Larry Romanoff -- Let’s Have a Financial Crisis: First, We Need a Central Bank

Let’s Have a Financial Crisis: 

First, We Need a Central Bank

By Larry Romanoff

Global Research, October 07, 2019

Region: USA

Theme: Global Economy, History

 

Westerners have been for generations infused with a conviction that a nation’s central bank must, under threat of great ‘moral hazard’, be kept separate and independent of that nation’s government. The reasons are unclear, but since this mythology qualifies as a biblical pronouncement, it is by nature not open to question. The proposition is, of course, nonsense. How can a country manage its affairs without having control of its own money and its own central bank? Think of a corporation having no access to its own money or credit, having to depend on an outside “unrelated and independent” third party for all funding, a party with no common interests whatever with this corporation, and with its own commercial interests often diametrically opposed to those of the company. Even worse, imagine the company having to “borrow” its own money from this independent source, and repay with interest. How could that possibly make sense? Welcome to the world of secret bankers and privately-owned central banks, like the Bank of England, of France and Germany, and the US Federal Reserve, the ultimate source of financial crises, of recessions and depressions, and of wars.

The history of economic turmoil and of wars has always revolved around those who control the world’s central banks. In fact, recessions and wars tend to have the same broad objective which is to put yet more money into those same hands. History is not short of documented evidence of the European bankers, primarily the Rothschilds but including eight families in all, not only inciting and fostering wars and revolutions but profiting by financing both sides of the conflicts. One problem after a war is that we have a (rich) victor and a (poor) loser. The rich victor may be easily able to repay his war financing with interest, but the poor loser is in a precarious position. Therefore, the war financing contracts typically contain a clause obligating the victor to permit the defeated country latitude to accumulate sufficient funds to repay its war debt in full – usually to the same banker or his brother or cousin. This may have been the origin of the expression “a win-win situation”. In any case, in addition to the huge profits from financing international conflicts, wars provide much opportunity for those bankers and their closest friends to purchase for pennies all the attractive assets of the newly-devastated losers, while also serving as a kind of grim warning to nations tempted to legislate too many restrictions on international capitalism.

Let’s consider the US Federal Reserve, the most well-known and possibly most hated of all privately-owned central banks. It was created by illegal legislation in 1913, giving it full control of the US money supply and credit and more or less the entire economy as well, its existence in violation of the very Constitution of the United States. The US government cannot, by virtue of this legislation, print its own money or issue its own credit. When the government needs money, it must borrow from the FED and repay with trillions in interest.

Why would the US government agree to such a foolish proposition? Because the US government is not in charge of the US. Officially, no one is permitted to know the names of the individuals who are the ultimate beneficial owners of the privately-owned Federal Reserve banks, and the legislation specifies that it is against the law to ask. The only information provided is that the shares of the New York FED, the primary bank, are owned by the regional FED banks, but nobody is permitted to know the true beneficial owners of the regional FEDs, and prying into this secret ownership is a crime. We could legitimately ask how such an astonishing condition could ever arise, and the source of the fear that prevents a widespread public attack on the matter. Moreover, the FED is free of necessity to publish accounts or to reveal the many trillions in profits it has collected from the public purse. We can assume that whoever wrote this legislation had considerable influence over those who passed it. For the record, the ultimate beneficial owners of the US Federal Reserve Central Banks have been reliably documented as follows: the Jewish owners of the Rothschild Banks of London and Berlin, the Warburg Banks of Hamburg and Amsterdam, Lehman Brothers of New York, Lazard Brothers of Paris, Kuhn Loeb Bank of New York, Israel Moses Seif Banks of Italy, Goldman Sachs and the Chase Manhattan Bank.

One of the great mysteries of the world of finance, of national economies, of inflations, recessions, stock markets, and wars, is the capacity of every economist and every media source to ignore the elephant in the room, the fact that the owners of these privately-owned national central banks, including the US FED, deliberately cause the inflations and recessions, the massive stock bubbles and market crashes and, most often, the wars. It’s not a secret, though the evidence is overwhelming and most often not even in dispute. An easy example we’ll examine in a minute is the savage recession of 1983 which was 100% engineered by the FED, though the instructions to do so emanated from Europe, and for which FED Chairman Volcker even publicly announced his intention to trash the economy, create a recession to the point where “blood would run in the streets”, and to destroy labor. Yet the industries of finance and economics, and the entire US Congress, treated that recession, which was factually a vicious planned attack on the nation’s economy and on the middle class, as they treated every other recession – as an unfortunate disaster of unknown origin.

