October 24, 2012
Beware of a new trial balloon being floated by the International Monetary Fund, that is, “The Chicago Plan Revisited.”
According to British journalist Ambrose Evans-Pritchard,
The conjuring trick is to replace our system of private bank-created money — roughly 97pc of the money supply — with state-created money. We return to the historical norm, before Charles II placed control of the money supply in private hands with the English Free Coinage Act of 1666.
Specifically, it means an assault on “fractional reserve banking”. If lenders are forced to put up 100pc reserve backing for deposits, they lose the exorbitant privilege of creating money out of thin air.
The nation regains sovereign control over the money supply. There are no more banks runs, and fewer boom-bust credit cycles. [Emphasis added]
At a time when some ivory-tower economists are predicting the end of capitalism, any talk of monetary reform by global banking organizations is worthy of attention, if not alarm. The IMF has been one of the primary engines of globalization, having worked in conjunction with the World Bank and the Bank for International Settlements for decades.
The IMF has now dug up the so-called “Chicago Plan” from the University of Chicago dating back to 1936, and is seriously studying it for modern application.
Beware. As Patrick Henry once stated, “I smell a rat.”
First, the University of Chicago was originally created with a grant from John D. Rockefeller in 1890, and has long been an academic vassal of Rockefeller interests. In 1936 during the heat of the Great Depression, leading economists were looking for alternatives to capitalism and monetary theory. Technocracy, for instance, was one attempt to suggest an alternative economic system, during the same time period. Neither Technocracy nor the Chicago Plan were successful at the time.
According to the IMF’s study,
“The decade following the onset of the Great Depression was a time of great intellectual ferment in economics, as the leading thinkers of the time tried to understand the apparent failures of the existing economic system. This intellectual struggle extended to many domains, but arguably the most important was the field of monetary economics, given the key roles of private bank behavior and of central bank policies in triggering and prolonging the crisis.
“During this time a large number of leading U.S. macroeconomists supported a fundamental proposal for monetary reform that later became known as the Chicago Plan, after its strongest proponent, professor Henry Simons of the University of Chicago. It was also supported, and brilliantly summarized, by Irving Fisher of Yale University, in Fisher (1936). The key feature of this plan was that it called for the separation of the monetary and credit functions of the banking system, first by requiring 100% backing of deposits by government-issued money, and second by ensuring that the financing of new bank credit can only take place through earnings that have been retained in the form of government-issued money, or through the borrowing of existing government-issued money from non-banks, but not through the creation of new deposits, ex nihilo, by banks.” [Emphasis added.]
I have long argued that the Federal Reserve Bank, established in 1913, is a private corporation whose private stockholders were the major banks of that time period. The Fed was a super-lobby that would work directly with government to orchestrate lending and collecting on an orderly basis. At that time, the banks did not “own” the various nations of the world, so they could not summarily dictate public policy.
No comments:
Post a Comment