& hows that "work~in" fer U.S. huh ????????????????????????????????
By Michael Snyder, on December 22nd, 2013
December
23rd, 1913 is a date which will live in infamy. That was the day when
the Federal Reserve Act was pushed through Congress. Many members of
Congress were absent that day, and the general public was distracted
with holiday preparations. Now we have reached the 100th anniversary of
the Federal Reserve, and most Americans still don't know what it
actually is or how it functions. But understanding the Federal Reserve
is absolutely critical, because the Fed is at the very heart of our
economic problems. Since the Federal Reserve was created, there have
been 18 recessions or depressions, the value of the U.S. dollar has
declined by 98 percent, and the U.S. national debt has gotten more than
5000 times larger. This insidious debt-based financial system has
literally made debt slaves out of all of us, and it is systematically
destroying the bright future that our children and our grandchildren
were supposed to have. If nothing is done, we are inevitably heading
for a massive amount of economic pain as a nation. So please share this
article with as many people as you can. The following are 100 reasons
why the Federal Reserve should be shut down forever...
#1 We like to think that we have a government "of
the people, by the people, for the people", but the truth is that an
unelected, unaccountable group of central planners has far more power
over our economy than anyone else in our society does.
#2 The Federal Reserve is actually "independent" of
the government. In fact, the Federal Reserve has argued vehemently in
federal court that it is
"not an agency" of the federal government and therefore not subject to the Freedom of Information Act.
#3 The Federal Reserve openly admits that the 12 regional Federal Reserve banks are organized "
much like private corporations".
#4 The regional Federal Reserve banks
issue shares of stock to the "member banks" that own them.
#5 100% of the shareholders of the Federal Reserve are
private banks. The U.S. government owns zero shares.
#6 The Federal Reserve is not an agency of the
federal government, but it has been given power to regulate our banks
and financial institutions. This should not be happening.
#7 According to
Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution,
the U.S. Congress is the one that is supposed to have the authority to
"coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix
the Standard of Weights and Measures". So why is the Federal Reserve
doing it?
#8 If you look at a "U.S. dollar", it actually says
"Federal Reserve note" at the top. In the financial world, a "note" is
an instrument of debt.
#9 In 1963, President John F. Kennedy issued
Executive Order 11110
which authorized the U.S. Treasury to issue "United States notes" which
were created by the U.S. government directly and not by the Federal
Reserve. He was assassinated shortly thereafter.
#10 Many of the debt-free United States notes issued under President Kennedy
are still in circulation today.
#11 The Federal Reserve determines what levels some
of the most important interest rates in our system are going to be set
at. In a free market system, the free market would determine those
interest rates.
#12 The Federal Reserve has become so powerful that it is now known as "
the fourth branch of government".
#13 The greatest period of economic growth in U.S. history was when
there was no central bank.
#14 The Federal Reserve was designed to be
a perpetual debt machine.
The bankers that designed it intended to trap the U.S. government in a
perpetual debt spiral from which it could never possibly escape. Since
the Federal Reserve was established 100 years ago, the U.S. national
debt has gotten
more than 5000 times larger.
#15 A permanent federal income tax was established
the exact same year
that the Federal Reserve was created. This was not a coincidence. In
order to pay for all of the government debt that the Federal Reserve
would create, a federal income tax was necessary. The whole idea was to
transfer wealth from our pockets to the federal government and from the
federal government to the bankers.
#16 The period prior to 1913 (when there was no income tax) was the greatest period of economic growth
in U.S. history.
#17 Today, the U.S. tax code is about
13 miles long.
#18 From the time that the Federal Reserve was created until now, the U.S. dollar has lost
98 percent of its value.
#19 From the time that President Nixon took us off the gold standard until now, the U.S. dollar has lost
83 percent of its value.
#20 During the 100 years before the Federal Reserve was created, the U.S. economy
rarely had any problems with inflation. But since the Federal Reserve was established, the U.S. economy has experienced constant and never ending inflation.
#21 In the century before the Federal Reserve was
created, the average annual rate of inflation was about half a percent.
In the century since the Federal Reserve was created, the average
annual rate of inflation has been
about 3.5 percent.
#22 The Federal Reserve has stripped the middle class of trillions of dollars of wealth through the hidden tax of inflation.
#23 The size of M1
has nearly doubled since 2008 thanks to the reckless money printing that the Federal Reserve has been doing.
