out of these schemes. Without US participation, the league was doomed. Incredibly, even though The US rejected the World Central Bank, the BIS, the New York Federal Reserve ignored its government and arrogantly sent representatives to Switzerland to participate in the central bankers meeting right up until 1994 when The US was finally officially dragged into it.
Their world government schemes thwarted, the bankers resorted to the old formula, another war to wear down the resistance to world government while reaping handsome profits. To this end, Wall Street helped resurrect Germany through the thyssen banks which were affiliated with the Harriman interest in New York just as the Chase Bank had assisted in the financing of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia during World War one. Chase Bank was controlled by the Rockefeller family. Subsequently, it was merged with Warburg's Manhattan Bank to form the Chase Manhattan Bank. Now this has merged with Chemical Bank of New York making it the largest Wall Street bank.
Their strategy worked. Even before World War two was over, world government was back on track. In 1944 at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank were approved with full US participation. The second League of Nations, renamed the United Nations, was approved in 1945. Soon, a new international court system was functioning as well.
All effective opposition to these international bodies before the war had evaporated in the heat of war just as planned. These new organizations simply repeated on a world scale what the National Banking Act of 1864 and the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 had established in The US. They created a banking cartel composed of the world's central banks, which gradually assumed the power to dictate credit policies to the banks of all the nations. For example, just as the Federal Reserve Act authorized the creation of a new national fiat currency called Federal Reserve Notes, the IMF has been given the authority to issue a world fiat money called special drawing rights or SDRs. To date, the IMF has created an excess of $30,000,000,000 worth of SDRs.
Member nations are being pressured to make their currencies fully exchangeable for SDRs. In 1968, congress approved laws authorizing the Fed to accept SDRs as reserves in The US and to issue Federal Reserve notes in exchange for SDRs. What does that mean? It means that in The US, SDRs are already a part of our lawful money. And what about gold?
SDRs are already partially backed by gold and with two thirds of world gold now in the hands of central banks, the money changers can go about structuring the world's economic future in whichever way they deem most profitable. Keep in mind, just as the Fed is controlled by its board of governors, the IMF is controlled by its board of governors, which are either the heads of the different central banks or the heads of the various national treasury departments dominated by their central banks. Voting power in the IMF gives The US and The UK, that is to say the Fed and the Bank of England, effective control. Just as the Fed controls the amount of money in The US, the BIS, IMF, and World Bank control the money supply for the world. So we see repetition of the old goldsmith's fraud replicated on the national scale with central banks like the Fed and on the international scale by the three arms of the World Central Bank.
Is this organization of the BIS, the IMF, and the World Bank, which we refer to collectively as the World Central Bank presently expanding and contracting world credit? Yes. Regulations put into effect in 1988 by the BIS required the world's bankers to raise their capital and reserves to 8% of liabilities by 1992. Increased capital requirements put an upper to the fractional reserve lending similar to the way cash reserve requirements do. What is this seemingly insignificant regulation made in a Swiss city eight years ago meant to the world?
It means our banks cannot loan more and more money to buy more and more time before the next depression as a maximum loan ratio is now set. It means those nations with the lowest bank reserves in their systems have already felt the terrible effects of this credit contraction as their banks scrambled to raise money to increase their reserves to 8%. To raise the money, they had to sell stocks, which depressed their stock markets and began the depression first in their countries. Japan, which in 1988 had among the lowest capital and reserve requirements and thus was the most affected by the regulation has experienced the financial crash which began almost immediately in 1989 which has wiped out a staggering 50% of the value of its stock market since 1990 and sixty percent of the value of its commercial real estate. The Bank of Japan has lowered its interest rates to one half of 1%, practically giving away money to resurrect the economy, but still the depression worsens.
Due to the $20,000,000,000 US bailout of Mexico, the financial collapse in that nation is already known here. Yet despite the bailout, the economy continues to be a disaster. One huge debt after another is rolled over as new loans are being made simply to enable Mexico to pay the interest on the old loans. In the South Of Mexico, the poor have been in open revolt as every spare peso has been siphoned out of the country to make interest payments. It is important to note that a radical transfer of power is taking place as nations become subservient to a supranational World Central Bank controlled by a handful of the world's richest bankers.
As the IMF creates more and more SDRs by the stroke of a pin on IMF ledgers, more and more nations borrow them to pay interest on their mounting debts and gradually fall under the control of the faceless bureaucrats of the World Central Bank. As the worldwide depression worsens and spreads, this will give the world central bank the power of economic life and death over these nations. It will decide which nations will be permitted to receive further loans and which nations will starve. Despite all the rhetoric about development and the alleviation of poverty, the result is a steady transfer of wealth from the debtor nations to the money changers central banks which control the IMF and the World Bank. For example, in 1992, the third world debtor nations, borrowed from the World Bank, paid $198,000,000 more to the central banks of the developed nations for World Bank funded purposes than they received from the World Bank.
All this increases their permanent debt in exchange for temporary relief of poverty caused by prior borrowings. Already, these repayments exceed the amount of the new loans. By 1992, Africa's external debt had reached $290,000,000,000, 2 and a half times greater than in 1980, resulting in skyrocketing infant mortality rates and unemployment, deterioration of schools, housing, and the general health of the people. The entire world faces the immeasurable suffering already destroying the third world and now Japan, all for the benefit of the money changers. As one prominent Brazilian politician put it, the Third World War has already started.
It is a silent war, not for that reason any less sinister. The war is tearing down Brazil, Latin America, and practically all the third world. Instead of soldiers dying, there are children. It is a war over the third world debt, one which has as its main weapon interest, a weapon more deadly than the atom bomb, more shattering than a laser beam. Although it would be absurd to ignore the pivotal role played by influential families such as the Rothschilds, the Warburgs, the Schiffs, the Morgans, and the Rockefellers in any review of the history of central banking and fractional banking.
Keep in mind, by now central banks and the large commercial banks are up to three centuries old and deeply entrenched in the economic life of many nations. These banks are no longer dependent on clever individuals such as a Nathan Rothschild. Years ago, the question of ownership was important but no longer. For example, both the Bank of England and the Bank of France were nationalized after World War two and nothing changed, nothing at all. They endure and continue to grow now protected by numerous laws, paid politicians, and mortgage media untouched by the changing of generations.
