Funny Money

 

Simon Sheppard explores basic economics

A story is told of the German inter-war era, 1921-1923, when hyper-inflation raged. The Reichmark had so devalued that the banknotes which comprised a worker’s weekly pay had become too heavy to carry, so one employee took a wheelbarrow to collect his wages. Stopping on his way home to buy some vegetables, the man parked his wheelbarrow outside the shop and went inside. He emerged a few minutes later to find a pile of banknotes on the pavement. A thief had stolen the wheelbarrow and left the cash!

There are pictures of children during this period using bundles of banknotes as toy building bricks. The rate of devaluation had got so bad that customers at a restaurant would negotiate the cost before eating, because by the end of the meal the price would have risen. Similar hyper-inflation occurred more recently in Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia), where it became cheaper to use banknotes for toilet paper and toilet paper was almost impossible to obtain. A bus fare from work in the evening cost more than it had that morning.

Such are the effects of hyper-inflation. But how does it arise? To understand this we need to recall the original definitions of the words we use, because many words have been redefined to no longer mean what they are supposed to mean. While many have heard of the hyper-inflationary periods in history such as the time of John Law in France and the German period quoted above, even many Economics graduates are unacquainted with the basic financial concepts detailed here.

For a start, prices do not inflate, they increase. The original and proper definition of inflation is an expansion of the money supply. An increase in prices is merely a consequence of that. An ‘inflation rate’ (price increases) of 5% annually means that the people’s savings are worth 5% less – buy 5% less goods – at the end of the year than at the beginning. Prices have not gone up so much as the value of the money has gone down. Money has been created, added to the supply and that has diluted the money already in circulation.

How is creating money even possible? Because what we commonly call money is not really money, not any more. Up until 1914, a one-pound coin was called a sovereign and made of gold. British coins in circulation such as florins and half-crowns really did contain silver. Over the pond, the dollar was originally a fixed weight of silver, with silver having an established price ratio to gold. Containing precious metals, these coins were real money, with inherent value. As a last resort the coins could be melted down and used as a source of the valuable metals they contained.

Banknotes began as receipts for deposits of gold and silver. Nowadays what we call “money” is not real money at all. That is how the supply of it can be increased by simply printing it, or more usually, making an entry in a ledger. Debts and credits are created with the press of computer keys, which is only possible because we have ‘fiat currency.’ The word fiat is derived from the Latin factum or ‘thing done’ which basically means that the value of the currency is what the government says it is. Ultimately, the legitimacy of the currency is that the government accepts it in payment of taxes. A better word for the promissory notes which the government issues might be scrip.*

Governments cannot create gold and silver out of thin air so the temptation to employ fiat currency becomes irresistible, especially when they want to finance a war or further a particular agenda. In fact almost all of government power now derives from the ability to create “money” out of nothing. Cash to pay for foreign wars, police, prisons, propaganda and so on is effectively created out of thin air and without having to ask the taxpayer to pay for it all. The power to create scrip enables the government to assume responsibilities and take powers unto itself for which it has neither mandate nor authority.

Governments have succumbed to the temptations of fiat currency and have run up debts so huge that they defy comprehension. Some years ago it was revealed that the interest paid on the UK national debt was £100 million per day, and the time is approaching when the tax raised will not even cover the interest on the debt. More borrowing will be required simply to service the debt. Governments are so profligate that money is borrowed to give away in foreign aid.

To appreciate the enormous sums involved, consider that £500 in new £50 notes is roughly 1mm thick. Then a million pounds would be a pile about 2 metres high. A trillion (1012) pounds would be two million metres or approximately 1,250 miles high. It is inconceivable that the trillions in UK and US debt will ever be repaid.

Negative interest rates turn reality upside-down in a different way: a lender pays the borrower to use his money. Such lunacy can only exist in the bizarro world of central banks and artificial currency creation. Interest rates express the amount of risk and the value of time, so a negative interest rate says: “The risk is zero and time is worth less than nothing.” Negative interest rates were openly declared by the Japanese central bank and some European banks, but any interest rate which is less than the rate at which prices increase is effectively negative.

The creation of scrip, that is inflating the money supply, is really a hidden form of taxation. Each iteration of this process reduces the value of the notes already in circulation. Hence in the 1960s an ordinary working man could buy a house with a ten-year mortgage; his wife did not need to work. Now, both man and wife must work and commit to a 25 or 30-year mortgage. While we have wondrous new amenities like mobile phones, the internet, big screens and a countless number of TV channels, our actual wealth has fallen.

Neither is the creation of money confined to central banks. Even high street banks routinely create credit in the system known as fractional reserve banking. In this, typically 10% of a bank’s deposits are held in reserve while the other 90% is issued as interest-bearing loans. The 90% loaned will shortly find its way back to a bank, and that bank will itself only keep 10% in reserve. After only six iterations of this, a bank has been able to make loans of five-fold the original deposit. The only way to avoid this circular system is to borrow money from a bank and store it, for example under a mattress. The fractional reserve system relies on the depositors not all asking for their money back at the same time, which is why a bank run is so disastrous: it is not that the money is tied up in property or other illiquid assets, the secret is that the money does not exist at all.

For hundreds of years in Britain usury was forbidden by the Church. The original definition of usury is making money from money, which is what interest is. Money is not a good, it is a measure. But distorting the measure has such great advantages that the temptation to do so is overwhelming. Today usury is rampant and practically every word of importance has had its meaning corrupted. In addition to public debt there are insolvent pension funds and massive private debts such as corporate bonds. Calls, puts and all manner of derivative trades are made in a highly leveraged financial system. Several quadrillion (1015) dollars exist in derivative contracts, much of it apparently on Deutsche Bank’s books.

This situation is unsustainable; while it is possible to conjure fiat currency out of thin air, it is not possible to create wealth out of nothing. Wealth so produced is as notional as the “money” which purchased it. Sooner or later the bill will come due.

In past times the conditions which led to hyper-inflation were limited to one country at a time. France, Germany, the US, Argentina and Zimbabwe have all experienced financial upheaval at one time. In the present day however, the conditions which give rise to hyper-inflation are occurring simultaneously all over the world. Many countries are engaged in a ‘race to the bottom’ as they seek to exploit the advantages of creating currency while it retains some value. For example, the Swiss central bank bought 5% of Apple Corp., which it achieved simply by creating Swiss Francs for that purpose.

Additionally, any significant failure could start a domino effect and cause the entire financial system to crumble. Proponents of sound money are astonished that this unsustainable state of affairs has lasted as long as it has, but there are ‘plunge protection teams’ and all manner of manipulations taking place behind the scenes to keep the financial system limping along. Salient among these is artificially low interest rates. The normal means of arresting an inflationary spiral is to raise interest rates, as Paul Volker did during the Reagan years, but the debts are now so huge that a significant increase in interest rates would lead to mass bankruptcy.

We have been conditioned by a steady diet of Hollywood disaster films to think of collapse as a momentous affair, following a critical event such an asteroid hitting the earth or a volcano erupting. It is certainly true that crisis can occur suddenly, but some events do not feature daring heroics and dramatic adventures for a thrilling ninety-minute cinema showing. A character in a Hemingway novel described going bankrupt in two stages: “Gradually and then suddenly.” Financial collapse is likely to be less of an event than a process, and that process is already underway.

