A little known historical fact that will collapse even further the reputation of the City of London by Justin Walker
As I start to write this article, today is Remembrance Sunday and I’m listening live to the sombre but magnificent strains of Elgar’s Nimrod as the parade at The Cenotaph assembles for the nation’s annual act of remembrance to the fallen. Like almost everyone else, I’m always humbled and moved by the veterans’ march-pass to pay their respects to fallen friends and comrades – but this year I will find it particularly poignant in the light of my recent research concerning a little known fact about the outbreak of the First World War. Let me explain.
Yesterday, I watched by sheer chance the spectacle of the Lord Mayor’s Show on television. This year’s parade for the inauguration of the 685th Lord Mayor of London, Alderman Roger Gifford, was no different from any other. As ever it was a combination of centuries old, corporate traditions, with floats and vintage vehicles representing the various Worshipful Companies, combined with local units from the armed forces along with enthusiastic and diverse community groups of children and young people. It was pageantry and modern day life parading together side by side to show off all that is best about our capital city.
Alderman Roger Gifford, the new Lord Mayor of London, enjoying his big day.
All very innocent and benign you would think. There was Roger Gifford, a banker by trade, smiling and clearly enjoying himself hugely as he doffed his large black tricorne hat to the passing parade. All around him on the VIP stand were his family, friends, business acquaintances and representatives from the City of London – people who just seemed relaxed, normal and happy.
Looking at this joyous and colourful scene on the streets of London, I was reminded of the fictional character Richard Hannay in John Buchan’s pre-First World War famous spy novel The Thirty-nine Steps. The final scene sees the hero Hannay confronting The Black Stone, the network of ingenious German spies who had morphed into the higher echelons of British society and had discovered, by the use of magnificent disguise and deception, the war-time dispositions of the Royal Navy. Having tracked them down to their secret lair on the Kentish coastline, Hannay is confronted by a scene of complete domestic normality. There is nothing about the Germans or the villa that could suggest anything other than a typical British upper middle class household at ease with itself enjoying a seaside holiday. But just one sudden flicker of recognition restored Hannay’s confidence that he had discovered The Black Stone.
Well, such a flicker of recognition also restored my confidence. As soon as I saw the giant wicker effigies of Gog and Magog on the parade, the mythical ‘protectors’ of the City of London, my confusion disappeared. The façade of decency and respectability was gone in an instant – the truth of what we were really looking at had once again been restored
For those of us who, after many years of careful and detailed research, now understand the hidden machinations of global finance and who are aware of the secretive network of criminals and traitors who seek world government on their terms, this annual spectacle of corporate celebration and respectability by people who are not household names clearly masks an evil that must now be exposed quickly and effectively.
With the exception of a few thousand very powerful people, the entire world’s population, all seven billion of us, are trapped … trapped into a criminal debt creating banking ‘system’ that has taken hundreds of years to perfect and to come to fruition. This ‘system’ results in enslavement and servitude. It creates dreadful unhappiness amongst ordinary decent people and causes wars, debt, starvation, pollution and environmental destruction. It feeds on greed, fear and division. It forces people onto the corporate treadmills of mass mindless production and mass mindless consumption. It uses lies, deception, intimidation and entrapment at all times. It is a system that is so clever and so cunning that most of the world is completely oblivious to its existence. It is a system that allows a few winners at the expense of a huge number of losers. It is a system that considers itself to be unbeatable and indestructible and is now so arrogant that it believes it can control everything and everyone on its terms. It is a system where psychopaths and sociopaths can flourish. And without question the centre of this system, the heart of this global corporate beast is the innocent sounding Square Mile known as the City of London.
Put very simply, the banking dynasties, such as the House of Rothschild, control the political processes around the world to such an extent that their network of private central banks have the right to create money completely out of thin air and then charge interest on that ‘nothingness’. The polite term is ‘Fractional Reserve Lending’ but in reality it is just simple fraud. The result is that the whole world is currently drowning in a sea of fraudulent debt.
