Time is scarce this week, and in an effort to keep pace, I am going to try to kill two birds with one stone.
Sometime in late June I will be presenting Part III of the series “Let’s End the Money Racket” at the 100th annual meeting of the Western Economics Association International (WEAI) in San Francisco. In preparation for this meeting of well over a thousand participants I must submit a presentable draft of my paper before the beginning of next week. So today’s blog will be for you, the WEAI, and ultimately all Americans and the world, if only I can build the momentum. For once the idea takes hold and the ball starts rolling, I will not be needed anymore. Whereupon I can watch as my idea unfolds and ready myself for when I pounce on my next inspiration.
As the basis for my paper has been taken from the series “Let’s End the Money Racket” that I posted here on Substack I will try not to bore you with tedious repetition. Rather, I have created a whirlwind exposition of the problem at hand. Please share it, if you are so inclined.
America is confronted with a pending crisis that will be much larger than we, as a nation and the world as a whole, have ever experienced. Most Americans and the world are unaware, or are aware and feel helpless in the face of it. Yes, we can sense or even know that something is amiss, but we do not know exactly what it is. Important is that we understand that our ignorance is intended by those who are creating the crisis. Endlessly they go way out of their way to distract us from their true intent and many machinations. Indeed, with each new occurrence of the same crisis they have become increasingly refined or more brutal in their response.
Your first question is hopefully what is the pending crisis and why is it inevitable? And, your second question is hopefully who is they and why? I will try to answer both question in a single stroke.
Since the close of World War II the US government has grown ever more powerful on the world stage. Compared to our enemies whom we crushed and our allies who were crushed by our enemies, we suffered little. The war, although very costly on this side of both the Atlantic and Pacific, broke the spell of Roosevelt’s Great Depression. This was likely intentional.
Fortunately, we recovered from the abhorrence very quickly. Nearly all that our government borrowed was paid back, and jobs were quickly found for those previously absent in war, as our nation’s female work force returned to the family hearth and raised a generation of children with a spirit of hope and promise. This prosperity was realized. Unfortunately, we had not learned our lesson, and were destined to become duped still again. This was surely intentional.
By 1994 the Bank of England was three hundred years old, and we are still living in its shadow. Despite our having twice defeated the British empire on our own soil, once in 1781 and once in 1814, we were unable to escape the mechanism that had allowed the British kingdom to become the “greatest” empire that the world had ever known. It took two very tragic world wars to bring the empire to an end, but rather than strengthening our republic we succumbed to the shadow and took over the reigns of Great Britain’s fallen empire.
I call it a shadow because the mechanism is designed to obscure. Alas, no corruption, whatever form it might take, can survive very long in the light. It is for this reason that we have only to expose it, and we can free ourselves from its effects.
Now, I have nothing against banking, and view the institution as essential to the maintenance of steady income and expenditure flows. Banks also provide many services of which most of us are not even aware. Indeed, my best friend is a banker. No, my concern is not about the role of banking, but the source and nature of the money that it uses to conduct its business. It is this that needs to change and the sooner that it changes the better, for the crisis that looms ahead is large, and those in charge will surely engage in more of the same, if they are not compelled to do otherwise. It will not be pretty, if we do not act. History is our refuge.
The well was poisoned already long ago, and we have learned to live with an insidious malady. In some ways it is like a herpes virus. It comes in bouts and then disappears. And, when it returns we have already forgotten it and have trouble recognizing it until it reaches an advanced stage. Unlike herpes that lies dormant in the spinal column until triggered anew, the poison in our money supply never sleeps; the malady in which it results is chronic, like a toxin-induced, auto-immune disorder in which the body attacks itself. Furthermore, the medicine that we take is always the same, and those who understand the disease are the same who prescribe and sell it. As they profit from what they sell, they prefer that we remain sick. And, because they understand the disease well, they are able to shield themselves from each and every bout. Like a cancer, however, the malady keeps getting worse. The bouts last longer, are more intense, and leave us worse off than the ones before. Today we are headed toward a bout like we have never experienced.
Those who benefit from the malady are, of course, those who insure that the well remains poisoned so that they can continue to sell us their medical “relief”.
So, what is the poison? It is statutory counterfeit and its more recent variant fiat currency. The malady is the lending of money into existence. The more scientific name for this disease is money ex nihilo. The symptoms of the resulting illness are numerous and some are more common than others. They include incremental inflation, the boom-and-bust cycle, run-away government spending, an ever widening income and wealth gap, chronic budget and trade deficits, a deteriorating standard of living, ever-increasing household debt, hyper-inflation, housing foreclosures, massive entitlement programs, and a dysfunctional society that lives today as if there were no tomorrow. The medicine used to treat this disease are government austerity programs, artificially induced market corrections, minimum wages laws, government imposed price ceilings, deposit and unemployment insurance, debt forgiveness, and so on and so forth. Many of these medications provide short-term relief, while exacerbating the disease’s long-term progression.
Those who poison the well, prescribe the medications, and sell them without a cure. These include the governments who borrow money into existence, the banks who lend it into existence, and those in the private sector who are closest to the bankers and government officials who facilitate this lending and borrowing. They either purchase what has been lent or sell to those who have borrowed. It is a completely disgusting system for everyone, but those who understand the poetry of corruption and shield themselves from the calamity through a system of sophisticated deception that has been developed and refined for well over three centuries. It is legitimized today in our respective national media and introductory macroeconomic textbooks around the world. There is barely a member in Congress today who has not been infected with the associated ignorance.
At the time of the Bank of England’s founding in 1694 the only bond market in all of Europe was located in the Dutch port city of Amsterdam, and the market was still largely undeveloped. In contrast, the Amsterdamsche Wisselbank (Exchange Bank of Amsterdam) — a then highly venerated municipal institution in the Province of Holland of the by then well-established Dutch Republic — was already 85 years old and had begun to exhibit important signs of corruption. Unfortunately, it was this corruption to which the English falsely attributed the Dutch bank’s success, and it was this corruption that was institutionalized for the first time in world history by the English Parliament when the Bank of England (BOE) was created.
In effect, statutory counterfeit was not the ingenious invention of astute 17th bankers looking to make a profit in a highly competitive loan market in the heart of London; rather, it was market fraud institutionalized by the English state to fund their king’s role in Europe’s Nine Years War fought against the longest royal reign in the history of Europe — that of King Louis XIV of France.
To put the matter in other words, what was before a highly profitable, surreptitious form of behavior that was severely punished in any court of English law suddenly became the approved behavior of a newly created, privately held and managed, government-authorized, English, financial monopoly. Far more troubling today is that this three century old English bank quickly became the model for central banking around the world and the spearhead for the promotion of the poison that brings about the malady of the fraudulent practice of lending purchasing power (money) into existence — a practice that until this day is being promoted as the indispensable foundation for real economic growth in a system of voluntary free markets. Nothing could be further from the truth.
No, it is not central banking that is the disease, and the elimination of central banking is not the cure.
In liberty,
Roddy A. Stegemann, First Hill, Seattle 98104
Author of Mount Cambitas - The Story of Real Money, “A Call for the Restoration of Monetary Order” (Parts I and II), the Substack series “Let’s End the Money Racket”.