Dark Skinny

“Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt…” - Mark Twain

  • Most Popular

  • Meta

  • RSS

    Categories

    • Categories

    Related Sites

  • Archives

    • Archives

      open all | close all

US Recession: Historic Similarities to 1931

Posted by slowsmile on 26th January 2009

1929

I’ve read a few articles concerning comparisons of the present day Financial Crisis in the US with The Great Depression Years. In this comparison among many, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, writing in the UK Telegraph, walks us through a history, painting a small economic and political picture of what it was like in 1931 America, the similarities as well as differences to the present day crisis - the economic effects, wide civilian suffering with minor regional uprisings, Hoover’s bumbling policies, the Fed’s inadequacy and Roosevelt’s election, intervention and key change of policies. Much of this troubled economic period - in many ways - eerily resembles the Bush-Obama changeover.

In this extract - taken from his article  “Bad news: we’re back in 1931. Good news: it’s not 1933 yet.” - Mr. Evans-Pritchard takes us back to those times in a general historic  and economic assessment between then and now:

“President Obama faces a happier world. The liberal economic order is still in tact, if fraying at the edges. Capital and ships move freely. North America and Europe talk the same political language. China has so far proved a dependable pillar of the international system.

But then the world seemed benign enough in early 1931. It is the second phase of depression that does terrible things.

Roosevelt took over a country where the economic machinery had completely broken down. The New York Stock Exchange and the Chicago Board of Trade had closed. Thirty-two states had shut their banks. Texas had restricted withdrawals to $10 a day.

Few states could borrow on the bond markets. Illinois and much of the South had stopped paying teachers. Schools closed for months. An army of 25,000 famished war veterans squatting in view of Congress had been charged by troopers of the 3rd US cavalry with naked sabres – led by a Major George Patton.

Armed farmers threatening revolution had laid siege to a string or Prairie cities. A mob had stormed the Nebraska Capitol. Minnesota’s governor was recruiting Communists only for the state militia. Lawyers attempting to enforce foreclosures were shot. More than 100,000 New Yorkers applied to go to the Soviet Union when Moscow advertised for 6,000 skilled workers.

We forget how close America came to open redepressionvolt. Eleanor Roosevelt feared the country was beyond saving. Her husband kept the faith. He channelled the anger against Wall Street, diffusing it. “The practices of the unscrupulous money-changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion,” he began his presidency.

The Fed was an ideological deadweight. Bowing to pressure from Congress it began to purchase bonds in mid-1932 to boost the money supply, but then recoiled, before retreating into pitiful self-justification. A third of the rescue funds in Hoover’s Reconstruction Finance Corporation had been embezzled.

Today there has been no such failure of US institutional imagination, even if, as George Soros argues, the Treasury’s policies have been “haphazard and capricious”.

The twin blasts of fiscal and monetary stimulus have been massive. In short order the Fed has slashed rates to zero. It is now conjuring money out of thin air on an industrial scale, buying $600bn of mortgage bonds to force down the cost of home loans, and propping up the commercial paper market to avoid mass corporate default. Ben Bernanke, a Depression junkie, is proceeding with a messianic sense of certainty. The wash of money should ensure that the next 18 months will not mimic the cascade of disasters from late 1931 to early 1933.

It buys time. But it does not solve the deeper problem, which is that a West addicted to Ponzi credit has put off the day of reckoning with ever more extreme monetary policy with each downturn, stealing prosperity from the future.

It will be an extremely delicate task to right the ship again. Central banks will have to extricate themselves from their venture into the bond markets without setting off a bond debacle in 2010 or 2011. Governments will have to map out of a path of Puritan discipline for year after year.

This will be Barack Obama’s grim test of statesmanship.”

Posted in Economics, US Politics, World Politics | No Comments »

Insider Concerns at The Federal Reserve

Posted by slowsmile on 1st November 2008

imageIn 1910, in a quiet backwater in Georgia at The Jekyl Island Hunt Club, there was a meeting whose simple purpose was the formation of US The Federal Reserve. Those who attended were: Senator Nelson Aldrich (Nelson Rockefeller’s maternal grandfather); A. Piatt Andrew, Economist and Assistant Secretary of the Treasury; Frank Vanderlip, President of the National City Bank of New York; Henry P. Norton, President of Morgan’s First National Bank of New York; Paul Moritz Warburg, a German who was partner in the New York banking house of Kuhn, Loeb Co.; Benjamin Strong, an aid to J. P. Morgan.

The Federal Reserve was incorporated in 1913 and has been creating a completely unnecessary National Debt ever since. In simple terms, the Fed creates money as debt. They create money  and credit out of thin air by nothing more than the ruse of “fractional lending” and a book entry. Whenever the members of the Fed make any loans, that debt money is the US money supply.

THE TEN ORIGINAL MEMBER BANKS OF THE FEDERAL RESERVE

All owned by the Rothschilds

Rothschild Bank of London
Warburg Bank of Hamburg
Rothschild Bank of Berlin
Lehman Brothers of New York
Lazard Brothers of Paris
Kuhn Loeb Bank of New York
Israel Moses Seif Banks of Italy
Goldman, Sachs of New York
Warburg Bank of Amsterdam
Chase Manhattan Bank of New York

Please note that The Rothschild family owns and runs all the above so-called “American Banks”. Therefore you could safely assume that the Rothschild family both runs and controls the whole of the American Banking System. Indeed, Rothschilds is an old European family which has dominated the European banking system for centuries. So not even an American runs the US banking system - a European family cartel manipulates it completely with impunity.

