Federal Reserve System: Difference between revisions

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According to Austrian School economist Dr. Murray Rothbard, credit expansion (i.e., easy money) coupled with interventionism beginning in the 1920s interfered with natural business cycles of the free market system, resulting in the stock market crash of 1929 and the Great Depression. Rothbard cites inflation as the primary cause of the depression:  
According to Austrian School economist Dr. Murray Rothbard, credit expansion (i.e., easy money) coupled with interventionism beginning in the 1920s interfered with natural business cycles of the free market system, resulting in the stock market crash of 1929 and the Great Depression. Rothbard cites inflation as the primary cause of the depression:  


<blockquote>Government is inherently inflationary because it has, over the centuries, acquired control over the monetary system.... Inflation is a form of taxation, since the government can create new money out of thin air and use it to bid away resources from private individuals, who are barred by heavy penalty from similar “counterfeiting.”...</blockquote>
<blockquote>
Government is inherently inflationary because it has, over the centuries, acquired control over the monetary system.... Inflation is a form of taxation, since the government can create new money out of thin air and use it to bid away resources from private individuals, who are barred by heavy penalty from similar “counterfeiting.”...


<blockquote>Given the Federal Reserve System and its absolute power over the nation’s money, the federal government, since 1913, must bear complete responsibility for any inflation. The banks cannot inflate on their own; any credit expansion can only take place with the support and acquiescence of the federal government and its Federal Reserve authorities. The banks are virtual pawns of the government, and have been since 1913.<ref>Murray Rothbard, ''America’s Great Depression'' (Kansas City: Sheed and Ward, 1975), pp. 29, 33.</ref></blockquote>
Given the Federal Reserve System and its absolute power over the nation’s money, the federal government, since 1913, must bear complete responsibility for any inflation. The banks cannot inflate on their own; any credit expansion can only take place with the support and acquiescence of the federal government and its Federal Reserve authorities. The banks are virtual pawns of the government, and have been since 1913.<ref>Murray Rothbard, ''America’s Great Depression'' (Kansas City: Sheed and Ward, 1975), pp. 29, 33.</ref>
</blockquote>


== Abandonment of the gold standard ==
== Abandonment of the gold standard ==

Latest revision as of 12:52, 18 June 2024

The Eccles Building, Washington, D.C., headquarters of the Federal Reserve System

From the very beginning, the infiltrators of the dark forces worked to thwart the plan of God-government for America. One of their first moves was taking the wealth of the nation out of the hands of the people and putting it into the hands of the international bankers.

Antony Sutton notes in Wall Street and FDR:

In modern America the most significant illustration of society as a whole working for the few is the 1913 Federal Reserve Act. The Federal Reserve System is, in effect, a private banking monopoly, not answerable to Congress or the public, but with legal monopoly control over money supply without let or hindrance or even audit by the General Accounting Office. It was irresponsible manipulation of money supply by this Federal Reserve System that brought about the inflation of the 1920s, the 1929 Depression, and so the presumed requirement for a Roosevelt New Deal.[1]

The Federal Reserve System, serving the interests of the banking community, exercises the unilateral right to expand and contract the supply of money and credit and create periods of boom and bust. The ramifications of this state of affairs are almost beyond calculation. Today we could have a financial collapse worse than the Great Depression of the 1930s. And we know that the power elite used the depression to concentrate power in the central government.

Establishment

Jekyll Island Club, location in 1910 of the secret meeting where bankers drew up plans for a central bank for the U.S.

In his work The War on Gold, Antony Sutton explains:

The groundwork for the Federal Reserve System was laid at an unpublicized meeting at the J. P. Morgan Country Club on Jekyll Island, Georgia, in November 1910. Senator Nelson Aldrich, bankers Frank Vanderlip (president of National City Bank and representing Rockefeller and Kuhn Loeb interests), Henry P. Davison (senior partner of J. P. Morgan), and Charles D. Norton (president of Morgan’s First National Bank) met in secret to decide how to foist a central bank system on the United States. Others at the meeting were Paul Moritz Warburg, the German banker, and Benjamin Strong (a Morgan banker who later became first Governor of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York). Out of the Jekyll Island cabal came the basic bill passed by Congress and signed into law by President Woodrow Wilson as the Federal Reserve Act of 1913. Under the earlier sub-Treasury system, bankers had no control over the money supply in the United States and, even less to their liking, none over currency issues.[2]

The Federal Reserve Act gave the banking community control of the nation’s money in violation of Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution, which gives to Congress the power “to coin money” and “regulate the value thereof.”

