People then seemed to realize the danger of fiat money, yet The Federal Reserve Act was passed by Congress and signed into law by President Woodrow Wilson on December 23, 1913, when most lawmakers had already left the Capital for their home states -- and it passed on a simple majority of those present vote. The Federal Reserve (a cabal of international banks that is not part of the US Government) seized control of the US monetary system and their policy of deliberate inflation has eroded purchasing power 97+% (50% reduction since just 1970!). Even though the constitution still describes the value of a dollar as a specific weight of gold, like most other things in that document it is ignored.
Private ownership of gold was decreed to be illegal just 20 years later -- Presidental Executive Order 6102, signed on April 5, 1933, by President Franklin D. Roosevelt "forbidding the hoarding of gold coin, gold bullion, and gold certificates within the continental United States" was designed to prevent an internation run on our (drastically less valuable) dollar. Silver was removed from the coin in 1965, completing the transition to fiat money.
President John F. Kennedy voiced support for returning America to the Gold Standard. He was assassinated soon after. His Vice President, who assumed the Presidency, wasn't so foolish as to express support for that idea.
Now it seems to be a spending free-for-all, as if there is no concern whatsoever for the peril that debt (national or private) presents.
What a dangerous time we live in. "Ignore that man behind the curtain!" Who, then, was Glenda, the Good Witch meant to represent?
The Netflix movie The Irishman is about a labor union organizer/mob hitman [1] who claims to have assisted in JFKs assassination at the behest of the mob/ Jimmy Hoffa.
You can literally spin a wheel of different motivations for groups who wanted JFK dead and they all have their own convincing reasons. Except hackjack's little conspiracy here, which seems to be missing a final paragraph about why we need to switch to using Bitcoin as our standard currency.
Note the odds calculation is slightly wrong due to a rounding error.
I checked the dates and locations (3,4,5 are unchecked and not included in the calc in the vid. I have the book... somewhere) http://dpaste.com/048G3AZ.txt
A little known secret is that the Lunarians had him assassinated due to his declaration of war against the Moon. Elon Musk better watch out for the Martians now that he's threatened to nuke them. :)
> Even though the constitution still describes
> the value of a dollar as a specific weight of
> gold, like most other things in that document
> it is ignored.
Citation needed.
Article 1, Section 10 is the only place I can recall saying anything about gold:
No State shall enter into any Treaty, Alliance, or Confederation; grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal; coin Money; emit Bills of Credit; make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts; pass any Bill of Attainder, ex post facto Law, or Law impairing the Obligation of Contracts, or grant any Title of Nobility.
_My_ reading opens up a door for "Texas Bucks" issued with backing/redemption of some volume of gold/silver. But I'll wait on expounding more to give you the opportunity to show me where I am mistaken.
> The Federal Reserve (a cabal of international banks that is not part of the US Government) seized control of the US monetary system
The body that controls the US monetary system is the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. The Board of Governors are Senate-confirmed Presidential appointees. I'm not quite seeing how this is not part of the US government.
Sure, the Federal Reserve System involves private member banks, who have some role on governing the regional fed banks, but those don't control monetary policy, the Board of Governors does.
> The Federal Reserve Act was passed by Congress and signed into law by President Woodrow Wilson on December 23, 1913, when most lawmakers had already left the Capital for their home states
The bill passed the House of Representatives by an overwhelming majority of 298 to 60 on December 22, 1913. The bill passed the Senate by a vote of 43 to 25 on December 23, 1913. That's 60% of those voting.
There were 96 Senate seats in 1913, and 71 senators were present for the vote on the final version of the bill. Of those present, 43 voted for the bill, 25 voted against, and 3 did not vote because of vote pairing. 24 senators were absent and 1 seat was empty because of a recent death.
An earlier version of the bill passed the Senate on December 19 by a vote of 54 to 34 (an absolute majority). Only one Senator who voted for the bill on December 19 changed his vote to nay on December 23. This was George Perkins (R), Calif.
If all senators had voted, the vote would have been 57 votes in favor of the bill. There would be 50 Democrats, plus one Progressive —Miles Poindexter— and 6 Republicans: Jones, Norris, Weeks (who all voted for the bill), as well as Crawford, Fall, and Sterling (who were absent but would have voted for the bill).
Of course, any Congress could repeal the Federal Reserve Act. It has been amended dozens of times since 1913.
Claim:
> The Federal Reserve (a cabal of international banks that is not part of the US Government) seized control of the US monetary system
The Federal Reserve System includes an indepent federal agency, the Board of Governors, led by 7 governors who are nominated by the president of the United States and approved by the United States Senate.