#24 The Federal Reserve has been starting to behave
like the Weimar Republic, and we all remember how that ended.
#25 The Federal Reserve has been
consistently lying to us
about the level of inflation in our economy. If the inflation rate was
still calculated the same way that it was back when Jimmy Carter was
president, the official rate of inflation would be somewhere
between 8 and 10 percent today.
#26 Since the Federal Reserve was created, there have been
18 distinct recessions or depressions: 1918, 1920, 1923, 1926, 1929, 1937, 1945, 1949, 1953, 1958, 1960, 1969, 1973, 1980, 1981, 1990, 2001, 2008.
#27 Within 20 years of the creation of the Federal Reserve, the U.S. economy was plunged into the Great Depression.
#28 The Federal Reserve created the conditions that caused the stock market crash of 1929, and
even Ben Bernanke admits that the response by the Fed to that crisis made the Great Depression even worse than it should have been.
#29 The "easy money" policies of former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan set the stage for the great financial crisis of 2008.
#30 Without the Federal Reserve, the "subprime mortgage meltdown" would probably never have happened.
#31 If you can believe it, there have been
10 different economic recessions
since 1950. The Federal Reserve created the "dotcom bubble", the
Federal Reserve created the "housing bubble" and now it has created
the largest bond bubble in the history of the planet.
#32 According to an official government report, the Federal Reserve made
16.1 trillion dollars
in secret loans to the big banks during the last financial crisis. The
following is a list of loan recipients that was taken directly from
page 131 of the report...
Citigroup - $2.513 trillion
Morgan Stanley - $2.041 trillion
Merrill Lynch - $1.949 trillion
Bank of America - $1.344 trillion
Barclays PLC - $868 billion
Bear Sterns - $853 billion
Goldman Sachs - $814 billion
Royal Bank of Scotland - $541 billion
JP Morgan Chase - $391 billion
Deutsche Bank - $354 billion
UBS - $287 billion
Credit Suisse - $262 billion
Lehman Brothers - $183 billion
Bank of Scotland - $181 billion
BNP Paribas - $175 billion
Wells Fargo - $159 billion
Dexia - $159 billion
Wachovia - $142 billion
Dresdner Bank - $135 billion
Societe Generale - $124 billion
"All Other Borrowers" - $2.639 trillion
#33 The Federal Reserve also paid those big banks
$659.4 million in "fees" to help "administer" those secret loans.
#34 During the last financial crisis, big European banks were allowed to borrow
an "unlimited" amount of money from the Federal Reserve at ultra-low interest rates.
#35 The "easy money" policies of Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke have created
the largest financial bubble this nation has ever seen, and this has set the stage for the great financial crisis that we are rapidly approaching.
#36 Since late 2008, the size of the Federal Reserve balance sheet has grown from less than a trillion dollars
to more than 4 trillion dollars. This is complete and utter insanity.
#37 During the quantitative easing era, the value of
the financial securities that the Fed has accumulated is greater than
the total amount of publicly held debt that the U.S. government
accumulated
from the presidency of George Washington through the end of the presidency of Bill Clinton.
#38 Overall, the Federal Reserve now holds
more than 32 percent of all 10 year equivalents, and that percentage is rising by about 0.3 percent each week.
#39 Quantitative easing creates financial bubbles, and when quantitative easing ends those bubbles
tend to deflate rapidly.
#40 Most of the new money created by quantitative easing has ended up
in the hands of the very wealthy.
#41 According to a prominent Federal Reserve insider, quantitative easing has been one giant "
subsidy" for Wall Street banks.
#42 As one CNBC article recently stated, we are seeing absolutely rampant inflation in "
stocks and bonds and art and Ferraris".
#43 Donald Trump once made the following statement about quantitative easing: "
People like me will benefit from this."
#44 Most people have never heard about this, but
a very interesting study conducted for the Bank of England shows that quantitative easing actually increases the gap between the wealthy and the poor.
#45 The gap between the top one percent and the rest of the country is now the greatest that it has been
since the 1920s.
#46 The mainstream media has sold quantitative
easing to the American public as an "economic stimulus program", but the
truth is that the percentage of Americans that have a job
has actually gone down since quantitative easing first began.
#47 The Federal Reserve is supposed to be able to
guide the nation toward "full employment", but the reality of the matter
is that an all-time record
102 million working age Americans do not have a job right now. That number has risen by about 27 million since the year 2000.