* Scrip describes subscription receipts, provisional or supplementary certificates issued to existing shareholders. On the basis that we are shareholders in our nation’s wealth, the definition stands.

Peter Schiff relates how his father Irwin Schiff (who died in prison as a tax rebel) compared the change from gold-backed banknotes to fiat currency as follows: depositing a coat at a cloakroom desk and receiving a ticket saying ‘IOU One Coat.’ Then later taking the ticket back and the cloakroom clerk scribbles out the ‘IOU’ and hands back the ticket, keeping the coat.

https://www.heretical.com/main.html#directory

German Hyperinflation 1923

 

The true facts of this financial disaster do not appear in any history textbooks today.  Today’s history uses this inflation to twist the truth into its opposite.  It cites the radical devaluation of the German mark as an example of what goes wrong when governments print their own money, rather than borrow it from private cartels run by the banksters.  In reality the exact opposite is the truth as with so much of our accepted historical wisdom today.

The Weimar financial crisis actually began with the impossible reparations payments imposed at the Treaty of Versailles. Hjalmar Schacht (who was never a Nazi Party member and now it appears clear why that was the case), the Rothschild agent who was currency commissioner for the Republic, opposed letting the German government print its own money…

 “The Treaty of Versailles is a model of ingenious measures for the economic destruction of Germany.  Germany could not find any way of holding its head above the water, other than by the inflationary expedient of printing bank notes.”

Schacht echoes the history books’ deception that Weimar inflation was caused when the German government printed its own money; however, in his 1967 book ‘The Magic of Money’, Schacht revealed that it was the privately owned ‘Reichsbank’, not the German government that was injecting new money into the economy. Thus, it was that this Elite-owned and run private bank caused the Weimar hyperinflation.

Like the US Federal Reserve, the Reichsbank was overseen by appointed government officials, but was operated for private gain.  What drove the wartime inflation into hyperinflation was speculation by foreign investors, who sold the German Mark short, betting on its decreasing value.  In the manipulative device known as the ‘short sell’, speculators borrow something they do not own, sell it, and then ‘cover’ by buying it back at the lower price.

Speculation in the German Mark was made possible because the privately owned Reichsbank (not yet under Nazi control) made massive amounts of currency available for borrowing.  This currency, like all first-world currency today, was created with accounting entries in the bank’s books and then this ‘magic’ money was lent at compound interest.  When the Reichsbank could not keep up with the voracious demand for Marks, other private banks were then allowed to also create Marks out of nothing and to lend them at interest.  The result was runaway debt and inflation.

On the 24th June 1922, right-wing fanatics assassinated Walter Rathenau, the moderate German foreign minister.  Rathenau was a charismatic figure and the idea that a popular, wealthy and glamorous government minister could be shot in a law-abiding society shattered the faith of the German people, who needed to believe that the country was in safe hands after the trauma of the previous decade. The wealthier, by now extremely nervous citizens were already taking their money out of banks and investing it into ‘real goods’ such as diamonds, works of art and safe real-estate, with true intrinsic values, unlike currency which the Elite will manipulate up or downwards to suit their own agendas. Eventually, the ordinary German citizens also began to trade their Marks for real commodities.

 The British historian Adam Fergusson noted that pianos were being bought, even by non-musical families.  Sellers held back because the Mark was worth less every day and as prices soared, the amounts of currency demanded became greater and greater and the German Central Bank responded to these demands through the printing of more, increasingly worthless paper.  Yet still the ruling authorities did not acknowledge that there was anything amiss.  A leading financial newspaper at the time, reported that the amounts of money in circulation were not excessively high but nevertheless Dr. Rudolf Havenstein, the president of the Reichsbank (German equivalent to the Federal Reserve / Bank of England) told an economics professor that he needed a new suit but wasn't going to buy one until prices came down.

 Why did the German government not act sooner to halt the inflation?  The problem was partly that it was a shaky, fragile government, especially after the assassination of Rathenau.  The vengeful French sent their army into the Ruhr to enforce their demands for reparations due under the Versailles Treaty and the Germans were powerless to resist due to the virtual disbandment of their armed forces and they feared unemployment far more than inflation.  In 1919, Communists had attempted a coup and severe unemployment may have given the Communists another opportunity to seize power.  The great German industrial combines Krupp, Thyssen, IG Farben and Stinnes welcomed the inflation and survived it well by astute forward planning and possibly foreknowledge of what was to come.  A cheaper Mark, they reasoned, would make German goods cheap and easy to export and they needed the export earnings to buy raw materials abroad.  Inflation kept everyone working.

 And so the printing presses continued producing the ever-decreasing in value Mark and once they began to run, they were impossible to stop.  The price increases became unmanageable.  Menus in cafes could not be revised quickly enough to keep up with the speed of the inflation.  A student at Freiburg University ordered a cup of coffee at a café and the price on the menu was 5,000 Marks per cup.  He had two cups but when the bill arrived, it was for 14,000 Marks.  ‘If you want to save money and you want two cups of coffee, you should order them both at the same time’, he was told by the proprietor.

Things became so bad that people would not even bother to bend down to pick up a one hundred million Mark note carelessly discarded by a passer-by as by that time it had become worth less than the paper upon which it was printed.  There was a famous case of a man walking along a street on a shopping trip to buy bread, carrying his money in a large wicker basket, such was the quantity and bulk of the notes he needed to carry.  Upon unsuccessfully attempting to enter a particularly busy shop, he reasoned that he could quite safely leave most of his money outside in the basket as no-one would bother to risk stealing such a bulky yet paltry amount of money.  He was absolutely correct.  When he returned, he found his money was all still there but someone had stolen his basket!

 The presses of the Reichsbank could not keep up to demand, even though they ran through the night.  Individual cities and states began to issue their own money and Dr. Havenstein, the president of the Reichsbank, did not get his new suit.  A factory worker described payday, which was every day at 11 am: ‘At 11:00 in the morning a siren sounded, and everyone gathered in the factory forecourt, where a five-ton lorry was drawn up loaded to overflowing with paper money.  The chief cashier and his assistants climbed up on top.  They read out names and just threw out bundles of notes.  As soon as you had caught one you made a dash for the nearest shop and bought just anything that was going.’  Teachers, paid at 10 am, brought their money to the playground, where relatives took the bundles and hurried off with them.  Banks closed at 11am as by this time they had invariably run out of cash anyway.

 The flight from currency that had begun with the buying of diamonds, gold, country houses and antiques now extended to minor and almost useless items, bric-a-brac, soap and hairpins to name but a few.  This hitherto law-abiding country crumbled into petty thievery, petrol (gasoline) was siphoned from cars and people bought things they didn't need and used them to barter.  A pair of shoes for a shirt or some crockery for coffee.  Berlin had an unreal atmosphere, prostitutes of both sexes roamed the streets and cocaine was the fashionable drug.  When the 1,000-billion Mark note was first issued in 1923, few bothered to collect the change when they spent it.  By November 1923, with one dollar equal to one trillion Marks, the breakdown was complete and the German economy had become one of barter.  The currency had completely lost its meaning.