The Federal Reserve and the Great Depression

According to Austrian School economist Dr. Murray Rothbard, credit expansion (i.e., easy money) coupled with interventionism beginning in the 1920s interfered with natural business cycles of the free market system, resulting in the stock market crash of 1929 and the Great Depression. Rothbard cites inflation as the primary cause of the depression:

Government is inherently inflationary because it has, over the centuries, acquired control over the monetary system.... Inflation is a form of taxation, since the government can create new money out of thin air and use it to bid away resources from private individuals, who are barred by heavy penalty from similar “counterfeiting.”...

Given the Federal Reserve System and its absolute power over the nation’s money, the federal government, since 1913, must bear complete responsibility for any inflation. The banks cannot inflate on their own; any credit expansion can only take place with the support and acquiescence of the federal government and its Federal Reserve authorities. The banks are virtual pawns of the government, and have been since 1913.[3]

Abandonment of the gold standard

At the time the Constitution of the United States was being framed, the nation was in the midst of a terrible inflation caused by the expansion of the Continental, a paper currency that had been issued during the Revolutionary War. This experience taught the framers the importance of a fully gold-backed currency, and they provided for a monetary system based on gold and silver in the Constitution. Article I, Section 10, reads, “No State Shall ... make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts.”

The framers intended Congress to use gold and silver coin as money even though they did not explicitly state that Article I, Section 10 applied to the federal government. This can be demonstrated by the statements of a number of the framers, by a text analysis of the Constitution and by Supreme Court decisions. The Founding Fathers’ intent is also seen in the actions of the First Congress, which in 1792 created a monetary system based on gold and silver.[4] During the debate over the wording of Article I, Section 10, Roger Sherman, a delegate to the Constitutional Convention, said he thought this “a favorable crisis for crushing paper money.”[5] Thomas Jefferson and John Adams both wrote about the evils of paper money. However, contrary to the framers’ intent, bankers plotted to control the currency.

The Civil War brought the first deviation from this system, causing steep inflation. In 1879, the U.S. returned to a convertible gold standard and prosperity. American monetary policy began to change drastically after the passage of the Federal Reserve Act, December 23, 1913, which gave the power to create money to an independent agency, the Federal Reserve Board. The agency issued Federal Reserve notes, which became the only legal tender in America, and progressively reduced the promise to exchange paper dollars for gold. At the time of their original issue in 1914, Federal Reserve notes were 40% gold-backed. During World War II, the gold reserve was reduced to 25%. On March 18, 1968, the gold reserve requirement was entirely eliminated.

The Federal Reserve System is no part of the divine plan of America

On October 10, 1977, the ascended master known as the God of Gold said the formation of the Federal Reserve System

... must be challenged and reversed because it is no part of the divine plan of the United States.... The American people must understand the great fraud that has been perpetrated upon them by this printing of money without backing. The grinding out of money by the printing presses will surely cause the collapse of the economies of the nations.... The salvation of the soul of America depends upon the reestablishment of gold.[6]

Sources

Mark L. Prophet and Elizabeth Clare Prophet, The Path to Attainment, pp. 297, 399–401.

  1. Antony Sutton, Wall Street and FDR (New Rochelle: Arlington House Publishers, 1975), p. 75.
  2. Antony C. Sutton, The War on Gold (Seal Beach, Calif.: ’76 Press, 1977), p. 84.
  3. Murray Rothbard, America’s Great Depression (Kansas City: Sheed and Ward, 1975), pp. 29, 33.
  4. Edwin Vieira, Jr., Pieces of Eight: The Monetary Powers and Disabilities of the United States Constitution (Old Greenwich, Conn.: Devin-Adair, 1983), pp. 15–36.
  5. Notes of Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787 Reported by James Madison (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1966), p. 542.
  6. The God of Gold with the God Tabor, October 10, 1977, “The Flow of Energy in the City Foursquare: Children of God, Demand and Supply the Abundance of the Mother!”