#48 For years, the projections of economic growth by the Federal Reserve have
consistently overstated
the strength of the U.S. economy. But every single time, the
mainstream media continues to report that these numbers are "reliable"
even though all they actually represent is wishful thinking.
#49 The Federal Reserve system fuels the growth of
government, and the growth of government fuels the growth of the Federal
Reserve system. Since 1970, federal spending has grown
nearly 12 times as rapidly as median household income has.
#50 The Federal Reserve is supposed to look out for
the health of all U.S. banks, but the truth is that they only seem to be
concerned about the big ones. In 1985, there were
more than 18,000 banks in the United States. Today, there are only
6,891 left.
#51 The six largest banks in the United States
(JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs
and Morgan Stanley) have collectively gotten
37 percent larger over the past five years.
#52 The U.S. banking system has 14.4 trillion dollars in total assets. The six largest banks now account for
67 percent of those assets and all of the other banks account for only
33 percent of those assets.
#53 The five largest banks now account for
42 percent of all loans in the United States.
#54 We were told that the purpose of quantitative
easing is to help "stimulate the economy", but today the Federal Reserve
is actually paying the big banks
not to lend out 1.8 trillion dollars in "excess reserves" that they have parked at the Fed.
#55 The Federal Reserve has allowed an absolutely
gigantic derivatives bubble to inflate which could destroy our financial
system at any moment. Right now, four of the "too big to fail" banks
each have total exposure to derivatives that is well in excess of
40 trillion dollars.
#56 The total exposure that Goldman Sachs has to derivatives contracts is
more than 381 times greater than their total assets.
#57 Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has a
track record of failure that would make the Chicago Cubs look good.
#58 The secret November 1910 gathering at Jekyll
Island, Georgia during which the plan for the Federal Reserve was
hatched was attended by U.S. Senator Nelson W. Aldrich, Assistant
Secretary of the Treasury Department A.P. Andrews and a whole host of
representatives from the upper crust of the Wall Street banking
establishment.
#59 The Federal Reserve was created by the big Wall Street banks and for the benefit of the big Wall Street banks.
#60 In 1913, Congress was promised that if the Federal Reserve Act was passed that it would
eliminate the business cycle.
#61 There
has never been a true comprehensive audit of the Federal Reserve since it was created back in 1913.
#62 The Federal Reserve system has been described as "
the biggest Ponzi scheme in the history of the world".
#63 The following comes directly from
the Fed's official mission statement: "To
provide the nation with a safer, more flexible, and more stable
monetary and financial system." Without a doubt, the Federal Reserve
has failed in those tasks dramatically.
#64 The Fed decides what the target rate of
inflation should be, what the target rate of unemployment should be and
what the size of the money supply is going to be. This is quite similar
to the "
central planning" that goes on in communist nations, but very few people in our government seem upset by this.
#65 A couple of years ago, Federal Reserve officials walked into one bank in Oklahoma and demanded that they take down
all the Bible verses and all the Christmas buttons that the bank had been displaying.
#66 The Federal Reserve has taken some other very
frightening steps in recent years. For example, back in 2011 the
Federal Reserve
announced plans
to identify "key bloggers" and to monitor "billions of conversations"
about the Fed on Facebook, Twitter, forums and blogs. Someone at the
Fed will almost certainly end up reading this article.
#67 Thanks to this endless debt spiral that we are
trapped in, a massive amount of money is transferred out of our pockets
and into the pockets of the ultra-wealthy each year. Incredibly, the
U.S. government spent
more than 415 billion dollars just on interest on the national debt in 2013.
#68 In September, the average rate of interest on the government’s marketable debt was
1.981 percent. In January 2000, the average rate of interest on the government’s marketable debt was
6.620 percent.
If we got back to that level today, we would be paying more than a
trillion dollars a year just in interest on the national debt and it
would collapse our entire financial system.
#69 The American people are being killed by compound
interest but most of them don't even understand what it is. Albert
Einstein once made
the following statement about compound interest...
"Compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world. He who understands it, earns it … he who doesn’t … pays it."
#70 Most Americans have absolutely no idea where
money comes from. The truth is that the Federal Reserve just creates it
out of thin air. The following is how I have
previously described how money is normally created by the Fed in our system...
When the U.S. government decides that it wants to spend
another billion dollars that it does not have, it does not print up a
billion dollars.
