Recession: What the Feds Don’t Want You to Know

"To cause high prices, all the Federal Reserve Board will do will be to lower the rediscount rate..., producing an expansion of credit and a rising stock market; then when ... business men are adjusted to these conditions, it can check ... prosperity in mid career by arbitrarily raising the rate of interest. It can cause the pendulum of a rising and falling market to swing gently back and forth by slight changes in the discount rate, or cause violent fluctuations by a greater rate variation and in either case it will possess inside information as to financial conditions and advance knowledge of the coming change, either up or down.

This is the strangest, most dangerous advantage ever placed in the hands of a special privilege class by any Government that ever existed.

The system is private, conducted for the sole purpose of obtaining the greatest possible profits from the use of other people's money.

They know in advance when to create panics to their advantage, They also know when to stop panic.

Inflation and deflation work equally well for them when they control finance." 

INTEREST, DIVIDENDS AND RENTS.

The greatest of all the present social burdens is the excessive interest, dividends and rent charges levied on us by those who control centralized capital.  It may seem to those possessing great wealth that they are vested with the right to levy for its use whatever toll they please upon the plain people.  What they do levy makes it evident that they think the people owe them more than it is possible for us to pay.

In no case has government so signally neglected its function as in its failure to issue money and control the charges made for its use.  Banks and individuals have been permitted to set up a system for financial action which is supported by credits and the products of the people’s industries.  Through its use they are enabled to collect exorbitant dividends, interest, and profits on what they do not produce.

From the testimony given by George F. Baker (President of the First National Bank of New York City) before the committee appointed to investigate the Money Trust, we learn that the operations of a single bank produced, in fifty years, profits equal to $86,000,000, or 172 times its original capital.  If that bank continues to do business and is allowed to pile up profits in that geometrical progression, it alone, in less than 100 years, will extort from the people all of their property, and—that bank is but one of the 30,000 banks operating on an uneconomic system.

The total capitalization (which includes surplus and undivided profits) of 30,000 banks in 1913, was considerable over $4,000,000,000 and dividends compounded on that sum, as is the custom of banks, will, if allowed to do so by the indifference of the people to their own rights, consume the balance of the nation’s wealth. The accumulated holdings of all the trusts that centralize wealth would immensely reduce the time it will take for the interest and dividends on these holdings to absorb all of our present property, and all of what we earn in the future, except what is required to be left to enable us to eke out a bare subsistence.

The whole country has sold money short and could not possibly deliver or pay the money that it has agreed to pay.  ... The annual interest alone, contracted to be paid on these obligations, probably exceeds all of the money in existence.