 Then, a new president took over the Reichsbank, Horace Greeley Hjalmar Schacht, who came by his first two names because of his father's admiration for an editor of the New York Tribune.  The Rentenmark was not Schacht's idea, but he executed it and as the Reichsbank president, he got the credit for it.  For decades afterward he was able to maintain a reputation for financial wizardry and he became the architect of the financial prosperity brought by the Nazi party.

 Obviously, although the currency was worthless, Germany was still a rich country with mines, farms, factories, and natural resources aplenty.  The backing for the Rentenmark was mortgages on the land and bonds on the factories, but that backing was a fiction; the factories and land could not be turned into cash or used abroad.  Nine zeros were struck from the currency, that is, one Rentenmark was equal to one billion old Marks.  The Germans wanted desperately to believe in the Rentenmark, and so they simply did. 

But although the country slowly began to function almost normally again, the savings of the middle-classes were never restored, nor were the values of hard work and decency that had accompanied the savings.   With the currency went many of the lifetime plans of average, ordinary citizens.  It was the custom for the bride to bring some money to a marriage; so many marriages were called off and many widows dependent on insurance found themselves destitute.  People who had worked for a lifetime and built up a sizeable pension fund, found that their pensions would not even buy a cup of coffee.  Such are the ways that the ordinary citizens of the world are cheated out of the money by these vultures. 

“The cities were still there, the houses not yet bombed and in ruins, but the victims were millions of people.  They had lost their fortunes, their savings; they were dazed and inflation-shocked and did not understand how it had happened to them and who the foe was who had defeated them.  Yet they had lost their self-assurance, their feeling that they themselves could be the masters of their own lives if only they worked hard enough; and lost, too, were the old values of morals, of ethics, of decency.”  Pearl Buck, American author

Thus, according to Schacht himself, the German government did not cause the Weimar hyperinflation.  On the contrary, the government brought hyperinflation under control.  It placed the Reichsbank under strict government regulation and took prompt corrective measures to eliminate foreign speculation.  One of those measures was to eliminate easy access to loans from private banks and eventually Hitler regained Germany’s financial stability through the issuance of Government Treasury Certificates.

Schacht, the Rothschild agent, disapproved of this government fiat money (obviously) and was consequently dismissed as head of the Reichsbank when he refused to issue it.  Nevertheless, he acknowledged in his later memoirs that allowing the government to issue the money it needed did not produce the price inflation predicted by classical economic theory, which states (for obvious reasons) that currency must be borrowed from private cartels.

What really causes hyperinflation is uncontrolled speculation.  When speculation is coupled with debt (owed to private banking cartels) the result is always disaster.  On the other hand, when a government issues currency in carefully measured ways, it causes supply and demand to increase together, leaving prices unaffected.  Hence there is no inflation, no debt, no unemployment, and no need for income taxes.

Naturally this terrifies the bankers, since it eliminates their powers and it also terrifies the Elite, since their control of banking allows them to buy the media, the government and everything else.  Were the nations of the world to revert to Government-only money issuance, then the world financial crisis would be solved overnight, as would much of the ever-increasing poverty and suffering we are currently witnessing.

Significantly, it was in the midst of this financial carnage that further devastated an already prostrate nation, that an unobtrusive, former army corporal was thrust into the spotlight and promoted as a great ‘leader of men’.  The prevailing conditions of the time providing a perfect stage for anyone with any aspirations of greatness and the ability to ‘mesmerise’ his audiences with nationalist, patriotic rhetoric.  And thus the world was introduced to the soon-to-be world public enemy number one, Adolf Hitler…

The Falsification Of HistoryOur Distorted RealityBy

John Hamer

As in Executive Order 11110 kind of daring, more or less

 

(...)

What Causes Inflation?

From a discussion in Hitler’s Table Talks, we have an alternative viewpoint:

Inflation is not caused by increasing the fiduciary circulation. It begins on the day when the purchaser is obliged to pay, for the same goods, a higher sum than that asked the day before. At that point, one must intervene. Even to [finance minister Hjalmar] Schacht, I had to begin by explaining this elementary truth: that the essential cause of the stability of our currency was to be sought for in our concentration camps. The currency remains stable when the speculators are put under lock and key. I also had to make Schacht understand that excess profits must be removed from economic circulation.

Ooh—no more Mr. Nice Guy! (Further into the discussion, the former German chancellor had some choice words about the usual type of clever economists whose shtick is “to pour out ideas in complicated meanderings and to use terms of Sibylline incomprehensibility.” That seems like a fair description of postmodernism, doesn’t it?) Back in the good old days, Germany set up a bureau that regulated prices and wages to prevent a return of the notorious Weimar-era hyperinflation. It’s still in effect, and changes require careful negotiations. The system still works to hold inflation in line, though they’re not giving much credit to the guy who mandated it.

Aside from exorbitant markups and profiteering that Literally Hitler discussed, as well as increases in fuel and raw materials that I discussed, the more conventional viewpoint about inflation is that money itself is subject to the laws of supply and demand. There certainly is something to it. Scarcity is what makes money valuable. The kings of old were well aware of what happens when a country debases its currency. Still, that didn’t stop quite a few of them from coining funny money to cover budget deficits.

If vast quantities of money can be produced out of thin air—quite easy these days—then this reduces the value, creating a strong inflationary pressure. Think of fiat currency as fairy dust that holds value because people believe it has value. Cryptocurrency isn’t the answer; it’s fairy dust too, and a lot more powdery than dollars. These days, it’s quite easy to crank out paper money. (By far, the greater part is numbers in a computer; no need for printing presses to go brrrr, brrrr, brrrr.) Don’t try this at home, kids—when private citizens produce greenbacks on their laser printers, it’s called counterfeiting, and the government hates competition!

No discussion of inflation would be complete without the role of coin-clipping banksters. To make a long story short, fractional reserve banking is when money from depositors is lent out at interest. Banks must retain a certain percent in reserve for the sake of liquidity. (The original 1863 rate was 25%, more recently it was 10%, and now it’s zilch.) Interest rates change over the years, but presently you get chump change from an ordinary savings account, 7% on a new mortgage, 8% on your car note, and 22% on credit card balances—and a lot worse if you have bad credit. I’ll add that the banksters get a piece of the action on transaction fees, yet another coin-clipping trick. (It’s typically 2.87%-4.35% per transaction—surely this adds up to an impressive heap of lettuce!) Lately, costs are passed onto consumers, since businesses no longer may write it off on taxes.

Needless to say, interest payments for plebeians like us is like feeding money into a paper shredder, but the banksters see things entirely differently. What a racket! That’s some nice vigorish from funds that don’t even belong to them! It’s OPM, as they say in the biz—other people’s money. Of course, when an astronomical pile of moolah effectively gets doubled up like this, then this increases the money supply and reduces the value of cash in circulation, and suddenly your greenbacks now buy less. It’s all about the supply and demand, right?

The Top of the Pyramid

In the USA, the prime interest rate is set by the Federal Reserve. Although it sounds like a government institution, it’s really a private banking consortium which usually rakes in tens of billions of vigorish from its own operations. The plan was devised in late 1910 at a meeting on Jekyll Island—a rather portentous name. The attendees deciding America’s economic future in this private shindig were Senator Nelson Aldrich and banksters A. Piatt Andrew, Henry Davison, Arthur Shelton, Frank Vanderlip, and Paul Warburg yes those Warburgs.