The USA now has a National Debt of over 16 trillion dollars, whilst the UK owes its creditors over one trillion pounds. The planned contagion of spiralling and unlawful debt is now sweeping over Europe with a renewed vigour. Greece and Spain are being torn apart by appalling austerity measures to the point that civil war or military intervention are now being openly talked about on the streets. Italy is giving all the signs that its economy is now entering into very stormy waters indeed. Ireland, Portugal, France and Belgium are already in a mess and are unlikely to see their debts become more manageable. Tens of millions of people have experienced a major downturn in their quality of life, along with their prospects for a more secure and better future, as unlawful austerity measures brought in by corrupt politicians begin to bite. Even the stronger economies of Germany, The Netherlands and Luxembourg have now been downgraded by Moody’s, the Rothschild controlled credit rating agency.
A Simple Solution To End This Madness – The Greenback
What is happening to all of us is criminal. However, there is a very simple solution that the banking dynasties do not want you to know about.
At the height of the American Civil War, the US Treasury warned President Lincoln that further funding would be needed if the Federal North was to have the resources needed to defeat the Confederate South. The President initially went to the Rothschilds and the private banks who wanted between 24 and 36 per cent interest. Lincoln knew that if he agreed to take loans from the bankers that he would be putting his country into a debt noose that would strangle the economic prosperity out of his country and which would be almost impossible to pay off.
On the advice of a businessman with proven integrity, Colonel Dick Taylor from Illinois, Abraham Lincoln made the decision to print debt-free and interest-free paper money based on nothing more than the honour of the American Government. Called ‘Greenbacks’ because they were coloured green on one side only, the US Treasury issued 450 million dollars worth of these notes and they were immediately accepted as legal tender by a willing and grateful nation. The war was eventually won and this very popular new paper currency seemed set to continue. In the words of Lincoln himself:
“The government should create issue and circulate all the currency and credit needed to satisfy the spending power of the government and the buying power of consumers….. The privilege of creating and issuing money is not only the supreme prerogative of Government, but it is the Government’s greatest creative opportunity. By the adoption of these principles, the long-felt want for a uniform medium will be satisfied. The taxpayers will be saved immense sums of interest, discounts and exchanges. The financing of all public enterprises, the maintenance of stable government and ordered progress, and the conduct of the Treasury will become matters of practical administration. The people can and will be furnished with a currency as safe as their own government. Money will cease to be the master and become the servant of humanity. Democracy will rise superior to the money power.”
Senate document 23, Page 91. 1865
However, the response by the private bankers to this sudden threat to their banking empire was swift and brutal as this extract from The Times of London in 1865 shows:
” If that mischievous financial policy, which had its origin 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 debts and be without a debt. It will have all the money necessary to carry on its commerce. It will become prosperous beyond precedence in the history of the civilised 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.”
On Good Friday, April 14th 1865, a lone gunman ended the presidency of Abraham Lincoln. Sadly, his Greenback legacy died with him as the private bankers managed to ‘persuade’ Congress to revoke this successful initiative in favour of the debt creating National Banking Act which eventually led to the formation of the privately run Federal Reserve in 1913. Since then, America’s unlawful debt has risen to over 16 trillion dollars.
“I have two enemies; the Southern army in front of me and the financial institutions in the rear. Of the two, the one in the rear is my greatest foe.” Abraham Lincoln
The solution for dealing with private debt-creating bankers is simple. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, to stop any sovereign government from issuing through its treasury its own interest-free money based on nothing more than the wealth and integrity of the nation. This is the big secret that the City of London would rather keep to itself. If this simple fact were to become mainstream then people everywhere would simply walk away and the entire banking system would completely collapse.
And now we come to a very little known historical episode that I alluded to at the beginning that takes this concept of the debt-free ‘Greenback’ from America to Britain … and in so doing exposes the truly appalling values that are prevalent even today within the City of London.