By 1850, the House of Rothschild represented more wealth than all the families of Europe. Shortly after William Patterson formed the Bank of England(est. 1695),  its control passed to Nathan Rothschild and here is how he did it:

Nathan Rothschild was an observer on the day the Duke of Wellington defeated Napoleon at Waterloo, Belgium. He knew that with this information he could make a fortune. He later paid a sailor a big fee to take him across the English Channel in bad weather. The news of Napoleon’s defeat would take a while to hit England. When Nathan arrived in London, he began selling securities and bonds in a panic. The other investors were deceived into believing that Napoleon won the war and was eyeing England so they began to sell their securities too. What they were unaware of is that Rothschild’s agents were buying all the securities that were being sold in panic. In one day, the Rothschild fortune grew by one million pounds. They literally bought control of England for a few cents on the dollar. The same way the Rockefeller’s went into Japan after World War 2 and bought everything 10 cents on the dollar. SONY=Standard Oil New York, a Rockefeller Company.

Nathan Mayer von Rothschild(1840-1915), 1st Baron Rothschild, once boasted:

“I care not what puppet is placed upon the throne of England to rule the Empire on which the sun never sets. The man that controls Britain’s money supply controls the British Empire, and I control the British money supply.”

Frederick Morton wrote in his book, The Rothschilds:

“…the wealth of the Rothschilds consists of the bankruptcy of nations.”

But the Fed staunchly maintains that they are a private institution who’s only function is to serve the US government and its citizens. Well of course they do !! So, purely out of interest, lets look at those Financial Institutions that Hank Paulson (ex-CEO of Goldman Sachs) and Ben Bernanke have “saved” in the recent TARP bail-out:

  • Morgan Stanley
  • Citibank
  • Wells Fargo
  • Goldman Sachs
  • Bank of America
  • Merrill Lynch
  • State Street
  • Bank of New York

Every single one of these institutions is either related or has interests and connections to the original Fed forming cartel of 1910, ultimately run by the Rothschilds family. These financial institutions have all been saved as a priority by their cartel buddies within the Fed brotherhood. How many Mainstreet banks (that’s ordinary non-Investment Banks) have been saved or helped by the Fed? I would suggest that the Fed brotherhood’s Wall Street tentacles and influence spreads long, dirty and deep into the very heart of the US political infrastructure - which is the only possible explanation that could adequately explain their inexplicable untouchableness and apparent freedom of agenda.

Now some other facts about the the Fed:Fed

  • The Fed, as a private US institution, pays no corporate or any other income tax at all to the US government.
  • The Fed is allowed to look after US prices and the money supply - “at their own discretion”.
  • The Fed charges interest to the US government for every single Federal Note it produces. This charge, in the form of seignorage, is then passed on to the US citizens as an invisible “inflation tax”.
  • The Fed has NEVER been properly audited.
  • At their top-level meetings, the Fed keeps no written records or memoranda.
  • The Fed, as a private institution, is headed by an American banking cartel which, in turn, is under the complete influence of the European-based Rothschild banking family.

As a result of The Fed’s unstoppable financial activity and due to all the rash debt they have caused within America so consistently over the years, 22 cents in every single US dollar is now foreign owned through all their self-serving and mutifarious debt instruments. If these debt instruments were being used properly, then surely the US National Debt would be coming down wouldn’t it ?  But instead, it becomes painfully evident that the Fed uses these foreign loans, multiplied hugely by the practice of “Fractional Reserve Lending” to further create  credit, leading to unstable and untenable mountains of corporate, personal and financial debt. The US Fiscal Debt is currently running at about $60 trillion now, which is 6 X the reported National Debt and about 15 X GDP. These comparisons become even more ridiculous when compared against the dollar notes in circulation - which is approximately $600 billion. The Fiscal Debt is therefore 100 X more than the dollar notes in circulation !! Is this the measure of a strong economy ? Remember that  the total production of the world economy amounts to $60 trillion alone. David Walker, ex-Comptroller General of the government GAO has said that in order to pay back this US Fiscal Debt, every citizen in America would have to pay its government $480,000 just to break even.

In these current hard economic times, it seems that the forefathers of the  American Constitution had some real vision. In 1826, the second bank’s charter was soon to expire and presidential candidate Andrew Jackson - an avid and honest constitutionalist - campaigned fiercely against a central bank which was owned and operated by the international banking element. Here is Jackson’s opinion of those bankers:

“You are a den of vipers. I intend to wipe you out, and by the Eternal God I will rout you out…If people only understood the rank injustice of the money and banking system, there would be a revolution by morning.”

-

References:

The Federal Reserve History and Conspiracy

The Federal Reserve: History of Lies, Thievery, and Deceit

David Walker Interview on CBS(Youtube)

Posted in Economics, US Politics, World Politics | No Comments »