It was a group of bankers, all Rothschild representatives, who met at Jekyll Island and concocted the plan for the Federal Reserve System that was eventually sold to Congress while most members were away on Christmas vacation. It was US President Woodrow Wilson, so deeply obligated to banking and corporate interests, controlled by his handler and puppet-master Colonel E.M. House, (a Rothschild agent who was not a Colonel and whose real name was ‘Huis’), who signed into law the 1913 US Federal Reserve Act that effectively turned over control of both the US currency and the economy to the Rothschild banking interests, an act which even Wilson recognised and described as a treason to his own nation. He wrote a few years later:

“I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country. A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. The growth of the nation and all our activities are in the hands of a few men. We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated Governments in the civilized world … by the opinion and duress of a small group of dominant men.”

Congressman Charles Lindbergh, famous for flying solo across the Atlantic Ocean, had this to say about the creation of the Federal Reserve:

“When the President signs this Bill, the invisible government of the monetary power will be legalized. The greatest crime of the ages is perpetrated by this banking and currency bill”, a prediction would soon prove to be true.

Lindberg also stated very accurately that these international bankers had worked out to an exact science the methods of employing the vast power inherent in a privately-owned Central Bank to create alternate periods of inflation and deflation, realising vast profits by whipsawing the public during each such cycle. He said,

“From now on depressions will be scientifically created.”, and of course he was correct, as we would soon see.

A bit later, we had the comment by President Franklin Roosevelt to his handler Col. E.M. House (who real name was Huis), who had also been Wilson’s handler, that

“The real truth … is, as you and I know, that a financial element in the larger centers has owned the Government ever since the days of Andrew Jackson”.

The “financial element” is of course the Rothschilds and other European bankers who had been deeply involved in the US since the early days of the Republic. Let’s have a quick look at some of those “early days”.

The FED has had several incarnations in the US, the first being in 1791 when the Rothschilds managed to force through the US Congress legislation for the foundation of a privately-owned central bank for the nation. The Bank was called the Bank of the United States, with the Rothschilds as the main owners, and with only a 20-year charter to expire in 1811. All public sentiment was against this bank and strongly favored revoking its charter to create a government-owned central bank as Thomas Jefferson meant to do. Unfortunately, the banking debate was placed on hold while the Euro-bankers plunged the US into its War of 1812, partly as punishment and partly to help clarify their thinking. After the war, with the nation in a climate of fear and economic hardship, the Rothschilds managed to have the bank’s charter renewed for another 20 years. On the cusp of the expiration of this second charter, Andrew Jackson took a run at the US Presidency and throughout his campaign he cursed and railed at these European bankers who controlled this so-called ‘Bank of the United States’.

“You are a den of vipers. I intend to expose you and by Eternal God I will rout you out. If the people understood the rank injustices of our money and banking system there would be a revolution before morning.”

Jackson was no sooner elected than he was the target of an assassination attempt by a gunman named Richard Lawrence, who confessed to the police that that he had been “in touch with the powers in Europe”. Despite the obvious danger to his life, Jackson refused to renew the bank’s charter and the US national debt went to zero for the first and last time in the nation’s history. But in retaliation, the Bank’s president Nicholas Biddle, an agent for the Paris-based Jacob Rothschild, immediately cut off all funding to the US government and plunged the country into a deep depression. Simultaneously, the same bankers plunged the US into a war with Mexico, greatly exacerbating the economic hardship and once again offering the US president an opportunity to clarify his thinking.

