I'm wondering about this. What is it that makes the Federal Reserve system a popular target for conspiracy theories?
Numerous reasons.
- The initial Jekyll Island meeting was carried out in complete and total secrecy. The press was not permitted any information and was left incapable of informing the public, which had a right to know about any proposed changes to their monetary system.
- One of the men involved, Frank Vanderlip, even admitted the organization and nature of the Jekyll Island meeting had a conspiratorial element. From the February 9, 1935 edition of the
Saturday Evening Post:
[T]here was an occasion, near the close of 1910, when I was as secretive—indeed, as furtive—as any conspirator....I do not feel it is any exaggeration to speak of our secret expedition to Jekyll Island as the occasion of the actual conception of what eventually became the Federal Reserve System.…We were told to leave our last names behind us. We were told, further, that we should avoid dining together on the night of our departure. We were instructed to come one at a time and as unobtrusively as possible to the railroad terminal on the New Jersy littoral of the Hudson, where Senator Aldrich's private car would be in readiness, attached to the rear end of a train for the South.…Once aboard the private car we began to observe the taboo that had been fixed on last names.…Discovery, we knew, simply must not happen, or else all our time and effort would be wasted.
- The Federal Reserve caused the Great Depression through monetary expansion and contraction. Current Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke admits this:
Let me end my talk by abusing slightly my status as an official representative of the Federal Reserve System. I would like to say to Milton and Anna: Regarding the Great Depression. You’re right, we did it. We’re very sorry. But thanks to you, we won’t do it again.
- More than one White House, banking, and other government insider has claimed that the Great Depression was deliberate. Curtis Dall was Franklin Delano Roosevelt's son-in-law, a successful Wall Street banker, and White House insider. In his book, My Exploited Father-in-Law, he wrote:
The depression was the calculated 'shearing' of the public by the World Money powers, triggered by the planned sudden shortage of supply of call money in the New York money market.
- The Federal Reserve has failed miserably at it's primary policy objectives over the last 97 years. The results:
* Non-stop inflation since 1913. The U.S. dollar has lost 95% of it's value since the creation of the Federal Reserve.
* A steady, unrelenting cycle of depressions and recessions with periods of massive unemployment.
* Disastrous U.S. government fiscal policy, which is partially a function of Federal Reserve monetary policy.
* Our monetary system under the Federal Reserve is naturally unstable and relies on the growth of debts to remain operational, because our money equals debt. There can be no economic growth in this country without a corresponding increase in the supply of money to facilitate commerce. To create this money, the government and citizens must go into increasing levels of debt, paying increasing levels of interest to private Federal Reserve System banks for the use of their own national currency.
- The Federal Reserve has never been independently audited and has stonewalled attempts by numerous members of Congress to have an outside audit of their books completed.
- Distinguished Georgetown professor and Council on Foreign Relations archivist Carroll Quigley revealed in his 1966 book,
Tragedy & Hope, the long-range goal of the elite bankers behind the Federal Reserve and the rest of the world's central banking system:
The powers of financial capitalism had another far reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements, arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences. The apex of the system was the Bank for International Settlements in Basle, Switzerland, a private bank owned and controlled by the worlds' central banks which were themselves private corporations. The growth of financial capitalism made possible a centralization of world economic control and use of this power for the direct benefit of financiers and the indirect injury of all other economic groups.
- There's no good reason the people and government of this country should go into debt just to create and have the money the Constitution granted Congress the authority to create through the Treasury. The U.S. Treasury could print sovereign money without any debt whatsoever and spend it into the economy, just as Lincoln had done with his greenbacks. For our money to be in the hands of private bankers for their own benefit and profit is quite obviously unnecessary and dare I say, conspiratorial.
