Peter St. Onge

But how did we get to debtors' prisons?

Okay.

Why it's corrupt.

Right.

So in our current system, if banks print on their own, they can't in the free market.

And so, you know, one of the first things that you do as a banker is you start trying to bribe politicians to do what's called suspension of specie redemption.

Okay.

Meaning that you deposit your money in the bank, but if the bank gets into trouble, it doesn't have to give you your money back.

Not in gold.

It can just give you IOUs.

Why?

And that's what was pushed in the 1800s.

That then led to wildcat banking, meaning that banks just printed stuff.

They printed as much money as they could possibly pump out the door.

And so the solution to that was the Fed, which is a cartel.

It's essentially all the banks get together and say, hey, listen, if we all print unlimited money,

using governments to bail it out, that we're going to have these constant boom busts and then people can see it.

And then they might pass regulations like Andrew Jackson giving her to the second bank of the US.

So in order to prevent that from happening, let's create this really formal sounding thing called the Federal Reserve.

The metaphor they used was a reservoir of water.