The Great War And The Debt-free Bradbury Treasury Note
Three weeks ago, as part of my ongoing research into the banking elite, I came across a fascinating book entitled The Financiers and the Nation by the Rt. Hon. Thomas Johnston, P.C., ex-Lord Privy Seal. It was written in 1934 and republished in 1994 by Ossian Publishers Ltd.
The text of this quite remarkable and rare book is available here.
In Chapter 6, entitled ‘Usury on the Great War’, I’ve selected the following paragraphs which I believe are both shocking and self-explanatory:
WHEN the whistle blew for the start of the Great War in August 1914 the Bank of England possessed only nine millions sterling of a gold reserve, and, as the Bank of England was the Bankers’ Bank, this sum constituted the effective reserve of all the other Banking Institutions in Great Britain.
The bank managers at the outbreak of War were seriously afraid that the depositing public, in a panic, would demand the return of their money. And, inasmuch as the deposits and savings left in the hands of the bankers by the depositing public had very largely been sunk by the bankers in enterprises which, at the best, could not repay the borrowed capital quickly, and which in several and large-scale instances were likely to be submerged altogether in the stress of war and in the collapse of great areas of international trade, it followed that if there were a widespread panicky run upon the banks, the banks would be unable to pay and the whole credit system would collapse, to the ruin of millions of people.
Private enterprise banking thus being on the verge of collapse, the Government (Mr. Lloyd George at the time was Chancellor of the Exchequer) hurriedly declared a moratorium, i.e. it authorized the banks not to pay out (which in any event the banks could not do), and it extended the August Bank Holiday for another three days. During these three or four days when the banks and stock exchanges were closed, the bankers held anxious negotiation with the Chancellor of the Exchequer. And one of them has placed upon record the fact that ‘he (Mr. George) did everything that we asked him to do.’ When the banks reopened, the public discovered that, instead of getting their money back in gold, they were paid in a new legal tender of Treasury notes (the £1 notes in black and the 10s. notes in red colours). This new currency had been issued by the State, was backed by the credit of the State, and was issued to the banks to prevent the banks from utter collapse. The public cheerfully accepted the new notes; and nobody talked about inflation.
To return, however, to the early war period, no sooner had Mr. Lloyd George got the bankers out of their difficulties in the autumn of 1914 by the issue of the Treasury money, than they were round again at the Treasury door explaining forcibly that the State must, upon no account, issue any more money on this interest free basis; if the war was to be run, it must be run with borrowed money, money upon which interest must be paid, and they were the gentlemen who would see to the proper financing of a good, juicy War Loan at 31/2 per cent, interest, and to that last proposition the Treasury yielded. The War was not to be fought with interest-free money, and/or/with conscription of wealth; though it was to be fought with conscription of life. Many small businesses were to be closed and their proprietors sent overseas as redundant, and without any compensation for their losses, while Finance, as we shall see, was to be heavily and progressively remunerated
The real values of the private bankers and the City of London have been exposed for all to see. Whilst hundreds of thousands of British soldiers were dying on the killing fields of Flanders and elsewhere doing what they saw as their patriotic duty, British bankers, safely out of danger and not sharing the appalling conditions on the Western Front, were only interested in one thing – how to make obscene profits from Britain’s desperate efforts to win the war. To say that the private bankers and the City of London have the morals of sewer rats is to be extremely unkind to our little rodent friends. But this is the clincher. As a direct result of the greed and treason of the British private bankers in preventing the continuance of the Bradbury Treasury Notes, Britain’s National Debt went up from £650 million in 1914 to a staggering £7,500 million in 1919.
And this is where it all gets particularly interesting. The following is an extract from the official and current HM Treasury’s Debt Management Office website … and it appears to be completely at odds with the account given by the Rt. Hon. Thomas Johnston.
