What Can Be Done?

0:00What can be done? It should by now be all too clear that we cannot rely upon Alan Greenspan or any Federal Reserve Chairman to wage the good fight against the chronic inflation that has wrecked our savings, distorted our currency, levied hidden redistribution of income and wealth, and brought us devastating booms and busts. Despite the establishment propaganda, Greenspan, the Fed and the private commercial bankers are not the inflation hawks they like to label themselves. The Fed and the banks are not part of the solution to inflation. They are instead part of the problem. In fact, they are the problem.

0:47The American economy has suffered from chronic inflation and from destructive booms and busts because that inflation has been invariably generated by the Fed itself. That role, in fact, is the very purpose of its existence, to cartelize the private commercial banks and to help them inflate money and credit together, pumping in reserves to the banks and bailing them out if they get into trouble. When the Fed was imposed upon the public by the cartel of big banks and their hired economists, they told us that the Fed was needed to provide needed stability to the economic system. After the Fed was founded during the 1920s, the establishment economists and bankers proclaimed that the American economy was now in a marvelous new era, An era in which the Fed, employing its modern scientific tools, would stabilize the monetary system and eliminate any future business cycles.

1:51The result? It is undeniable that ever since the Fed was visited upon us in 1914, our inflations have been more intense and our depressions far deeper than ever before. There is only one way to eliminate chronic inflation, as well as the booms and bust brought by that system of inflationary credit. And that is to eliminate the counterfeiting that constitutes and creates that inflation. And the only way to do that is to abolish legalized counterfeiting. That is, to abolish the Federal Reserve system and return to the gold standard, to a monetary A monetary system where a market-produced metal, such as gold, serves as the standard money and not paper tickets printed by the Federal Reserve.

2:45While there is no space here to go into the intricate details of how this could be done, its essential features are clear and simple. It would be easy to return to gold and to abolish the Federal Reserve and to do so at one stroke. All we need is the will. The Federal Reserve is officially a corporation, and the way to abolish it is the way any corporation, certainly any inherently insolvent corporation, such as the Fed, is abolished. Any corporation is eliminated by liquidating its assets and parceling them out pro rata to the corporation's creditors. Figure 12 presents a simplified portrayal of the assets of the Federal Reserve as of April 6, 1994.

3:33Figure 12, Federal Reserve Assets, April 6, 1994. Gold, dollars in billions, 11. U.S. Government and other Federal Securities, 345. Treasury Currency Outstanding plus SDRs, 30. Other Fed Assets, 35 Total, $421 Billion Of the Federal Reserve Assets, except gold, all are easily liquidated. The $345 Billion of U.S. government and other federal government agency securities owned by the Fed should be simply and immediately cancelled.

4:19This Act would immediately reduce the taxpayers' liability for the public debt by $345 billion, and indeed, why in the world should taxpayers be taxed by the U.S. Treasury in order to pay interest and principal on bonds held by another arm of the Federal Government, the Federal Reserve? The taxpayers have to be sweated and looted, merely to preserve the accounting fiction that the Fed is a corporation, independent of the Federal Government. Other Fed assets, whether they be loans to banks or buildings owned by the Fed, can be scrapped as well, although perhaps some of the assets can be salvaged. Treasury currency, simply old paper money issued by the Treasury, should quickly be cancelled as well.

5:09And SDRs, $8 billion, were a hopeless experiment in world governmental paper that Keynesians had thought would form the basis of a new world fiat paper money. These, too, should be immediately cancelled. We are left with the $11 billion of the Fed's only real asset, its gold stock. That is supposed to back approximately $421 billion in Fed liabilities. Of the total Fed liabilities, approximately $11 billion is capital, which should be written off and written down with liquidation. And $6 billion are treasury deposits with the Fed that should be cancelled.