Now worn by the sixth generation's son who's been raised in a system that he may never question question as he is named to serve on the governing boards of countless philanthropic organizations. To focus attention today on individuals or families or to attempt to sort out the current holders of power serves little useful purpose and would be a distraction from the cure. The problem is far bigger than that. It is the corrupt banking system that was and is being used to consolidate vast wealth into fewer and fewer hands that is our current economic problem. Change the names of the main players now, and the problem will neither go away nor even miss a beat.
Likewise, among the hordes of bureaucrats working in the World Bank, central banks, and international banks, only a tiny fraction have any idea of what's really going on. No doubt they'd be horrified to learn that their work is contributing to the terrible impoverishment and gradual enslavement of mankind to a few incredibly rich plutocrats. Plutocrats. So really, there's no use in emphasizing the role of individuals anymore. And the problem even transcends the normal spectrum of political right and left.
Both communism and socialism as well as monopoly capitalism have been used by the money changers. Today, they profit from either side of the new political spectrum. The big government welfare state on the so called left wing versus the neoconservative laissez faire capitalists who want big government totally out of their lives on the right wing. Either way, the bankers win. Monetary reform is the most important political issue facing this nation.
That clarified. Let's proceed to the conclusions in the spirit Lincoln declared with malice towards none, with charity towards all. At the start of this video, we ask a number of troubling questions. Let's be sure we've answered them.
Speaker 0: What's going on in America today? Why are we over our heads in debt? Why can't the politicians bring debt under control?
Speaker 1: Why are we over our heads in debt? Because we're laboring under a debt money system that is designed and controlled by private bankers. Now some will argue that the Federal Reserve System is a quasi governmental agency, But the president appoints only two of the seven members of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors every four years, and he appoints them to fourteen year terms far longer than his own. The senate does confirm those appointments, but the whole truth is that the president wouldn't dare appoint anyone to that board of whom Wall Street does not approve. Of course, this does not preclude the possibility that some honorable men may be appointed to the board of governors, But the fact is that the Fed is specifically designed to operate independently of our government as are nearly all other central banks.
Some argue that the Fed promotes monetary stability. We saw the current head of the Bank of England, Eddie George, claim that this was the most important role of a central bank. In fact, the Fed's record of stabilizing the economy shows it to be a miserable failure in this regard. Within the first twenty five years of its existence, the Fed caused three major economic downturns including the Great Depression, and for the last thirty years has shepherded the American economy into a period of unprecedented inflation. Again, this is not some wild conspiracy theory.
It's a well known fact among top economists. As Nobel Prize winning economist Milton Friedman put it, the stock of money, prices, and output was decidedly more unstable after the establishment of the Federal Reserve System than before. The most dramatic period of instability in output was, of course, the period between the two wars, which includes the severe monetary contractions of nineteen twenty twenty one, '19 '20 '9 '30 '3, and nineteen thirty seven thirty eight. No other twenty year period in American history contains as many as three such severe contractions. This evidence persuades me that at least a third of the price rise during and just after World War one is attributable to the establishment of the Federal Reserve System.
And that the severity of each of the major contractions, nineteen twenty twenty one, '19 '20 '9 '30 '3, and nineteen thirty seven thirty eight is directly attributable to acts of commission and omission by the reserve authorities. Any system which gives so much power and so much discretion to a few men so that mistakes, excusable or not, can have such far reaching effects is a bad system. It is a bad system to believers in freedom just because it gives a few men such power without any effective check by the body politic. This is the key political argument against an independent central bank. To paraphrase Clemenceau, money is much too serious a matter to be left to the central bankers.
We must learn from our history before it is too late. Why can't politicians control the federal debt? Because all our money is created out of debt. Again, it's a debt money system. Our money is created initially by the purchase of US bonds.
The public buys bonds like savings bonds. The banks buy bonds. Foreigners buy bonds. And when the Fed wants to create more money in the system, it buys bonds but pays for them with a simple bookkeeping entry, which it creates out of nothing. Then this new money created by the Fed is multiplied by a factor of 10 by the banks, thanks to the fractional reserve principle.
So although the banks don't create currency, they do create checkbook money or deposits by making new loans. They even invest some of this created money. In fact, over $1,000,000,000,000 of this privately created money has been used to purchase US bonds on the open market, which provides the banks with roughly $50,000,000,000 in interest, risk free each year less the interest they pay to some depositors. In this way, through fractional reserve lending, banks create over 90% of the money and therefore cause over 90% of our inflation. What can we do about all this?
Fortunately, there's a way to fix the problem fairly easily, speedily, and without any serious financial problems. We can get our country totally out of debt in one to two years by simply paying off these US bonds with debt free US notes just like Lincoln issued. Of course, that by itself would create tremendous inflation since our currency is presently multiplied by the fraction fractional reserve banking system. But here's the ingenious solution advanced in part by Milton Friedman to keep the money supply stable and avoid inflation and deflation while the debt is retired. As the treasury buys up its bonds on the open market with US notes, the reserve requirements of your hometown local bank will be proportionally raised so the amount of money in circulation remains constant.
As those holding bonds are paid off in US notes, they will deposit this money thus making available the currency then needed by the banks to increase their reserves. Once all The US bonds are replaced with US notes, banks will be at 100% reserve banking instead of the fractional reserve system currently in use. From this point on, the former Fed buildings will only be needed as a central clearinghouse for checks and as vaults for US notes. The Federal Reserve Act will no longer be necessary and could be repealed. Monetary power can be transferred back to the Treasury department.
There would be no further creation or contraction of money by banks. By doing it this way, our national debt can be paid off in a single year or so, and the Fed and fractional reserve banking abolished without national bankruptcy, financial collapse, inflation or deflation, or any significant change in the way the average American goes about his business. To the average person, the primary difference would be that for the first time since the Federal Reserve Act was passed in 1913, taxes would begin to go down. Now there's a real national blessing for you rather than for Hamilton's banker friends. Now let's take a look at these proposals in more detail.
Here are the main provisions of a Monetary Reform Act which needs to be passed by Congress. We've drafted a proposed Monetary Reform Act which follows at the end of this tape. Of course, variations with the same results would be equally welcome. One, pay off the debt with debt free US notes. As Thomas Edison put it, if The US can issue a dollar bond, it can issue a dollar bill.
They both rest purely on the faith and credit of the United States government. This amounts to a simple substitution of one type of government obligation for another. One bears interest, the other doesn't. Federal Reserve notes could be used for this as well, but could not be printed after the Fed's abolished as we propose, so we suggest using US notes instead. Two, abolish fractional reserve banking.