In 1913, Congress passed the Federal Reserve Act, effectively delegating to them its authority to “coin money and regulate the value thereof” under Article 1, Section 8, Clause 5 of the Constitution. (This was, of course, right in time for funding the vast military expenditures of America’s century of forever wars—which unfortunately seems about to go into extended overtime.) It would be hard to imagine the voodoo economy without this massive edifice looming in the background.

Reducing the prime interest rate serves as an economic stimulus during the business cycle’s hard times. For one thing, it makes it easier for businesses to borrow money to expand their operations. Consumers will be incentivized a little further to shop ’till they drop on their credit cards, ultimately boosting corporate balance sheets. If inflation gets too high, the Federal Reserve chairman will pop a Viagra and crank up the big dial. To control inflation, higher rates begin to reduce the amount of doubled-up money lent at interest when loans become less affordable. Of course, this produces a massive headache for the public when their credit card rates get even more punishing, housing and car notes get more expensive, and so forth.

As it is, the Federal Reserve system is a blunt tool, but it stabilizes the boom-to-bust business cycle to a certain degree. (I’ll spare you the details about the ripple effects of interest rate changes on the bond markets and private equities.) The disadvantage is that it gives a small group of unelected figures control over an important economic input. Anyone who has metric tons of leverage, and—ahem—a magic crystal ball that predicts what the Fed is about to do, can profit tremendously. That would be quite difficult to prove after the fact, but all that is another discussion entirely.

The Federal Reserve also acts as the government’s big credit card. Unlike you, Congress can raise its own credit limit to whatever it wants. (This is usually accompanied by much heated budgetary debate.) As we’re surely well aware, America’s federal finances are out of balance—very much so. To get things back in balance, one way is to raise taxes. This could be political suicide. After Bush the Elder broke his “Read my lips—no new taxes” pledge after getting backed into a corner economically, it was a major factor that cost him the reelection. After him, Cupcake and her sidekick Chubby Bubba took a lot of heat for “tax and spend” policies. Still, until the Second Wargasm, the budget was balanced and the national debt millstone was starting to get chipped down for the first time since the Spanish-American War.

The other way to take on the deficit is to cut programs; this too is often greatly unpopular. For one example, military expenditures make up a very large chunk of the budget. This will continue so long as America is getting into wars for our Israeli buddies and otherwise playing Globocop. Then there are lots of big-ticket entitlement programs. (Work harder—tens of millions of slackers are counting on you!) Social Security is another very large chunk of the budget, and nobody wants to short-sheet Grandma, especially after she paid into the system for many years. While it was making a profit, the surplus was gobbled up by the federal budget since the LBJ administration, if I recall correctly. It worked when the large Baby Boomer population was in the workforce, but the figures started slipping after they began retiring. Then the party was over in 2021, when Social Security payments started exceeding intake from taxes. By 2033, the Social Security reserves will be depleted, and unless something changes before then, Grandma is due to take a 20% haircut—and you too, if you’re as ancient as I am.

No matter what the clever economists say, and of course the sneaky globalists, the answer does not involve mass migration to pump up revenue. Spain found out the hard way that the “pension payers” the government imported, promising an economic miracle, were an overall drain on the national budget, as well as more trouble than they’re worth. One study in Germany following about a million of Mama Merkel’s Syrian refugees (most of which were neither) found that only eleven of them got jobs, including just one in the private sector. The welfare tourists haven’t gone home yet, of course. In fact, there’s not a single country that benefited from admitting hordes of cardiovascular surgeons, quantum physicists, and aerospace engineers floating across the Mediterranean on rubber dinghies. Japan’s government at last began letting in migrants in the effort to prop up the economy to support their aging population. (They’re not pulling their own weight, of course, and are otherwise up to their usual cultural enrichment. Although I’m not the least bit Asian, I certainly hate to see their nice country taking the path to ruin.) The USA added close to 100 million non-whites to the population since 1965; yet another 100 million won’t produce better results.

American politicians, being the creatures they are, instead make up the budget deficit by hitting the Federal Reserve credit card. Rather than making hard and politically risky decisions, politicians punt the ball to future generations. The Federal Reserve facilitates the production of treasury bills. Effectively these are bonds which eventually have to be paid back with interest. The Clintonian “tax and spend” policies became “borrow and spend” under Bush the Younger. Thanks to improvident politicians—who all too often can’t handle their own finances, as the Congressional check kiting scandal of long ago demonstrated—this has created a yawning chasm of T-bills which will come due. At the time of writing, the American national debt adds up to $38.7 trillion and change. Now that’s a lot of lettuce!

The Effects of Runaway Spending

What happens from lending out such an astronomical amount to prop up the budget, effectively creating money out of thin air? The end result, of course, is quite similar to what happened when kings started substituting silver-plated copper coins for the real thing. This effectively creates a hidden inflation tax, picking the public’s pockets. Could a future government default on the debt? Technically, it’s possible, but the economic ripple effects would be tremendous. Just for beginners, it would blow up lots of stable mutual funds, gutting retirement accounts. As for trying to borrow more sovereign debt after that, we’d be in the same position as Greece in 2009, forced to accept loans at exorbitant rates to float their sinking ship of state. There would be much more to the economic apocalypse after that.
Now open your Form 1040 instructions, and on the page before the index, you’ll see some helpful pie charts telling you where it all goes. In FY 2025, 13% went into net interest on the debt. Then after that:

In fiscal year 2024 (which began on October 1, 2023, and ended on September 30, 2024, federal income was $4.920 trillion and outlays were $6.751 trillion, leaving a deficit of $1.831 trillion.

The astronomical numbers involved can seem rather unfathomable. Everyone knows a million is a pretty nice chunk of change, but eyes often glaze over when zillions are reckoned. So let’s move the decimal point seven places to the left and put this in terms of a household budget. Your annual income as of October 2024 was $492K—hey, congratulations, rich guy! Before you go shopping for another Lamborghini, note that you spent $183K more than you earned then. You fed $88K of interest into the paper shredder, despite having the very best rate in the country. As of today, your credit card balance is $3.87 million. Perhaps you’ve got a cash flow problem there, rich guy!

Now Riddle Me This

Why can’t the government write mortgages with reasonable terms for carefully selected buyers as an alternative track for bank financing? It already guarantees loans. Instead of just assuming risk with no reward, the government could be making profits that would help the federal balance sheet without raising taxes, cutting spending, or stiffing Grandma. I understand that Italy began such a program intending to boost their steeply declining native fertility rate by making housing affordable for young couples. It’ll be interesting to see where it goes.

Now I’ll get more daring—as in Executive Order 11110 kind of daring, more or less. We haven’t been on the gold standard since I was a kid, and it was effectively a dead letter long before then. Therefore, there’s no need to borrow from massive banks with a dragon’s hoard of bullion in their vaults. Why can’t Congress just float its own bonds under its legitimate Constitutional authority instead of going through the Federal Reserve? Heck if I know. I’m not a Klugscheißer economist; I’m just a dumb blond from Flyover Country.

Beau Albrecht
From: Inflation and Other Dysfunctions of the Voodoo Economy

https://counter-currents.com/

Banking System is Responsible for Our Enslavement

 

We already have a digital currency. “Money” is just digits on a ledger kept by the Rothschilds.

