[simple economic solution] easy enough for a child to understand

American family

Why aren't the economists proposing this?

I've transcribed the concluding remarks from the film The Money Masters, narrated by Bill Still and they appear from the section "The power to change things" onwards. It’s interesting that William Still's Wikipedia page was deleted from Wikipedia on February 12th, 2008, citing “notability” concerns, i.e. that he was not famous enough any longer for a Wiki page.

The film describes the American situation in the 19th and 20th centuries but the experiences and lessons are applicable worldwide, certainly to Britain and Europe.

Background

For much of the 19th century, there was a quite open conflict between the international finance [the heirs of Alexander Hamilton] and the people, as represented by the presidents and press. The battle reached its peak in the time of Andrew Jackson when the bankers quite openly admitted that they had the power to shut down the country and that the Government did not have the power to stop them.

Biddle's remarks confirm this. He went on to greater fame:

“This worthy President thinks that because he has scalped Indians and imprisoned Judges, he is to have his way with the Bank,” Biddle wrote to a federal judge in February 1834. By the fall of that year, Biddle was so reviled for his nationwide curtailment of credit that he was hunted by mobs in Philadelphia, forcing him to bar the doors of his house and post armed guards.

This is in stark contrast to today when bankers are at pains to suggest that they have no powers, that they are just as swayed by naturally occurring business cycles as the average consumer and that they do the best they can [wiping away a tear] to keep everything stable for the good of the people.

This is such a palpable untruth, as there is a wealth of evidence that they have used their combined power since the inception of the United States, especially in periods when a central bank has been in place, to contract money and expand it at will.

In the post Civil War years, when the bankers once again reasserted themselves, the issues were Lincoln's greenbacks and the fight between gold and silver standards. The people still hankered over the greenbacks because they were debt-free but Lincoln had had to concede the power back to the bankers to finance the last part of the war and so the advantage had been lost and yet the bankers still didn't have what they wanted - their rechartered central bank and complete power over the issuing of money and the controlling of credit.

So they contracted money, with a view to creating a new melting pot from which they could recharter the central bank and this is how the availability of money in the economy changed:


It all altered one day in 1913:

The Congressmen prepared to leave Washington for the annual Christmas recess, assured that the Conference bill would not be brought up until the following year. Now the money creators prepared and executed the most brilliant stroke of their plan. In a single day, they ironed out all forty of the disputed passages in the bill and quickly brought it to a vote. On Monday, December 22, 1913, the bill was passed by the House 282-60 and the Senate 43-23.

The Times buried a brief quote from Congressman Lindbergh that "the bill would establish the most gigantic trust on earth," and quoted Representative Guernsey of Maine, a Republican on the House Banking and Currency Committee, that "This is an inflation bill, the only question being the extent of the inflation."

Congressman Lindbergh spoke to the House:

"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 trusts will soon realize that they have gone too far even for their own good.

The people must make a declaration of independence to relieve themselves from the Monetary Power. This they will be able to do by taking control of Congress. Wall Streeters could not cheat us if you Senators and Representatives did not make a humbug of Congress. . . . If we had a people's Congress, there would be stability.

The greatest crime of Congress is its currency system. The worst legislative crime of the ages is perpetrated by this banking bill. The caucus and the party bosses have again operated and prevented the people from getting the benefit of their own government."

Here are some other things which were said:








There are so many quotes from that era, all decrying the fact that the bankers had finally won. Lindbergh's was the most eloquent. The secretiveness in how they did it also speaks volumes:

Frank Vanderlip, Assistant Secretary of Treasury and then member of the Jeckyll Island group

Was there ever an admission more capable of shutting up those who claim all is above board with the Fed?

The power to change things [Bill Still]

[These days], the problem of the bankers ... 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 political left wing versus the neo-conservative 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.

We’re labouring under a debt money system that’s 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 FRB 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 honourable 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 head of the Bank of England, Eddie George, claim that this was the most important role of the 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.

There's little dispute among the top economists about this.

As Milton Friedman put it:

The stock of money, prices and output was decidedly more unstable after the establishment of the 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 1920-21, 1929-33, and 1937-38. No other 20-year period in American history contains as many as three such severe contractions.

The severity of each of the major contractions 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 ….

Why are we over our heads in debt? 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 U.S. bonds. The public buys bonds like U.S. 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 book-keeping entry which it creates out of nothing.

Then this new money, created by the Fed, is multiplied by a factor of ten 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 one trillion dollars of this privately created money has been used to purchase U.S. bonds on the open market, which provides the banks with roughly $50 bn 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 U.S. bonds with debt free U.S. notes, just like Lincoln issued.

Of course, that by itself would cause tremendous inflation, since our currency is presently multiplied by the 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 U.S. 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 in U.S. notes, they will deposit this money thus making available the currency then needed by the banks to increase their reserves.

Once all the U.S. bonds are replaced with U.S. 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 clearing house for cheques and as vaults for U.S. 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’d 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, 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.

Proposals

Here are the main provisions of a Monetary Reform Act which needs to be passed by Congress.


As Thomas Edison put it:



Federal Reserve notes could be used for this as well but could not be printed after the Fed’s abolished as we proposed so we suggest using U.S. notes instead.


… to absorb the new U.S. notes which would be deposited and would become the banks’ 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 U.S. government in a one-time operation.

In other words, they too would be paid off with debt-free U.S. 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, an anachronism.


… 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 handed back to the Department of the 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.