As the debt is paid off, the reserve requirements of all banks and financial institutions would be raised proportionally at the same time to absorb the new US notes, which would be deposited and become the bank's increased reserves. Towards the end of the first year of the transition period, the remaining liabilities of financial institutions would be assumed or acquired by the US government in a one time operation. In other words, they too would eventually be paid off with debt free US notes in order to keep the total money supply stable. At the end of the first year or so, all of the national debt would be paid, and we could start enjoying the benefits of full reserve banking. The Fed would be obsolete and anachronism.
Three, repeal the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 and the National Banking Act of 1864. These acts delegate the money power to a private banking monopoly. They must be repealed and the money power handed back to the Department of Treasury where they were initially under president Abraham Lincoln. No banker or person in any way affiliated with financial institutions should be allowed to regulate banking. After the first two reforms, these acts would serve no useful purpose anyway since they relate to a fractional reserve banking system.
Four, withdraw The US from the IMF, the BIS, and the World Bank. These institutions like the Federal Reserve are designed to further centralize the power of the international bankers over the world's economy, and The US must withdraw from them. Their harmless functions such as currency exchange can be accomplished either nationally or in new organizations limited to those Such a monetary reform act would guarantee that the amount of money in circulation would stay very stable, causing neither inflation nor deflation. Remember, for the last three decades, the Fed has doubled the American money supply every ten years. That fact and fractional reserve banking are the real causes of inflation and the reduction in our buying power, a hidden tax.
These and other taxes are the real reasons both parents now have to work just to get by. The money supply should increase slowly to keep prices stable, roughly in proportion to population growth about 3% per year, not at the whim of a group of bankers meeting in secret. In fact, all future decisions on how much money will be in the American economy must be made based on statistics of population growth and the price level index. The new monetary regulators and the Treasury Department, perhaps called the monetary committee, would have absolutely no discretion in this matter except in time of declared war. This would ensure a steady stable money growth of roughly 3% per year resulting in stable prices and no sharp changes in the money supply.
To make certain the process is completely open and honest, all deliberations would be public, not secret, as meetings of the Fed's Board of Governors are today. How do we know this will work? Because these steps remove the two major causes of economic instability, the Fed and fractional reserve banking, and the newest one as well, the BIS, Bank of International Settlements. But most importantly, the danger of a severe depression would be eliminated. Let's listen to Milton Friedman on the single cause of severe economic depressions.
I know of no severe depression in any country or any time that was not accompanied by a sharp decline in the stock of money, and equally of no sharp decline in the stock of money that was not accompanied by a severe depression. Issuing our own currency is not a radical solution. It's been advocated by presidents Jefferson, Madison, Jackson, Van Buren, and Lincoln, but it's been used at different times throughout Europe as well. Perhaps the best example is one of the small islands off the coast of France in the English Channel. Called Guernsey, it's been using debt free money issues to pay for large building projects for nearly two hundred years.
Here we are in Guernsey, and this is the Guernsey Flower and Vegetable Market. Market. Guernsey is one of the most successful examples of just how well a debt free money system can work. In 1815, a committee was appointed to investigate how best to finance this new market. The impoverished island could not afford more new taxes, so the state's fathers decided to try a revolutionary idea, issue their own paper money.
They were just colorful paper notes backed by nothing, but the people of this tiny island agreed to accept them and trade with them. To be sure they circulated widely, they were declared to be good for the payment of taxes. Of course, this idea was nothing new. It was exactly what America had done before the American Revolution, and there are many other examples throughout the world. But it was new to Guernsey, and it worked miracles.
This market is still in use. And remember, it was built for no debt to the people of this island state. But what if we follow Guernsey's example? How would the bankers react to these reforms? Certainly, the international bankers cartel will oppose reforms that do away with their control of the world's economies as they have in the past.
But it is equally certain that Congress has the constitutional authority and responsibility to authorize the issuance of debt free money, US notes, and to reform the very banking laws it ill advisedly enacted. Undoubtedly, the bankers will claim that issuing debt free money will cause severe inflation or make other dire predictions. But remember, it is fractional reserve banking which is the real cause of over 90% of all inflation, not whether debt free US notes are used to pay for government deficits. In the current system, any spending excesses on the part of congress are turned into more debt bonds, and the 10% purchased by the Fed are then multiplied many times over by the bankers causing over 90% of all inflation. Our fractional reserve and debt based banking system is the problem.
We must ignore its inevitable resistance to reform and remain firm until the cure is complete. As the director of the Bank of England in the nineteen twenties, sir Josiah Stamp put it, referring to this modern fractional reserve banking system. Banking is conceived in an equity and born in sin. Bankers own the earth. Take it away from them, but leave them the power to create money and control credit.
And with the flick of a pen, they will create enough money to buy it back again. Take this great power away from the bankers, and all great fortunes like mine will disappear, and they ought to disappear. For this would be a better and happier world to live in. But if you want to continue the slaves of bankers and pay the cost of your own slavery, let them continue to create money and to control credit. Americans are slowly figuring this out.
Today, over 3,200 cities and counties have endorsed the proposal of a nonprofit organization called sovereignty. The sovereignty movement calls for Congress to authorize the secretary of the treasury to issue $90,000,000,000 per year of US notes, not Federal Reserve notes nor debt based bonds, to loan money interest free to cities, counties, and school districts for needed capital improvements. Remarkably, and to their praise, the Community Bankers Association of Illinois representing 515 member banks has endorsed this sovereignty proposal, a good step in the right direction. As Milton Friedman has repeatedly pointed out, no severe depression can occur without a severe contraction of money. In our system, only the Fed, the Bank of International Settlements with US Bankers cooperation, or a combination of the largest Wall Street banks could cause a depression.
In other words, our economy is so huge and resilient, a depression just can't happen by accident. Unless we reform our banking system, they will always have that power. They can pull the plug in our economy anytime they choose. The only solution is to abolish the Fed and the fractional reserve banking system and withdraw from the BIS. Only that will break the power of the international bankers over our economy.
And keep in mind, a stock market crash itself cannot cause a severe depression. Only the severe contraction of our money supply can cause a severe depression. The stock market crash of nineteen twenty nine only wiped out market speculators, mostly the small to medium ones, resulting in $3,000,000,000 in wealth changing hands. But it served as a smokescreen for a 33% contraction in credit by the Fed over the next four years, which resulted in over $40,000,000,000 in wealth from the American middle class being transferred to the big banks. Then despite impotent howls of protest from a divided congress, the independent Fed kept the money supply contracted for a full decade.
