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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 VIII The Hand of the Banker Tracing a Sordid Scroll

28,000,000,000 " May 1938 to 30,000,000,000 " July 1939 to 45,000,000,000 " Feb. 1941 to 65,000,000,000 " Jan. 1958 to 280,000,000,000 Then Pearl Harbour. Limit jumped in March 28, 1941 to. . . $125,000,000,000. The sky was the limit. The bankers stopped the little fellows who had been pouring tiny millions into gopher holes — raking leaves in never-visited parks, lining with stones the ravines running through the bankers' large blocks sprawling over vacant portions of thousands of towns, building parks in out of the way places, killing stock and ploughing under cotton while millions were naked and hungry, sleeping on thin, knotted mattresses, — that was spending money too slow. They would never push Uncle Sam $100 billion in debt with cheap New Deal spenders. They rounded up the Frasers, the Kaisers, the Fords, the Durants, the Du Ponts, the Hughes, the Garrsons, the Mays — the big contractors, the bigger the better, the crookeder they were the more contracts they got. The bankers said to them through the soft-voiced High Priest of Banking, Barney Baruch, "To hell with the cost. We are in clover again. We are in war. Jobs will multiply. Money will triple. Sirs, the sky will be the limit. We will build unneeded plants, remote from raw materials. The most costly way will be most pleasing to us. We will spend $15 million on a magnesium plant in the village of Austin, Texas, which will never turn a wheel; a $60 million iron furnace in the potato fields of East Texas, and its furnace shall never glow. We will hire all the crackpots we can find to think up crazy schemes to waste money. Go, go out to spend, pad your expense accounts, never forgetting the cost-plus formula" — and the poltroon Congressmen hung on the "elder statesman" Barney Baruch's words, doing his bidding, as he ordered them again and again, as the War lingered, to raise the debt (bond) limit. And the limit was pushed to $300,000,000,000! Look, you spineless Americans who bear the burden without trying to do something about it — look at the following figures taken from the Report of the Treasurer of the United States, issued Oct. 1, 1946, giving the highest war debt, on Feb. 28, 1946. TOTAL: $279,764,369,348.28

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