The bankers’ incitement of wars of clarification in America included the US civil war which, contrary to popular belief, was not about slavery but about political and financial control of the US. There is more than ample evidence that the severe divisions within the country which led to the American civil war were deliberately inflicted upon the US by these same bankers, who were fulfilling their warning delivered more than ten years earlier that disobedience would be punished by the crafting and imposition of a civil war. Their plan, which succeeded admirably, was “to exploit the question of slavery and thus to dig an abyss between the two parts of the Republic”, thereby throwing the new nation into a bitter civil war with the intent of ending with two weak and easily-controlled republics instead of one strong one. Germany’s Chancellor Otto Von Bismarck claimed the European bankers were responsible for the American Civil War, stating “The division of the United States was decided by the high financial powers of Europe”, and van Helsing wrote “The reasons leading to this civil war were almost completely due to the Rothschild agents”, one of whom was George Bickly who persuaded the Confederate States of the advantages of secession from the Union, thereby precipitating the American civil war. All American history texts attribute the civil war to slavery disputes, constituting one of the greatest lies and historical revisions existing in any nation.

In any case, the bankers did succeed in their incitement to violence, and the Civil War was unleashed on the US, with the London bankers backing the Union and the French bankers backing the South. Everyone made a fortune and by 1861 the US was $100 million in debt. At this time, Abraham Lincoln became the new President and snubbed the bankers by issuing US government currency popularly known as Greenbacks to pay Union Army bills without incurring debt to the Rothschilds. At the time, the Rothschild-controlled Times of London wrote:

“If that mischievous policy, which had its origins in the North American Republic, should become indurated down to a fixture, then that Government will furnish its own money without cost. It will pay off its debts and be without debt. It will have all the money necessary to carry on its commerce. It will become prosperous beyond precedent in the history of the civilized governments of the world. The brains and the wealth of all countries will go to North America. That government must be destroyed, or it will destroy every monarchy on the globe.”

In 1863, the US Congress passed the National Banking Act that reinstated the Rothschild’s privately-owned US central bank, but Lincoln was re-elected President the following year and, cursing this bank, vowed to repeal the act as soon as he took his oath of office. Of course, before he had a chance to act, he was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth, who had major connections to the same bankers. His granddaughter wrote a book titled ‘This One Mad Act’, which documented Booth’s contact with some “mysterious Europeans” just before his assassination of President Lincoln. Related facts which are not widely known are that Lincoln’s wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, was an opium addict and that Booth was her drug dealer who had apparently made overtures to his European friends to offer his services in an intelligence capacity, given his unlimited accessibility to the White House. Some years later, US President James Garfield, who was also stridently against the existence of this privately-owned financial monster, publicly revealed a few inconvenient truths, claiming “Whoever controls the volume of money in our country is absolute master of all industry and commerce. When you realize that the entire system is controlled by a few powerful men at the top, you will not have to be told how periods of inflation and depression originate.” Naturally, Garfield was also quickly assassinated, in this case only months into his term, having ignored opportunities to clarify his thinking.

In the 1930s, US Congressman Louis McFadden, Chairman of the Banking and Currency Committee, stated:

“The real menace of our republic is this invisible government which, like a giant octopus, sprawls its slimy length over city, state and nation. Like the octopus of real life, it operates under cover of a self created screen. At the head of this octopus are the Rockefeller Standard interests and a small group of powerful banking houses generally referred to as international bankers. The Wall Street Crash (of 1929) was a “carefully contrived occurrence”. The international bankers sought to bring about a condition of despair so that they might emerge as the rulers of us all. This evil institution (The US FED) has impoverished and ruined the people of these United States and has practically bankrupted our Government. It has done this through the corrupt practices of the moneyed vultures who control it.” McFadden also stated “When the Federal Reserve Act was passed, the people of these United States did not perceive that a world banking system was being set up here – a super-state controlled by international bankers and international industrialists acting together to enslave the world for their own pleasure. Every effort has been made by the Fed to conceal its powers but the truth is – the Fed has usurped the government.”

McFadden was killed for making those comments and a few similar; he avoided two assassination attempts by gunfire but finally succumbed to poisoning at a public dinner. For their crimes in initiating the 1929 crash, McFadden actually filed impeachment charges against individual officers of the FED, after which they orchestrated an enormous effort to discredit him. When that failed, they killed him. Nobody attacks the FED or its owners, and lives.