Occasionally they will produce coupons i.e. currency, to make it all seem real.

Chinese-style social credit is planned. They will control us by controlling our money.

The covid scam and deadly “vaccines” have told us that politicians and cops don’t work for us, but for the central banking cartel that wishes to lock down humanity permanently.

The same applies to the mass media and most professions. Everyone dances to the money tune, and Rothschild is the Pied Piper.

BLOOD POISONING

We suffer from blood poisoning. “Money” is the blood supply of society. This “medium of exchange” circulates like blood in a human body. With it, everyone is sanguine; without it, you have a corpse.

Unfortunately, our feckless ancestors gave control over the money supply to Cabalist Jews and Freemasons who find excuses (wars, scamdemics) to produce it in the form of a debt to themselves.

They profit at both ends. They charge interest on debt they create out of thin air; and their shares in “defence” and pharmaceutical corporations also increase, due to the phoney wars and pandemics they start.

Their goal is to expand their monopoly over money creation into a monopoly over literally everything, (e.g. thought, “wokeness”) inducting humanity into their satanist sex-and-death cult. They weaponized the common cold as a pretext to decimate and enslave humanity.

MONEY IS A MIND GAME

In March 2022, a half dozen US regional banks went bankrupt losing $500 billion in deposits.

It’s all black magic. Money is just digits on a ledger kept by the Rothschilds.

Did these depositors lose their money? No. The Fed just created another $500 billion out of thin air. These Satanists finagled the US national credit card and are maxing it out until the USD collapses.

In the last few years, banks have become increasingly active in pushing the globalist agenda. For example, my bank is all for “diversity” — homosexuality and migration. (It’s rare to find a white male teller at a Canadian bank who is not a homosexual.)

Similarly, most corporations sing from the same globalist hymn book.

Banks are all franchises of the Rothschild world central banking system, much like some MacDonald’s stores are independently owned. But banks all depend on the central bank for “money.” That’s why banks and the corporations dependent on them promote bizarre agendas like gender dysfunction, family breakdown, gun control, sodomy, miscegenation and minority status for Caucasians.

WHAT DOES ‘MONEY? LOOK LIKE? (When it’s not currency)

When I write a cheque to the gas company, an armored car does not pull up to my bank, collect the cash from my account and deliver it to the gas company’s bank. All that REALLY happens is some digits change at the two banks.

My bank account is not a little letterbox with cash sitting in it. My account is just a number in their books signifying what they owe me should, God forbid, I decide to withdraw the cash.

When we use our credit cards or when we buy a stock, the only thing that happens is that accounts are adjusted.

We are really banking with the Rothschilds. Our little nest egg is actually their magical “credit,” a slice of the national “debt” owed to them, “money” which they created from nothing and “loaned” to the government. It is a reflection of the government’s ability to repay, although it never will.

The banking system is a vast system of accounts. Money doesn’t actually exist except for a small amount in paper coupons (currency). “Money” is an abstract concept denoting value.

MEDIUM OF EXCHANGE

Money is a medium of exchange. Think of it as electrical current instead of currency. It is basically a virtual credit system that is the lifeblood of every economy.

Who owns this franchise? This system of accounts? Who adds or subtracts credit?

Who decides who gets to play?

A syndicate of mostly cabalist (Masonic) Jewish banking families led by the Rothschilds.

Unfortunately, these Cabalists are Satanists. They are determined to protect and extend this banking monopoly to a monopoly over everything — real wealth, political power, knowledge, media, education, culture, religion, law etc.

They want to own us and our children as well. (We are collateral on the national debt.) This is the essence of Communism and New World Order which is largely in place. The goal is to gradually enslave humanity. When they finally get rid of cash, they can cut off our “credit” at a moment’s notice.

How do they maintain control? They control the corporate cartels who are all dependent on banks. These corporations fund the politicians who follow bankers’ orders.

Many of these politicians are Freemasons. Organized Jewry and Freemasonry are accomplices in the banking racket. In general, complicity in the banking fraud is the price of success today.

Why is it a fraud? Because sovereign governments could “generate their own electricity” interest-and-debt-free. We wouldn’t need to sell our soul and our children’s Birthright.

THE DEEP STATE

The “Deep State” is the secret network dedicated to protecting the fraudulent banking system and advancing its satanic agenda. Most of the players belong to Freemasonry or Organized Jewry. Intelligence agencies like the CIA, Mossad, and MI-6, the police and the army are the bankers’ enforcers. Mass surveillance (the NSA etc.) ensures that nobody gets any ideas.

Mankind is doomed unless the central bank is nationalized, “debt” is disowned and money is created debt-and-interest free.

It’s a question of whether mankind will be dedicated to making satanist trillionaires even richer, or lifting everybody up to where they can begin to fulfill their Divine potential.

ILLUMINATI 4 Genocide & War

Henry Makow Ph.D

All they have had is the power to print money. The rest, they have usurped from humanity

Curtis Lemay famously said:

There are no innocent civilians. It is their government and you are fighting a people, you are not trying to fight an armed force anymore. So it doesn’t bother me much to be killing the so-called innocent bystanders.

As a human being, should this not concern you? What part of the organized slaughter of vast numbers of innocent people can you find acceptable? Do you believe that you are special in some way, that you were being protected, or that you will be protected now?

There has been abundant evidence of great evil at work in the world, throughout time and in our present time. Do you really wish to be ignorant of its existence and operation?

There is an interconnectedness of all things. If you don’t care about the obvious lies, the deaths of innocent children, the fire-bombings of cities, the suppression of dissent, the propaganda, the escalating terrorism, in which, quite strangely, innocent people are always and everywhere the target, sooner or later it is coming for you, or your children, or your grandchildren. If you know and you’re not doing anything about it, or saying anything about it, it’s time.

It’s time to start connecting the dots, because they lead to you.

If you are wealthy, you might assume that, because the system has allowed them to accumulate wealth, they will be protected in some way, that they are special. You are special. They’re saving you for dessert.

You have been allowed to chase profits while the wellbeing and re-silience of your people have been broadly and systematically eliminated.

There are monsters under the stairs eating people alive. But you don’t want to look under the stairs, because you want to keep using the stairs.

To not know is bad. To not want to know is worse.

Willful ignorance of the existence and operation of evil is a luxury even the wealthy can no longer afgord.

We are in the grip of the greatest evil humanity has ever faced (or refused to acknowledge, as the case may be). Hybrid war is unlimited.

It has no bounds. It is global, and it is inside your head. It is never-ending.

Nothing focuses the mind like an imminent hanging, or as Samuel Johnson originally said, “Depend upon it sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.”

Hybrid war can be stopped. Stopping it begins in your mind.

During the Great War, Edward L. Bernays had worked with the Committee on Public Information to “sell” the war to the public. In 1928, he published his book Propaganda [53], in which we can read this statement on the subject:

Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.

The systematic psychological manipulation of society, begun with the evils of the Great War, has continued non-stop and has escalated to the point that we are now subject to full spectrum, continuous psychological operations.

Eighty-one years after the publication of Bernays’ book, Chris Hedges wrote the following [54, p. 51]:

A public that can no longer distinguish between truth and fiction is left to interpret reality through illusion. Random facts or obscure bits of data and trivia are used either to bolster illusion and give it credibility, or discarded if they interfere with the message . . .