“The threat of World War One pushed British banks into crisis; exacerbated further as half the world’s trade was financed by British banks and as a consequence international payments dried up. In response to this crisis, John Maynard Keynes (the renowned economist), persuaded the Chancellor Lloyd George to use the Bank of England’s gold reserves to support the banks, which ended the immediate crisis. Keynes stayed with the Treasury until 1919. The war years of 1914-18 had seen an increase in the National Debt from £650 million at the start of the war to £7,500 million by 1919. This ensured that the Treasury developed new expertise in foreign exchange, currency, credit and price control skills and were put to use in the management of the post-war economy. The slump of the 1930s necessitated the restructuring of the economy following World War II (the national debt stood at £21 billion by its end) and the emphasis was placed on economic planning and financial relations.
Why is there is no mention whatsoever of the £300 million of Bradbury debt-free paper Treasury Notes issued in 1914? Instead, it says Lloyd George, on the advice of John Maynard Keynes, used the Bank of England’s gold reserves which, according to Johnston, only amounted to £9 million. What is going on here? Who is telling the truth? Could it be that HM Government, the puppets of the City of London, don’t want you to know about the simple but effective concept of debt-free and interest-free Treasury Notes?
What Do The System-serving Politicians And “Economists” Say About The issuance Of Treasury Notes?
As soon as the concept of the debt-free and interest-free Greenback Dollar (and now the Bradbury Pound) is raised in polite conversation with either a politician or an economist, two immediate knee jerk verbal reactions occur from these system-servers.
The first is to say that if a government suddenly starts printing its own money through its treasury based on the credit and wealth of the country, instead of going through its central bank, we would be heading towards what happened in the Weimar Republic in Germany in the early 1920s where hyperinflation spiralled out of control and a loaf of bread was bought with a barrow load of almost worthless paper money.
To this I just say look again at what actually happened in Germany at that time. It was not the Weimar’s treasury but it was the privately controlled central bank, the Reichsbank, who was printing the money, coupled with the extreme actions of currency speculators and foreign investors that caused all of the problems.
Hyperinflation could not happen as a result of the Bradbury Pound, because the democratically elected government would actually ‘govern’ … now that is novel! Speculation would be prevented, and most importantly, the newly created money would be spent on a productive economy, rather than bankers bonuses.
The second reaction from system-servers is that the country is already printing its own money – it is called Quantative Easing, that mysterious cash injection into the economy which only seems to get as far as the banks and not to where it is actually needed. Only trouble is, it is the Bank of England doing the printing and not HM Treasury. Based around government issued Bonds (promissory notes based on the wealth of the nation), this complex process only increases the National Debt and it certainly doesn’t solve anything.
The simple truth is that people who serve the system and who have been ‘educated’ by such organisations as the Fabian inspired London School of Economics (LSE), are not suddenly going to bite the hand that gives them a very good living.
So what does all of this mean for us, the people?
Before looking at this, let’s just consider for a moment what ‘money’ actually is. It is simply a convenient unit of exchange for goods and services that people have COMPLETE CONFIDENCE in. Now if HM Government were to issue debt-free and interest-free treasury notes through HM Treasury rather than the Bank of England in order to meet the needs and happiness of all the people whilst getting them out of unlawful debt, my guess is that people might have a lot of confidence in such a benign and benevolent financial system.
There is absolutely no defence for the present system whereby private bankers create money completely out of thin air for themselves to lend and then charge interest on that ‘nothingness’. The Bank of England, with its hidden controller the Bank for International Settlements based in Basel, Switzerland (often described as the Central Bank of Central Banks), dictate behind the scenes the fiscal policies and direction that our supposed sovereign and independent government must take. We are all prisoners of this utterly corrupt system and it’s time to confront it head on to collapse it.
If our government were to go down the path of a new Bradbury Treasury Note (as well as pursuing the banksters with Common Law for their crimes against humanity) then our debt burden would be removed overnight – there would be no deficit and no national debt. Under Common Law, all debts involving the use of fractional reserve lending by the central and private banks will be written off as they were arrived at by the use of fraud. Money would be immediately made available by HM Treasury to meet the essential needs of the country. The nation’s happiness, well-being and security would be taken care of without the need for an invasive and complex tax system. We would have Gross Domestic Happiness instead of Gross Domestic Product dictating humanity’s future.