The third incarnation of the Rothschild’s US Central Bank, the US Federal Reserve, had existed unchallenged since 1913, but US President Kennedy found himself in the crosshairs of these same bankers. Kennedy had committed the same mortal sin as Lincoln, when in 1963, against the strong advice of the bankers and his own Treasury officials, he authorized the issuance of more than $4 billion in US Treasury Notes to avoid the usurious interest rates demanded by the FED bankers. Kennedy, of course, was killed almost immediately by Lee Harvey Oswald. Oswald’s wife, in a 1994 interview with writer A. J. Weberman, said “The answer to the Kennedy assassination is with the Federal Reserve Bank. Don’t underestimate that. It’s wrong to blame it on Angleton and the CIA per se only. This is only one finger on the same hand. The people who supply the money are above the CIA”. Americans appear to have finally had their thinking clarified and gotten the message. In the 50 years since Kennedy’s death, no more US presidents have been brave enough to suggest ridding the country of the Rothschild-owned FED.

Now, Let’s Have a Financial Crisis

The main advantage proposed for a privately-owned central bank was that booms and busts, inflations and depressions, would be things of the past. Of course this was a huge lie, as history can testify. In fact, the opposite was true: the main advantage of a private central bank was precisely that it would give its owners the power to create alternating periods of economic expansion and crippling contraction, enabling them to extract enormous wealth from the economy at each cycle. If we research the asset values of many major multinationals and the major Wall Street and secretive European banks and their owners, we will find their assets increased markedly in the aftermath of each recession, assets vacuumed up at fire-sale prices.

The US has had many financial crises leading to many recessions, all inflicted on an innocent population by the Satan-worshippers at the FED, in each case serving primarily to eviscerate the middle class by a massive transfer of wealth to the top 1%. Prior to the creation of the first US FED, there had been many international financial crises or panics, all engineered by these same European bankers, usually ending with their purchase of distressed assets at large discounts, often to be resold later at an enormous profit. These parasitic vampires have engaged in a special kind of economic vandalism with surprising frequency in past 100 years or so, in all cases jointly engineered from Europe but generally executed by the US Federal Reserve. In every instance, excessive liquidity fuelled by easy credit, and one kind of asset bubble or another followed by a severe monetary contraction, were the foundation for economic disaster.

There are many examples of this unrestrained financial capitalism wreaking havoc with the US and with the world, one of the most famous of these and certainly one of the most devastating, being the 1929 crash and the subsequent Great Depression. Like most recessions after the last establishment of the FED, this one was “Made in the USA” – but designed in Europe with a little help from the FED’s friends at the Bank of England. Sir Montagu Norman, a Rothschild agent and Governor of the Bank of England for many years, was considered the single most influential banker in the world, and was the organiser of the “informal talks” between heads of central banks in 1927, which led directly to the Great Stock market Crash of 1929. Let’s have a quick look.

The 1929 Crash and the Great Depression

During the 1920s, Europe was in fragile condition, improving but still suffering from the dramatic fall in production and other effects of the First World War. Most European economies were financially unstable because of the war debts they’d accumulated, with Britain having lost 40% of her foreign assets paying for the war. With her previously strong trading position permanently weakened, this left her more dependent upon exports and more vulnerable to any downturn in world markets. By comparison, the US economy in the 1920s was doing very well. Fueled by easy money, provided through credit by courtesy of the FED, these years produced a US spending spree. This era of new discoveries, inventions and production methods, created many profitable new industries and businesses. Increased incomes, along with the introduction of credit, fuelled a huge increase in US consumer spending, permitting Americans to buy for the first time, expensive items that were normally affordable only by the wealthy. Shoppers were able to buy not only new cars, but all their furniture and major household appliances on time payment plans. It was estimated at the time that as much as 90% of all these major items purchased in the US, were bought on credit.

These European bankers created the FED as they did several other nations’ central banks, as a tool to strip wealth from national economies and to consolidate their economic power in order to do so. In the case of the Great Depression in 1929, the FED had inflated the money supply by almost 65% in only a few years, an astonishingly rapid, monetary expansion. In addition to the immense volume of easy credit available for consumer purchases, the stock market was being constantly promoted as a royal road to riches and the compliant media cooperated with floods of tales on the instant wealth awaiting anyone buying common stocks. New millionaires were appearing almost daily as the New York Stock Exchange continuously soared to new heights. But then when the FED burst the stock bubble, this Magical World of Disney vanished literally overnight. The euphoria of the ‘Roaring Twenties’ and lack of oversight created an enormous stock bubble that finally imploded from the credit contraction on Oct. 29, 1929 and wiped out $40 billion in one swoop. Millions of people, and many companies, lost everything.