When opinions cannot be distinguished from facts, when there is no universal standard to determine truth in law, in science, in scholarship, or in reporting the events of the day, when the most valued skill is the ability to entertain, the world becomes a place where lies become true, where people can believe what they want to believe. This is the real danger of pseudo-events and pseudo-events are far more pernicious than stereotypes. They do not explain reality, as stereotypes attempt to, but replace reality. Pseudo-events redefine reality by the parameters set by their creators. These creators, who make massive profits selling illusions, have a vested interest in maintaining the power structures they control.

The people behind the wars have never been investigated and removed from power. They have continued in control of all central banks, and money creation, and have extended their control globally.

Certainly many who have abetted this are ignorant of the greater design.

But the people behind the wars are, quite literally, lying, thieving killers, and they know it. To say that there is much evidence of this is an understatement. Perhaps they have not killed innocent men, women and children with their own hands, but they have deliberately caused these deaths. That this is done with intent can be known through the persistence of their planning and actions over many decades. While the scale and audacity of this criminality seems unimaginable to us, nothing is unimaginable to them. Their criminality has now reached unprecedented and ultimate scale, as its aim is the subjugation of the entire globe and of all people.

Wars have always been not so much about taking things as about subjugation of populations on all sides. Vast destruction and death are acceptable to their planners. You might ask, how could the people plotting and executing such insane schemes be held together? I suggest that it has something to do with the binding power of shared guilt, of the criminal pact. The perpetrators are each and all are bound, whether explicitly or unconsciously, by evidence of shameful, treasonous acts committed against their own people. The commission of crime is a power totem among them. The more heinous the crime, the more powerful is the binding force.

In the past few years, you have been living within an escalating hybrid war. Globally, we have witnessed overt media control and propaganda campaigns; censorship, including arrests of people speaking in public; monitoring of all electronic communications and physical contact tracing; brutally enforced lock-down and masking requirements, with people being beaten, handcuffed and arrested, even in their homes; suspension of healthcare services and weakening of healthcare systems; invasive testing requirements for employment and travel; forced quarantine of travelers; and coerced quarantine and “vaccination” of the healthy general population.

Governments dropped all pretense of democracy and were emboldened to practice open despotism. There were no functioning checks on this power. The courts provided no effective recourse to the public.

Governments broadly abused fundamental human rights, using as justification the need to prevent the spread of infectious diseases, which are, in truth, a great many, ever-present, and continually evolving. And so, this justifocation, if allowed to stand, affirms the end of democracy and the continuation of openly despotic government.

Are you able to contemplate that this may have been about more than a virus?

We have witnessed designs and real attempts to exert physical control over every person’s body, globally, and this is continuing [55]. Why is this happening?

I will make a startling assertion. This is not because the power to control is increasing. It is because this power is indeed collapsing. The “control system” has entered collapse.

Their power has been based on deception. Their two great powers of deception, money and media, have been extremely energy-efficient means of control. But these powers are now in rampant collapse. This is why they have moved urgently to institute physical control measures. However, physical control is difficult, dangerous and energy-intensive.

And so, they are risking all. They are risking being seen. Is this not a sign of desperation?
Where will they hide when they have all of the assets, when they have damaged all of humanity, and caused billions to awaken through suffering?

They promote the belief that they are all-powerful. They are not. All they have had is the power to print money. The rest, they have usurped from humanity.

Never before has a system benefitted so few at the great expense of so many. Is this not inherently unstable and unsustainable? Physical control, as opposed to rule by deception, requires enormous energy.

Can this be sustained while destroying all economies, and abusing all people, globally? They do not know how to “build back better.” Look at their footprint around the world—the destruction, the economic devastation. When it comes to the real world, they are exceptionally good at just one thing: fucking things up. Then they declare victory, and fix blame on others for the horrific damage done.

(...)

All organizations promoting war are criminal organizations. The people behind them are mass murderers. The men and women orchestrating chaos in country after country are criminals of the worst kind. The people following orders are not heroes; they are criminals.

The people controlling this system are quite obviously not benevolent.

They are not noble. They are not elite. They are insane!

They are the antithesis of everything we could value, admire, and love.

These people do not represent human development, or the future of humanity. They are lacking in essential human qualities. They are aberrant. Antipathy for humanity is aberrant. For 99.99% of human history, sociopaths like these would not have survived the next winter.

Their nature was seen and they were ostracized from the village, to save the village.

They operate today through anonymity enabled by inhuman scale of social organization. Even so, this will not allow them to continue indefinitely. We have entered a time in which their nature is being recognized. Knowledge of their existence has become unavoidable.

Their grasping will come to an end, because all of humanity cannot allow it to continue. Once it is recognized, humans will bond against a common existential threat. People from all walks of life will join in common cause. We have witnessed this already.

Their power structure can and must be dismantled non-violently. The “masterminds” will not yet be known. However, the individuals and organizations near the levers of power (monetary, media, government, “healthcare”, military, police, legal, corporate), operating with criminal intent toward the mass of humanity, can be identified. The allegiances of these functionaries are unstable, driven by narrow self-interest.

By directly and personally putting these people on notice that their actions are being documented, and subject to criminal prosecution, they may be impelled to decline further involvement. This process can be accelerated. It is not necessary to wake up the majority! We are not fighting the 1%, but the 0.01%. Even without mobilizing the majority, it is entirely possible to realize an enormous advantage of intelligent, capable, activated people.

If the people behind this Great Taking persist in their insane schemes, they will inevitably be found. It will be quite simple to follow the collateral to those who have arranged to take it. Perhaps they aren’t such masterminds after all!

We will come to know who is behind this hybrid war against humanity.

We will come to know who controls the Bank for International Settlements, the Federal Reserve System, and all central banks globally, and hence all political parties, governments, media, and armed forces.

We will come to know who controls the CIA.

And we will finally know who has been behind the assassinations.

Let me close with John F. Kennedy’s own words:

Our problems are man-made;
therefore, they can be solved by man.

***
Supreme excellence consists of breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting.
Sun Tzu

What is this book about? It is about the taking of collateral, all of it, the end game of this globally synchronous debt accumulation super cycle.

This is being executed by long-planned, intelligent design, the audacity and scope of which is dificult for the mind to encompass. Included are all financial assets, all money on deposit at banks, all stocks and bonds, and hence, all underlying property of all public corporations, including all inventories, plant and equipment, land, mineral deposits, inventions and intellectual property. Privately owned personal and real property financed with any amount of debt will be similarly taken, as will the assets of privately owned businesses, which have been financed with debt. If even partially successful, this will be the greatest conquest and subjugation in world history.
We are now living within a hybrid war conducted almost entirely by deception, and thus designed to achieve war aims with little energy input. It is a war of conquest directed not against other nation states but against all of humanity.

Private, closely held control of all central banks, and hence of all money creation, has allowed a very few people to control all political parties, governments, the intelligence agencies and their myriad front organizations, the armed forces, the police, the major corporations, and of course, the media. These very few people are the prime movers.

Their plans are executed over decades. Their control is opaque. When George Soros said to me, “You don’t know what they can do,” it was these people to whom he referred. Now, to be absolutely clear, it is these very few people, who are hidden from you, who are behind this war against humanity. You may never know who they are. The people you are allowed to see are hired “face men” and “face women.” They are expendable.

