I wanted to dive straight into crypto today, but then I changed my mind

The video that I shared yesterday is important. Issues in there must be understood.

I feel the need to briefly highlight the important points of that video. I wish to share a few of my views before shifting to crypto.

By the way: did you notice that that video was made before crypto became well known? It's from 2011!

Once again I remind you that conspiracy theorists love this topic and will take it too far. There IS a dark and hidden side to it, there ARE evil people with secret agendas. My advice is: Fact check EVERYTHING you hear or see on the internet, with reputable sources!

I'm a reputable source - you can trust Bit Brain. 😉

Money - a recap of yesterday's video post:

Excuse the non-standard format of this post

I'm going to go through the video in chronological order - picking out important parts as I go along. I will probably repeat myself and there will definitely be a lack of coherent flow. So be it. After that I will share a few relevant quotes from major role players.

If you have not watched the video, then now is the time, I'm only skimming through the vital stuff here. (https://steemit.com/cryptocurrency/@bitbrain/money-understanding-it-and-cryptocurrencies-part-1-how-fiat-works)

Please note that the video is American in nature. This discussion is based on the American system. That does not matter, I'm not an American myself. But with the largest economy in the world, and with the US Dollar being the standard international exchange currency, whatever happens in America matters to everyone! And chances are that similar things are happening in all countries. Researching the background to this video will show you that the events of this video are linked to countries all around the world.

Recap on the video:

• Individuals have money. To keep it safe they store it in banks.
• Banks pay very low interest on money held in them.
• For large purchases, individuals borrow money from banks.
• Individuals borrow money from banks at high interest.
• A bank takes money you store in it and lends it to other people at a higher rate than it pays you for keeping your money (it may also recoup the interested paid to you through fees and banking charges).
• Banks eventually run out of money to lend. But that doesn't stop them from lending.
• Banks borrow money from the Fed (The Federal Reserve) so that they can go on lending money. The Federal Reserve makes money by charging banks interest.
• Banks have often lent money irresponsibly, because the more they lend, the more money they make. (This can cause a market crash, like the most recent one in 2008).
• Banks encourage lending through advertising and other marketing strategies. They lend money to those who don’t need it or who can't even afford it. (People go on holidays or buy cars that they can't afford).
• Credit cards are designed to encourage you to borrow even more money from banks (I personally get phoned by banks offering me credit cards all the time. I also often get calls from my own bank offering to extend me additional credit. I always say no. I have never run a credit card into the red, I always maintain a small credit balance. The only reason I keep a credit card is to build and maintain my credit record).
• The Fed keeps most of the money. Nobody is allowed into the Fed. Not courts, not politicians, not the CIA, not the FBI. Nobody.
• The FEDERAL RESERVE is a PRIVATE BANK with a purposefully misleading name. It is NOT under government control. (Much like The City of London, yup, it's a private business too.)
• The Fed loans money to banks (that it gets from the mint).
• The Fed orders the printing of money by the Mint i.e. The Fed controls the Mint. (So the US money supply from a government entity is controlled by a private bank).
• Printing money devalues money in circulation. This causes inflation.
• The Fed order money to be printed, they loan it to the government, they charge the government interest on it and then the government taxes you to pay for the interest!
• The modern banks/Fed try to keep the public ignorant and uninformed.

Read the very top line of this dollar note carefully

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_one-dollar_bill

The founding fathers must be spinning in their graves knowing that their faces are on notes issued by private multi-national banking families!