In the 1920s, stock margins were only 10%, permitting 90% financing to buy stocks. When the bubble burst, share prices fell dramatically and the loans were all called in – but nobody had the money to pay. Banks and brokerages failed as debtors reneged on their debts, and panicked depositors attempted to withdraw their savings, triggering multiple bank runs and more bank failures. As a direct result of the market collapse and the inability to repay loans, more than 9,000 US banks failed. Bank deposits were uninsured, so millions more people lost their life savings. The surviving banks were too afraid to make more loans and credit dried up, thereby making everything yet worse. The bank failures did not occur because the banks were insolvent. To the contrary, they typically held more than sufficient assets but insufficient liquid cash to meet the fear-driven demand for withdrawals. It was the contractual responsibility of the FED as the nation’s central bank and lender of last resort, to provide sufficient cash to these banks to meet this temporary demand, but the FED inexplicably refused to provide this credit and let the banks fail. And of course, that was part of the plan, permitting the larger banks to gobble up the thousands of banks that closed. The major banks that formed this oligarchy had avoided the demand and call loans for the purchase of stocks during the market frenzy they were so heavily promoting, leaving the smaller local banks to do this financing. The result, of course, was that when the FED pulled the plug they had the cash to short the market and make billions and to then purchase stocks at the bottom of the crash for 10% or less of their prior values. From all of this, the transfer of wealth into only a few hands was almost unimaginably large.

William Bryan, in his treatise on The United States’ Unresolved Monetary and Political Problems, wrote:

“When everything was ready, the New York financiers started calling 24 hour broker call loans. This meant that the stockbrokers had to dump their shares on the market in order to pay the loans. This naturally collapsed the stock market and brought a banking collapse all over the country because the banks not owned by the oligarchy were heavily involved in broker call claims at this time, and bank runs soon exhausted their coin and currency and they had to close. The Federal Reserve System would not come to their aid, although they were instructed under the law to maintain an elastic currency.”

With all the losses of wealth and grave fear for the future, everyone stopped spending, production ground to a halt and millions more lost their jobs, with the higher unemployment (25%+) creating yet less consumer spending. And the US government also stopped spending (to conserve resources in a bad time), and made things much worse again. When all the banks and businesses were failing, the US passed the Smooth-Hawley Tariffs in 1930, with very high taxes and duties on imports. This killed foreign imports – thereby passing the depression to other countries, destabilising the European economies even further, and led to retaliation which killed US exports. After that, all economies collapsed, and it was only the planned Second War that put an end to it.

However, the FED cannot take the primary credit because it was the magicians at the Bank of England who triggered this one, the raise in the British Bank Rate serving as the immediate detonator of the US Crash of 1929. Hicks and Mowry wrote in their 1956 Short History of American Democracy that “The stock-market collapse came in October, 1929 when English interest rates were raised to 6.5% in order to bring home needed capital that had been attracted to the United States by the high speculative profits”. I disagree to the extent that the Bank’s action wasn’t intended so much to ‘bring home needed capital’ as to deliberately suck all the loose cash and gold out of the US and precipitate a crisis. Following this massive suction, the FED severely contracted the US money supply to complete the job. It was the FEDs excessive credit overwhelming the market that created the bubble, and the FEDs subsequent severe monetary contraction that created the collapse, marking the beginning, and the main cause, of the 1930s Great Depression. Of course, the FED’s friends weren’t idle after this, but busy buying up valuable assets for pennies on the dollar, including businesses, land, and thousands of other banks.

In later hearings conducted by the US Congress, testimony was given that the FED had been “working closely with the heads of European central banks”, and that a major economic crash had been already planned by 1927 and had been awaiting a propitious moment to be executed. There had been a secret luncheon with FED officials and the heads of the European central banks to finalise the planning, with the oligarchy members being warned the international bankers were tightening the noose. Subsequent to this, Montagu Norman, Governor of the Bank of England, traveled to Washington and on February 6, 1929, had a meeting with Andrew Mellon, the Jewish Secretary of the US Treasury, a member of the family that owned Gulf Oil. As Carroll Quigley noted, “Immediately after this mysterious visit, the Federal Reserve Board reversed its easy-money policy and began raising the discount rate. The balloon which had been inflated constantly for nearly seven years was about to be exploded.”

