Antony C. Sutton - The Federal Reserve Conspiracy

THE

FEDERAL

RESERVE

CONSPIRACY

by Antony C. Sutton

First Printing: Copyright 1995 Antony C. Sutton

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without permission of the publisher, except brief quotes used in conjunction with reviews written especially for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or for educational purposes.

Reprint Edition: 2014 by Dauphin Publications Inc.

ISBN: 978-1-939438-19-5

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

The Bankers' Bank

Since 1913 politicians and media have treated the Federal Reserve Bank as a kind of untouchable off limits semi-God... no one except certified crackpots and kooks criticizes the Fed. Conventional wisdom dictates that anyone who attacks the Federal Reserve System is doomed and Congressional investigation of the Fed would result in economic chaos and a disastrous plunge in the stock market.

Recently President Clinton got to appoint Alan Blinder to a seat on the seven-member Board of Governors. Blinder launched into criticism of Fed actions, i.e., interest rates are too high and differed from the policy laid down by Chairman Alan Greenspan.

Poor Blinder was blindsided by the establishment press and no doubt received advice to keep quiet because since this initial speech, Blinder has repeatedly stated there are no differences between himself and Chairman Greenspan and refuses to go beyond this curious mea culpa.

There is a vast misconception about the Fed. The President and the Congress have very little, if any, influence on policy. The Congress handed over all monetary powers to the Fed in 1913. The Fed is a private bank, owned by banks, and pays dividends on its shares owned only by banks. The Fed is a private Bankers' Bank.

Yet Fed policy, not Government policy, is the dominant factor in economic growth. The Fed can create jobs by loosening credit. The Government talks a lot about creating jobs but in fact can only create bureaucracies which restrict rather than promote enterprise. The private sector creates productive jobs and the private sector is heavily dependent on Fed policy to do this.

The Congress has never investigated the Fed and is highly unlikely to do so. No one sees Fed accounts; they are not audited. No balance sheets are issued. No one, but no one , ever criticizes the Fed and survives.

Why all the secrecy and caution? Simply because the Fed has a legal monopoly of money granted by Congress in 1913 proceedings that were unconstitutional and fraudulent. Most of Congress had no idea of the contents of the Federal Reserve Bill signed by President Woodrow Wilson who was in debt to Wall Street.

The Federal Reserve has the power to create money. This money is fiction, created out of nothing. This can be money in the form of created credit through the discount window at which other banks borrow at the discount rate of interest or it can be notes printed by the Treasury and sold to the Fed and paid for by Fed-created funds

In brief, this private group of bankers has a money machine monopoly. This monopoly is uncontrolled by anyone and is guaranteed profit. Further, the monopoly doesn't have to answer questions or produce books or file annual statements.

It is an unrestricted money monopoly.

This book explains how this money monopoly came about. Obviously, Congress and the general public were misled and lied to when the Federal Reserve Bank was in discussion. Why the monopoly has continued is that the public is lazy, and so long as their individual world is reasonably fulfilling, has no reason to question Fed actions.

Even if they do they will find few books that surface the real facts. Academicians are too interested in protecting the Fed monopoly. An academic book criticizing the Fed will never find a publisher and the economist author would probably find tenure denied.

This is the first book that details hour by hour the events that led up to passage of the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 - and the many decades of work and secret planning that private bankers had invested to obtain their money monopoly.

The Federal Reserve Conspiracy

Los Angeles Times Cartoon by Ed Gamble, 1994

Chapter 2

Thomas Jefferson

and The Money Power

It is fashionable in our contemporary academic world to ignore the powerful arguments of the Founding Fathers: the arguments of Presidents Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Andrew Jackson in particular. These arguments are that the Republic and the Constitution are always in danger from the so- called "money power," a group of autocrats, an elite we would call them today, who have manipulated the political power of the state to gain a monopoly over money issue.

Our modern academics even ignore Thomas Jefferson's chief reason for remaining in politics, i.e., to save the newly born United States from those elitists Jefferson called "monocrats" and "monopolists." It was the banking monopoly that Jefferson considered to be the greatest danger to the survival of the Republic.

The Jeffersonian ideal, one that contemporary elitists and Marxists sneer at, was a Republic comprising small property owning citizens (Marx would later call them bourgeoisie and Nelson Rockefeller used to call them "peasants") with a sense of civic awareness and a regard for the rights of their neighbors. The best government for Jefferson was the least government, where individual citizens take it upon themselves to protect the rights of neighbors. While Jefferson rejected socialist ideas he equally rejected the monopoly power of banking interests and feared what elitist banking power would do to American liberties. Said Jefferson:

If the American people ever allow the banks to control the issuance of their currency, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers occupied. The issuing power of money should be taken from the banks and restored to Congress and the people to whom it belongs. I sincerely believe the banking institutions are more dangerous to liberty than standing armies. (1)

The First Private Banking Monopoly

The Founding Fathers' discussion of banks and the money power reflect the clash of political philosophies among early Americans with Alexander Hamilton on one side and Jefferson, Madison and Franklin on the Jeffersonian side. Hamilton represented the autocratic tradition prominent in Europe that figured on winning through a banking monopoly what could not be won politically. It was Hamilton who introduced a bill in December, 1790 into the House of Representatives to grant a charter for the privately owned Bank of the United States, thus creating the first private money monopoly in the U.S., a predecessor to the privately owned Federal Reserve System. And it was Alexander Hamilton who just a few years before wrote the charter for the Bank of New York, the first bank in New York City. Isaac Roosevelt, great-great-grandfather Thomas Jefferson and the Money Power of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, was its second president, from 1796- 1791.

The Hamiltonian proposal for a national bank was a charter for private monopoly, a Congressional grant for a privileged few. The Bank of the U.S. had the sole right to issue currency, it was exempt from taxation, and the U.S. government was ultimately responsible for its actions and debts. As described by George Bancroft:

Hamilton recommended a National Bank with a capital of ten or fifteen million dollars, to be paid one-third in hard money and the other two-thirds in European funds or landed security. It was to be erected into a legal corporation for thirty years, during which no other bank, public or private, was to be permitted. Its capital and deposits were to be exempt from taxation, and the United States, collectively and particularly, were to become conjointly responsible for all its transactions. Its sources of profit were to be the sole right of issuing a currency for the United States equal in amount to the whole capital stock of the bank. (2)