None of this is rocket science – if the Spanish and Greek governments genuinely wanted to put right overnight the economic woes of their countries, they would immediately start printing and supplying interest-free and debt-free treasury notes based on the wealth and integrity of their respective countries. They would also tell the IMF, the EU and the Bank for International Settlements to go and whistle for their ‘money’! Why? Because it was created out of thin air, it didn’t exist in the first place, and the whole banking system is fraudulent … in other words, see you in a common law court in front of a jury!!!!
Banks, money and finance must exist to serve humanity, not the other way round. Our enslavement by unlawful debt can be ended overnight with one signature by the Chancellor of the Exchequer. It really is that simple!
Document:
Bankers, Bradburys, Carnage And Slaughter On The Western Front Ebook
Related Content:
The Case For A “Greenback” Pound
BSN Editor’s Note:
The typical response to calls for a return to debt-free greenback style money is to regurgitate the well known stories of Weimer republic hyper-inflation and cries of ‘if politicians are allowed to create money they’ll abuse their power and enrich themselves.
Of course the truth is more complicated and the proposed solutions I’ve heard never put the power to create money solely in the hands of politicians.
As Ellen Brown explains in her wonderful book ‘Web of Debt’ almost all incidences of hyper-inflation have been cause by currency speculation or deliberate counterfeiting (especially in times of war, where one side will issue fake bank notes of the enemy in order to cause financial instability).
This makes very interesting reading and is not what we think we know:
The Weimar Hyperinflation? Could it Happen Again?
“It was horrible. Horrible! Like lightning it struck. No one was prepared. The shelves in the grocery stores were empty.You could buy nothing with your paper money.” – Harvard University law professor Friedrich Kessler on on the Weimar Republic hyperinflation (1993 interview)
Some worried commentators are predicting a massive hyperinflation of the sort suffered by Weimar Germany in 1923, when a wheelbarrow full of paper money could barely buy a loaf of bread. An April 29 editorial in the San Francisco Examiner warned:
“With an unprecedented deficit that’s approaching $2 trillion, [the President’s 2010] budget proposal is a surefire prescription for hyperinflation. So every senator and representative who votes for this monster $3.6 trillion budget will be endorsing a spending spree that could very well turn America into the next Weimar Republic.”1
In an investment newsletter called Money Morning on April 9, Martin Hutchinson pointed to disturbing parallels between current government monetary policy and Weimar Germany’s, when 50% of government spending was being funded by seigniorage – merely printing money.2 However, there is something puzzling in his data. He indicates that the British government is already funding more of its budget by seigniorage than Weimar Germany did at the height of its massive hyperinflation; yet the pound is still holding its own, under circumstances said to have caused the complete destruction of the German mark. Something else must have been responsible for the mark’s collapse besides mere money-printing to meet the government’s budget, but what? And are we threatened by the same risk today? Let’s take a closer look at the data.
History Repeats Itself – or Does It?
In his well-researched article, Hutchinson notes that Weimar Germany had been suffering from inflation ever since World War I; but it was in the two year period between 1921 and 1923 that the true “Weimar hyperinflation” occurred. By the time it had ended in November 1923, the mark was worth only one-trillionth of what it had been worth back in 1914. Hutchinson goes on:
“The current policy mix reflects those of Germany during the period between 1919 and 1923. The Weimar government was unwilling to raise taxes to fund post-war reconstruction and war-reparations payments, and so it ran large budget deficits. It kept interest rates far below inflation, expanding money supply rapidly and raising 50% of government spending through seigniorage (printing money and living off the profits from issuing it). . . .