One might seek comfort in thinking that this must be crazy; nothing like this has ever happened before . . . but it has. The precedent for the intent, design and horrific execution of such a plan can be found by examining the early 20thcentury, the period of the great wars and the Great Depression. The proclaimed “Great Reset” now in progress, however, includes major innovations, which will allow unprecedented concentration of wealth and of power over humanity through deprivation. How might it come to pass that you will own nothing, as so boldly predicted by the World Economic Forum? It certainly is not about the personal convenience of renting.

With the collapse of each financial bubble and the ensuing financial crisis, a story is rolled out which should by now be familiar to you. It goes like this: All of us are at fault. We just wanted too much, and we were living beyond our means. And now, our collective greed has caused this terrible global crisis. The “Authorities”, the “Regulators” had struggled mightily to protect us from our own “animal spirits”, their great and elaborate efforts having been demonstrated through decades of work. Despite their good intentions, however, they failed, and can’t be blamed (or prosecuted) for that. After all, we are all to blame. In any case, let’s look forward. The financial system must be restarted, so that we can provide credit to you again, create jobs and get the economy growing, whatever it takes! 

This time, what it will take is all of your property, or what you thought was your property. Here is your Central Bank Digital Currency deposited on your smart phone, so that you can buy milk. Noblesse Oblige!

Money is an extremely efficient control system. People order themselves upon money incentives, and thus diffcult, dangerous and energy intensive overt physical control need not be employed broadly. But the money control system breaks down at the end of a monetary “super cycle”, with collapse in the Velocity of Money (Velocity, or VOM). This is a multi-decade process.

Velocity is the number of times that a unit of currency is spent to buy goods and services in a period of time. This is measured by comparing the value of all goods and services produced in a period of time (Gross 3 I. Introduction Domestic Product, or GDP), with the value of all cash and deposits which can be used nearly as easily as cash (Money Supply).

Velocity = GDP Money Supply Thus,Velocity × Money Supply = GDP. Lower Velocity results in lower GDP.

Milton Friedman was an economist noted for the study of monetary history. In his book A Monetary history of the United States, 1867-1960 [1], co-authored with Anna Schwartz, we find the following observation:

[W]e know enough to demonstrate rather conclusively that . . .velocity [of money] must have declined sharply from 1880 to World War I . . .

Collapse in VOM is exactly what was unfolding from the 19thcentury and leading up to the Great War. Within a few years, the Russian, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman empires ceased to exist, as did the Qing Dynasty. The German economy was destroyed. Then followed the Great Depression, the Second World War, and the slow collapse of the British Empire. No populations were unscathed. There were no winners.

Or were there?
***

My Aunt Elizabeth had been ten years old when the banks were closed by executive order in 1933 [30]. When I asked her to tell me about the Great Depression, she said that suddenly no one had any money, that even wealthy families had no money and had to take their daughters out of private school because they could not pay the tuition.

I wondered why even these wealthy families could not send their children back to their schools after the banks were reopened.

The answer is that only the Federal Reserve Banks and banks selected by the Federal Reserve were allowed to reopen.

“The Federal Reserve Banks,” writes Allan Meltzer, “sent the Treasury lists of banks recommended for reopening, and the Treasury licensed those it approved.” Meltzer’s study A History of the Federal Reserve [31] is considered the most comprehensive history of the central bank.

People with money in banks that were not allowed to reopen lost all of it. Their debts were not canceled, however; these were taken over by the banks selected by the Federal Reserve System. If these people could not make their debt payments—which was now likely, since they had lost their cash—they lost everything they had financed with any amount of debt, e.g., their house, their car, and their business.

Thousands of banks were never allowed to reopen. The grand facades of former bank buildings could be seen around Cleveland. There was such devastation of banks that a neighborhood Catholic church was built with massive stone columns salvaged from a bank building which had been demolished.

The Cleveland Trust Co. had grown through acquisition to become, by 1924, the sixth largest bank in the United States. As noted by The Case Western Reserve University Encyclopedia of Cleveland History [32], “the bank survived the Depression well.” How was that possible?

It was selected by the Federal Reserve to consolidate debts. I had a finance professor who told the class that Cleveland Trust had run a systematic process of foreclosing upon and evicting many thousands of families from their homes in the greater Cleveland area. After these families were evicted from their homes, and their equity wiped out, they were offered the possibility of moving back into their former homes as renters, the advantage to Cleveland Trust being that these families would pay to keep the houses heated until they could be sold.

Cleveland Trust did “well.” How did my finance professor know about this? His family was one of those many thousands of families whose home mortgage had been taken over by Cleveland Trust.

Contrast this with the cheery image conveyed by William L. Silber, who was a member of the Economic Advisory Panel of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. In his article Why Did FDR’s Bank Holiday Succeed?

[33], Silver writes:

Much to everyone’s relief, when the institutions reopened for business on March 13, depositors stood in line to return their hoarded cash to neighborhood banks. Within two weeks, Americans had re-deposited more than half of the currency that they had squirreled away before the suspension. The market registered its approval as well. On March 15, 1933, the first day of trading after the extended closure, the New York Stock Exchange recorded the largest one-day price increase ever. With the benefit of hindsight, the nationwide Bank Holiday in March 1933 ended the bank runs that had plagued the Great Depression . . . Contemporary observers consider the Bank Holiday and the Fireside Chat the one-two punch that broke the back of the Great Depression . . . the speed with which the Bank Holiday Act reestablished the integrity of the payments system demonstrates the power of credible regime-shifting policies.

The Emergency Banking Act of 1933, had been passed by Congress on March 9, 1933, three days after FDR declared the bank holiday, with only a single copy available on the floor of the House of Representatives, and with copies being made available to senators as the bill was being proposed in the senate, after it had passed the house [34].

Was it successful? We are led to believe that the Bank Holiday was a brilliant scheme. Well it was—for some. It was enormously successful for those banking interests who took the assets and consolidated their power. It certainly demonstrated the power of “regime-shifting policies.”

We will see that it was not just about taking peoples homes and other stuff. As to ending the panic, perhaps that is not so difficult to do when you have fomented the panic.

In the Wikipedia article The Great Depression [35] we find the following illumination of the Fed’s odd behavior in the years leading up to the bank holiday:

The Monetarist explanation was given by American economists Milton Friedman and Anna J. Schwartz. They argued that the Great Depression was caused by the banking crisis that caused one-third of all banks to vanish, a reduction of bank shareholder wealth and more importantly monetary contraction of 35%, which they called “The Great Contraction.” By not lowering interest rates, by not lowering rates and by not injecting liquidity into the banking system to prevent it from crumbling, the Federal Reserve passively watched the transformation of a normal recession into the Great Depression.

The Federal Reserve allowed some large public bank failures— particularly that of the New York Bank of United States [in Decem-ber, 1930]—which produced panic and widespread runs on local banks, and the Federal Reserve sat idly by while banks collapsed.

Friedman and Schwartz argued that, if the Fed had provided emergency lending to these key banks, or simply bought government bonds on the open market to provide liquidity and increase the quantity of money after the key banks fell, all the rest of the banks would not have fallen after the large ones did, and the money supply would not have fallen as far and as fast as it did.