It also includes 12 regional Federal Reserve Banks, each a separate corporation. Each district Bank has 9 directors, 6 chosen by the member banks in the district, and 3 chosen by the Board of Governors (the federal agency). Each bank gets two votes for directors. If there are multiple banks in the district owned by the same company, only one of those banks can vote for directors.
Federal Reserve member banks consist of all national banks plus those state-chartered banks that choose to belong. There were more than 1,600 member banks at the end of 2018: https://pastebin.com/iiDR4Za4
Claim:
> Even though the constitution still describes the value of a dollar as a specific weight of gold
Hi. Recovered crackpot here. You're stuck on a few ideas, routinely propagated by people overwhelmed by the complexity of the interface between global economics and politics, and made attractive by their apparent simplicity, that I have previously considered, and already thought myself out of.
The Fed:
The Fed is a pseudo-governmental organization, like the Postal Service or the Federal National Mortgage Association ("Fannie Mae"). It has a variety of member banks, but they do not control the Fed. They disproportionately benefit from it, but they are not directly in charge. The Fed is their cartel enforcer; none of them could trust the others to run it fairly. It has to be independent of the banks. And it has to be independent of politics. It is its own selfish little entity, with a [public] dual mandate of ensuring full employment and low [demand-pull] inflation. It can never truly succeed at both, but it can certainly fail at both.
Your concerns seem to be focused on fiat money. The actual danger, adequately managed by the Fed, is fractional reserve banking. When left un-cartelized, fractional reserve wreaks havoc on the money supply, and asymmetric settlements eventually cause banks that are too profligate with their lending to fail, and those not profligate enough to be outcompeted. The Fed standardized the reserve fraction, so that the member banks could lend money that did not previously exist and charge interest on it, making debt into the largest part of the monetary basis, and real savings and production into a minority contributor.
The secondary private mandate of the Fed is to manage the reserve ratio and settlement rates such that no individual bank can get greedy, go rogue, and destroy the whole system that otherwise makes a whole lot of people a whole lot of money for doing very little actual work.
Don't get me wrong. The Federal Reserve System is a great way for the rich to stay rich and keep the poor from rising, and there is no social justice in the system it manages. But it is a perfectly reasonable technical solution for greedy bankers destroying the whole economy via exuberant overreach--which they would otherwise do (more frequently) if left unchecked. If you assume greedy bankers will always exist, the Fed is the lesser evil. They actually are stealing some of your hard work and giving it away to rich people, but probably nowhere near as much of it as you think, and you do benefit from their work more than you may expect.
There is nothing inherently bad about fiat money. Money in its purest form is just a mutually agreeable unit of accounting. As long as there exists some fair process for matching the size of the money supply to the current level of economic activity, fiat money works fine for everyone. Counterfeiting is what spoils it. And lending additional money into existence based on fractional reserves of currency is counterfeiting-by-the-law. It's a similiar unethical con to "naked short-selling".
JFK:
The exact reason why JF Kennedy was assassinated is now indeterminate. There isn't enough forensically-reliable evidence remaining to support any postulated conspiracy, or ascribe motive to any of their principals. Personally, I favor the hypothesis that he was killed by racists to delay or reverse civil rights gains for minorities. The red-sealed direct-issue US notes, to replace green-sealed Fed notes, are a long-shot motive hypothesis, at best.
We don't know why JFK was killed. It is no longer possible to answer those questions or verify those claims. Thinking about JFK is probably going to be a time-wasting distraction from questions you can actually answer via independent analysis. There are just so many holes in the JFK story now, you can easily project onto it, which is only going to tell you more about yourself than anything about the real world. So drop it, if you can. There are plenty of stories from this century that you can look into. Why not try to prove that SCotUS justice Scalia was murdered?
Spending:
The spending free-for-all is... wait... what spending free-for-all? Rich folks are stockpiling cash, loaning it, and investing it, not spending it. There's no [demand-pull] inflation, because the money the Fed (and its member banks) is creating is never actually making it to the pockets of consumers.
> And lending additional money into existence based on fractional reserves of currency is counterfeiting-by-the-law. It's a similiar unethical con to "naked short-selling".
Are you referring to debt monetization, QE, something else? I'm unsure if you're referring to something the Fed prevents or actively practices. QE helps to heat up a faltering economy, at the expense of contributing to income inequality.
I mean nothing more than increasing the de facto money supply by lending multiple times against the same reserves. The reserve requirement is a multiplier for whatever new money the Fed decides to issue. But banks don't have to lend all the way up to their maximum, so printing new notes into a fractional reserve regime is actually kind of a mushy and inaccurate way to increase the money supply.
Quantitative easing smells like Keynesian claptrap to me, but I'm not an economist, and it might be one of those things that works if it's needlessly complicated, only because if it were simple, the markets would immediately adjust to it such that it would have no real effect. I have a sneaking suspicion that QE is what happens when you don't have enough value-backed money left in the economy to pay the interest on all the debt-backed money, and all rational actors stop borrowing. So the answer is to create dummy debt and let people use it as the backing for the money used to pay the interest on their real debt? I don't know. That science is too dismal for me.