Only World War two ended the terrible suffering Fed people. In a depression, the remaining wealth of the debt burden American middle class will be wiped out by unemployment, declining wages, and the resulting foreclosures. If we start to act to reform our monetary system, the money changers may do what they did in 1929 and then the nineteen thirties, crash the stock market and use that as a smokescreen while contracting the money supply. But if we're determined to fight to regain control over our money, we can come out of it fairly quickly, perhaps in only a very few months as US notes begin to circulate and replace the money withdrawn by the bankers. The longer we wait, the greater the danger will permanently lose control of our nation.
But some still wonder why the international bankers would want to cause a depression. Wouldn't that be killing the goose that is currently laying all those golden interest eggs? Remember what Larry Bates said at the first of this videotape.
Speaker 3: You see, in periods of economic upheaval, in economic crisis, wealth is not destroyed. It is merely transferred.
Speaker 1: Do we have any hints as to what the money changers have in store for us? Here's what David Rockefeller, the chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank, the largest Wall Street bank, had to say. We are on the verge of a global transformation. All we need is the right major crisis, and the nation will accept the new world order. So crisis is needed to fulfill their plans quickly.
The only question is when the crisis will occur. Fortunately, we probably have a little time. It's unlikely that this crisis will occur before the nineteen ninety six elections, but after that, the danger begins rising. But whether or not they decide to cause a crash or a depression through relentless increases in taxes and the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs being sent overseas, thanks to trade agreements such as GAT and NAFTA, the American middle class is an endangered species. Cheaper labor, including slave labor in Red China, which Harry Wu has heroically documented, is being used to compete with American labor.
In other words, money is being consolidated in fewer and fewer hands as never before in the history of this nation or the world. Without reform, the American middle class will soon be extinct, leaving only the very rich few and the very many poor as has already occurred in most of the world. We've been warned of all this by congressmen, presidents, industrialists, and economists down through the years. Religious leaders too have seen the danger. About 1898, during the time of William Jennings Bryan, Pope Leo the thirteenth put it this way.
On the one side, there is the party which holds the power because it holds the wealth, which has in its grasp all labor and all trade, which manipulates for its own benefit and its own purposes all the sources of supply and which is powerfully represented in the councils of state itself. On the other side, there is the needy and powerless multitude sore and suffering. Rapacious usury which although more than once condemned by the church is nevertheless under a different form but with the same guilt still practiced by avaricious and grasping men that a small number of very rich men have been able to lay upon the masses of the poor a yoke little better than slavery itself. More recently, during America's Great Depression Pope Pius the eleventh spoke of the same problem. In our days, not alone is wealth accumulated, but immense power and despotic economic domination is concentrated in the hands of a few.
This power becomes particularly irresistible when exercised by those who, because they hold and control money, are able also to govern credit and determine its allotment. For this reason, supplying, so to speak, the lifeblood to the entire economic body and grasping as it were in their hands the very soul of the economy so that no one dare breathe against their will. Educate your friends. Our country needs a solid group who really understand how our money is manipulated and what the solutions really are. Because if a depression comes, there will be those who call themselves conservatives who will come forward advancing solutions framed by the international bankers.
Beware of calls to return to a gold standard. Why? Simple. Because never before has so much gold been so concentrated outside of American hands, and never before has so much gold been in the hands of international governmental bodies such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. A gold backed currency usually brings despair to a nation and to return to it would certainly be a false solution in our case.
Remember, we had a gold backed currency in 1929 and during the first four years of the Great Depression. Likewise, beware of any plans advanced for a regional or world currency. This is the international bankers Trojan horse. Educate your member of congress. It only takes a few persuasive members to make the others pay attention.
Most congressmen just don't understand the system. Some understand it, but are so influenced by bank pack contributions that they ignore it, not realizing the gravity of their neglect. We hope we've made a valuable contribution to the national debate on monetary reform. It remains for each man to do his duty consistent with his state in life. May God give us the light to help reform our nation and ourselves.
We say ourselves because ultimately vast multitudes of men are going to be driven more and more to desperation by the accumulation of the world's wealth in fewer and fewer hands. Men will tend to become like their oppressors, selfish and greedy. Rather, let's keep in mind during this period of reform a warning not to lose sight of greater things. As Pope Pius the eleventh put it, for what will it profit men that a more prudent distribution and use of riches make it possible for them to gain even the whole world, if thereby they suffer the loss of their own souls? What will it profit to teach them sound principles and economics if they permit themselves to be so swept away by selfishness by unbridled and sordid greed that hearing the commandments of the Lord, they do all things contrary.
@IandE4Life - Steve Gibbs | Family Wealth Expert
🏦 HOW THE FEDERAL RESERVE SECRETLY ENSLAVED THE WORLD - FULL DOCUMENTARY https://t.co/2Bg1TWeSDM
Video Transcript AI Summary
On 11/07/2024, the Federal Reserve chairman asserted independence from presidential control, sparking questions about the Fed's power. To understand its influence, we must go back to Jekyll Island in 1910. Amidst a collapsing banking system, key figures secretly convened to create a central bank, later known as the Federal Reserve.
The goal was to stabilize the financial system. The Aldrich plan, though initially rejected for being too pro-banker, was modified and signed into law. After World War II, the US dollar became the global reserve currency and the Fed gained immense power. Through monetary policy and covert operations, the Fed has shaped global finance. Critics argue that the Fed's policies have led to wealth inequality, boom and bust cycles, and a debt trap for many.
Full Transcript
Speaker 0: On 11/07/2024, the chairman of the Federal Reserve openly defied the president of The United States Of America, declaring essentially that even the leader of the free world could not supersede supersede him.
Speaker 1: Do you believe that the president has the power to fire or demote you and has the Fed determined the legality of a president demoting at will any of the other governors with leadership positions?
Speaker 2: Not permitted under the law.
Speaker 1: Not what?
Speaker 2: Not permitted under the law.
Speaker 0: What kind of power can defy the leader of the free world? How are we all convinced to grant nearly unlimited power to this money printing agency? So what is the Federal Reserve, and how has it driven us towards a hundred years of inequality, wars, and a $36,000,000,000,000 debt bubble that's ready to burst at any moment. To understand this, we're gonna need to go a hundred and ten years back to a secret meeting that was held on a private island off the coast of Georgia. This is the story of Jekyll Island.
