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nydus/The Legalized Crime of BankingPublic

Silas Walter Adams critiques the Federal Reserve Banking System, arguing that its monetary policies have significantly inflated the costs of war and national debt. The book examines the historical impact of private banking practices on the American economy and proposes a constitutional alternative for the management of the nation's money supply.

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Table of Contents

Chapter XVIII Inflation And Featherbedding

money just to the "demand deposits," is the sorriest sort of reckoning. Time deposits may easily be transferred over to the demand column. And the same is true of savings deposits, and many other "deposits" hidden in different nooks, and cached in many secret places. Any form of monetary obligation may be quickly and easily converted into demand deposits, therefore nobody, and I mean nobody knows the volume of all of the monetary funds listed under the many headings. Yet, to arrive at the volume of money we must ascertain all of these funds, and reach a grand total. To do so would alarm even the informed in the creative field of money. Cash does not enter that picture, because it is exchangeable with cheques, bank deposits. You transform anyone of the several kinds of deposits into another, by changing the figures from one column to another; but when you draw money out of the bank, you have your account debited an equivalent amount, and while you have the cash in your hand, you use it rather than a personal cheque. It is the sorriest sort of cover up to say that we have just two kinds of money, cash and demand deposits, when a child should know that the only difference between time deposits and demand deposits is a mere matter of time, and that at any time you may have the banker transfer your time deposits to your demand deposits, and you may proceed to cheque against it immediately. So fellow-citizens, when you take just the volume of cash plus the volume of demand deposits for our total volume of money, you have only a small percentage of our money supply. The time deposits, the savings deposits, the billions of bank credit which may be quickly converted into deposits; aye, you may convert your investment obligations, from a promissory note to U.S. Bonds" quickly into new deposits, swelling the, volume of money, and all of it sends the total volume of money skyward. If you accept such spurious reasoning as that we have just "two kinds of money, cash and demand deposits," then why not go a step further and admit that there are many millions in the demand deposit columns that are never chequed out, and as far as the circulating money is concerned, it too is "time" dead deposits. All writers

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