Banking Recent USA History 
By several authors on World Plutocracy

Posted January 30, 2011; updated November 13, 2021.   Disclaimer The information displayed herein is intended to simplify the complexity of the global economy.

 The FEDERAL RESERVE System Is PRIVATELY OWNED 

Our banking history is filled with deception, fraud, larceny and treason. To understand the problem of how modern, deceptive banking policy adversely affects every American citizen and is, indeed, antithetical to our great Republic, we must begin with an examination of the historical evolution of the privately owned central banking system. A cursory exploration of this system reveals that from its very inception it, by design, undermines political will and insures a lifetime of feudal-like, debt-based enslavement.

The History Of Deception

Beneath the yoke of an unending cycle of indebtedness which renders anyone who participates in the economy, at the consumer level, forever beholden to banks, the great majority of Americans spend a life-time of labor, often working at more than one job, not to produce a better life for ourselves and our loved-ones, but in a never-ending struggle to pay-off debt, or simply to pay interest (and very little principle) on so-called loans. This "debt" was literally created from thin air. The lenders risk nothing, because they have, in reality, lent nothing.

Fairness in an economy is defined as receiving an equal measure of compensation for an equal measure of production. Our present, completely controlled by the policies of enormous private international banking interests, by its very nature, must preclude this simple precept. This scheme exists in our economy today under the direction of a corporation known as the Federal Reserve System.

The name Federal Reserve System is, by design, a completely false and deceptive designation given to a private corporation, the purpose of which is to allow the private creation, control and ownership of our nation's currency and assets. This insures unlimited profit for private banking interests through the irreversible perpetuation and exponential expansion of debt, both public and private.

The Goldsmith Era Of Banking

An example of how present lending policies came into practice can be traced to goldsmiths of Medieval Europe. Rather than carrying around large quantities of cumbersome gold and silver to pay for goods and services, people found it more convenient to store or "deposit" their hard currency with goldsmiths who would then issue receipts which could be exchanged "upon demand" for the gold or silver on deposit.

As people began to find it more convenient to simply exchange the receipts directly, among themselves, as payment, they became a widely accepted form of "currency". As this system facilitated trade within the economy, the goldsmiths found that people would hold and exchange the receipts and rarely bring them in for the actual asset - the gold or silver on deposit.

With this realization, the goldsmiths began to produce more receipts (currency) for the assets than they actually had on deposit. By this system of counterfeiting, they found that they could actually control the supply of currency in circulation. By reducing the available supply of money in circulation they would force the borrowers into insolvency and foreclose on property. This system was implemented in cycles which would impoverish the debtors and enrich the goldsmiths.

Throughout the following centuries, attempts to reform these types of practices have provided temporary relief. Through manipulation and centralization of wealth however, this practice is perpetuated in much the same form in our present money system.

The First Central Bank Of The U.S.

In 1791, a bill sponsored by Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton was passed by Congress. This bill established the largest American corporation of its time, known as the First Bank of the United States. This corporation, controlled almost exclusively by big money interests, was tenured by a charter of 20 years which expired in 1811. Under popular pressure of American citizens who feared the power and influence of such a large and powerful institution, Congress rejected the renewal of this charter.

The Second Central Bank Of The U.S.

In 1816, Congress (under the influence of big money supporters) once again chartered a central bank, the Second Bank of the United States. In 1828 however, an ardent and avowed opponent of the central banking concept, Andrew Jackson, was elected President and led a popular campaign against this form of institutionalized economic power which resonated with the American public. The charter expired in 1836 and was not renewed.

The Free Banking Era

During the period spanning the years 1836 to 1865, State chartered banks and privately developed "free banks" became prevalent on the American economic landscape. These banks issued their own currency, in which only a fraction was redeemable in gold or specie, and offered demand deposits (checking accounts) to facilitate trade and commerce. A rapidly expanding system of check transactions engendered the New York Clearing House Association in 1853 as a vehicle for banks to exchange checks and settle accounts.

There was a prevailing notion (created and propagandized by the banking elite) that some system was necessary to stabilize U.S. currency. The National Banking Act of 1863 provided some remedial effect on economic stabilization, but bank failures and financial panic (a product of deliberate manipulation of the money supply) produced widespread anxiety about the future of the American economy.

The National Banking Act Of 1863

This act of Congress, passed during the Civil War, established a system of nationally chartered banks and required the currency issued by them to be backed by government securities. The act was subsequently amended to also require the taxation of state currencies, but not of national bank notes. This produced the intended effect of creating a uniform national currency. State banks and their respective currency, non-the-less, continued to expand - primarily in response to the growing popularity of expedient demand deposits (checking accounts).

The Artificial Financial Panics

Though currency had become more stable as a result of the National Banking Act of 1863, financial panics (orchestrated by the banking elite) and the resulting bank-runs continued to threaten the U.S. economy. Banking panics in 1893, and again in 1907 produced severe economic depressions in the United States. This gave impetus to a growing number of Americans calling for banking reforms.

