On today’s show we are going back to 1910. These were the origins of the formation of the Federal Reserve during a secretive meeting on Jekyll Island off the coast of Georgia.
Leading up to the fateful meetings that took place over nine days, there had been a series of runs on banks and financial panics in 1873, 1884, 1893 and 1907. These banking panics over the preceding decades had caused the outright failure of 1748 banks. The Federal Reserve Act of 1913 was a direct outcome of this clandestine meeting on Jekyll Island. The Federal Reserve was created to protect the banking system. It is owned by the member banks, not the US government. The Federal Reserve Banks that make up the Fed are not banks either in the traditional sense.
I have been thinking, long and hard about whether the Federal Reserve has been mistaken in their interest-rate policy. After all, it is a bold statement for some Podcaster located in Canada to declare in unequivocal terms that the Federal Reserve with its hundreds of PhD‘s is utterly and completely incompetent.
All it takes is a few minutes of the most basic Internet research to realize that the banking system in the United States is backed into a corner from which it is virtually impossible to see away out. That is, unless the Federal Reserve makes a choice between raising interest rates to fight inflation or lowering interest rates to save the banking system. I I am completely convinced that this is the choice facing the Federal Reserve.
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Host: Victor Menasce
email: podcast@victorjm.com