> The reserve requirement is a multiplier for whatever new money the Fed decides to issue.
This is backwards. The private banks decide to lend first. They then acquire the central bank reserves needed to meet the requirements. The central bank reserves are created on demand, so to speak.
The Fed policy influences the lending decisions of the banks, of course, but it's not as direct as creating reserves and then pushing them out there to be lent out.
Economic policy doesn't seem to subscribe to the same rules for causality as the rest of the universe. It's not so simple to say "this, because of this" when everything is bound up in tight feedback loops.
Banks lend more when the Fed creates more reserves, and the Fed creates more reserves when banks lend more. And also the opposite.
Looking at it at a time-fixed instant, the amount that banks lend is a multiple of the reserves they have, equal to the multiplicative inverse of the reserve requirement. If any one factor adjusts, one of the other two must likewise adjust to compensate, at a later time. If one member bank independently decides the money supply needs to be bigger, and lends more, and borrows more Fed notes as the banking reserves, yes, the Fed will probably just virtually print more virtual notes and transfer it to the bank's reserve account. But it also might say, "whoa, there," and also increase the interest rate on the loans it makes to member banks, thereby saying, "we don't actually want to increase the money supply that much".
If the Fed decides the money supply needs to expand by 1%, they can't just print up new notes equal to 1% of the current money supply. They have no way to get them into circulation directly. They generally only lend new notes to banks, for use as reserves. And whatever banks borrow as reserves get multiplied as loans. If the reserve requirement is 10%, the Fed could print 0.1% of the existing supply, lower its lending rate to -0.01% so banks will actually borrow all the new notes, and then banks might lend based on that to expand the money supply to the target amount.
But the banks also might just sit on the reserves and collect the -0.01%.
So the interest rate the Fed charges to banks is also involved. Too high, and the reserves the Fed created won't be borrowed at all. Too low, and the banks have less incentive to actually lend on those reserves.
Deciding on the correct amount of fiat to be in existence is a bit of a balancing act, when part of your system is built around allowing all banks to cheat by exactly the same amount.
If the reserve requirement is 100% or higher, nobody can lend what they don't have, so that mushy multiplier goes away, and the Fed needn't worry so much about what the member banks are doing or not doing. But then the banks would be pissed about losing their license to print money, and would probably find some other way to cheat, that the Fed doesn't know about.
These are all factors that encourage various political types to jump onto things like e-Gold or Bitcoin with both feet, without hesitation. The Fed system has banker graft built into it. The hates-the-bankers groups are fine with fiat, as evidenced by support of Bitcoin; they just don't want greedy bankers able to manipulate the size of the money supply for their own profit. They haven't exactly thought through much of the rest of it, but screw those greedy bankers, right? It turns out that when you establish a monopoly on scamming, each of the monopoly cartel's scammers get more unearned money, but less money is sucked out of the economy by scams in total. Who knew? The shitty Fed system is less horrible than the open-market alternative. It's like the Thieves' Guild in Ankh-Morpork. As long as you pay your monthly mugging and burglary franchise fee, you won't get your stuff stolen at random.
QE is buying debt on the public market and removing it from circulation, while injecting newly created money into the economy, in order to increase liquidity.
People then seemed to realize the danger of fiat money, yet The Federal Reserve Act was passed by Congress and signed into law by President Woodrow Wilson on December 23, 1913, when most lawmakers had already left the Capital for their home states -- and it passed on a simple majority of those present vote. The Federal Reserve (a cabal of international banks that is not part of the US Government) seized control of the US monetary system and their policy of deliberate inflation has eroded purchasing power 97+% (50% reduction since just 1970!). Even though the constitution still describes the value of a dollar as a specific weight of gold, like most other things in that document it is ignored.
Private ownership of gold was decreed to be illegal just 20 years later -- Presidental Executive Order 6102, signed on April 5, 1933, by President Franklin D. Roosevelt "forbidding the hoarding of gold coin, gold bullion, and gold certificates within the continental United States" was designed to prevent an internation run on our (drastically less valuable) dollar. Silver was removed from the coin in 1965, completing the transition to fiat money.
President John F. Kennedy voiced support for returning America to the Gold Standard. He was assassinated soon after. His Vice President, who assumed the Presidency, wasn't so foolish as to express support for that idea.
Now it seems to be a spending free-for-all, as if there is no concern whatsoever for the peril that debt (national or private) presents.
What a dangerous time we live in. "Ignore that man behind the curtain!" Who, then, was Glenda, the Good Witch meant to represent?