Each time, legendary banking mogul J.P. Morgan intervened and not only provided the illusion of economic stability, but consolidated power for himself and the powerful banking interests, which paved the way for the establishment of a private central bank.

Knowing that the American public now looked to banking legislation to control fluctuation of economic resources, but was also distrustful of a banker-controlled society, the large banking interests were now poised to carry out one of the most audacious deceptions ever perpetuated against the American public - the so called Federal Reserve System.

The Decentralized Central Bank

In response to the panic of 1907, the Glass-Owen Act of 1908 was passed to provide for the issue of emergency currency during widespread financial crisis. The National Monetary Commission was also established under this act to develop a more durable solution to the nation's problematic financial and banking practices.

The commission, under the direction of Senator Nelson Aldrich proposed a banker-controlled plan. Progressives however, led by William Jennings Bryan, strongly opposed such a plan. They preferred a central bank under public (governmental), not private (banker) control. With the election of Democrat Woodrow Wilson in 1912, the plan was effectively stalled.

The Birth Of The Federal Reserve System

With the intention of developing a workable central banking solution, President Wilson turned to Chairman of the House Committee on Banking and Finance, Representative Carter Glass, and a former Washington and Lee University professor of Economics, H. Parker Willis. By December of 1912, they had presented Wilson with a draft proposal.

For a year this plan was debated, contested and modified. The outcome was touted as a classic example of compromise which established a decentralized central bank that balanced the competing interests of private banks and populist sentiment. The true effect was to place control of the U.S. economy squarely in the hands of the big-money private bankers who could now create endless amounts of monetary credits, backed by nothing, to be lent at will to the United States Government.

On Sunday, December 23, 1913, two days before Christmas, while most of Congress was on vacation, President Woodrow Wilson signed the Federal Reserve Act into law. Wilson would later express profound regret over his tragic decision, stating:

"I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country. A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is concentrated. The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men. We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated governments in the civilized world - no longer a government by free opinion, no longer a government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a government by the opinion and duress of a small group of dominant men."

Less than one year later Congress declared the 16th Amendment as having been ratified, although it wasn't, creating the Internal Revenue Service which became the de-facto collection agency for the Federal Reserve System. Its only duty was to tax the income of citizens to make the interest payments for the U.S. Government loans that would soon follow.

By November 16, 1914 the Reserve Bank Organization Committee had selected twelve cities throughout the U.S. as sites for regional Reserve Banks, the existence of which served to conceal the fact that there was now a United States Central Bank. The Federal Reserve System then began operations just as European hostilities erupted into World War I.

The War-Time Fed Policy

With the outbreak of war, "emergency currency", issued under the Aldrich-Vreeland Act of 1908 allowed the U.S. Federal Reserve Banks to lend newly created money at will. Concurrently, the Reserve Bank's ability to discount bankers' acceptances allowed the United States (though officially neutral) to aid the flow of trade goods to the European war effort.

After three years of fighting, Germany had nearly destroyed England. The Federal Reserve and the banks that privately owned it had lent billions to the English and would stand to lose all of it if she were crushed. The only solution appeared to be pulling the U.S. into the war. The U.S. however, would not fight unless first attacked.

In 1915, J.P. Morgan and his banking associates established their plan to have the British liner, "Lusitania" with 128 American passengers onboard, laden with munitions, cruise right through the middle of the wartime shipping lanes in order to be sunk by a German submarine, thus bringing the U.S. directly into the conflagration.

It worked, and with the United States' official declaration of war on Germany in 1917, financing our own war efforts would produce astronomical profits for these private institutions. Thanks to the new income tax and IRS, taxpayer money would now flow like never before into the hands of private bankers as the government taxed the citizens and paid the interest on the finance of the war.

The Roaring 20's

The defeat of Woodrow Wilson by Warren Harding ushered in an unprecedented period of prosperity known as "the Roaring 20's. The primary engine for this economic expansion was the Federal Reserve's flooding of the economy with newly created, debt money, borrowed by the government during WWI.

Subsequently, Fractional Reserve Banking allowed the Fed to increase the money supply by more than 61% within three years. Money was plentiful, and a steady increase in bank loans, coupled with the worry-free attitude of the American public propelled a continued rise in the economy. Stock-market speculation was rampant and businesses expanded and became strung-out on easy credit.

Concurrently the Fed, under the direction of Benjamin Strong, head of the New York Fed, shifted toward a monetary policy of open market operations. Under the guise of stemming a potential recession in 1923, the Fed made a large purchase of government bonds.

This purchase strengthened the "public perception" that expanding credit and introducing more currency into the system would have a more stabilizing effect on the economy than would dependence on a gold standard. (In actuality, when the Fed buys government bonds from the public the economy will shrink by 10 to 33 times the purchased amount, depending upon what the fractional reserve rate currently is.)

