A great book on the creation of the fed and fractional reserve is The Creature From Jekyll Island

The Creature from Jekyll Island is one of the best books I've ever read, highly recommend it.

The Federal Reserve was created by the wealthy class to keep money in the hands of the few. Read 'The Creature from Jekyll Island'. The Fed is a sham. It is neither federal (the shareholders are the banks themselves) nor has it any reserves.

I recommend reading "The creature from Jekyll Island". This book opened my eyes up to the question "what is money?" and it's especially relevant today, given we are living through the largest wealth transfer in human history. But it also talks about how smaller banks work, and this notion of IOUs, credit and loans.

Yes, sound money is on par with both of those. Fiat money has indirectly killed more people than the lack of antibiotics ever did. Fiat is what gives corrupt governments like the USSR and China under Mao (and their modern, less corrupt equivalents) the ability to control an entire economy to the detriment of billions of people.

Once control over money is finally wrestled from the hands of the elite the world will see a boom in prosperity that hasn’t been seen since the industrial revolution.

Read some books, educate yourself on how important this topic is rather than posting a snarky reply.

Here’s a good place to start:

The Mystery of Banking by Rothbard

The Creature from Jekyll Island by Edward Griffin

Theory of Money and Credit by Mises

All are available for free online by searching for the PDF version.

Don’t know why my post got flagged, I provided several valuable resources, going to post it again, exactly as written.

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Yes, sound money is on par with both of those. Fiat money has indirectly killed more people than the lack of antibiotics ever did. Fiat is what gives corrupt governments like the USSR and China under Mao (and their modern, less corrupt equivalents) the ability to control an entire economy to the detriment of billions of people.
Once control over money is finally wrestled from the hands of the elite the world will see a boom in prosperity that hasn’t been seen since the industrial revolution.
Read some books, educate yourself on how important this topic is rather than posting a snarky reply.
Here’s a good place to start:
The Mystery of Banking by Rothbard
The Creature from Jekyll Island by Edward Griffin
Theory of Money and Credit by Mises
All are available for free online by searching for the PDF version.

I didn't mean to imply you wasted any time- you exhibit the one trait that I find exceedingly valuable: the ability to think for yourself. This is way too rare. And so I wanted to help you with some things that you might find useful. (I'd also recommend Atlas Shrugged, there's a reason it's a popular book, and if it's wrong, there's no harm in reading it, right?)

Economics in One Lesson is so cogent that it will, I think, let you absorb a great deal. And then the Creature from Jekyll Island, which is really a history book that reads like a thriller, will let you see how the departure from economics has had an effect on the country-- an effect the most recent version of which you correctly identified. (Which was impressive, frankly, can't tell you how many times people argued with me about house prices between 1998-2007. Sadly, going back to them in 2008-2010 and saying "See, I was telling you this!" didn't earn any kudos for my having called it correctly... I think their worldview is plastic and easily gets remapped by TV news.)

Anyway, the departure from economics is for very sound reasons-- it profits the people who are peddling the bad stuff. But that also means we can profit from it too.

Anyway, I just wanted to give you the books I thought would be most effective for you. I read a lot of investment books when I needed to learn how to invest (Vick's books on Warren Buffett I found particularly interesting-- now I calculate what my return will be before I make the investment. People assume that buying stocks is really risky, but the reality is risk is quantifiable. I can buy a stock and know that I will be able to sell it for a specific price at a specific time-- you can calculate this!)

Anyway, good luck! I admire your datamining-- there's a lot of opportunity for you out there if you keep that up.

> Yes, inflation reduces purchasing power if you assume that wages don't track inflation, but historically they do.

This is not only factually false, but if it were true it would invalidate the argument being made by the economists quoted in the NYTimes article.

I strongly recommend that you read The Creature from Jekyll Island or other materials on the history of the Fed and its role in US monetary policy.

Given that the entire point of the Federal Reserve is to promote inflation it's probably good that they think it's a good idea-otherwise why do they think that they exist?

The whole problem is that inflation is theft. You are basically having your property taken out from under you without realizing it. It's historically been very popular as a means of taxing the public without them realizing that's what you're doing.

This probably not the space to get into all this but reading "The Creature From Jekyll Island" is a good start. That the major players in the banking industry got together in secret to write the Federal Reserve Act suggests who the system really benefits.

"The Creature from Jekyll Island : A Second Look at the Federal Reserve" by G. Edward Griffin

"End the FED" by Ron Paul.

First off, bubbles are a side effect of the money cycle which is created by central banking -- both the Dotcom and 2008 bubbles were created by the Fed selling money below cost, building a massive carry trade in, for instance, houses.

