Quotes on Banking and Monetary Policy
Sunday, January 24th, 2010“Government is the only agency that can take a valuable commodity like paper, slap some ink on it, and make it totally worthless”
Ludwig von Mises
“Banking was conceived in iniquity and born in sin. Bankers own the Earth. Take it away from them, but leave them the power to create money, and with the flick of the pen they will create enough money to buy it back again…Take this great power away from them and all great fortunes like mine will disappear, and they ought to disappear, for then this would be a better and happier world to live in. But if you want to continue to be slaves of the banks and pay the cost of your own slavery, then let bankers continue to create money and control credit.”
Josiah Stamp Director of the Bank of England, 1928-1941
“It is well enough that the people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.”
Henry Ford
“We in the Congress have a moral and constitutional obligation to protect the value of the dollar and to understand why it is so important to the economy that a central bank not be given the unbelievable power of inflating a currency at will and pretending that it knows how to fine-tune an economy through this counterfeit system of money.”
Ron Paul, M.D. and U.S. Congressman (R-Texas)
“If all bank loans were paid, there would not be a dollar of coin or currency in circulation. Someone has to borrow every dollar we have in circulation.We are absolutely without a permanent money system.”
Robert Hemphill, Federal Reserve Bank, Atlanta
“By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.”
John Maynard Keynes
“All the perplexities, confusion and distress in America rise, not from defects in the Constitution or Confederation, not from want of honor or virtue, so much as from downright ignorance of the nature of coin, credit, and circulation.”
John Adams, in a letter to Thomas Jefferson, 1787
“If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.”
Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to Albert Gallatin, Secretary of the Treasury, 1802
“The war against illegal plunder has been fought since the beginning of the world. But how is legal plunder to be identified? Quite simply. See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them, and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime. Then abolish this law without delay…If such a law is not abolished immediately, it will spread: multiply and develop into a system.”
Bastiat
“I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country.” “[The United States is] no longer a government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a government by the opinion and duress of a small group of dominant men”.
Woodrow Wilson, referring to his signature enacting the Federal Reserve Board in 1913
“I was as secretive, indeed I was as furtive as any conspirator. Discovery, we knew, simply must not happen, or else all our time and effort would have been wasted. If it were exposed, that our particular group [of wealthy bankers] had got together and written a banking bill, that bill would have no chance whatever of passage by Congress”.
Frank A. Vanderlip, one of the members of the secret Jekyll Island meeting where the Federal Reserve was conceived in 1910