Speaker 3: Can I ask you a question? Yes. What do you know about the Federal Reserve?
Speaker 4: That's too much info. Let's ride that.
Speaker 5: We're literally going to where they created the Federal Reserve.
Speaker 6: Good to meet you.
Speaker 3: Nice to meet you, man.
Speaker 5: Good job.
Speaker 6: Glad you guys made it.
Speaker 7: The United States can pay any debt it has because we can always print money to do that. We
Speaker 0: were hoping to help take down the global financial hegemony.
Speaker 8: This is weird, man. This is strange. It feels like, you know, it feels like an old folks retirement sanctuary, but it also feels like a little bit of an eerie feeling.
Speaker 0: It feels out of time. Right? It's like, it's not new, it's not old.
Speaker 3: Picture this. You're an ordinary American citizen in the year nineteen o seven. In your city or a city near you, there are constant constant bank runs. Because the American financial system was very distributed, much in the same way that the internet is sort of distributed. Almost like a bunch of web pages.
They used to be just a bunch of banks loaning to each other, taking on each other's risks, not having one central issuer of currency. If you went from California to Florida or California to New York back in the eighteen hundreds and the nineteen hundreds, they would have a separate different currency. At one point, there were 30,000 currencies across all The United States. That's like almost more than the amount of shit coins in the crypto space.
Speaker 9: The first three attempts before the Federal Reserve, we had the Bank of North America, which was gonna have be Canada and The United States. That was the first central bank. Then we had the first Bank of the United States in Philadelphia, opposed by Thomas Jefferson supported by Alexander Hamilton. Then we had the second US Bank dissolved by Andrew Jackson. So Andrew Jackson had sufficiently kicked out the central bankers, in the eighteen thirties, and it took many, many decades again until they tried again to bring in a central bank to The United States.
Speaker 6: We were living within a system where people had physical gold and they would deposit that gold in banks
Speaker 8: and have paper banknotes issued in compensation for those physical gold coins. But when I hold these things,
Speaker 0: everyone my age, millennials, gen z, we just think of this as the money. Right? But everyone older comes from a time when this was not the money. This was a representation of the gold. This was just a placeholder for gold that was actually in a vault somewhere and gold has to be dug out of the ground.
Gold can't be invented out of thin air and so as long as this does represent gold, there's a limited supply.
Speaker 8: Yeah. And for a long time that works, right? Until you have a run on the bank where everyone comes in to demand their gold Yeah. And what happens is 20% of people get their gold and the bank runs out of gold. And that's when you have a bank run and the bank collapses.
Speaker 3: Nineteen o seven, this earthquake hit San Francisco, destroys all of these buildings. Those assets end up almost nearly worthless. And so you have these banks all across one of the biggest cities in America that are just going belly up and it causes contagion to other banks. It just takes one key player, one key event to trigger this domino wave. And basically, just set in motion all this banking panic.
People were afraid, people were angry, because they look at the banks as if it was their fault. But at the same time, the gut reaction wasn't, let's give it all over to the government, because America had fought for like hundreds of years to not have one central party controlling all the banks. The American banking system was collapsing in real time from coast to coast, but instead of letting it crumble, distribute, and rebuild, seven key players saw an opportunity to overhaul the entire system.
Speaker 5: Charles Norton, president of the First National Bank of New York.
Speaker 0: Frank Vanderlip, president of National Citibank. Henry p Davison, senior partner and confidant of JPMorgan. A. Piat Andrew, Harvard economics professor and assistant secretary of the United States Treasury Department.
Speaker 6: Benjamin Strong junior, vice president of the Bankers Trust Company.
Speaker 5: Paul Warburg, a German born financier and descendant of the Warburg banking dynasty.
Speaker 3: And finally, senator Nelson Aldrich, a US Senator from Rhode Island and chairman of the National Monetary Commission.
Speaker 6: So
Speaker 0: Aldrich is a general in the civil war. Right? But then after the civil war, he gets into politics eventually. The Panic of nineteen o seven happens. He gets appointed to a special panel.
Speaker 8: He creates the National Monetary Commission whose sole purpose is to study the nineteen o seven banking crisis and then to create, you know, potentially a solution. The US banking system is not sufficiently centralized. There's too much risk and too many panics that, you know, frequently cause these banks to collapse.
Speaker 0: He winds up creating
Speaker 8: this Aldrich plan, which essentially evolved directly into creating the Federal Reserve. They organized this this meeting here at Jekyll Island First in New Jersey in in November of nineteen ten.
Speaker 6: And they came here and held one of the most secret meetings of all time. The only person who knew who was involved in the meeting was JP Morgan because he is the one who provided them the Federal Reserve room.
Speaker 3: And all
Speaker 5: six of them wanted a way to come to Jekyll Island but without being seen together because at the time, if any journalist found them together, it would raise some flats.
Speaker 0: Mhmm.
Speaker 5: Because nobody at the time wanted the central bank.
Speaker 9: And any reporter who asked, they just said, we're going down to Southern Georgia for duck hunting. No big deal.
Speaker 5: Either duck hunting, getting away for the winter. So these six men all embarked on this journey to go from New York to Jekyll Island, which was around a two day trip. Two of them changed their name completely and all of them were instructed to use their first names.
Speaker 8: And these six men essentially worked together for an entire weekend. They created this plan to create reserve banks and each reserve bank will create an issue a centralized currency that will become, you know, the the currency of The United States, the sole currency of The United States, eliminating the ability of individual banks to issue their own notes.
Speaker 3: The goals of the Aldrich plan were to essentially create a central bank without calling it a central bank. So they did everything in their power to obfuscate it, to use different language, to try and distance themselves from this idea of one lending party that most of the public feared would end up basically absorbing every piece of capital and siphoning off all the wealth of the economy.
Speaker 8: The problem with the original Aldrich plan is that it was overtly too pro banker. The Democrats, for anti centralized banking, shot it down, and so what they did is they modified it in several different ways. One of the ways they modified it was creating, you know, the Federal Reserve Board of Governors who would reside in Washington DC and were appointed by the president and confirmed by the senate. Now the interesting thing that they built into, you know, the the new Federal Reserve System was that that Board of Governors actually wouldn't have direct control over monetary policy. The one that would have that control was the New York Fed, the most influential of all the 12 Federal Reserve banks.