A short while later, Louis T. McFadden, Chairman of the House Finance Committee exposed perfectly the entire scheme employed by these bankers to create the depression and plunder the nation, “by the simple expedient of withdrawing millions of dollars in banknotes from circulation and reducing credit”. McFadden claimed this was the entire cause of the depression and that if this money were put back into circulation, “the depression would disappear like a bad dream”. He testified that “It [the depression] was not accidental. It was a carefully contrived occurrence. The international bankers sought to bring about a condition of despair here so that they might emerge as the rulers of us all.” McFadden was killed for these words. His testimony, and his realisation, along with that of many others, was that the 1929 crash and subsequent Great Depression were neither accident nor the result of stupidity, but had been instead scientifically engineered by those with generations of experience in producing precisely such results.

Howard Zinn agreed with him, 100%, in saying,

“Throughout much of the 1800s and into the 1900s, the United States suffered several economic crises, one of the most significant of which was the Great Depression of 1873. The crisis was built into a system which was chaotic in its nature, in which only the very rich were secure. It was a system of periodic crises “1837, 1857, 1873 (and later: 1893, 1907, 1919, 1929)” that wiped out small businesses and brought cold, hunger, and death to working people while the fortunes of the Astors, Vanderbilts, Rockefellers, Morgans, kept growing through war and peace, crisis and recovery. During the 1873 crisis, Carnegie was capturing the steel market; Rockefeller was wiping out his competitors in oil.”

It is a matter of public record today that the Rothschilds and other European banking families on several occasions engineered recessions and economic panics in the US as both a demonstration of their power and as a warning to the American government of its perilous future if it persisted in refusals to a Rothschild privately-owned central bank. As Gary Allen wrote, “The man in charge of conducting these lessons was J. Pierpont-Morgan, American-born but educated in England and Germany. Morgan is referred to by many as the top American agent of the English Rothschilds. By the turn of the century J. P. Morgan was already an old hand at creating artificial panics. Such affairs were well co-ordinated.

Senator Robert Owen, a co-author of the Federal Reserve Act, (who later deeply regretted his role), testified before a Congressional Committee that the bank he owned received from the National Bankers’ Association what came to be known as the “Panic Circular of 1893.” It stated:

“You will at once retire one-third of your circulation and call in one-half of your loans.”

And of course that is how these central bankers create the recessions: an instant reduction of 35% or more in the nation’s money supply and a 50% reduction in total credit. The inevitable result is the bankruptcies of thousands of corporations and banks, and an enormous plunge in stock market values and corporate assets of every description which are now available for pennies on the dollar. Wait five or ten years, and repeat. The purpose is the immense transfer of wealth available in each such cycle, and not only from small banks and corporations but from the general public as well, many of whom also lose everything they had, all of those assets eventually filtering up to the few oligarchy bankers who planned the events. A further element is the resulting need for financing and credit by the government. Andrew Jackson killed the Rothschild’s privately-owned central bank in the US and left the nation free of debt. Wilson signed into law the creation of a new Rothschild-owned FED, and US government debt inflated by more than 800% on his watch. And of course, the greater the government debt, the more control these bankers have over the government.

Frederick Lewis Allen wrote an interesting book in the 1930s titled ‘The Lords of Creation’, a classic that discusses the financial history of the US until 1929. It discusses how the bankers and money men of the time controlled the economy of the country and, “unrestrained by regulations or moral imperatives” and driven by ruthlessness and greed, conspired to produce the immense global financial catastrophe of the Great Depression. Interestingly, in her introduction to a reprint of this book, Gretchen Morgenson wrote that it was not clear why “the frequency and severity of financial scandals” was increasing in the US. Gretchen needed to look a bit harder because the reasons are hiding in plain sight.