5:56That leaves the Federal Reserve with $11 billion of gold stock to set off against $404 billion in Fed liabilities. Fortunately for our proposed liquidation process, the $11 billion Fed valuation of its gold stock is wildly phony, since it is based on the totally arbitrary price of gold at $42.22 an ounce. The Federal Reserve owns a stock of 260 million ounces of gold. How is it to be valued? The gold stock of the Fed should be revalued upward so that the gold can pay off all the Fed's liabilities, largely Federal Reserve notes and Federal Reserve deposits, at 100 cents to the dollar.

6:46This means that the gold stock should be revalued such that 260 million gold ounces will be able to pay off $404 billion in Fed liabilities. When the United States was on the gold standard before 1933, the gold stock was fixed by definition at $20 per gold ounce. The value was fixed at $35 an ounce from 1933 until the end of any vestige of a gold standard in 1971. Since 1971, we have been on a totally fiat money, but the gold stock of the Fed has been arbitrarily valued by U.S. statutes at $42.22 an ounce.

7:34This has been an absurd undervaluation on its face considering that the gold price in in the world market has been varying from $350 to $380 an ounce in recent years. At any rate, as we return to the gold standard, the new gold valuation can be whatever is necessary to allow the Fed's stock of gold to be allocated 100% to all its creditors. There's nothing sacred about any initial definition of the gold dollar so long as we We stick to it once we are on the gold standard. If we wish to revalue gold so that the 260 million gold ounces can pay off 404 billion dollars in Fed liabilities, then the new fixed value of gold should be set at 404 billion dollars divided by 260 million ounces or $1,555 per gold ounce.

8:34If we revalue the Fed gold stock at the price of $1,555 per ounce, then its 260 million ounces will be worth $404 billion. Or to put it another way, the dollar would then be defined as one 1555th of an ounce. Once this revaluation takes place, the Fed could and should be liquidated and its gold If gold stock parceled out, the Federal Reserve notes could be called in in exchange for gold coins minted by the Treasury. In the meanwhile, the banks' demand deposits at the Fed would be exchanged for gold billion, which would then be located in the vaults of the banks, with the banks' deposits redeemable to its depositors in gold coin.

9:27In short, at one stroke, the Federal Reserve would be abolished, and the United States and its banks would then be back on the gold standard, with dollars redeemable in gold coins at $1,555 an ounce. Every bank would then stand, once again as before the Civil War, on its own bottom. One great advantage of this plan is its simplicity, as well as the minimal change in banking and the money supply that it would require. Even though the Fed would be abolished and the gold coin standard restored, there would, at this point, be no outliery of fractional reserve banking. The banks would therefore be left intact.

10:14But with the Federal Reserve and its junior partner, Federal Deposit Insurance, abolished, the banks would at last be on their own, each bank responsible for its own actions. Some champions of the free market advocate privatizing deposit insurance instead of abolishing it. As we've seen above, however, fractional reserve bank deposits are in no sense insurable. How does one insure an inherently insolvent industry? Indeed, it is no accident that the first collapse of saving and loan deposit insurance schemes in the mid-1980s took place in the privately run systems of Ohio and Maryland, privatizing governmental functions Actions, while generally an admirable idea, can become an unreflective and absurd fetish if the alternative of abolition is neglected. Some government activities, in short, shouldn't exist at all. Take, for example, the government function prevalent in the old Soviet Union of putting dissenters into slave labor camps. Presumably, we would want such an activity not privatized and thereby made more efficient but eliminated altogether.

11:36There would be no lender of last resort, no taxpayer bailout. On the contrary, at the first sign of balking at redemption of any of its deposits in gold, any bank would be forced to close its doors immediately and liquidate its assets on behalf of its depositors. A gold coin standard coupled with instant liquidation for any bank that fails to meet its contractual obligations would bring about a free banking system so hard and sound that any problem of inflationary credit or counterfeiting would be minimal. It is perhaps a second best solution to the ideal of treating fractional reserve bankers Bankers as embezzlers, but it would suffice at least as an excellent solution for the time being, that is, until people are ready to press on to full 100 percent banking.