Speaker 5: So they got President Wilson to sign the bill, and after their main priority was like, we're gonna have him sign it, and then we will alter the rules once it is signed.
Speaker 9: Saying the word bank was like, it was a four four letter word. So that's why the Federal Reserve is not called a bank. They wanted to make it seem like it came from the government, so they called it federal. They wanted to make it seem like they actually had some assets, so they called it a reserve. It's neither federal and it's not a reserve.
Speaker 5: But what I don't understand is how were they able to get away for it for so long? Because today, we see those banks and people trust those banks with their lives, which is funny to see that sort of shift from going to fearing central banking to loving them and being like the ride ride or die for the banks.
Speaker 9: I think that's a testament to how successful this original meeting on Jekyll Island was in 1910. To go from an era where people distrusted banks to a hundred and fourteen years later, they completely trust banks, and they don't have any understanding as to why they should distrust banks.
Speaker 6: We have an independent central bank that has served us well. We need to do our work in a way that's outside the political process to the maximum extent possible.
Speaker 7: The Federal Reserve is an independent agency, and that means basically that there is no eight other agency of government which can overrule actions that we take.
Speaker 3: With all you know about the founding of the Federal Reserve, how do you feel about them today?
Speaker 4: I all of your stuff.
Speaker 3: She's gonna get I
Speaker 5: plead the first.
Speaker 9: Love that. The education has been complete in total, and I think if you could bring back to life the six members of the Jekyll Island meeting, I think they would be wildly impressed with how successful their project was a hundred and fourteen years later.
Speaker 10: You know where we're going? We're going
Speaker 3: to the San Suu Kyi Building owned by JP Morgan who is the largest banking baron in all America. We're gonna spend the night in one of his residences, which is really
Speaker 4: cool. So
Speaker 6: you can
Speaker 0: have private about how you're gonna enslave the world.
Speaker 5: My god.
Speaker 4: Scheme scheme about how to force all the other banks to find your bank and
Speaker 0: and escape after banging your friend's wife.
Speaker 3: This cottage behind me belonged to the Rockefellers, one of the richest families in American history. But it has a really, really dark secret that we're gonna explore. We are at Indian Mound Cottage, also known as the Rockefeller Cottage. Yes, those Rockefellers. Now, why is this place called the Indian Mound Cottage?
When the French first arrived here, they were greeted by a tribe of Indians called the Gwali Indians, and also the Timucua Indians of this region. Those Indians, in some of the logs from the French explorers, were said to be at times, either six foot eight to seven and a half feet tall. So they were giant, massive. And unlike a lot of other encounters, these Indians were actually really receptive to the French explorers that had come to these lands and wanted to engage in trade relations with them. The Indians start to show them some of their culture, their rituals, the things that they do.
One of the nights what happens is there's a big circle of dancing men and women and they're cheering and they're doing a dance. One of the shamans dressed in this garb comes up to one of the Frenchmen and shows them this stone pillar, this altar, or perhaps a mount. A woman comes out with the body of child, no older than two, three years old. And without getting into more gruesome detail, the child's life is taken, and the child is placed upon the altar, and the ritual, the dances continue. The Frenchmen get very creeped out, and they decide, yep, let's continue onwards down the river here, down in Georgia, and maybe find somewhere else to post up.
We know that there are accounts of native tribes all around The Americas partaking, the Aztecs, the Mayans, and perhaps the Guala Indians partaking in child sacrifice. And yet, with this historical record, known by quite a few people that have moved here, the Rockefellers decided to build their cottage on what is perceived to be one of the exact sites of one of these rituals.
Speaker 5: I feel, since I live on an island, I feel that being on an island, you can get away with so much. And that's something that is super underrated because nobody talks about it.
Speaker 3: Yeah. You're kinda right. Like, some of the most heinous crimes, secret meetings, like terrible things have all happened on islands, Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, Alcatraz, Epstein Island, the Federal Reserve. The meeting on Jekyll Island went completely unknown to the public for five years after it occurred without much fanfare. One of Jekyll's secret collaborators, Frank Vanderlip, wrote an article for the Saturday Evening Post admitting to the events that had taken place.
Several other participants confessed details shortly after. But by that time, the American public no longer cared. They were embroiled in the First World War, the first war funded by central bankers both from the East and the West, and the first that could foreshadow a century of war untethered from the restraints of the banking systems of the past.
Speaker 0: After World War two, this is the first time that we've had the Fed in charge in The United States after a major war has just swept Europe, and The US is clearly on top in the global order. They've got all this industry and all this power and they have this meeting called Bretton Woods where they're gonna heal the global financial system, reset the global monetary system because everyone is decimated. And this is where they make dollar, the US dollar, the global reserve currency and they set up a system by which every other country is going to be beholden to the US dollar and to the Federal Reserve System. On one hand, they'll manipulate another country with monetary policy and try to force countries to do their bidding through monetary coercion. And if they don't comply, then they have the jackals, the CIA, to come around as the muscle and to overthrow the government or to assassinate someone or to start a coup or whatever it is.
And so now you've gone from the Federal Reserve taking over The United States and The United States money. And then after World War two, the whole global monetary system needs to be rebuilt and they rebuild it in the Fed's image using the American dollar while founding the covert military force essentially that is going to enforce that dollar supremacy all around the world.
Speaker 8: After after World War two, we see the expansion of this dollar system. You know, for a few years there's quiet peace and quiet as the CIA is built up and you know, the IMF starts to make these these loans to poor countries and basically extort them out of their assets and get them to use their votes and their power in the UN to support US foreign policy and as compensation for the loans that they make, they get their land or their natural resources as collateral that can be sold off to US corporations. So essentially what it does is it, you're right, globalizes The US corporate interests and allows them to gain more wealth and more power and status than ever before.
Speaker 3: In the Dune universe, they talk about spice, this this magical element that enlightens and awakens people and it's kind of this thing that all the nations are are fighting over and our version of that is credit. It allows us to exceed, you know, the boundaries of our actual country's productivity by borrowing from the future. We're literally taking something out of time to enable us to do you know, superhuman things in the present. And it again, it's it's just like a drug. It's just it has all the qualities of the perfect type of addictive concoction.
Speaker 9: Oh, absolutely. Politicians, they they could never ask their citizens to fund, wars or other projects.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 9: And so this is the easy way for governments to get the money without asking their citizenry. They actually take it from their citizenry in the form of inflation.