Rather, the U.S. government creates a bunch of U.S. Treasury bonds (debt) and takes them over to the Federal Reserve.
The Federal Reserve creates a billion dollars out of thin air and exchanges them for the U.S. Treasury bonds.
#71 What does the Federal Reserve do with those U.S. Treasury bonds? They end up getting auctioned off
to the highest bidder. But this entire process actually creates more debt than it does money...
The U.S. Treasury bonds that the Federal Reserve receives
in exchange for the money it has created out of nothing are auctioned
off through the Federal Reserve system.
But wait.
There is a problem.
Because the U.S. government must pay interest on the Treasury bonds,
the amount of debt that has been created by this transaction is greater
than the amount of money that has been created.
So where will the U.S. government get the money to pay that debt?
Well, the theory is that we can get money to circulate through the
economy really, really fast and tax it at a high enough rate that the
government will be able to collect enough taxes to pay the debt.
But that never actually happens, does it?
And the creators of the Federal Reserve understood this as well.
They understood that the U.S. government would not have enough money to
both run the government and service the national debt. They knew that
the U.S. government would have to keep borrowing even more money in an
attempt to keep up with the game.
#72 Of course the U.S. government could actually
create money and spend it directly into the economy without the Federal
Reserve being involved at all. But then we wouldn't be 17 trillion
dollars in debt and that wouldn't serve the interests of the bankers at
all.
#73 The following is what
Thomas Edison once had to say about our absolutely insane debt-based financial system...
That is to say, under the old way any time we wish to add to the national wealth we are compelled to add to the national debt.
Now, that is what Henry Ford wants to prevent. He thinks it is
stupid, and so do I, that for the loan of $30,000,000 of their own money
the people of the United States should be compelled to pay $66,000,000 —
that is what it amounts to, with interest. People who will not turn a
shovelful of dirt nor contribute a pound of material will collect more
money from the United States than will the people who supply the
material and do the work. That is the terrible thing about interest. In
all our great bond issues the interest is always greater than the
principal. All of the great public works cost more than twice the actual
cost, on that account. Under the present system of doing business we
simply add 120 to 150 per cent, to the stated cost.
But here is the point: If our nation can issue a dollar bond, it can
issue a dollar bill. The element that makes the bond good makes the bill
good.
#74 The United States now has
the largest national debt
in the history of the world, and we are stealing more than 100 million
dollars from our children and our grandchildren every single hour of
every single day in a desperate attempt to keep the debt spiral going.
#75 Thomas Jefferson once stated that if he could add just one more amendment to the U.S. Constitution
it would be a ban on all government borrowing....
I wish it were possible to obtain a single amendment to
our Constitution. I would be willing to depend on that alone for the
reduction of the administration of our government to the genuine
principles of its Constitution; I mean an additional article, taking
from the federal government the power of borrowing.
#76 At this moment, the U.S. national debt is sitting at
$17,251,528,475,994.19. If we had followed the advice of Thomas Jefferson, it would be sitting at zero.
#77 When the Federal Reserve was first established, the U.S. national debt was sitting
at about 2.9 billion dollars. On average, we have been adding more than that to the national debt
every single day since Obama has been in the White House.
#78 We are on pace to accumulate more new debt under
the 8 years of the Obama administration than we did under all of the
other presidents in all of U.S. history combined.
#79 If all of the new debt that has been accumulated
since John Boehner became Speaker of the House had been given directly
to the American people instead, every household in America would have
been able
to buy a new truck.
#80 Between 2008 and 2012, U.S. government debt grew by
60.7 percent, but U.S. GDP only grew by a total of about
8.5 percent during that entire time period.
#81 Since 2007, the U.S. debt to GDP ratio has increased from 66.6 percent to
101.6 percent.
#82 According to the U.S. Treasury, foreigners hold approximately
5.6 trillion dollars of our debt.
#83 The amount of U.S. government debt held by foreigners is
about 5 times larger than it was just a decade ago.
#84 As I have written about
previously, if the U.S. national debt was reduced to a stack of one dollar bills it would circle the earth at the equator
45 times.
#85 If Bill Gates gave every single penny of his
entire fortune to the U.S. government, it would only cover the U.S.
budget deficit
for 15 days.
#86 Sometimes we forget just how much money a
trillion dollars is. If you were alive when Jesus Christ was born and
you spent one million dollars every single day since that point, you
still would not have spent one trillion dollars by now.
