Monday, June 6, 2011

Eliminate Ponzi-schemes, terminate the usury charades and take back your money - and their power - from private banks....


Eliminate Ponzi-schemes, terminate the usury charades and take back your money - and their power - from private banks....

This crisis has an exit...
By Ellen Brown

Countries everywhere are facing debt crises today, precipitated by the credit collapse of 2008. Public services are being slashed and public assets are being sold off, in a futile attempt to balance budgets that can't be balanced because the money supply itself has shrunk. Governments usually get the blame for excessive spending, but governments did not initiate the crisis. The collapse was in the banking system, and in the credit that it is responsible for creating and sustaining.

Contrary to popular belief, most of our money today is not created by governments. It is created by private banks as loans. The private system of money creation has grown so powerful over the centuries that it has come to dominate governments globally. The system, however, contains the seeds of its own destruction. The source of its power is also a fatal design flaw.

The flaw is that banks advance "bank credit" that must be paid back with interest, continually requiring more money to be repaid than was created as loans; the only way to get additional money from the private banking system is to take out yet more loans, at interest. The system is, in effect, a pyramid scheme. When the banks run out of borrowers to support the pyramid, it must collapse; and we are nearing that point today.

There are more sustainable ways to run a banking and credit system, as will be shown.

How banks create money
The process by which banks create money was explained by the Chicago Federal Reserve in a booklet called Modern Money Mechanics. It states:
  • "The actual process of money creation takes place primarily in banks." [p3]
  • "[Banks] do not really pay out loans from the money they receive as deposits. If they did this, no additional money would be created. What they do when they make loans is to accept promissory notes in exchange for credits to the borrowers' transaction accounts. Loans (assets) and deposits (liabilities) both rise [by the same amount]." [p6]
  • "With a uniform 10 percent reserve requirement, a $1 increase in reserves would support $10 of additional transaction accounts." [p49]
  • A $100 deposit supports a $90 loan, which becomes a $90 deposit in another bank, which supports an $81 loan, etc.

    That's the conventional model, but banks actually create the loans first. They find the deposits to meet the reserve requirement later. Banks create money as loans, which become checks, which go into other banks. Then, if needed to clear the checks, they borrow the money back from the other banks. In effect, they borrow back the money they just created, pocketing the spread between the interest rates as their profit. The rate at which banks can borrow from each other in the United States today - the Fed funds rate - is an extremely low 0.2%.

    How the system evolved
    The current system of privately issued money is traced in Modern Money Mechanics to the 17th century goldsmiths. People who left gold with the goldsmiths for safekeeping would be issued paper receipts for it called "banknotes". Other people who wanted to borrow money were also happy to accept paper banknotes in place of gold, since the notes were safer and more convenient to carry around.

    The sleight of hand came in when the goldsmiths discovered that people would come for their gold only about 10% of the time. That meant that up to 10 times as many notes could be printed and lent as the goldsmiths had gold. Ninety percent of the notes were basically counterfeited.

    This system is called "fractional reserve" banking and was institutionalized when the Bank of England was founded in 1694. The bank was allowed to lend its own banknotes to the government, forming the national money supply. Only the interest on the loans had to be paid. The debt was rolled over indefinitely.

    That is still true today. The US federal debt is never paid off but just continues to grow, forming the basis of the US money supply.
    The public banking alternative
    There are other ways to create a banking system, ways that would eliminate its Ponzi-scheme elements and make the system sustainable. One solution is to make the loans interest-free; but for Western economies today, that transition could be difficult.

    Another alternative is for banks to be publicly owned. If the people collectively own the bank, the interest and profits go back to the government and the people, who benefit from decreased taxes, increased public services, and cheaper public infrastructure. Cutting out interest has been shown to reduce the cost of public projects by 30-50%.

    In the United States, this system of publicly owned banks goes back to the American colonists. The best of the colonial models was in Benjamin Franklin's colony of Pennsylvania, where the government operated a "land bank". Money was printed and lent into the community. It recycled back to the government and could be lent and relent.

    The system was mathematically sound because the interest and profits returned to the government, which then spent the money back into the economy in place of taxes. Private banks, by contrast, generally lend their profits back into the economy, or invest in private money-making ventures in which more is always expected back than was originally invested.

    During the period that the Pennsylvania system was in place, the colonists paid no taxes except excise taxes, prices did not inflate, and there was no government debt.

    How private banknotes became the national US currency
    The Pennsylvania credit system was sustainable, but some early American colonial governments just printed and spent, inflating the money supply and devaluing the currency. The British merchants complained, prompting King George II to forbid the colonists to issue their own money.