Speaker 3: Do you know about the Federal Reserve and what happened on this island?
Speaker 6: I'm actually giving them a tour, telling them about it right now.
Speaker 3: Oh, that's amazing. What do you think so far?
Speaker 6: Great. Oh, fantastic. Awesome.
Speaker 5: Feels at ease, you know, like nothing can go wrong here. There's peace. It's So it's relatively small. It's peaceful. It's deserted.
Speaker 3: It kinda lulls you to sleep. This kind of of the bugs, like they're playing a concert that's stream directly in your ears. This island really is a pretty place, a beauty to hold. But underneath all of the the greenery, the animals here, the well maintained lawns, the cheery people we see riding on bikes. There's some really, really dark history.
Speaker 11: Is that tax money that the Fed is spending?
Speaker 2: It's not tax money. The banks have, accounts with the Fed much the same way that you have an account in a commercial bank. So to lend to a bank, we simply use the computer to mark up the size of the account that they have with the Fed. So it's much more akin, although not exactly the same, but it's much more akin to printing money than it is to borrowing.
Speaker 12: Will you tell the American people to whom you lent 2,200,000,000,000.0 of their dollars? Federal Reserve's discount tell us who they are. No. Because the reason
Speaker 5: that
Speaker 4: And Ben Bernanke, in a statement at a Wall Street dinner, said in front of everyone, he said, we know that the Fed we now know that the Fed was responsible for the nineteen thirties Great Depression. And he said, we're sorry and we promise it won't happen again. Yeah. So he knew. And again, he is Ben Bernanke was a a student of Great Depression.
Right? He His dissertation, his PhD thesis was on the Great Depression. He studied it his entire life. And he understood that the Fed was the per was the sole you know, one of the sole contributors to the destruction and the loss of life and the economic catastrophe that was the Great Depression.
Speaker 3: And then fifty eight years after the founding of the Federal Reserve, something changed.
Speaker 11: I have directed secretary Connolly to suspend temporarily the convertibility of the dollar into gold or other reserve assets. Your dollar will be worth just as much tomorrow as it is today.
Speaker 3: Spoiler alert, it wasn't temporary. Every single thing that the Fed has done and created through monetary policy has destroyed the common person at every single level and has enriched those that are insulated and those who have asymmetric information about how that system works. The Fed is responsible for creating and abetting, you
Speaker 4: know, most of the financial crises. The Fed, with this zero interest rate policy in QE, has created the worst wealth gap. We're we're at levels of wealth inequality that we haven't seen since the French Revolution.
Speaker 0: A huge portion of the value we're producing for the world is being siphoned out of our collective coffers. We're all living on sort of taxed time without even realizing it. They're not stealing money. They're stealing our time. They're stealing our, you know, health and happiness.
They're stealing your ability to support your whole family on a single paycheck. In
Speaker 3: a place steeped in history and shadowed by secrets, how do you even begin to push back against the weight of it all?
Speaker 12: Oh, the money's down, slipping through our hands, time they steal under their command.
Speaker 4: The actions of the Fed affect everything, down to the mental health and the stability of families. So this can be seen in, you know, graphs and rates of suicide and depression among young men who have been unable to find work. Right? Largely because of the boom bust cycles the Fed has created. In my family, after 02/2008, my brother who was in real estate, who was a broker, lost his business and basically spent a decade, hopping between jobs, surfing on couches, living at home, you know, battling with depression, battling with nihilism.
And he was unable to get ahead in life and build a business and build back credit because of the debt and the over speculation that had ruined him, that had popped and completely ruined his his financial future. And seeing him completely destroyed by that was very painful for me growing up. He was my next oldest brother. He was the person I was closest to and the person I admired and see him hurt by that and just be hopeless and not know what to do was very difficult because what the Fed does is is insidious. They're not overtly marching into a town and destroying some jobs or overtly stealing somebody's money or overtly closing a bank account.
But their actions and the side effects of those actions of the 0% interest rates and the boom and bust cycles destroy much of the real economy. Post 02/2008, you know, the economy changed. We allowed the banks to live and the small business owners and the entrepreneurs to get crushed and that wealth effectively evaporated from their hands and was transferred to the wealthy. The Fed robs us through the boom and bust cycles that they create and they socialize the losses by running QE and inflating the debt away and every time that debt is used to bail out the wealthy and the connected and the powerful over and over and over again.
Speaker 6: You know, there's a lot of focus on on, you know, New York billionaires these days, but my favorite one is not running.
Speaker 5: Ah. That
Speaker 10: compromise is not a bad word. Compromise is what democracy is all about. That you get most of the people get a good percentage of what they want, a handful of people on the two Sigmas out get almost nothing, and then that's the way we come together and move. Their vain attempt to
Speaker 4: kill the credit cycle has created this financial gravity that's trapped the federal government as well as most private citizens in a debt trap in the singularity and it's crushing. You know? If you're in debt, especially student loan debt, you can't discharge that via bankruptcy. You're trapped for life. Jefferson once said, right, there are two ways to enslave a nation, by the sword or by debt.
And the Fed succeeded in doing it through debt.
Speaker 9: I played a lot of monopoly as a kid, and I was always fascinated by why the bank can never go bankrupt, because they can just print more money. So here we are at the birthplace of the American version of
Speaker 0: the bank that can't go bankrupt and can print more money for any reason. Because the moment that you tokenize, dollarize, the exchange of my life's value for your life's value, that opens it up to greed, to manipulation, and to bad actors.
Speaker 5: They keep you so tired and so busy that you don't even wanna question anything. They bombard you with the nine to five job. They make both the mom and the dad work. They make your children go to school and be raised by the system.
Speaker 0: And they hide it as though it's the government. They hide it as though it's the US government, but the actual empire is the wealthy bankers on top. The way you make money in today's world is by sinning. Right? Greed, gluttony, right?
Adultery, like all of the sins Only money. Boom. They're all incentivized. And when everyone is in a world of scarcity, and the incentive is to sin in order to escape scarcity, and everyone that is scarce and not sinning is inherently less kind. When you don't have enough, you certainly aren't gonna share.
You aren't gonna be nice. You're gonna be stressed. You're gonna be irritable. Bad for your health. So everyone who's not making it is in their own form of hell.
And everyone that is making it is building their own form of hell. Right? And so the system it's whether they design it that way or not, the Federal Reserve sets up a world where it pays to sin. And if you won't sin, you'll be poor. And they teach it to you from birth through the music, the movies, the celebrities, all their idols right from birth.