At the same time, Strong further consolidated the power of the Fed by promoting a policy of relations with the Bank of England and other international central banks. The Fed and its conglomeration of huge, international member banks had now set the stage for the most massive rip-off of the nation's economy to date.

The Great Depression

In August of 1929, the Fed began to tighten the money supply continually by buying more government bonds. At the same time, all the Wall-Street giants of the era, including John D. Rockefeller and J.P. Morgan divested from the stock-market and put all their assets into cash and gold.

Soon thereafter, on October 24, 1929, the large brokerages all simultaneously called-in their 24 hour "call-loans." Brokers and investors were now forced to sell their stocks at any price they could get to cover these loans. The resulting market crash on "Black-Thursday" was the beginning of the Great Depression.

The Chairman of the House Banking and Currency Committee, Representative Louis T. Mc Fadden, accused the Fed and international bankers of premeditating the crash. "It was not accidental," he declared, "it was a carefully contrived occurrence (created by international bankers) to bring about a condition of despair...so that they might emerge as rulers of us all."

He went on to accuse European "statesmen and financiers" of creating the situation to facilitate the reacquisition of the massive amounts of gold which Europe had lost to the U.S. during WWI. In a 1999 interview, Nobel Prize winning economist and Stanford University Professor Milton Friedman stated: "The Federal Reserve definitely caused the Great Depression."

The Bankruptcy Of The U.S.

Because the government of the U.S. (a corporation) had paid its loans to the Fed with real money exchangeable for gold, it was now insolvent and could no longer retire its debt. It now had no choice but to file chapter 11. Under the Emergency Banking Act (March 9, 1933, 48 Stat.1, Public law 89-719) President Franklin Roosevelt effectively dissolved the United States Federal Government by declaring the entity bankrupt and insolvent.

June 5, 1933 Congress enacted HJR 192 which made all debts, public or private, no longer collectable in gold. Instead, all debts public or private were to be payable in un-backed Fed-created fiat currency. This new currency would now be legal tender in the U.S. for all debts public and private.

Henceforth, our United States Constitution would be continuously eroded due to the fact that our nation is now owned "lock stock and barrel," by a private consortium of international bankers, contemptuous of any freedoms or sovereignties intended by our forefathers. This was all accomplished by design.

The Confiscation Of America's Gold

Under orders of the creditor (the Federal Reserve System and its private owners) on April 5, 1933 President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Presidential order 6102, which required all Americans to deliver all gold coins, gold bullion, and gold certificates to their local Federal Reserve Bank on or before April 28, 1933.

Any violators would be fined up to $10,000, imprisoned up to ten years, or both for knowingly violating this order. This gold was then offered by the Fed owners to any foreign, non-U.S. citizen, at $35.00 per ounce. Over the entire previous 100 years, gold had remained at a stable value, increasing only from $18.93 per ounce to $20.69 per ounce.

Since then, every U.S. citizen (by virtue of their birth certificate) has become an asset of the government, pledged at a specific dollar amount to pay this debt through future taxation. Thus, every American citizen is in debt from birth (via future taxation), and is, for all practical purposes, property of the creditors, the privately owned Federal Reserve System.

The Self Perpetuating Cycle

Presently, the United States government (which again, is completely owned and controlled by the international bankers) continues to forfeit its sovereignty by entering into international monetary and trade agreements which abolish almost all forms of trade tariffs that previously protected not only the value of American commercial productivity and workforce labor, but which were also a substantial source of revenue for the government.

The loss of this revenue, as well as the expanding deficits created by recent massive reduction in taxation for large corporations and the very wealthiest citizens, insures continued borrowing by the government. This self-perpetuating cycle of borrowing is made possible only by the ability of the government to guarantee repayment (of only the interest, never the principal) through future taxation on the earnings of every American citizen.

The Modern Day Slavery

Due to our banking history of deception, fraud and counterfeiting, which only benefits the purported elite bankers and their underlings, the borrowed principal itself is being used to make the payments on our debt at interest, thus, it is mathematically impossible to pay off.

We are, therefore, obligated to continue this cycle of borrowing indefinitely, causing complete money slavery for life. The amount owed will expand endlessly, until our monthly payments exceed our income, we are bankrupt, and all we have acquired in this lifetime is pillaged from us. Or, until the privately owned Federal Reserve System is ended and all debts are terminated.

Assassinated  U.S. Presidents  Abraham Lincoln,  James Garfield,  and  John F. Kennedy  were each trying to regain Constitutional control of U.S. monetary policy

References:

Banking history, Debt to Success System.  Banking history

Lambert Tim, "A brief history of banks," 2019.  Lambert: Bank history 2019

Pleutocracy.  Pleutocracy