• Historically we had barter systems (I would trade you my basket of onions for your cow hide).
  • Then gold became the common medium of exchange (it allowed much more flexibility when trading).
  • Banks were originally created to keep the gold safe. (For a small fee).
  • Gold was kept in bank vaults and banks issues IOUs for the gold stored in them.
  • Rather than go to banks to get their gold to trade, people just started swapping their IOU notes - paper money was born. IOUs were as good as gold.
• Greedy banks started printing more IOUs than they held in gold.
• IOUs printed without more gold to back them are inflationary.
• Inflation affects the purchasing power of your IOUs (though it would not have affected gold if you still held that).
• Inflation means that you can't afford things anymore, so you borrow more money from banks, who charge you more interest on your loans.
• If everyone loses faith in the banks, they panic and try to draw their money out. Since banks lend more than they have, this causes a crash (like the one in 2008). Banks don't even hold enough fiat money (the IOUs) to cover such a demand for funds, let alone gold!
• (It doesn't come up in the video, but the gold standard has been done away with internationally. Currencies are no longer backed by gold! This is the definition of fiat currencies. They are currencies backed by nothing more than a promise by those who issue them. This is ironic, because those same entities ask what backs Bitcoin. Which do you trust more: a smart contract on an immutable blockchain with a limited coin supply, or a bunch of lying, cheating stealing politicians and their "Promise money" with no supply limit? - but let me not get ahead of myself, more on that tomorrow.)
• Banks essentially figured out how to turn paper into gold.
• Major banks financed both sides in big conflicts because there is much money to be made from wars. There is also a great chance of at least one side ending up in major debt (owed to the bank).
• Major banking families manipulated stocks. (The story in the video about England being placed into debt by a lie told during the Napoleonic Wars may or may not be true. Either way, the end result is the same. The banks came to own the country through its debts.)
• There was a secret meeting of major bankers in 1910 at the J.P. Morgan estate (attended by Rockefeller, Rothschild, Morgan and others). That was when the idea of the Federal Reserve was born. They executed their master-plan in December 1913). New president Woodrow Wilson had agreed to sign the order legitimising the Fed before even being elected! So under Wilson the Fed came in to being, got the contract with America to print dollars, and started eroding the currency's value by increasing supply. (Look at what you can buy for $100 today compared to what you could get 100 years ago. - But if you still held $100 in gold from 1918... ...oh wait, you gave it to the banks to look after... You can conspiracy a bit now if you like.)
• The Rothschild banking family placed its children in all the major global financial centres at the time.

Beyond the video

The video does contain some spurious information. Some of the conspiracy rubbish leaked in there too. But it's okay, that is cancelled out by a lot of real information that was left out. Information that is far more damning than the little bit of extra which was put in. If you are interested, then this is a topic worth researching (properly) on your own.

I want to deal with the last part of the video by looking at a few of the quotes that they used. Many of their quotes were misquotes or paraphrased quotes. The Jackson deathbed quote "I killed the bank" probably never happened at all. But they are on the right track.

I will now try to give you the real quotes that should have been in the video, and maybe a few extra ones too. I include these quotes because these are quotes by men who knew the system we are speaking about here better than anyone else. These are from American presidents who realised the same thing that the makers of this video did, and who tried to fight it. These quotes are from the most powerful men of their time, fighting a battle that was (and still is) very real.

Upper left this time
From https://commons.wikimedia.org/ File: "Obverse_of_the_series_2009_$100_Federal_Reserve_Note.jpg"

Thomas Jefferson (Third president of the USA: March 4, 1801 – March 4, 1809)

"And to preserve their independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our election between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude. If we run into such debts, as that we must be taxed in our meat and in our drink, in our necessaries and our comforts, in our labors and our amusements, for our callings and our creeds, as the people of England are, our people, like them, must come to labor sixteen hours in the twenty-four, give the earnings of fifteen of these to the government for their debts and daily expenses; and the sixteenth being insufficient to afford us bread, we must live, as they now do, on oatmeal and potatoes; have no time to think, no means of calling the mismanagers to account; but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains on the necks of our fellow-sufferers."
Letters of Thomas Jefferson. From https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/53021-and-to-preserve-their-independence-we-must-not-let-our

"It is incumbent on every generation to pay its own debts as it goes. A principle which if acted on would save one-half the wars of the world. "
From http://thesteadydrip.blogspot.co.za/2013/01/beware-of-misquoting-thomas-jefferson.html

"To compel a man to subsidize with his taxes the propagation of ideas which he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical."
http://thesteadydrip.blogspot.co.za/2013/01/beware-of-misquoting-thomas-jefferson.html

"And I sincerely believe, with you, that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies; and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale." [Thomas Jefferson to John Taylor, Monticello, 28 May 1816. Ford 11:533]
From http://thesteadydrip.blogspot.co.za/2013/01/beware-of-misquoting-thomas-jefferson.html

"Bank-paper must be suppressed, and the circulating medium must be restored to the nation to whom it belongs." [Jefferson's comment to John Wayles Eppes in 1813]
https://www.monticello.org/site/jefferson/private-banks-spurious-quotation

Andrew Jackson (Seventh president of the USA: March 4, 1829 – March 4, 1837)

