The practice of banking is old, and its origins are interesting, because they tell us a lot about why we have the system we have today. This is a knowledgeable audience; please bear with me if I repeat things you are already familiar with.
The Very First Banks
Long, long ago, wealthy people began to store their money with the town’s silver or gold smiths. The smiths always had the most secure storage facilities for their precious metals, and they could rent space in it to the town’s wealthy who wanted to secure their excess coin. The smith would provide a written receipt for the amounts of precious metals and/or coins stored with him. In time, people discovered they could use the receipts themselves in trade, with the added benefit of not having to carry the coin around. Once this became custom, networking between community smiths would allow transactions over distances to take place. Receipts would start to be issued in round numbers to facilitate their use in trade. Thus was banking born in the West.
The Problem of the Time Value of Money
For most of Europe
, Christianity was the prevailing religion at the time. Usury was a sin for many centuries, which presented Christian kings and nobility with a serious problem. The idea that money had a changing value over time was common sense to the higher classes with discretionary funds. But remaining in good standing within the church forbade them from charging interest for the use of their money. People of Jewish faith had no such religious limitation, as the nobles quickly realized. Jews were hired to manage the process of loaning at interest, and one more feature of modern banking was born.
As an aside, it was this solution to the problem of usury that led rather directly to the Holocaust. Jews, by the relative freedom of their faith, had become a dominant force in European banking, and were convenient scapegoats for German leaders dealing with the inflation crisis during the Weimar Republic period. The real reasons for runaway inflation had other roots – the excessive demands placed by the victors of WW1 upon the German economy for reparations and poor management of the currency by the German Central Bank. This enmity whipped up by politicians against the Jews was seized upon by Hitler and used in his rise to power.
Fractional Reserve Lending
Along this path, the emerging profession of banking discovered a tool for the massive creation of wealth for the banking system. They realized that paper substitutes for money did not have to be limited to the amount of money within their vaults. All they had to do was keep enough money handy to cover their busiest days. But panics and crises would often result in runs on the bank that they could not handle
, which would force closure, and worse, endanger their lives. Enter central banking – a government-sponsored franchise to back the banks and transfer their losses to the taxpayer. It took the bankers several tries to get the system set up correctly, but once successful, this eliminated the downside risk for bankers, who were now free to open the fractional reserve banking spigot wide open, knowing the risks were covered.
This then is the back story for the single greatest fraud in the history of humanity, and the driving force for evil in today’s world.
The Implications
Think about this. The world has seen the greatest explosion of productivity and wealth creation in the last hundred and fifty years. The industrial revolution, now harnessed to the boom in information technology, has made the average human being dozens if not hundreds of times more productive than people of the 19th century. After many millennia of hard work and hard living, humanity has suddenly leapt out of the Malthusian Trap.
By any sensible examination of the circumstances, it should be clear that each succeeding year in this recent history, an hour of labor should have been able to generate an increasing amount of value in trade. There have been brief periods of time where we actually saw this happen, like when the price of computers were falling in nominal dollars during the end of the 20th century. But what has actually happened is that the vast majority of this value creation was being stealthily stolen from most Americans through the artifice of inflation. Today’s dollar is worth about 3% of the dollar’s value at the time of the creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913. The labor hour, the central resource of the middle and lower classes in America, has been steadily devalued through currency inflation, dramatically reducing the ability of most Americans to truly ‘share the wealth’ of 20th and 21st century productivity.
All of this stolen wealth had to go somewhere. So where did it go? One analysis I read estimated that over time
, approximately 15 trillion dollars worth of this wealth went into the pockets of the owners of the controlling interests of the Federal Reserve. If this is so, a similar, or even larger amount surely accrued to the owners of the interests controlling the central banks of Europe.
This begins to explain how it is possible that the wealthiest handful of families in the West can control as much as a third of the world’s wealth. No other human activity or enterprise can approach the history of fractional reserve banking for its sheer ability to capture economic value.
These dozen or so wealthiest families, despite their lofty status, have one serious problem. Sooner or later, people are going to figure out this fraud. The system they have created cannot last forever. All fiat currencies eventually decline in value to zero, and our economy is showing clear signs of the endgame fast approaching. People are going to realize that these bankers are the reason why they have been kept from the ability to accumulate their own generational wealth. They are going to discover that they would have been far more prosperous in the absence of fiat currency and fractional reserve lending. So the cabal have begun to use the power their wealth affords them to capture governments in the West, and to reduce the degree of individual freedom within these western nations. They know the greatest risk to their oligarchy is a society free to examine its context and declare an enemy. Nothing would be more dangerous to them than such a movement arising in the U.S. before they could impose their control.