Secondly, if there is a crash, the best thing to do is nothing. Let the people who invested poorly get wiped out-- it's better for the economy. (There are examples of this too- crashes that happened before the federal reserve which were much worse than the 1929 crash, but which are forgotten to history because they didn't create Great Depressions because there was no Federal Reserve to "bail out the system")

The bailouts of 2008 were the worst thing that came out of that. Government shouldn't be bailing out these businesses, especially after those businesses made billions getting below cost money from that same government.

IT's not really economics you're talking about here but the corruption in the system.

Bailouts are part of the game-- thats how they scam us. Bailouts don't protect us (that's the con.)

For an excellent history of money and the last 100 years of bailouts and how this exact same thing has been done dozens of times already-- check out G Edward Griffens "The Creature from Jekyll Island" -- it's a history book about money, but it's anything but dry.

Do you consider losing %98 of its value "stable"? The US Dollar has lost at least that, probably closer to %99.9999, though it's harder to measure now that the fed is not giving us reliable stats anymore.

Do you realize the FED is a private bank, owned by the upper %1 of the %1? And that giving them an interest rate on ever dollar in circulation was probably the worst example of a government granted monopoly ever?

Do you realize that the incentives are completely aligned against us? The government wants to deficit spend with impunity, the fed wants to collect rent on the entire economy, so the fed prints money, and makes it look like it's not been irresponsible in doing so? (For instance, via the FOMC, by manipulating the gold price)

It's really amazing to me that Liberals seem to never have met a corporation they like, yet they are universally in favor of the Federal Reserve.

Maybe you don't realize it's a private corporation? Yeah, yeah the governing board is appointed, blah blah, that's like saying one fox appointed another to make sure the henhouse was safe.

And now, thanks to Obama, the Fed has the power to FORCIBLY MERGE smaller banks. No way that could be abused, right?

Read The Creature from Jekyll Island. Learn the fed's history. It's not exactly secret this stuff. But most people never get told. And of course the fed isn't going to advertise it.

I won't attempt to argue that the Liberty Dollar wasn't a misguided enterprise. Even when the law is on your side, the fact that the government controls the courts assures that you'll never get a fair trial.

You're misunderstanding the constitution and what the "right to create currency" means. There are many currencies in circulation, and there have been many state and even private currencies over the years. Even today there are localities that make their own currencies- such as the Ithica Hour
http://www.ithacahours.com/

What the constitution reserves to the federal government is merely the power to determine how many grains of silver are contained in a given dollar.

Thus, actually, the current paper US dollar, which is not denominated in silver, is illegal, it is counterfeit!

Thus it is clear that tradition has long ago seperated from the law. But this is relatively recent. In 1930s it was that the government made ownership of gold illegal and switched from silver certificates to unbacked dollars, but even then the dollar was backed internationally with gold, until Nixon closed the Gold window in the 1970s and defaulted the US government.

An excellent book on the history of Money in the USA, is "The Creature from Jekyll Island" by G. Edward Griffin.

I know people without valid credential sometimes have very insightful ideas.

And sometimes it's hard to have a discussion with someone when they don't understand the fundamentals of a field.

However it would be nice if you went into detail as opposed to just linking to that book. It's not part of the standard economic body of knowledge so I don't think it would be appropriate to expect your would be arguers to read it, especially when the author's wikipedia page is

G. Edward Griffin (born November 7, 1931) is an American far-right conspiracy theorist, author, lecturer, and filmmaker. He is the author of The Creature from Jekyll Island (1994), which promotes theories about the motives behind the creation of the Federal Reserve System.[1][2] Griffin's writings include a number of views regarding various political, defense and health care interests. In his book World Without Cancer, he argues that cancer is a nutritional deficiency that can be cured by consuming amygdalin, a view regarded as quackery by the medical community.[1][3][4] He is an HIV/AIDS denialist, supports the 9/11 Truth movement, and supports a specific John F. Kennedy assassination conspiracy theory.[1] Also, he believes the actual geographical location of the biblical Noah's Ark is located at the Durupınar site in Turkey.[5]

This is very interesting, and I hope it is a success.

Since the government can't shut down bitcoins by stealing them (how they ended the last attempt at a sound currency- the FBI perpetrated a heist where they stole $8M in Platinum, Gold and Silver).... they will have to take more direct methods, like passing a law, or calling this "money laundering".

If they don't, then things like this will proliferate, and the only power the government has to back its currency is violence.

