“Long before we wake up from our dream of prosperity through an inflated currency, our gold, which alone could have kept us from catastrophe, will have vanished and no rate of interest will tempt it to return.” ~ U.S. Senator Elihu Root (R-NY) 1913
Puck cartoon of Senator Nelson Aldrich circa 1906
The Federal Reserve Bank has been a bone of contention, since our nation’s founding. This rogue agency has proven itself to be the evil entity that many early American leaders believed it to be, but not one word on the Fed was forthcoming, when Congresswoman Maxine Waters announced the schedule of the House Financial Services Committee on October 3rd, after the Federal Reserve Bank started transferring billions of dollars into the Repurchasing Market on September 17th. This activated its proposal to hand seventy-five billion dollars a day to unnamed banks on Wall Street, until November 4th, the first such intervention since the 2008 economic collapse and the bailout of financial organizations deemed “too big to fail”; and, it is just one more criminal act in a long line of abuses committed against all America.
In 2011, James Felkerson wrote in an academic piece, that from 2007 to 2010, the Fed had funneled an unbelievable $29 trillion in revolving loans to Wall Street and global banks. It did this without any apparent realization and authority from Congress, even though by law both the House Financial Services and the Senate Banking Committees are to be briefed on any such emergency loans, including the names of those banks taking the loans.
These Big Banks and corporations are taking this “free” taxpayer dollars and buying back stocks in their own companies, rather than risk investment in productive investments, which creates an illusion of economic growth. The purchases give companies the appearance of being more profitable than they actually are, even though their earnings have remained stagnant. And it is the Fed’s perverse incentives that have given rise to this debt-dependent speculative system that allows companies to pocket their profits, while at the same time, they socialize their losses and pass them along to the taxpayer, ‘We the People’.
In 1832, President Andrew Jackson, extremely antagonistic towards the Bank of the United States, stated: “Gentlemen! 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 bread-stuffs 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 [a] 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, I will rout you out.”
We are currently witnessing a continuation of the mal-investments that led to the 2008 economic collapse and massive loans combined with another huge expansion of credit. When banking institutes issue huge credit lines, any future economic collapse is proportional to that amount of outstanding credit.
This isn’t a true “boom economy” and the current boom is the culmination of monetary inflation and an expanded credit cycle, in the wake of the residential property and stock market booms, between 2005 and 2007, and mal-investments that have not yet been fully corrected. To date, this is by far a larger credit elevation than that of 1922-1929, and the Great Depression on the 20th century.
It seems as though everyone in America has bought into the promise of applied macroeconomics, refusing to acknowledge the contrary signals through the prism of classic economics, while they accept macro-economist premises that economic truths on a micro-level are not applicable to the whole at the macro-level. This level of ignorance will soon prove to be a huge mistake, since nobody can live forever beyond their means and ability to repay amounts owed.
One should note that the JP Morgan Bank, one of the largest in the United States, was hit with three felony counts under the RICO Act last month, concerning the precious metals market. This is particularly alarming in light of JP Morgan’s $158 billion cash reduction in the Federal Reserve, between January and June of 2019, a fifty-seven percent decline this year.
JP Morgan the Pirate (Jamie Dimon)
Why hasn’t the need of the United States’ largest bank to acquire such a large loan over a six month period raised any warning bells in Congress? Why does JP Morgan need such a large loan if it has $1.6 trillion in deposits and a “fortress balance sheet,” as asserted by JP’s CEO, Jamie Dimon?
By the end of June 2019, America’s four largest banks had a combined $5.45 trillion in deposits: JP Morgan claimed $1.6 trillion; Bank of America claims $1.44 trillion; Wells Fargo posts $1.35 trillion, and Citibank holds a bit over $1 trillion.
So why the current panic at the Fed? If the liquidity doesn’t exist to allow these banks to issue billions in loans, when they supposedly hold $5.45 trillion, something very serious has occurred in the financial industry and another economic crisis looms on the horizon.
Recently, CNBC reported that U.S. manufacturing purchasing managers’ index was the lowest it’s been since June 2009, at 47.8 percent, and in recent days, many hundreds of Americans have been laid off from companies, such as Kroger and many others. Bayou Steel just laid off 376 workers, according to Market Realist; Daimler Trucks North America is laying off 450 people; WeWork is set to end five thousand jobs, one-third of its workforce; Hewlett Packard Inc. is cutting approximately 8,000 positions, and lets not forget that Walmart was forced to close 63 locations last year.
This isn’t a “boom economy” anyway one looks at it, especially when we see Democrats and Republicans alike engaging in out-of-control deficit spending, as if the U.S. Treasury is there own personal piggy bank and there is no tomorrow. If this were truly such a golden period of economic recovery, our financiers wouldn’t be clamoring for interest rate cuts, when they are already at historically low levels.
The Looting Bankers
America has seen this greed motivated reach for more and more before, as the borrowers seem not to have one care on how their loans will be repaid, and most of America cares not so long as they get their cut. It is this extreme callous character flaw and apathy and a complacency and the turning of a blind eye by corrupt Congressmen, a national immorality, that is allowing the Fed to once more bail out the worse white collar criminals on Wall Street, as they continue to take huge portions of bail out funds to reward themselves with tens of millions of dollars in bonuses and billions of dollars to lawyers to prevent them from being prosecuted for fraud.
It is an indication of America’s collective genius or its collective madness that permits Her people to hold so many contradictory assumptions, combined under the same economic system, and blindly and blithely proceed as if they were all joined by perfect cogent thought, logic and reason. And yet, many Americans cannot escape the nagging feeling that something is going extraordinarily wrong, as our best and brightest economic experts call madness “common sense,” denying that their deal with the devil doesn’t come at some terrible price eventually.
The impeccable and brilliant Senator Elihu Root strongly opposed the Federal Reserve Act in 1913, noting in a blistering and prescient manner that “the Federal Reserve … provides an expansive currency, not an elastic one”. He noted that the temptation to expand the currency would cause the Fed to create the very cycles it was supposed to prevent.
It is far past time to eradicate the Federal Reserve Bank and the economic sickness that accompanies centralized banking, wherever one finds it.
Whatever a man sows, so shall he reap. Need little, want less and love more.
~ The Author ~
Justin O. Smith has lived in Tennessee off and on most of his adult life, and graduated from Middle Tennessee State University in 1980, with a B.S. and a double major in International Relations and Cultural Geography – minors in Military Science and English, for what its worth. His real education started from that point on. Smith is a frequent contributor to the family of Kettle Moraine Publications.