    Taxes had to be paid to England in gold. That meant going into debt to the English bankers. The result was a massive depression. The colonists finally rebelled and went back to issuing their own money, precipitating the American Revolution.

    In an international first, the colonists funded a war against a major power with mere paper receipts, and won. But the British counterattacked by waging a currency war. They massively counterfeited the colonists' paper money at a time when this was easy to do. By the end of the war, the paper scrip was virtually worthless. After it lost its value, the colonists were so disillusioned with paper money that they left the power to issue it out of the US constitution.

    Meanwhile, Alexander Hamilton, the first US Treasury Secretary, was faced with huge war debts, and he had no money to pay them. He therefore resorted to the ruse used in England known as fractional reserve banking. In 1791, Hamilton set up the First US Bank, a largely private bank that would print banknotes "backed" by gold and lend them to the government.

    The ruse worked: the paper banknotes expanded the money supply, the debts were paid, and the economy thrived. But it was the beginning of a system of government funded by debt to private bankers, who lent banknotes only nominally backed by gold.

    During the American Civil War (1861–1865), president Abraham Lincoln avoided a crippling war debt by returning to the system of government-issued money of the American colonists. He issued US Notes from the Treasury called "Greenbacks" rather than borrowing at usurious interest rates. But Lincoln was assassinated, and Greenback issuance was halted.

    In 1913, the privately owned Federal Reserve was authorized to issue its own Federal Reserve Notes as the national currency. These notes were then lent to the government, eliminating the government's own power to issue money (except for coins). The Federal Reserve was set up to prevent bank runs, but 20 years later we had the Great Depression, the greatest bank run in history. Robert H Hemphill, credit manager of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, wrote in 1934:
    We are completely dependent on the commercial Banks. Someone has to borrow every dollar we have in circulation, cash or credit. If the Banks create ample synthetic money we are prosperous; if not, we starve.
  • For the bankers, however, it was a good system. It put them in control.

    Setting the global debt trap
    Professor Carroll Quigley was an insider groomed by the international bankers. He wrote in Tragedy and Hope in 1966:
    The powers of financial capitalism had another far reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole.

    The apex of the system was to be the Bank for International Settlements [BIS] in Basle, Switzerland, a private bank owned and controlled by the world's central banks which were themselves private corporations. Each central bank... sought to dominate its government by its ability to control Treasury loans…
    The debt trap was set in stages. In 1971, the dollar went off the gold standard internationally. Currencies were unpegged from gold and allowed to "float" in currency markets, competing with other currencies, making them vulnerable to speculation and manipulation.

    In 1974, a secret agreement was entered into with the members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries to sell oil only in dollars. The price of oil was then suddenly quadrupled. Countries lacking oil had to borrow dollars from US banks.

    In 1980, interest rates were raised to 20%. At 20% compound interest, debt doubles in under four years. As a result, most of the world became crippled by debt. By 2001, developing nations had repaid the principal originally owed on their debts six times over; but their total debt had quadrupled because of interest payments.

    When debtor nations could not pay the banks, the International Monetary Fund stepped in with loans - with strings attached. The debtors had to agree to "austerity measures," including:
  • Cutting social services;
  • Privatizing banks and public utilities;
  • Opening markets to foreign investors;
  • Letting currencies "float".

    Today, austerity measures are being imposed not just in developing countries but in the European Union and on US States.
    The BIS: apex of the private central banking pyramid
    What Professor Quigley foretold about the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) has also come to pass. The BIS now has 55 member nations and heads the global financial pyramid.

    The power of the BIS was seen in 1988, when it raised the capital requirement of its member banks from 6% to 8% in an accord called Basel I. The result was to cripple the Japanese banks, which until then were the world's largest creditors. Japan entered a recession from which it has not yet recovered.

    US banks managed to escape by dodging the capital requirement. They did this by moving loans off their books, bundling them up as "securities", and selling them to investors.

    To persuade the investors to buy them, these mortgage-backed securities were protected against default with "derivatives", which were basically just bets. The "protection seller" collected a premium for agreeing to pay in the event of default. The "protection buyer" bought the premium. Owning the asset was not required. Like gamblers at a horse race, derivative players could bet without owning a horse. Derivatives became a very popular form of gambling. The result was the mother of all bubbles, exceeding US$500 trillion by the end of 2007.

    Because of securitization and derivatives, credit mushroomed. Virtually anyone who walked in the door could get a loan.