But employing violence here may be too much for people to accept. ...who am I kidding. Like I said the FBI stole $8M from an american vault and americans don't care, the ones who even know about it believe it was justified because the FBI gave a press release branding the people "terrorists" who "sought to undermine the US Dollar".

Oh, undermining the dollar, it sounds so scary when you put it that way.

Everyone should read The Creature from Jekyll Island by Griffen. It's a monetary history of the USA. The federal reserve was not created by accident, the boom-bust cycle they've perpetrated (eg: 2008 crisis for example) is not by accident either.

I won't say they'll use violence against bitcoin-- they're still using propaganda and that hasn't failed yet... or bitcoin might unravel itself.

But if this store is a success, it can't be allowed to stand, or there will be others and the entire system will unravel, eventually.

I haven't read "The Creature from Jekyll Island," but I have seen some good citations. It's probably better taken as an exposition of the motives of private central banking than an argument for a gold standard. The complication in US history comes from a private central banking cartel (the Federal Reserve) using the departure from a gold standard to their own profit. Through this (naive) lens, returning to a gold standard would help to keep monetary tricks in check.

Any modern currency reform should instead concentrate on public banking with a Fiat currency. This combination allows for controlled market expansion, with the everyday banking profits being distributed across the commonwealth. It should be noted that this would have no affect on the profits of investment banking, and would not require any substantial change to our current US Dollar economy.

I almost bought this, but the author looks very shady:

>G. Edward Griffin (born November 7, 1931) is an American author, filmmaker, and conspiracy theorist. Griffin's writings promote a number of views and conspiracy theories regarding various of his political, defense and health care interests. In his book World Without Cancer, he argues that cancer is a nutritional deficiency that can be cured by consuming amygdalin, a view regarded as quackery by the medical community.[2][3][4] He is the author of The Creature from Jekyll Island (1994), which promotes false theories about the motives behind the creation of the Federal Reserve System.[2][5] He is an HIV/AIDS denialist, supports the 9/11 Truth movement, and supports a specific John F. Kennedy assassination conspiracy theory.[2] He also believes that the biblical Noah's Ark is located at the Durupınar site in Turkey.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._Edward_Griffin

I listened to a lecture by the author of "The Creature from Jekyll Island" where he made some outrageous claims about the ownership of the Fed. I was trading US Govt. bond futures at the time and we went to some pains to understand the federal reserve system and to say he erred in fact is being generous. It was full of slavering nonsense, often with anti semetic overtones.

As a side point paper money is obviously extremely vulnerable if abused (see Zimbabwe) however the idea that your money supply should be dictated by mining is beyond primitive. Periods of rapid economic expansion will lead to deflation unless the state controls mining and has sufficient mineral reserves which then becomes the same thing as printing money.

The real subversion of economics is at a higher level. This guy is just exposing (in this article and in his film) the patsy and placing all the blame on the patsy.

It is the federal reserve and the government that engineered this financial crisis. It was obvious there would be a housing bubble in (at least to me) 2001, before the bubble really started, when they forced interest rates below the rate of inflation- meaning lending was incentivized because the cost of money was below zero.

I knew about it early enough to profit from it on both sides, on the way up and on the way down.

But the heist of american money was a two-part job. The banks set it up in partnership with government which created freddie mac and fannie mae-- and then the governmetn actually stole the money with the bailouts.

If the government hadn't bailed out these banks they would have fallen and more worthy banks would have grown to take their place.

Instead we have institutionalized corruption. The concept of "to big to fail" is considered legitimate, and moral hazard is now standard operating procedure.

So long as everyone pretends like the bailouts where a natural consequence and not the largest theft in american history.... we're set up nicely for them to do it again. And again. And again.

I suggest people who are genuinely interested in these things should read The Creature from Jekyll Island by Griffen. It covers the history of the federal reserve, and how they play the bailout game every other decade. Each time the amount is larger and the audacity and greed on the part of government and bankers is larger... and then when we've forgotten about it, they do it again.

You might be wondering how government profits form this. The individuals in government profit financially, though of course the money is laundered as cushy jobs, book deals and campaign contributions... but they also profit by gaining more power over the economy.

I'm almost done reading "The Creature from Jekyll Island", by Griffin. Having had little background in finance or economics, much of what's been happening in the financial markets the past several years was just a mystery to me, and about a year ago I decided I wanted to understand how it worked. CFJI has helped quite a bit. It's not an easy read, even though it's well written, simply due to the subject matter (I had to read ch. 10 three times). It nevertheless does a great job of explaining how modern fiat currency systems work, and the mechanisms used by nations' central banks today.