These institutions, like the Federal Reserve, are designed to further centralize the power of the international bankers over the world’s economy and the U.S. must withdraw from them. Their harmless functions, such as currency exchange, can be accomplished either nationally or in new organizations, limited to those functions.

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 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 to 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 rate of 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 of all, the BIS – the 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 depression:

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 200 years.

To be sure that they would be circulated widely, they were declared to be “good for the payment of taxes”.

Danger

But what if we follow Guernsey’s example? How would the bankers react to these reforms? Certainly the international bankers cartel would 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, U.S. 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 U.S. 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 1920s, Sir Josiah Stamp, put it, referring to this modern fractional reserve banking system:

"Banking was conceived in iniquity and was born in sin. The bankers own the earth; take it away from them but leave them the power to create deposits, and with a flick of a pen they will create enough deposits 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 control credit."

The Sovereignty proposal which proposes the issuance of U.S. notes to pay for major works has received the endorsement of the Community Bankers Association of Illinois, representing 515 banks. That's one small step forward.

Coming crash

Are we headed into an economic crash of unprecedented proportions? If so, can we prevent it and what can we do to protect our families?

[My note: don’t forget this text was prepared pre-1996, so it is predicting an event twelve years down the track.]

No severe depression can occur without a severe contraction of money. In our system, only the Fed, the BIS, with U.S. 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 that 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 on our economy any time 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, in itself, cannot cause a severe depression. Only the severe contraction of our money supply can cause a severe depression.

The stock market crash of 1929 only wiped out market speculators, mostly the small to medium ones, resulting in $3bn 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 bn 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 WW2 ended the terrible suffering the Fed inflicted on the American people.

In a depression, the remaining wealth of a debt-burdened American middle-class will be wiped out by unemployment, by 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 1930s – 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 U.S. notes begin to circulate and replace the money withdrawn by the bankers.

The longer we wait, the greater the danger we’ll 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 which is currently laying all those golden interest eggs?

Larry Bates said:

You see, in periods of economic … upheaval, wealth is not destroyed, it is merely transferred.

Do we have any hints as to what the money changers have in store for us?

This is the plan:


Step one has been achieved, step two is underway, as is step three.

Crisis is needed to fulfil their plans quickly. The only question is when the crisis will occur. Fortunately, we probably have a little time. It’s unlikely the crisis will occur before the 1996 elections but after that, the danger begins rising.

But whether or not they decide to cause a crash or a dpression, through relentless increases in taxation or loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs being sent overseas, thanks to trade agreements such as GATT and NAFTA, the American middle-class is an endangered species.

How every individual and family can and should now act



# Buy pre 1965 silver coins, gold to a point, foreign currency funds [but not if the world crashes], Swiss or Austrian account, spread it round as much as possible between these.

# Be very careful – when the depression comes, there will be those coming forward, calling themselves conservatives but offering solutions framed by the international bankers. False prophets, in other words.

# Beware of calls to return to a gold standard while U.S. notes are still not being issued. Never before has so much gold been so concentrated in few hands outside of America, in the hands also of the World Bank and the IMF.

# Beware of any plans for a regional or world currency – this is the international bankers’ trojan horse.

# Educate your local member as to the dangers and the way forward. It only takes a few of you to do so and it must be listened to. Your local member might not be anti-people; they simply don’t understand the system.

# Others understand but are so far into patronage that they have no chance but to ignore you. You need to identify which your local member is.

# Remember, the further and further under the yolk and into depression we are sunk, the more we resemble the bestiality of the cabals.

Things Bill Still does not cover

1. The Internet

He couldn’t have taken into account the proliferation of blogging which happened not so long after his film and the much better chance than he did of getting the message out. On the other hand, our blogs can be shut down overnight for calling for these measures, citing any excuse they like.

2. Military might

He doesn’t seem to appreciate the sheer power of police or military in being able to stop you. If any sort of organized movement got going to replace Bank of England notes, for example, with real money, the law would be on the heads of that movement quicker than you can say Brazilian electrician or David Kelly.

3. Infiltration

There are trolls and 5th columnists in all professions who can pull the plug on any individual very quickly. Not only would your livelihood be gone but you’d not qualify for benefits. Almost no frightened person in a recession is going to be a hero, particularly if the coordination of the reform movement is patchy and has been termited.

We’re not playing games here – this is multi-trillions of pounds, euros and dollars at stake and with it, the power to order the world.

The overriding question will always remain though:

Who’ll bell the cat?

Today

The same error is being made over and over and over. Under the heading "California's finances are in a mess", the proposal is ...........?

To issue bonds.

To issue more debt, in other words, to go deeper into the cabal's pocket. No, no, no. Be the first state to issue Treasury notes, Gubernator, debt-free Treasury notes.

Don't attack the wrong people

This blog abhors violence and does not urge angry mobs to lynch Gordon Brown, Barack Obama and their executives, once the crash comes. You might like to leave them down the list and start with, instead:

Ben Bernanke, Donald L. Cohn, Charlie Bean, Rachel Lomax, Paul Tucker, Jean-claude Trichet, Lucas D. Papademos, Guillermo Ortiz, Jean-Pierre Roth, Stanley Fischer (Bank of Israel), Mervyn King (Bank of England), Donald Kohn (Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System), Alan Greenspan and many others.

If James Bond could find out where Mr. White lived, well .....

Funnily enough, the people in the 1800s and early 1900s seemed to understand economics better:

Biddle was so reviled for his nationwide curtailment of credit that he was hunted by mobs in Philadelphia, forcing him to bar the doors of his house and post armed guards.

Will we, the people, heed the message and take it up with the central bankers?