#87 If right this moment you went out and started spending one dollar every single second, it would take you
more than 31,000 years to spend one trillion dollars.
#88 In addition to all of our debt, the U.S. government has also accumulated
more than 200 trillion dollars in unfunded liabilities. So where in the world will all of that money come from?
#89 The greatest damage that quantitative easing has
been causing to our economy is the fact that it is destroying worldwide
faith in the U.S. dollar and in U.S. debt. If the rest of the world
stops using our dollars and stops buying our debt, we are going to be in
a massive amount of trouble.
#90 Over the past several years, the Federal Reserve has been monetizing
a staggering amount of U.S. government debt even though Ben Bernanke once promised that he would never do this.
#91 China recently announced
that they are going to quit stockpiling more U.S. dollars. If the Federal Reserve was not recklessly printing money, this would probably not have happened.
#92 Most Americans have no idea that one of our most
famous presidents was absolutely obsessed with getting rid of central
banking in the United States. The following is
a February 1834 quote by President Andrew Jackson about the evils of central banking....
I too have been a close observer of the doings of the
Bank of the United States. I have had men watching you for a long time,
and am convinced that you have used the funds of the bank to speculate
in the breadstuffs of the country. When you won, you divided the profits
amongst you, and when you lost, you charged it to the Bank. You tell me
that if I take the deposits from the Bank and annul its charter I shall
ruin ten thousand families. That may be true, gentlemen, but that is
your sin! Should I let you go on, you will ruin fifty thousand families,
and that would be my sin! You are a den of vipers and thieves. I have determined to rout you out and, by the Eternal, (bringing his fist down on the table) I will rout you out.
#93 There are plenty of possible alternative financial systems, but at this point
all 187 nations that belong to the IMF have a central bank. Are we supposed to believe that this is just some sort of a bizarre coincidence?
#94 The capstone of the global central banking
system is an organization known as the Bank for International
Settlements. The following is how I described this organization in a
previous article...
An immensely powerful international organization that
most people have never even heard of secretly controls the money supply
of the entire globe. It is called the Bank for International
Settlements, and it is the central bank of central banks. It is located
in Basel, Switzerland, but it also has branches in Hong Kong and Mexico
City. It is essentially an unelected, unaccountable central bank of
the world that has complete immunity from taxation and from national
laws. Even Wikipedia admits that "it is not accountable to any single national government."
The Bank for International Settlements was used to launder money for
the Nazis during World War II, but these days the main purpose of the
BIS is to guide and direct the centrally-planned global financial
system. Today, 58 global central banks belong to the BIS, and it has
far more power over how the U.S. economy (or any other economy for that
matter) will perform over the course of the next year than any
politician does. Every two months, the central bankers of the world
gather in Basel for another "Global Economy Meeting". During those
meetings, decisions are made which affect every man, woman and child on
the planet, and yet none of us have any say in what goes on. The Bank
for International Settlements is an organization that was founded by the
global elite and it operates for the benefit of the global elite, and
it is intended to be one of the key cornerstones of the emerging one
world economic system.
#95 The borrower is the servant of the lender, and the Federal Reserve has turned all of us into debt slaves.
#96 Debt is a form of social control, and the global
elite use all of this debt to dominate all the rest of us. 40 years
ago, the total amount of debt in our system (all government debt, all
business debt, all consumer debt, etc.) was sitting at about 2 trillion
dollars. Today, the grand total exceeds 56 trillion dollars.
#97 Unless something dramatic is done, our children
and our grandchildren will be debt slaves for their entire lives as they
service our debts and pay for our mistakes.
#98 Now that you know this information, you are responsible for doing something about it.
#99 Congress has the power to shut down the Federal
Reserve any time that they would like. But right now most of our
politicians fully endorse the current system, and nothing is ever going
to happen until the American people start demanding change.
#100 The design of the Federal Reserve system was
flawed from the very beginning. If something is not done very rapidly,
it is inevitable that our entire financial system is going to suffer an
absolutely nightmarish collapse.
The truth is that we do not have to have a Federal Reserve. The
greatest period of economic growth in U.S. history was when we did not
have a central bank. If we are ever going to turn this nation around
economically, we are going to have to get rid of this debt-based
financial system that is centered around the Federal Reserve. On the
path that we are on now, there is no hope. Please share this article
with as many people as you can. It is imperative that we try to wake
the American people up while we still have time.
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