I cannot directly prove this, but huge amounts of circumstantial evidence strongly suggest that this small oligarchy has labored for decades to create the New World Order
, developed a constellation of entities to recruit and train, captured the United Nations and the IMF with the intent to strengthen their ability to impose their will and protect themselves from people free enough to rebel against their crimes. They have done this by harnessing the issues du jour, like social justice, climate change, and more recently the virus pandemic to their own goals of global hegemony, as a way of co-opting a generation of progressive political and opinion leaders to their cause while hiding from them the true purpose of all this effort.
This, I believe, is why we are where we are as a nation in this moment. And I say this with full awareness of the fact that the CCP has deeply compromised the Biden family and numerous other politicians, and played a key role in subverting the electronic balloting system in many states and enabling the theft of a Presidential election in November 2020. I do not think there is a Central Bank anywhere in the world that is not influenced to a meaningful degree by this cabal of top banking families.
Imagine, if you can, what our world might look like today if we had the strength to insist that sound money was the only money.
Thanks for the very informative post, Mouse 2. Now, what to do?
I’m becoming convinced it’s going to have to burn to the ground, and be rebuilt.
That is the question. Congress gave away control of the People’s money in 1913. They can take it back, and easily return us to sound money. But the People must control Congress in order for this to happen. And they need to learn what relatively few Americans know about how our system of money has been used to enslave us.
I lay the problem on the banks. If they have 1 unit of gold, and issue 20 chits for 1 unit, backed by only one unit of gold, each chit is actually worth only 1/20 of the gold held by the bank. Robbery. As to Congress, are we sure they are not ‘owned’ by the banks. et al? A hell… Read more »
Central Banking has been a long con. Fractional reserve lending, as the bankers call it, literally permits the banks to create money, which is what’s actually happening in the example you give. How wealthy would car dealers be if they could somehow lease at 10% interest 20 cars that cost them nothing for every one they have in inventory? This… Read more »
This is not to disagree with any of the above, but is intended to further illuminate the main post. Humbly: Interestingly, the public policies of Governments from Portugal to Russia and China explicitly forbade the Jews from having most manufacturing and productive trades. Banking / money lending was one of the very few occupations allowed to them. One can hardly… Read more »
Wil, when I wrote this post, I was painfully aware of just how much relevant history I was leaving out for brevity, so I appreciate your comment. Jews have long been the object of suspicion and hatred, often accused of various conspiracies. Most of this has been cheap religious politics fueling these cultural clashes, because Judaism and Christianity have far… Read more »
Jews deny Christ, they have more in common with Islam than Christianity.
That aside, the primary reason Jews were demonized was they did not integrate with the nation, they kept themselves apart, and thus, are always “the other”
Jesus and his followers were all Jews. Christianity as a faith did not arise until well after his death. Jews don’t deny Christ, they just do not believe he is God. It is actually Christianity that is unique for its views of Christ, as apart from Judaism and Islam. And all of this has been and is in continuous motion,… Read more »
“Jews don’t deny Christ, they just do not believe he is God.”
No, they don’t believe he is the messiah.
“It is actually Christianity that is unique for its views of Christ,”
yeah, the whole messiah thing. I know. That was kinda my point.
The church was born on the day of Pentecost, 50 days after Jesus’ resurrection, 10 days after His ascension.
Wrong on all counts. That may well be a record, by percentage, anyway. I would suggest you spend a few hours contemplating Islam’s “Holy Book”. There’s an education to be had looking through the later Suras. Don’t take my word for it – look for yourself. Jews do not, in general, deny The Christ – I see several Jewish Christians… Read more »
You cannot be both Jewish, and Christian, unless the word “Jew” has no religious connotations at all. If you wish to dance around the definition of Jew in that way, I am not really interested in a motte and bailey conversation. as for suggesting I am a klanner, or some other form of bigot, meh, been called worse. Try again,… Read more »
“Jew” implies both a race and a religion. If you meant one over the other, perhaps you should be more precise in your choice of words. I believed you meant both, not that it really matters. That said, your very first sentence on this thread was remarkably similar to the same hateful, bigoted bullshit I grew up in the old… Read more »
You may of course impugn anyone in any way you wish, reality won’t bend to your will though.
My statement was simple Jew’s deny Christ, you then rattle on as if that is somehow an offensive statement. Weird.
Nice try at the flounce and bounce though, never seen that before…
‘“Jew” implies both a race and a religion. If you meant one over the other, perhaps you should be more precise in your choice of words. I believed you meant both,’ If you actually believed that, then you wouldn’t have brought up messianic Jews, as they are not Jews in the religious sense, they are Christians. In the religious sense,… Read more »
The short version is that “Sound Money” is, indeed, good policy. Provided your definition of sound money is something along the lines of public law describing one ounce of silver / gold as a certain number of dollars. Or seed corn. Or Horses. Or acres of land. Or some other, publicly agreed upon standard. Pick yer poison, take yer choices,… Read more »