Speaker 13: After two or three hundred years of crimes, all governments put their hands and stopped any further developments. Governments say it must not develop any further. We are not allowed to experiment on it. Money hasn't been improved. Money has has rather become worse in the course of time.
I don't believe that we should ever have a good money again before we take the thing out of the hands of government. We can't take them violently out of the hands of government. All we can do is buy some sly around because and to do something they can't stop.
Speaker 5: So I regard the Federal Reserve as one of the most transparent central banks in the world.
Speaker 10: We That's a statement. Plain. What what do you fear about the audit?
reSee.it AI Summary
I've uncovered the troubling reality of America's student loan system, which has morphed into a profit-driven machine rather than a means to access education. The government expects $184 billion in profits over the next decade, with Sallie Mae evolving into a predatory lender. Key borrower protections have been stripped away, leading to staggering interest rates and aggressive collection practices. The system lacks basic consumer protections and perpetuates debt that delays major life milestones. The solution lies in removing the government from student lending entirely, allowing for a competitive market.
@IandE4Life - Steve Gibbs | Family Wealth Expert
🧵 Inside America's $1.7T Student Loan Machine: How Education Became a Tax on the American Dream (1) Let's expose the most profitable government operation you've never heard of—a system that transformed from helping students access education into an inescapable debt trap. This isn't just a crisis. It's a carefully engineered machine.
@IandE4Life - Steve Gibbs | Family Wealth Expert
(2) First, the numbers: The government expects $184B in profits over 10 years from student loans. That's more than many Fortune 500 companies. But how did education financing become such a profitable venture? The story starts with Sallie Mae.
@IandE4Life - Steve Gibbs | Family Wealth Expert
(3) Sallie Mae's evolution tells you everything. It transformed from a quasi-public institution serving student interests into an aggressive private lender notorious for: -Harassing phone calls to workplaces -Contacting distant relatives -Fees that could balloon $40,000 loans to $100,000+
@IandE4Life - Steve Gibbs | Family Wealth Expert
(4) But the real transformation happened in two phases that stripped away crucial borrower protections: 2005: Made private student loans non-dischargeable in bankruptcy 2010: Eliminated private lenders from federal loans, removing market competition
@IandE4Life - Steve Gibbs | Family Wealth Expert
(5) From 1992-2006: -Loans had variable rates that moved with the market -You could consolidate to lock in low rates -Even after consolidating, you could reconsolidate if you had new loans -2002-2005 saw rates as low as 3%
@IandE4Life - Steve Gibbs | Family Wealth Expert
(6) Here's what's wild: The old system had a "two-step process" that let borrowers: -Consolidate with the Department of Education -Refinance with a private lender at lower rates This kept rates competitive. All gone now.
@IandE4Life - Steve Gibbs | Family Wealth Expert
(7) Today's rates are staggering: Undergrad: 6.53% Grad: 8.08% Parent PLUS: 9.08% When mortgage rates hit historic lows in 2020-21, homeowners refinanced under 3%. Student borrowers? Trapped at these high rates.
@IandE4Life - Steve Gibbs | Family Wealth Expert
(8) The government now has collection powers that exceed even the IRS: -Garnish wages without court orders -Seize tax refunds -Take Social Security benefits -Collect from disability payments No other lender has these powers.
@IandE4Life - Steve Gibbs | Family Wealth Expert
(9) Here's the absurdity: Banks won't approve a $100,000 mortgage without verifying income and assets. But an 18-year-old can borrow that much for education based on hypothetical future earnings—with zero underwriting standards.
@IandE4Life - Steve Gibbs | Family Wealth Expert
(10) The deception goes deeper. Colleges advertise "average" salaries of $60,000, but here's the math they don't show: -9 graduates making $35,000 -1 making $305,000 "Average" = $62,000 Reality: 90% earn far less than advertised
@IandE4Life - Steve Gibbs | Family Wealth Expert
(11) Parent PLUS loans are particularly predatory: -Highest interest rates (9.08%) -Can borrow up to full cost of attendance -Minimal credit checks -Follow parents into retirement -Limited repayment options
@IandE4Life - Steve Gibbs | Family Wealth Expert
(12) The system lacks basic consumer protections found in EVERY other financial product: -No clear cost disclosure requirements -No standard bankruptcy protections -No statute of limitations on collection -No assessment of ability to repay
@IandE4Life - Steve Gibbs | Family Wealth Expert
(13) Even the supposed "quality control"—accreditation—is a joke. The organizations that accredit schools? They're run by the schools themselves. No conflict of interest there, right?
@IandE4Life - Steve Gibbs | Family Wealth Expert
(14) The human cost is staggering. Average debt of $27,000 balloons to $50,000+ with interest. This debt is delaying: -Marriage -Children -Home ownership -Career changes -Business startups -Retirement savings
@IandE4Life - Steve Gibbs | Family Wealth Expert
(15) Why does tuition keep rising? Apart from reckless government spending and record inflation, it is also because government guarantees every loan. No market pressure, no competition, no reason for schools to control costs. Just an endless flow of taxpayer-backed dollars. https://t.co/39fq6wDVjB
@IandE4Life - Steve Gibbs | Family Wealth Expert
(16) While bankruptcy protections would help, the real solution is getting government out of student lending entirely. We need to return to a market-based system where: -Rates adjust with markets -Loans can be refinanced -Schools compete on price -Lenders assess repayment ability -Basic consumer protections exist
@IandE4Life - Steve Gibbs | Family Wealth Expert
(17) What we have now isn't a lending program—it's a blank check to universities, cosigned by students, guaranteed by taxpayers, and enforced with powers that exceed the IRS.
@IandE4Life - Steve Gibbs | Family Wealth Expert
(18) The system isn't broken. It's working exactly as designed—a perpetual profit machine that turns education into eternal debt. The solution isn't reform. It's removal of government from the student loan business entirely.
@IandE4Life - Steve Gibbs | Family Wealth Expert
(19) Next time someone says "just pay what you borrowed," show them this thread. Because this isn't about personal responsibility. It's about a system designed to trap an entire generation in perpetual debt.
@IandE4Life - Steve Gibbs | Family Wealth Expert
(20) If you found this breakdown of America's student loan machine enlightening, follow me for more deep dives into the financial systems shaping our lives. Knowledge is the first step toward change. 🎓💸