“The really chilling parallel is that the United States, Britain and Japan have now taken to funding their budget deficits through seigniorage. In the United States, the Fed is buying $300 billion worth of U.S. Treasury bonds (T-bonds) over a six-month period, a rate of $600 billion per annum, 15% of federal spending of $4 trillion. In Britain, the Bank of England (BOE) is buying 75 billion pounds of gilts [the British equivalent of U.S. Treasury bonds] over three months. That’s 300 billion pounds per annum, 65% of British government spending of 454 billion pounds. Thus, while the United States is approaching Weimar German policy (50% of spending) quite rapidly, Britain has already overtaken it!”
And that is where the data gets confusing. If Britain is already meeting a larger percentage of its budget deficit by seigniorage than Germany did at the height of its hyperinflation, why is the pound now worth about as much on foreign exchange markets as it was nine years ago, under circumstances said to have driven the mark to a trillionth of its former value in the same period, and most of this in only two years? Meanwhile, the U.S. dollar has actually gotten stronger relative to other currencies since the policy was begun last year of massive “quantitative easing” (today’s euphemism for seigniorage).3
Central banks rather than governments are now doing the printing, but the effect on the money supply should be the same as in the government money-printing schemes of old. The government debt bought by the central banks is never actually paid off but is just rolled over from year to year; and once the new money is in the money supply, it stays there, diluting the value of the currency. So why haven’t our currencies already collapsed to a trillionth of their former value, as happened in Weimar Germany? Indeed, if it were a simple question of supply and demand, a government would have to print a trillion times its earlier money supply to drop its currency by a factor of a trillion; and even the German government isn’t charged with having done that. Something else must have been going on in the Weimar Republic, but what?
Schacht Lets the Cat Out of the Bag
Light is thrown on this mystery by the later writings of Hjalmar Schacht, the currency commissioner for the Weimar Republic. The facts are explored at length in The Lost Science of Money by Stephen Zarlenga, who writes that in Schacht’s 1967 book The Magic of Money, he “let the cat out of the bag, writing in German, with some truly remarkable admissions that shatter the ‘accepted wisdom’ the financial community has promulgated on the German hyperinflation.” What actually drove the wartime inflation into hyperinflation, said Schacht, was speculation by foreign investors, who would bet on the mark’s decreasing value by selling it short.
Short selling is a technique used by investors to try to profit from an asset’s falling price. It involves borrowing the asset and selling it, with the understanding that the asset must later be bought back and returned to the original owner. The speculator is gambling that the price will have dropped in the meantime and he can pocket the difference. Short selling of the German mark was made possible because private banks made massive amounts of currency available for borrowing, marks that were created on demand and lent to investors, returning a profitable interest to the banks.
At first, the speculation was fed by the Reichsbank (the German central bank), which had recently been privatized. But when the Reichsbank could no longer keep up with the voracious demand for marks, other private banks were allowed to create them out of nothing and lend them at interest as well.4
A Story with an Ironic Twist
If Schacht is to be believed, not only did the government not cause the hyperinflation but it was the government that got the situation under control. The Reichsbank was put under strict regulation, and prompt corrective measures were taken to eliminate foreign speculation by eliminating easy access to loans of bank-created money.
More interesting is a little-known sequel to this tale. What allowed Germany to get back on its feet in the 1930s was the very thing today’s commentators are blaming for bringing it down in the 1920s – money issued by seigniorage by the government. Economist Henry C. K. Liu calls this form of financing “sovereign credit.” He writes of Germany’s remarkable transformation:
“The Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933, at a time when its economy was in total collapse, with ruinous war-reparation obligations and zero prospects for foreign investment or credit. Yet through an independent monetary policy of sovereign credit and a full-employment public-works program, the Third Reich was able to turn a bankrupt Germany, stripped of overseas colonies it could exploit, into the strongest economy in Europe within four years, even before armament spending began.”5
While Hitler clearly deserves the opprobrium heaped on him for his later atrocities, he was enormously popular with his own people, at least for a time. This was evidently because he rescued Germany from the throes of a worldwide depression – and he did it through a plan of public works paid for with currency generated by the government itself. Projects were first earmarked for funding, including flood control, repair of public buildings and private residences, and construction of new buildings, roads, bridges, canals, and port facilities. The projected cost of the various programs was fixed at one billion units of the national currency. One billion non-inflationary bills of exchange called Labor Treasury Certificates were then issued against this cost. Millions of people were put to work on these projects, and the workers were paid with the Treasury Certificates. The workers then spent the certificates on goods and services, creating more jobs for more people. These certificates were not actually debt-free but were issued as bonds, and the government paid interest on them to the bearers. But the certificates circulated as money and were renewable indefinitely, making them a de facto currency; and they avoided the need to borrow from international lenders or to pay off international debts.6 The Treasury Certificates did not trade on foreign currency markets, so they were beyond the reach of the currency speculators. They could not be sold short because there was no one to sell them to, so they retained their value.
