by
George Sontag
Centralized banking has been devised for a purpose unseen and much different than what the public and most of our elected leaders/legislators believe. The purpose is not to stabilize, but to destabilize economies for ulterior motives. The elite have the weapon to retain control over societies. This weapon is called the Central Banking system. No country owns this weapon. It is wielded by a tiny circle of people. The identities of these people are largely hidden. They owe allegiance to no country, despot or political ideology only themselves. They deploy this weapon at their own discretion. They are the rulers of the western world. They are the “men in the shadows.”
Some basics, in the 2019 fiscal year the United States Government spent 1.1 trillion dollars more than it will collect in taxes. This number is called the “budget deficit.” Operating with a budget deficit is nothing new in our government’s history. This has been going on for decades, independent of which party has controlled the White House or Congress. If you were to add together all the deficits over the years you would arrive at a sum of approximately 22 trillion dollars. This number is called the “national debt.”
The ability to “pay off” this debt seems impossible, yet we continue to operate more or less the same way, borrowing more and more to meet our country’s obligation to social services, defense, infrastructure, and obligations to our debt holders. Most people are aware of these staggering numbers, yet few of us seem to consider basic questions about the system, like “Where does the money come from?” or “Who would continue lending us these sums given our poor track record of even balancing our budget?” The answers to these questions are astounding and can lead to an understanding of our nation’s history and monetary system that is absolutely necessary to put nearly every aspect of geopolitics into perspective.
The Federal Reserve, covertly conceived by the wealthiest few and brought into existence by Congress in 1913, is part of a global system of centralized banking that has been devised for a purpose unseen and much different than what the public and most of our elected leaders and legislators believe. The result of this system, as evidenced by repeated examples, has not been to stabilize economies but to destabilize them. This has been the intention of the founders of the modern banking system all along.
To accept his bold assertion it is useful to first consider how this is accomplished before understanding why it is done in the first place. As stated above, the total national debt is on the order of 22 trillion dollars as of 2019. However, according to The Federal Reserve there is only about 1.7 trillion dollars of currency in circulation. Where are the other 20 trillion dollars? Clearly, it exists only as numbers attached to accounts existing in computer memory. Monetary transactions are no longer dominated by the exchange of currency backed by a commodity (like gold or silver), they are instead represented by the increase of a receiver’s account balance that corresponds to the equivalent decrement in the account of the payer. This, of course, seems like a reasonable system that is equitable to both parties. However, if you examine it more closely, certain fundamental questions arise, primarily, where did the money come from in the first place?
The total amount of money in circulation in 1950 was approximately 27 billion dollars. How do we now have 60 times more money? The answer is that it was created by our banks and the Federal Reserve, an institution uniquely endowed by our government to “print” money at its own discretion. The expansion of the supply of money is less accomplished by the actual printing of legal tender than it is by the “creation” of debt. To illustrate this, let us consider a simplistic model of how a bank works. First, a bank serves as a secure place to store depositor’s money. The bank issues the depositor a receipt of deposit. Long ago these receipts were recognized as being more convenient than actually using coins to facilitate transactions. The “money” was in a vault, but the receipts of deposit, when they began to be accepted as payment by a third party, began functioning as money itself. Griffin explains that this form of money is termed “receipt money.” The modern representation of this convenience has taken the form of checking accounts.
Clearly, the amount of goods and services generated by the country has grown with our population and its concomitant increase in our labor force. Also, innovation in manufacturing and the development of technologies have given rise to less expensive ways to make stuff. We have also engineered methods for extracting our natural resources, making the required raw materials more abundantly available for industry. These changes continually influence the supply and demand for goods and services that ultimately will dictate what things cost. These are the “market” forces that capitalism relies upon to self-regulate and ostensibly create an environment for innovation. If the amount of money in circulation is left untouched, prices will continually readjust to represent the total value of the total amount of goods and services generated by an economy. There should never be a need to put more money into circulation.
When the bank acts as a lending institution, it can also provide depositors with an added incentive to keep their holdings there in the form of interest. The bank can pay this interest on its deposits by lending this money out to other customers in the form of mortgages, business and personal loans, etc. and charging a higher interest on these sums. The ability of private citizens and industry to have access to money to purchase homes or invest in their businesses or education allows for economic growth and a higher standard of living and is generally considered a good thing and something we all depend upon.
When we receive a loan to purchase something that we cannot “afford” we understand that it has not been given to us for free. We will pay for it over time. In the case of a home mortgage paid over thirty years the borrower ends up paying several times the amount they borrowed. This is all spelled out to the borrower when they sign the promissory note and agree to the terms. The money that gets lent is not possessed by the bank, it is owned by the depositors of the money. The depositors are free to continue to withdraw from their accounts, meanwhile the borrowers also have access to the very same pool of money. When your bank loans a sum of money to another party the amount in your account there does not get reduced. So, where does the money come from? The bank is essentially creating money out of debt and subsequently collecting interest on it. This money is added to circulation and when this happens, the value of every single dollar in the system gets depleted. Prices go up. This is inflation, and it can exact a devastating toll on the system depending on how much debt is created.
The Fed is a Monetary Cartel that has been setting us up for bigger failures... The Federal Reserve, with the power Congress has endowed it with, sets standards for the portion of money banks within its system are allowed to loan. Because the profitability of the bank is directly related to the amount of money they loan out, banks are motivated to maximize the amount they lend. In 2008, when it became recognized that a massive number of irresponsible home loans were made over the course of a decade and a number of banks could fail, the government stepped in by infusing the banking system with large sums of money. This money does not exist anywhere. It is created on the fly by the issuance of government bonds, essentially IOUs. But who would be willing to accept government IOUs in such a crisis? Nobody. Nobody, except the Federal Reserve. Through the purchase of government debt the Federal Reserve floods the system with essentially a limitless amount of “money.” This money did not come from the sale of goods and services or gold bars from the treasury. This money is ink on paper called Federal Reserve Checks which are used to fund government debt and ultimately result in greater balances in commercial bank accounts when the government spends it. The crisis gets averted. Or does it?
In the short run, the economy does not grind to a halt, and we laud the intervention as a success. However, there has been no increase in the amount of goods, commodities or services that the nation possesses. There is just more money out there. When that happens, the value of every single piece of currency, including the money in your wallet, drops. We grumble at the necessity of more taxes and less governmental services but few taxpayers realize the extent that their own wealth has been decremented by an unseen cost inflation, the direct cause of poor lending practices of our banks. We are told that we are in a crisis for a number of vague and complex reasons having to do with rarely agreed upon economic theories and a failure of our leaders to appreciate them. In fact, the reasons are simple. We have a system where banks can and will make the most profit if they make more loans. When they fail, the Federal Reserve ultimately steps in by creating more debt, which we shoulder by allowing our earnings and savings to be devalued. The cost to the average American rises as his net worth shrinks via inflation. Inflation IS the silent tax on us all.
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