"Gentlemen! I too have been a close observer of the doings of the Bank of the United States. I have had men watching you for a long time, and am convinced that you have used the funds of the bank to speculate in the breadstuffs of the country. When you won, you divided the profits amongst you, and when you lost, you charged it to the bank. You tell me that if I take the deposits from the bank and annul its charter I shall ruin ten thousand families. That may be true, gentlemen, but that is your sin! Should I let you go on, you will ruin fifty thousand families, and that would be my sin! You are a den of vipers and thieves. I have determined to rout you out, and by the Eternal,(bringing his fist down on the table) I will rout you out!"
From the original minutes of the Philadelphia committee of citizens sent to meet with President Jackson (February 1834), according to Andrew Jackson and the Bank of the United States (1928) by Stan V. Henkels
From https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Andrew_Jackson

Take a look at this information about Andrew Jackson as president. I quote directly from Wikipedia:

In 1833, Jackson attempted to begin removing federal deposits from the bank, whose money-lending functions were taken over by the legions of local and state banks that materialized across America, thus drastically increasing credit and speculation.

The national economy following the withdrawal of the remaining funds from the Bank was booming and the federal government through duty revenues and sale of public lands was able to pay all bills. On January 1, 1835, Jackson paid off the entire national debt, the only time in U.S. history that has been accomplished.

Both from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Jackson

John F. Kennedy (Thirty fifth president of the USA: January 20, 1961 – November 22, 1963)

Conspiracy theorists will point to Executive Order 11110 (I mention it as it was in the video). They may or may not be onto something, but I suspect that they are onto nothing. I don't believe Kennedy's death had anything to do with that order. I don't believe that that order would actually have hurt the Fed in any way.

A few links (and extracts from them) to get you started:

...the Federal Reserve System considers itself "an independent central bank because its monetary policy decisions do not have to be approved by the President or anyone else in the executive or legislative branches of government, it does not receive funding appropriated by the Congress, and the terms of the members of the Board of Governors span multiple presidential and congressional terms." The federal government sets the salaries of the board's seven governors. The federal government receives all the system's annual profits, after a statutory dividend of 6% on member banks' capital investment is paid, and an account surplus is maintained. In 2015, the Federal Reserve made a profit of $100.2 billion and transferred $97.7 billion to the U.S. Treasury.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Reserve_System

I wonder where that profit came from?

Federal Reserve Notes are legal tender, with the words "this note is legal tender for all debts, public and private" printed on each note. They have replaced United States Notes, which were once issued by the Treasury Department. Federal Reserve Notes are backed by the assets of the Federal Reserve Banks, which serve as collateral under Section 16. These assets are generally Treasury securities which have been purchased by the Federal Reserve through its Federal Open Market Committee in a process called debt monetizing. This monetized debt can increase the money supply, either with the issuance of new Federal Reserve Notes or with the creation of debt money (deposits). This increase in the monetary base leads to a larger increase in the money supply through fractional-reserve banking as deposits are lent and re-deposited where they form the basis of further loans.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Reserve_Note

...fractional-reserve banking permits the money supply to grow beyond the amount of the underlying base money originally created by the central bank.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional-reserve_banking

...and you wonder why you have inflation!

Conclusion

I hope that yesterday and today's posts have been educational. I hope that they got you thinking. I hope that you are starting to see how crypto fits in here and that you will see it in a new light. It is so much more than just virtual money on a blockchain.

I hope to do two more posts in this series, probably over the next two days, but it depends what happens in the crypto world (and possibly my world too) between now and then.

Good night everybody, don't forget to check for bankers under your beds...

Yours in crypto,
Bit Brain

This quote from yesterday's post bears repeating:

"Let us control the money of a nation, and we care not who makes its laws"
Maxim of money lenders of the old world

DISCLAIMER:
I am neither a financial advisor nor a professional trader/investor. This is not financial advice, investment advice or trading advice. Unless otherwise stated, all my posts are my opinion and nothing more. Crypto is highly volatile and you can easily lose everything in crypto. You invest at your own risk! Information I post may be erroneous or construed as being misleading. I will not be held responsible for anything which is incorrect, missing, out-of-date or fabricated. Any information you use is done so at your own risk. Always Do Your Own Research (DYOR) and realise that you and you alone are responsible for your crypto portfolio and whatever happens to it.