Bretton-Woods and the 1983 Recession

After the Second World War, all nations cooperated in creating what they hoped would be a stable system of currency exchange rates, one that would permit the world’s battered economies to redevelop in a safe environment. The foundation of this system was the Gold Standard, whereby all currencies were fixed to each other and related to the amount of gold actually held in stock, to prevent countries from inflating themselves out of debt on the international markets. Net international settlement payments would be made with gold although in practice they were mostly made in US dollars. But the US once again greatly over-extended itself in living on credit, then levying import taxes and adopting other protectionist measures in an attempt to avoid the strains created. By this time, the US began accumulating large balance of payments deficits which helped to create liquidity in the system but also created intolerable strains on international financing and on the US dollar itself. The end arrived in 1971 when the French Government, fearful of the considerably weakened position of the US dollar and concerned for its currency reserves, demanded to have all its dollars converted into gold as guaranteed by the system. Instead, the FED, again with a little help from its European friends, encouraged the US to default on the Bretton Woods Agreement, and on the fixed currency regime itself, and unilaterally terminated convertibility of dollars to gold. Of course, the entire international currency system collapsed, with all other nations losing massively on their now-rapidly-depreciating US dollars.

That 1971 decision left the US free to inflate its money supply and fuel more credit bubbles, but the FED’s actions plunged the world into a decade of ruinous inflation, reaching 20% or more in many countries and interest rates reaching 25% even in stable countries like Canada. The inflation led to, and was ended only by, the severe worldwide contraction of the early 1980s, deliberately engineered by Paul Volcker at the FED. This was a direct result of the FED-engineered Bretton Woods default ten years earlier, producing a recession which devastated entire sectors of economies in many nations, creating enormous hardships and economic losses, deliberately devastating the middle classes. In Western Canada, the center of that country’s petroleum industry, the contraction hit so hard and so quickly that house prices dropped by 50% in only 3 months and didn’t recover their 1984 levels until the year 2000.

The FED’s 1983 recession was not only savage but long-lasting. Unemployment was high, and very high in many industries. For a great many years, few jobs were available and most of those were only part-time or contract positions. One of the unexplored human tragedies of this recession was the fact that the social contract was rapidly being destroyed, with the social landscape being irreversibly changed in a way that few could deal with. From 1946 onward, with the new social contract in force, economies were expanding and most were at full employment. In those days, anyone who wanted a job could find one. A worker unhappy with his job could quit – just walk out – and within a day find another job equally as good. All those who came after the war were born into that environment, believing this was the way the world would always be. That was the greatest change, and the so-called baby boomers who were in their middle thirties or early 40s and at the peak of their careers, watched everything disappear in a soup of unemployment, divorce and bankruptcy.

The jobs were gone, the companies were gone, and the pensions were gone. There were not so many years yet to save for retirement, and few companies offered good pension plans after that. Two generations, that huge cohort of human beings, were thrown into something they didn’t understand, and they had no tools to deal with it. The human costs of the FED’s inhumanity were monstrous. It isn’t a surprise the US government had REX-84 and its internment camps ready for use; the surprise is that entire societies were so unprepared for that deliberate inhumanity that they acted with meekness instead of vengeance. And the Satan-worshippers safely pocketed one of the greatest wealth transfers of all time.

All of that worldwide inflation, all the worldwide recessionary pain, were from the same root cause – the insatiable greed of a small number of powerful people. And the tools were the same: the FED’s excessive liquidity and easy credit, then collapsing the system for the benefit of the bankers, and the US passing the adjustment pain to the rest of the world.

Subsequent recessions were spawned from the same source. The 2008 financial crisis in the US was almost equal in its viciousness to 1929, a frontal attack on the middle class and one of the greatest fraudulent transfers of wealth in the history of the world. All signs are that yet another is now in the works.

In this context, I would add as a footnote that the events surrounding Charles Lindbergh have never, in my view, been accurately examined or reported. Lindbergh was violently against the creation of the Rothschild-owned FED and threatened to kill it. Lindbergh at the time was so revered in the US that his touted election as US President was virtually a certainty, in which case he would have had the power to do as he threatened. I have a powerful suspicion that the kidnapping and killing of his child was not unrelated but was a warning. After this, Lindbergh was violently trashed in the world media and disappeared forever from public view.

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Financial Capitalism Gone Amok: Ultra-low Interest Rates and Price Bubbles

The original source of this article is Global Research

Copyright © Larry Romanoff, Global Research, 2019