Sept. 8, 2025 - Epoch Times
03:26
| 
| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| The word Federal Reserve is by itself funny because it doesn't say central bank. | |
| Americans hated the idea of a central bank because that was more like Germany and Bismarck or whatever. | |
| They didn't want that. | |
| But central bank is not an American institution, so they called it something completely different. | |
| It's actually kind of genius. | |
| They called it first the word federal. | |
| Federal meaning decentralized, you know, consistent with the Tenth Amendment. | |
| So to accomplish that federal piece, the new central bank had branches, you know, had Minneapolis Fed, Atlanta Fed, a Dallas Fed, Chicago Fed, San Francisco Fed. | |
| So there's many Federal Reserve banks around the country for no apparent reason, really, except to create the illusion of decentralization. | |
| Okay, so there was that. | |
| The second part, this word reserve, is funny when you think about it because it implies that they have something. | |
| They're in the possession. | |
| We have the reserves. | |
| Just in case we need them, we have the reserves. | |
| In the end, despite its name, despite the intentions of the founders, it was a central bank. | |
| It was a progressivist experiment and the application of expertise and science to the sound management of the monetary system of the country. | |
| But what's interesting is that, of course, of course, and anybody would have predicted this. | |
| I mean, Thomas Jefferson certainly would have, Thomas Paine, this whole generation would have predicted. | |
| If you get anything like a central bank, a national bank, a central bank, it will be abused. | |
| It will be abused to meet, but it doesn't matter the intentions, whatever. | |
| It'll be abused. | |
| So what presented itself soon after the Fed was founded? | |
| The war in Europe. | |
| The Great War. | |
| It was a mess, a terrible mess. | |
| And the Americans wanted nothing to do with it. | |
| But at some point, so what kept America out of wars for the most part was, well, we just didn't want to afford it. | |
| We didn't have the money. | |
| You know, solve your own problems. | |
| We're over here on the other side of the world. | |
| We can mind our own business over here. | |
| We don't have the money. | |
| Well, now with the Fed, you have the money. | |
| You've got a printing press. | |
| You've got this weird power of this one institution to buy and hold government-created debt with money that didn't previously exist. | |
| A check. | |
| The nation had a credit card with an infinite balance on it, an infinitely high limit. | |
| What could go wrong? | |
| What could go wrong, right? | |
| That actually, you know, and again, I think the founders of the Fed didn't really imagine this. | |
| They thought, well, we're all, look at us. | |
| We're responsible guys. | |
| You know, we know what's what. | |
| We would never do something like that. | |
| Well, they lost control of it right away. | |
| And so the Fed was probably the reason why the U.S. entered the Great War. | |
| Lots of people argue for a constitutional amendment to balance the budget. | |
| A lot of people want the Congress to cut spending and so on and so on. | |
| But until you unplug the Fed's capacity to just print money and cover up for all the profligacy of Congress, we're never going to get there. | |
| We need sound money, or we're never going to get anything remotely like a balanced budget. | |
| It's the Fed that makes it all possible. |
Export Selection