“The $16 trillion in secret bailout loans made by the Fed that the GAO had located in 2011 was only the tip of the iceberg. When the Levy Economics Institute added in other Fed bailout programs that the GAO had not included, the actual tally came to $29 trillion.
“While the Fed was secretly conducting the most unprecedented bailout of Wall Street banks in history from December 2007 through at least the middle of 2010, millions of Americans were struggling to make the mortgage payment on their home as a result of losing their job to an economic crisis caused by these very banks. Then those same banks moved in to foreclose on millions of homeowners, while secretly receiving these windfall bailouts from the Fed.” — Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 21, 2020
The unfathomable amount of money the Fed handed out might become Exhibit A when the Trump-Musk cleansing machine arrives at the Fed’s door, but really, what would you expect of an institution created for the purpose of keeping the big boys flush with ”elastic currency” while insisting it is really an inflation fighter?
The Great Money Bubble...
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Should Trump-Musk scold the Fed for its embarrassing “mathematically-impossible” episodes — the Great Depression, the stagflation of the 1970s, the Great Recession (see above) — or try something else?
On rare occasions a Fed member or even the Chairman will state in plain language what the Federal Reserve does — print money — but most people seem to forget it as soon as the words leave his mouth. Certain others who don’t forget it profit from the scam and trust in the public’s indifference to protect them. So far their trust has been well-placed. With few exceptions people don’t connect printing money with counterfeiting.
The Fed is a central bank with the appearance of decentralization to suggest it is somehow consonant with founding American values. Contrary to those values, its home in Washington, D.C., the Eccles Building, is huge and imposing, suggesting that something great and important is going on inside that’s none of our business.
It’s operating arm, the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), alone determines “monetary policy,” as if it were acting independent of any other influence, yet the most influential member of the FOMC is appointed by the President.
One of its goals is to stabilize prices. In 1985 a gallon of gas cost around $1.20. And today? As for the dollar itself, it’s worth about three percent of its value when the Fed first came on the scene in 1914.
It exists to prevent the kind of crises that haunted the economy before its inception, yet those kinds of crises have been more numerous and some far worse in the period after that, up to the present day. Its product, the Federal Reserve note, is legal tender, which includes the requirement that all creditors must accept the notes in the payment of debts, unless altered by contract.
In other words, the Fed has a state-granted monopoly of the kind of money we use.
As a cartel the Fed serves as a protector of the banking practice of fractional reserve lending, wherein a single deposit, when loaned, acts as a multiplier of deposits, thereby increasing the money supply, running up prices, and distorting the economy. A depreciating dollar favors debtors such as the federal government, encouraging it to borrow more. Fractional reserve banking is a form of embezzlement.
An Englishman who dropped out of school at age 12 to help his father make corset stays from whale bones, who wrote a foundational pamphlet that became a catalyst for American independence, later in life wrote a scathing commentary on paper money:
One of the evils of paper money is, that it turns the whole country into stock jobbers. The precariousness of its value and the uncertainty of its fate continually operate, night and day, to produce this destructive effect. Having no real value in itself it depends for support upon accident, caprice and party, and as it is the interest of some to depreciate and of others to raise its value, there is a continual invention going on that destroys the morals of the country.
He explained how legal tender laws were a method for establishing iniquity by law:
If anything had, or could have, a value equal to gold and silver, [it] would require no tender law; and if it had not that value it ought not to have such a law; and, therefore, all tender laws are tyrannical and unjust, and calculated to support fraud and oppression.
Wise to its vulnerabilities the Fed has purchased academic protection by putting the mainstream economics profession on its payroll.
The Great Deformation:...
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Since its inception it has been instrumental in getting Americans killed and maimed in overseas wars, where taxes alone would have proved insufficient and intolerable. Overseas wars produce blowback, resulting in vast government expenditures, unrelenting propaganda, and lost freedom, as well as civilian casualties over there and at home. With its inflation tax on unwary dollar holders, the Fed has turned government from a protective agency into one resembling the war-mongering, all-controlling monster from the pages of 1984.
The Fed has addicted the federal government into debt financing to such an extent that it threatens their beloved mantra “national security” if not abated.
Before the Federal Reserve, in the late 19th century, the country experienced the most prosperous economy in its history. The country was on a gold standard, though unfortunately a government-controlled gold standard. As such, the government could always break its promise to redeem banknotes for gold.
The right of gold redemption for Americans ended with Executive Order 6102. Violators could be fined up to $10,000 (equivalent to $243,000 in 2024), incarcerated for up to ten years, or both. People’s gold ended up at Fort Knox, built especially for the larceny and one of the world’s great fortresses, where the coins were reportedly melted into 400-ounce bars.
My suggestion for Trump-Musk: Continue your daring ways. Realize that US monetary history is dark and getting darker. Bring Ron Paul onto your team. Separate money from state control altogether. Repeal the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, and repeal all legal tender laws.
