The Birth of the Fed Monster

How a century of Dollar devaluation got started...and where it might go next...

WE WERE on our way to Sea Island this week, writes Bill Bonner in his Daily Reckoning. 

We looked across the bridge at another island – Jekyll Island. You know Jekyll Island, don't you? It's where the monster of the US Dollar was created...

A group of the nation's richest, biggest, and most powerful bankers got together there – in secret – in November, 1910. They figured it was time to put in place a system that would make it a little easier for them to make money. Instead of competing head to head, without any backstop to protect them when things got rough, they decided to set up a central bank.

The meeting was so cloaked in secrecy few believed it ever took place. Implausibly, it was first reported by the poet Ezra Pound. How Pound learned of it...and why he reported it...we don't know. But that's the word on the street.

B. C. Forbes reported in 1916:

Picture a party of the nation's greatest bankers stealing out of New York on a private railroad car under cover of darkness, stealthily riding hundreds of miles South, embarking on a mysterious launch, sneaking onto an island deserted by all but a few servants, living there a full week under such rigid secrecy that the names of not one of them was once mentioned, lest the servants learn the identity and disclose to the world this strangest, most secret expedition in the history of American finance.

I am not romancing; I am giving to the world, for the first time, the real story of how the famous Aldrich currency report, the foundation of our new currency system, was written... The utmost secrecy was enjoined upon all. The public must not glean a hint of what was to be done. Senator Aldrich notified each one to go quietly into a private car of which the railroad had received orders to draw up on an unfrequented platform.

Off the party set. New York's ubiquitous reporters had been foiled... Nelson (Aldrich) had confided to Henry, Frank, Paul and Piatt that he was to keep them locked up at Jekyll Island, out of the rest of the world, until they had evolved and compiled a scientific currency system for the United States, the real birth of the present Federal Reserve System, the plan done on Jekyll Island in the conference with Paul, Frank and Henry... Warburg is the link that binds the Aldrich system and the present system together. He more than any one man has made the system possible as a working reality.

And now it's official. Ben Bernanke went there to give a speech in 2010, marking the 100th year of the meeting.

The role of the Fed...apart from greasing the skids for rich bankers...was supposed to be to protect the value of the US Dollar. Why the US Dollar needed protection was never explained. For the previous 100 years, it had been solid enough – except for during the War Between the States, when Lincoln printed up far too many of them in order to pay for his attack on the South.

But Lincoln's paper Dollars came and went. And on the day the Fed was officially set up, in 1913, the US Dollar was still worth about as much as it had been when Napoleon Bonaparte set off for Russia.

Whatever the Fed was supposed do to, what it did not do was protect the greenback. Instead, the US Dollar slipped and slid throughout the 20th century and is now worth only about 3 cents.

What are the odds that a US Dollar's worth of debt...at 4% interest...will still be worth a Dollar 10 years...20 years...30 years from now? The odds can't be very high.

The headline story over the weekend was that GDP growth in America, in the last quarter, was "disappointing." Which just goes to show how little people understand what is going on.

The Great Correction began 5 years ago. The feds have been fighting it ever since – with trillions of Dollars' worth of fiscal and monetary stimulus. You can see what good this does. Just look at the Dow. After Lehman went broke the index dropped to the 6,000 level. Then, the feds began dumping in money. Remember TARP? And tax cut extensions. And 'cash for clunkers'? And ZIRP? And QEI, QEII, and now...the Twist?

Naturally, the markets...and the economy...react. GDP growth resumed in 2009. But most of the growth depends on further spending and money-creation by the feds. We don't know how much of it...maybe all of it.

There is no 'recovery.' Instead, the private sector is correcting...or trying to...and the economy is merely returning to its trend. GDP growth rates have been going down for 40 years. Growth rates averaged about 4% in the '70s...3% in the '80s and '90s...and then about 2% in the '00s. On a 10-year trailing average basis, they are down to about 1.6% now. And they still seem to be headed lower.

What caused this drop off in growth is a matter of debate. (We have our ideas!) But the decline in the last quarter was right in line with what has been going on for more than a generation.

As long as growth is disappointing, the feds will fight it...and they'll fight the Great Correction too. The US government borrows a trillion Dollars a year...with no end in sight.

And last year, 61% of that money came from...Ben Bernanke's printing press.

Keep up the fight, Ben! And our long-term fixed-rate mortgage will eventually be worthless.

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