    The tipping point came in August 2007, with the collapse of two hedge funds. When the derivatives scheme was exposed, the market for derivative-protected securities suddenly dried up. But the US stock market did not collapse until November 2007, when new accounting rules were imposed. The rules grew out of the Basel II Accords initiated by the BIS in 2004.

    "Mark to market" accounting required banks to value their assets according to market demand that day. Many US banks, like those in Japan in the 1990s, suddenly had insufficient capital to make new loans. The result was a credit crisis from which the US has not yet recovered.

    The BIS has now become global regulator, just as Quigley foresaw. In April 2009, the Group of 20 nations agreed to be regulated by a Financial Stability Board based in the BIS, and to comply with "standards and codes" set by the board. The codes are only guidelines, but countries that fail to comply risk downgrades in their credit ratings, something so costly that the guidelines have effectively become laws.

    An article on the BIS website states that central banks in the Central Bank Governance Network should have as their single or primary objective "to preserve price stability". That means governments should not devalue the national currency by inflating the money supply; and that means not "printing money" or borrowing credit created by their own central banks.

    Like the American colonies after King George took away their power to issue their own money, governments must fund their deficits by borrowing from private banks. The bankers' global control over currency issuance has become virtually complete.

    The effects of this policy are particularly evident in the European Union, where EU rules allow deficits of only 3% of government budgets and prevent member countries from either issuing their own money or borrowing credit advanced by their own central banks. Member nations must borrow instead from the European Central Bank, private international banks, or the IMF. The result has been forced austerity measures, as seen in Greece and Ireland. The system is so unsustainable that commentators are predicting that the EU may break up.

    The way out: return the money power to public control
    To escape the debt trap of the global bankers, the power to create the national money supply needs to be restored to national governments. Alternatives include:
  • Legal tender issued directly by national treasuries and spent on national budgets;
  • Publicly owned central banks empowered to advance the nation's credit and lend it to the government interest-free;
  • Nationalization of bankrupt banks considered "too big to fail". These banks could then issue credit to the public and serve the public's banking needs, with the profits recycling back to the government, defraying the tax burden on the people;
  • Publicly owned local banks (state, provincial, or municipal).

    Publicly owned banks have been successfully established and operated in many countries, including Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Germany, Switzerland, India, China, Japan, Korea, and Malaysia. In the United States there is currently only one state-owned bank, the Bank of North Dakota.

    The model, however, has proven to be highly successful. North Dakota is the only US state to have escaped the credit crisis unscathed. In 2009, while other states floundered, North Dakota had its largest budget surplus ever. In 2008, the Bank of North Dakota (BND) had a return on equity of 25%. North Dakota has the lowest unemployment rate in the country and the lowest default rate on loans. It also has the most local banks per capita.

    North Dakota has had its own bank since 1919, when farmers were losing their farms to the Wall Street bankers. They organized, won an election, and passed legislation. The state is required by law to deposit all its revenues in the BND. As with the sustainable model of the bank of colonial Pennsylvania, interest and profits are returned to the government and to the local economy.

    A growing movement is afoot in the United States to copy this public banking model in other states. Fourteen US state legislatures have now initiated bills for state-owned banks.

    The model could also be replicated in other countries. In Ireland, for example, where the major banks are insolvent and are already nationalized or soon will be, the government could deposit its revenues in its own publicly owned banks, add sufficient capital to meet capital requirements, and leverage these funds to create interest-free credit for its own local needs.

    That is exactly what Alexander Hamilton did when faced with government debts that were impossible to repay: he put the government's existing funds in a bank, then borrowed the money back several times over, employing the accepted "fractional reserve" model.

    Japan's solution is also a variant of what Alexander Hamilton proposed two centuries earlier. Japan retains its status as the third-largest economy in the world although it has a debt to gross domestic product (GDP) ratio of 226%. Japan has "monetized" the national debt, turning it into the national money supply. The government-owned Bank of Japan holds Japanese government debt equal to 100% of the nation's GDP; and because the government owns the bank, this loan is interest-free and can be rolled over indefinitely. An interest-free loan rolled over indefinitely is the equivalent of issuing money.

    Ellen Brown is an attorney and president of the Public Banking Institute,
  • http://PublicBankingInstitute.org.