This view was endorsed in 2002 by Federal Reserve Governor Ben Bernanke in a speech honoring Friedman and Schwartz with this statement [36]:

Let me end my talk by abusing slightly my status as an of f i cial representative of the Federal Reserve. I would like to say to Milton and Anna: Regarding the Great Depression, you’re right. We did it.

We’re very sorry. But thanks to you, we won’t do it again.

As this is “ancient history”, it was safe for Bernanke to make such an admission. But more to the point, it would allow him to posture as the wise man who had studied the “mistakes” of the Federal Reserve, and then to justify the Fed’s extraordinary measures to follow in the Global Financial Crisis. Is the Fed indeed “very sorry”? Can one believe the promise that “we won’t do it again”? They have studied the lessons of the past in detail; however, their purpose has been to prepare a new and improved global version for the spectacular end of this debt expansion super-cycle. That’s what this book is about.

Contrary to the image of success, which has been handed down to us, the Bank Holiday did not end the Great Depression. There was no recovery which might have allowed people to service their debts and keep their property. Why was that? 

“Inexplicably”, the Federal Reserve kept conditions tight [37]:

According to literature on the subject, the possible causes . . . were a contraction in the money supply caused by Federal Reserve and Treasury Department policies and contractionary fiscal policies.

If that was a comprehensive program to assure there would be no recovery, it worked quite well. Conditions remained broadly stressful for years, and they kept price levels down, so that people had no opportunity to sell assets for paying off debts. I know from family letters that, despite having no debts, times were quite tough. Grandma Webb wrote to her son (who was in a youth athletic program on an army base) about Grandpa Webb having been out trying to get any work for Webb Equipment. That was in 1936.

Contrary to the image of FDR as a savior, the people in my family who lived through the 30s considered FDR to be something like Satan himself, and they were not religious people.
Here is an interesting quote from Silber [33]:

The Emergency Banking Act of 1933, passed by Congress on March 9—combined with the Federal Reserve’s commitment to supply VIII. Bank Holiday 46 unlimited amounts of currency to reopened banks—created de facto 100 percent deposit insurance.

So according to William L. Silber, who was an economic advisor to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the Fed miraculously and suddenly in March of 1933 had the means “to supply unlimited amounts of currency to reopened banks”, which were, of course, only the banks selected by the Federal Reserve System. Clearly, the Fed had had the means all along to avoid the failure of those thousands of banks. A panic can be fomented easily when you run the system. They made it happen. They planned it, and then brought their solution after they got their regime-shifting policies in place.

The Federal Reserve System and the banks selected by the Fed were prepared to take things from people on a vast scale: their homes, their cars, and even their new electric appliances, which had been sold to them with the innovation of consumer credit. Did “the bankers” need to take this property? What was the real purpose? Can you get past the idea that they were trying to help? Even if we can, we are always led to think about this in a small way—that it is always about a natural human greed for money and for material things. It was not then, and it is not now.

Ask yourself: if they don’t want your money, and they don’t really want or need your stuff , and they’re not trying to help you, what do they want? What’s the point of all of their efforts?

This may be difficult to hear: It was deliberate strategy. It was about ultimate, complete power, allowing no centers of resistance. And so, it was about deprivation. It was about subjugation—and it still is, in more ways than we know.

It was not about helping people then, and it’s not about helping people now. It is all part of the same deliberate herding of humanity and elimination of any pockets of resilience, which plagues us still.

While Cleveland is now a crumbling city, it was a center of incredible prosperity in the 1920s. The Federal Reserve Bank building in Cleveland was completed in 1923, less than ten years after the signing of the Federal Reserve Act. The bank vault is the largest in the world, and it incorporates the largest hinge ever built. It seems they were preparing to put a lot of stuff in there, and for the possibility that there might be some stress about that. Perhaps it was not to be filled with refrigerators, washing machines, and toasters. There are machine gun turrets above the sidewalk on the street level.

There was a larger objective.

The preparatory work had been laid when the Federal Reserve System was secretly planned, and with the passage of the Federal Reserve Act in the quiet before Christmas, 1913. The Federal Reserve Act set up an inevitable logic that the Fed must take the gold of the public in a sufficiently major crisis, with the justification that credit could not be expanded otherwise.

This is exactly what is now set up to happen with all securities owned by the public, globally.
Here is an important excerpt from the Wikipedia article on Executive Order 6102 [38] :

The stated reason for the order was that hard times had caused ‘hoarding’ of gold.

However,

the main rationale behind the order was actually to remove the constraint on the Federal Reserve preventing it from increasing the money supply during the depression. The Federal Reserve Act (1913) required 40% gold backing of Federal Reserve Notes that were issued. By the late 1920s, the Federal Reserve had almost reached the limit of allowable credit, in the form of Federal Reserve demand notes, which could be backed by gold in its possession.

The executive order to confiscate all gold owned by the public was made under the authority of the Trading with the Enemy Act of 1917, which had been enacted four years after the creation of the Federal Reserve. The act had been used to confiscate the property of interned natives of Germany, and more. This is described by Daniel A. Gross in his article The U.S. Confiscated Half a Billion Dollars in Private Property During WWI [39], whose subtitle reads: “America’s home front was the site of interment, deportation, and vast property seizure.”

Apparently all the U.S. public was now the enemy. Think about this.

People who were simply protecting themselves and their families from the actions of the Federal Reserve System were accused of hoarding gold, and literally criminalized if they persisted in doing so. The rationale is incredible: You are hoarding gold, so we will take it and do what with it? Hoard it! As we have seen, once they had taken the gold of the public, they did not then use the resource to expand credit. People remained in a debt trap. The deprivation continued and even worsened. Clearly, the need to expand credit served only as a pretext for the confiscation of the public’s gold, which was the real premeditated objective.

I asked my father why people had turned in their gold. He said that if you did not you were a criminal, but further, that there was nothing you would be able to do with it because you could not legally transport or sell it. So, essentially, the use and value of gold had been confiscated.

This was certainly the case because it remained illegal for a U.S. person to own gold for more than forty years!

Here are some excerpts from Executive Order 6102 [40]:

All persons are hereby required to deliver on or before May 1, 1933, to a Federal Reserve Bank or branch or agency thereof or to any member bank of the Federal Reserve System all gold coin, gold bullion and gold certificates now owned by them or coming into their ownership . . .
Whoever willfully violates any provision of this Executive Order . . .may be fined not more than $10,000, or, if a natural person, may be imprisoned for not more than ten years, or both . . .

Note that the penalties were quite severe, and that all the gold was literally to be turned over to the Federal Reserve System. How nice!

Now we can see the purpose of constructing, in 1923, the largest bank vault in the world and a fortified building!

Perhaps gold will not be confiscated immediately this time around.

Gold has not been targeted as the essential collateral backing as was the case under the Federal Reserve Act. In this go-round it is securities of all kinds, globally, which have been set-up as the collateral backing underpinning the derivatives complex.

The big banks are organized as holding companies with subsidiaries.

The purpose of this structure is to legally separate risks. A subsidiary can be designed to take on liabilities, which cannot attach to assets in other subsidiaries or to the holding company. The weakened subsidiary can be separately bankrupted. (...)

David Rogers Webb
https://thegreattaking.com/