Within two years, Germany’s unemployment problem had been solved and the country was back on its feet. It had a solid, stable currency, and no inflation, at a time when millions of people in the United States and other Western countries were still out of work and living on welfare. Germany even managed to restore foreign trade, although it was denied foreign credit and was faced with an economic boycott abroad. It did this by using a barter system: equipment and commodities were exchanged directly with other countries, circumventing the international banks. This system of direct exchange occurred without debt and without trade deficits. Although Germany’s economic experiment was short-lived, it left some lasting monuments to its success, including the famous Autobahn, the world’s first extensive superhighway.7
The Lessons of History: Not Always What They Seem
Germany’s scheme for escaping its crippling debt and reinvigorating a moribund economy was clever, but it was not actually original with the Germans. The notion that a government could fund itself by printing and delivering paper receipts for goods and services received was first devised by the American colonists. Benjamin Franklin credited the remarkable growth and abundance in the colonies, at a time when English workers were suffering the impoverished conditions of the Industrial Revolution, to the colonists’ unique system of government-issued money. In the nineteenth century, Senator Henry Clay called this the “American system,” distinguishing it from the “British system” of privately-issued paper banknotes. After the American Revolution, the American system was replaced in the U.S. with banker-created money; but government-issued money was revived during the Civil War, when Abraham Lincoln funded his government with U.S. Notes or “Greenbacks” issued by the Treasury.
The dramatic difference in the results of Germany’s two money-printing experiments was a direct result of the uses to which the money was put. Price inflation results when “demand” (money) increases more than “supply” (goods and services), driving prices up; and in the experiment of the 1930s, new money was created for the purpose of funding productivity, so supply and demand increased together and prices remained stable. Hitler said, “For every mark issued, we required the equivalent of a mark’s worth of work done, or goods produced.” In the hyperinflationary disaster of 1923, on the other hand, money was printed merely to pay off speculators, causing demand to shoot up while supply remained fixed. The result was not just inflation but hyperinflation, since the speculation went wild, triggering rampant tulip-bubble-style mania and panic.
This was also true in Zimbabwe, a dramatic contemporary example of runaway inflation. The crisis dated back to 2001, when Zimbabwe defaulted on its loans and the IMF refused to make the usual accommodations, including refinancing and loan forgiveness. Apparently, the IMF’s intention was to punish the country for political policies of which it disapproved, including land reform measures that involved reclaiming the lands of wealthy landowners. Zimbabwe’s credit was ruined and it could not get loans elsewhere, so the government resorted to issuing its own national currency and using the money to buy U.S. dollars on the foreign-exchange market. These dollars were then used to pay the IMF and regain the country’s credit rating.8 According to a statement by the Zimbabwe central bank, the hyperinflation was caused by speculators who manipulated the foreign-exchange market, charging exorbitant rates for U.S. dollars, causing a drastic devaluation of the Zimbabwe currency.
The government’s real mistake, however, may have been in playing the IMF’s game at all. Rather than using its national currency to buy foreign fiat money to pay foreign lenders, it could have followed the lead of Abraham Lincoln and the American colonists and issued its own currency to pay for the production of goods and services for its own people. Inflation would then have been avoided, because supply would have kept up with demand; and the currency would have served the local economy rather than being siphoned off by speculators.
