The Man Who Would Be King

"Give me control of a nation's money and I care not who makes the laws."
— Mayer Amschel Rothschild  (1744 -1812)

Yesterday I listened to Ben Bernanke, current man behind the curtain at the Federal Reserve, suggest with a straight face that the key to avoiding future financial meltdowns was to put the Fed in charge of everything. “Just make me King of the World,” says Helicopter Ben, “and all your problems are over.” 

Mr. Bernanke’s greatest accomplishment as Fed chairman has been to distract the world from the obvious conclusion that the Fed caused the crisis by allowing a reckless increase in credit across the globe.

The Federal Reserve Bank is the private banking cartel charged with regulating the money supply of the Untied States. And since every major country in the world uses the U.S. dollar as a reserve currency, the Fed is in effect the world’s central bank.  Mr. Bernanke and the Federal Reserve already have power beyond the dreams of kings.

In 1913 our elected representatives granted the Fed the unique and enviable power to create money out of thin air and lend it to our government at interest. The profitability of this scheme for the Fed can hardly be comprehended. 

In a democracy, politicians need money to buy votes. For obvious reasons, borrowing money is always better than raising it through taxes. But even better than borrowing is simply printing money. The constitution doesn’t allow Congress to print money, however, and thus the symbiotic partnership with the big banks was born.

Because inflation is a form of larceny that almost no one understands, and because having more dollars makes everyone feel richer, bankers and politicians harvest vast hauls of power and influence by jiggering the money supply. And everyone gets a piece of the action for a while, because the modern way to create money is not to print it, but to borrow it into existence. Before the balloon hit the pin, people were happy to help by borrowing like there was no tomorrow. 

There’s only one problem with the inflation scheme whether we print or borrow money into existence. The problem is that money created out of thin air must eventually return whence it came.

This is not a theory. It’s an economic fact of nature. The eventual fate of unbacked paper currency systems is no more subject to the whims of bankers and politicians or the ardent wishes of debtors than the movement of the tides or the changing of the seasons. To work, such systems depend on an ever-expanding supply of credit. Nothing can expand forever. When the expansion reaches its limit, nothing can prevent a collapse.

During the collapse you often hear of “failures of confidence.” Such systems demand confidence because the game the central bank is running is a “confidence game,” or “con game” for short. Without confidence the high-flying bubble collapses into a nasty little pool of truth.

In his speech on March 10, Bernanke suggested the current mess could have been prevented if only he and his pals at the Fed had had more power to oversee the shenanigans of bankers. He recognized the moral hazard involved in the notion of a bank’s being “too big to fail,” but was not much troubled by it. And certainly acknowledged no fault in precipitating the “failure of confidence” we are experiencing in the financial markets.

Moral hazard occurs when you can make bets where you keep what you win, but people who are not even in the game pay your losses. The bankers and their clients, knowing the taxpayer stood ready, if not entirely willing, to cover their losses at the Wall Street crap table, started playing the hard-way and long odds bets that really pay big when you hit them but wipe you out when you lose. And why not? They knew that if they went bust, they were simply too big to fail. Uncle Sam and Ben Bernanke would snatch their bacon out of the fire if it came to that, no matter how many taxpayers had to be tossed into the flames.

Ben has declared his commitment to save the reckless at the expense of the prudent no matter the cost. To better carry out the rescue of his cronies in the banking and financial industry no sacrifice will be too great for the taxpayers to bear. And no long-term solution will be possible unless he becomes King of the World.

If you believe that, I’ve got a preconstruction condo in Miami I know you’re going to love. Get in on the ground floor right now with no money down for just half a million. You can flip this baby for a cool fifty grand without ever closing on it. Call me.