  • The international bankster elite hide themselves behind complicated 'legal' creations. Money is used to control the people of this planet, so the people who create that money are at the top of the 'food chain'. Who creates our money? My research leads me to believe that the House of Rothschild is at the top of the NWO pyramid of power, but I believe there is an entity over them which hides behind a curtain of secrecy. I can't believe the Queen or the Pope have any real power, rather they are the public representatives of the real power brokers.

    http://www.henrymakow.com/by_alcuin_bramertonfor_henryma.html

    It is accurate to posit that Australia, New Zealand and Canada are not independent, sovereign countries. However, these nations are not owned and run by the UK; they are owned and run by the House of Windsor Crown Temple syndicate within the City of London Corporation. The head signatory of the Crown Temple syndicate is Elizabeth Windsor (Queen Elizabeth II of England).

    It should not be forgotten that the most powerful financial syndicate in the Western World is that of the European Rothschilds. The Rothschilds, because of their power base inside the City of London Corporation, have a controlling membership of the London Crown Temple syndicate, and they also have executive control of the Vatican and the Mafia though the P2 Masonic Lodge in Italy.

    The financial affairs of the new UK coalition government in London are also Rothschild-controlled.

    Queen Elizabeth II fronts for the Rothschilds. She is the largest landowner on Earth. She is Head of State of the United Kingdom and of thirty one other states and territories, and is the legal owner of 6,600 million acres of land, one sixth of the Earth's land surface. A conservative estimate of the value of the Crown Temple syndicate's land holding, under the Queen's signature, is £17.6 trillion.

    The Queen's syndicate land holdings are based on the laws of the countries she owns and her land title is valid in each of those countries. Her main holdings are Canada, the 2nd largest country on Earth, with 2,467 million acres, Australia, the 7th largest country on Earth with 1,900 million acres, Papua New Guinea with114 million acres, New Zealand with 66 million acres, and the UK with 60 million acres.

    Elizabeth Windsor and her covert syndicate in London are the world's largest landowners by a significant margin. The next largest landowner is the Russian state, with an overall ownership of 4,219 million acres, and a direct ownership comparable with the Queen's land holding of 2,447 million acres. The 3rd largest landowner is the Chinese state, which claims all of Chinese land, about 2,365 million acres.

    The 4th largest landowner on Earth is often said to be the Federal Government of the United States, which owns about one third of the land area of the USA, 760 million acres. However, this Washington DC private corporation Federal Estate is actually owned and controlled by the London Crown Temple syndicate. Indeed, at the present time, the London syndicate in partnership with an old family Chinese syndicate, hold, and have activated, a $47 trillion World Court Writ of Execution and Lien on the US Treasury and the US Federal Reserve Board.

    The five largest "personal" landowners on Earth, at present, are Queen Elizabeth II of England (6,600 million acres), King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia (553 million acres), King Bhumibol of Thailand (126 million acres), King Mohammed IV of Morocco (113 million acres) and Sultan Quaboos of Oman (76 million acres). In reality, however, these named individuals are just the head signatories of old bloodline syndicates which act corporately through hidden family trusts....
    At the excellent globalresearch.ca website is the first of a four-part series attempting to decipher who the real global power-brokers are. My understanding is that the House of Rothschild is at the top of the international bankers pyramid of power, but I'm willing to change my opinion if shown the evidence.

    My opinion is that the political ideology of Zionism and the Zionist state of Israel was created by the House of Rothschild, which is using them to foment WW-III, which will result in the destruction of Israel. Zionism and the Zionist state are the worst enemies of Jewish people, yet many Jews ignorantly and foolishly support it. Fortunately there are many enlightened Jews who are exposing Zionists for what they really are - a mirror image of Nazis. Nazi Germany was armed to the teeth, and then used as a bully against its neighbors, and the world. Israel is armed to the teeth, and then used as a bully against its neighbors, and the world. What happened to Nazi Germany is going to happen to Zionist Israel, unless the people of Israel join us in the world-wide revolution against international Zionism and its creators that control international banking.

    (Part one of a four-part series)

    The Four Horsemen of Banking (Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup and Wells Fargo) own the Four Horsemen of Oil (Exxon Mobil, Royal Dutch/Shell, BP and Chevron Texaco); in tandem with Deutsche Bank, BNP, Barclays and other European old money behemoths. But their monopoly over the global economy does not end at the edge of the oil patch.

    According to company 10K filings to the SEC, the Four Horsemen of Banking are among the top ten stock holders of virtually every Fortune 500 corporation.[1]

    So who then are the stockholders in these money center banks?

    This information is guarded much more closely. My queries to bank regulatory agencies regarding stock ownership in the top 25 US bank holding companies were given Freedom of Information Act status, before being denied on “national security” grounds. This is rather ironic, since many of the bank’s stockholders reside in Europe.

    more>> http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=25080




    No comments:

    Post a Comment