The Real Weimar Threat and How It Can Be Avoided
Is the United States, then, out of the hyperinflationary woods with its “quantitative easing” scheme? Maybe, maybe not. To the extent that the newly-created money will be used for real economic development and growth, funding by seigniorage is not likely to inflate prices, because supply and demand will rise together. Using quantitative easing to fund infrastructure and other productive projects, as in President Obama’s stimulus package, could invigorate the economy as promised, producing the sort of abundance reported by Benjamin Franklin in America’s flourishing early years.
There is, however, something else going on today that is disturbingly similar to what triggered the 1923 hyperinflation. As in Weimar Germany, money creation in the U.S. is now being undertaken by a privately-owned central bank, the Federal Reserve; and it is largely being done to settle speculative bets on the books of private banks, without producing anything of value to the economy. As gold investor James Sinclair warned nearly two years ago:
“[T]he real problem is a trembling $20 trillion mountain of over the counter credit and default derivatives. Think deeply about the Weimar Republic case study because every day it looks more and more like a repeat in cause and effect . . . .”9
The $12.9 billion in bailout funds funneled through AIG to pay Goldman Sachs for its highly speculative credit default swaps is just one egregious example.10 To the extent that the money generated by “quantitative easing” is being sucked into the black hole of paying off these speculative derivative bets, we could indeed be on the Weimar road and there is real cause for alarm. We have been led to believe that we must prop up a zombie Wall Street banking behemoth because without it we would have no credit system, but that is not true. There is another viable alternative, and it may prove to be our only viable alternative. We can beat Wall Street at its own game, by forming publicly-owned banks that issue the full faith and credit of the United States not for private speculative profit but as a public service, for the benefit of the United States and its people.11
Ellen Brown developed her research skills as an attorney practicing civil litigation in Los Angeles. In Web of Debt, her latest book, she turns those skills to an analysis of the Federal Reserve and “the money trust.” She shows how this private cartel has usurped the power to create money from the people themselves, and how we the people can get it back. Her earlier books focused on the pharmaceutical cartel that gets its power from “the money trust.” Her eleven books include Forbidden Medicine, Nature’s Pharmacy (co-authored with Dr. Lynne Walker), and The Key to Ultimate Health (co-authored with Dr. Richard Hansen). Her websites are www.webofdebt.com and www.ellenbrown.com.
Notes:
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1. “Examiner Editorial: Get Ready for Obama’s Coming Hyperinflation,” San Francisco Examiner, April 29, 2009.
2. Martin Hutchinson, “Is It 1932 – or 1923?”, Money Morning (April 9, 2009).
3. See Monthly Average Graphs, x-rate.com.
4. Stephen Zarlenga, The Lost Science of Money (Valatie, New York: American Monetary Institute, 2002), pages 590-600; S. Zarlenga, “Germany’s 1923 Hyperinflation: A ‘Private’ Affair,” Barnes Review (July-August 1999).
5. Henry C. K. Liu, “Nazism and the German Economic Miracle,” Asia Times (May 24, 2005).
6. S. Zarlenga, op. cit.
7. Matt Koehl, “The Good Society?”, Rense (January 13, 2005).
8. “Bags of Bricks: Zimbabweans Get New Money – for What It’s Worth,” The Economist (August 24, 2006); Thomas Homes, “IMF Contributes to Zimbabwe’s Hyperinflation,” www.newzimbabwe.com (March 5, 2006).
9. Jim Sinclair, “Fed Actions a Bandaid on a Gaping Economic Wound,” reprinted in Go for Gold, September 18, 2007.
10. Eliot Spitzer, “The Real AIG Scandal, Continued! The Transfer of $12.9 Billion from AIG to Goldman Looks Fishier and Fishier,” Slate (March 22, 2009).
11. See Ellen Brown, “Cash Starved States Need to Play the Banking Game,” webofdebt.com/articles (March 2, 2009).
