Do We Really Need the Federal Reserve Bank?

[music]

Keith Fitz-Gerald, from marketoracle.co.uk

... For much of my career, I took the Fed for granted, believing like millions of Americans that it was acting in our country's best interest.

Then I sat down with legendary investor Jim Rogers in Singapore a few years back at the onset of the current financial crisis. During our discussion, he pointed out several things that really made me think about the Fed and its role in not only creating this crisis, but making it worse.


A 100 Year-Old Affront to Freedom

The American Fed as it operates today is an insult to anybody who believes in economic and political freedom. In an era of globally-linked finance, the very concept of a Fed is an abomination.

I realize that this may not sit well with you if this is the first time you've thought about the issue.

So let's walk you through a few things that will challenge your thinking...

The Fed was established in 1913. It's only 100 years old. And it's anything but an original part of America's economic machine.

Its original purpose was simple: To prevent banking failures.

At the time, the United States had just gone through the vicious bank panic of 1907. That crisis was significant because it saw the failure of Knickerbocker Trust, which sought -- but failed -- to receive financial support from its peers. Unable to obtain liquidity from any source, Knickerbocker Trust collapsed.

This affected public psychology deeply because Knickerbocker's peers not only chose not to rescue Knickerbocker, but also suspended payments to each other.

This boomeranged through the system and came to roost at the retail level when the public figured out that they didn't have access to their money, especially in "specie," meaning in gold. Bank runs and closures became the norm. The New York Stock Exchange fell 50% before financier J.P. Morgan famously locked banking executives in his personal library and formulated a liquidity injection that ultimately calmed everything down.

Loath to waste a good crisis, legislators stepped up to the plate by agitating for centralized banking as a means of restoring public confidence while providing the banking system with a source of liquidity that would prevent their wholesale collapse.

And they got it a few years later...in spades.

What's really interesting to me looking back using today's lens is how sophisticated the machinery of the time was. Powerful public and private figures worked together, often in great secrecy like they did at Jekyll Island, Georgia, to build the framework for the Fed. The Wall Street Journal published a 14-part series highlighting the need for a central bank. Citizen groups and trade organizations piled on.

And voilà...the Fed was born under the guise of a politically independent institution that would stabilize the financial system, protect the monetary supply against inflation, and maintain credit as needed by injecting stimulus when the economy flagged and withdrawing it when things were overheated. In the terminology of the day, this was viewed as giving elasticity to the dollar which would, in turn, establish more effective control over the banking system.

Full article here (http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article39655.html)

Please share to interested parties.

[GloriousPoetry]

Another good book to read that goes into historical events that led to the economic system we have today is William Bramley's The Gods of Eden.....disturbing book but very informative.

[ghostrider]

No... we don't need the fed ...

[Prodigal Son]

Morgan was quite a character. He kills all his opponents on the Titanic, manages to pull off an insurance fraud by switching it with the sister ship, and steps in to save the day with the solution to what he started in the first place.


The Secret Bailout of J. P. Morgan: How Insider Trading Looted Bear Stearns and the American Taxpayer

The mother of all insider trades was pulled off in 1815, when London financier Nathan Rothschild led British investors to believe that the Duke of Wellington had lost to Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo. In a matter of hours, British government bond prices plummeted. Rothschild, who had advance information, then swiftly bought up the entire market in government bonds, acquiring a dominant holding in England’s debt for pennies on the pound. Over the course of the nineteenth century, N. M. Rothschild would become the biggest bank in the world, and the five brothers would come to control most of the foreign-loan business of Europe. “Let me issue and control a nation’s money,” Rothschild boasted in 1838, “and I care not who writes its laws.”

In the United States a century later, John Pierpont Morgan again used rumor and innuendo to create a panic that would change the course of history. The panic of 1907 was triggered by rumors that two major banks were about to become insolvent. Later evidence pointed to the House of Morgan as the source of the rumors.

The public, believing the rumors, proceeded to make them come true by staging a run on the banks. Morgan then nobly stepped in to avert the panic by importing $100 million in gold from his European sources. The public thus became convinced that the country needed a central banking system to stop future panics, overcoming strong congressional opposition to any bill allowing the nation’s money to be issued by a private central bank controlled by Wall Street; and the Federal Reserve Act was passed in 1913. Morgan created the conditions for the Act’s passage, but it was Paul Warburg who pulled it off. An immigrant from Germany, Warburg was a partner of Kuhn, Loeb, the Rothschilds’ main American banking operation since the Civil War. Elisha Garrison, an agent of Brown Brothers bankers, wrote in his 1931 book Roosevelt, Wilson and the Federal Reserve Law that “Paul Warburg is the man who got the Federal Reserve Act together after the Aldrich Plan aroused such nationwide resentment and opposition. The mastermind of both plans was Baron Alfred Rothschild of London.” Morgan, too, is now widely believed to have been Rothschild’s agent in the United States. 1

Robert Owens, a co-author of the Federal Reserve Act, later testified before Congress that the banking industry had conspired to create a series of financial panics in order to rouse the people to demand “reforms” that served the interests of the financiers. A century later, JPMorgan Chase & Co. (now one of the two largest banks in the United States) may have pulled this ruse off again, again changing the course of history. “Remember Friday March 14, 2008,” wrote Martin Wolf in The Financial Times; “it was the day the dream of global free-market capitalism died.”

Full article click here (http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-secret-bailout-of-j-p-morgan-how-insider-trading-looted-bear-stearns-and-the-american-taxpayer/8974)

[sigma6]

Agreed the way you just told (even if Rogers told it to you like that, he was just trying to be diplomatic, I am sure he is not that naive) That was the fairy tale version. The Rothschilds via JP Morgan, who himself was only a front for them, created the banking crisis's it was all planned. The Banking families had been scheming for hundreds of years to get a Central Bank into place. Against the constitution of the US, and the principles of the founding fathers (pre-Satanic freemasons I am going to guess)

And no you don't need a Fed Reserve, because they probably stole all the gold there was to steal. And they sucked just about all they can carry away in the last 40 years to boot. Right on schedule at the end of their 99 year lease. So why would they need to continue the Federal Reserve? The "job" is done.