Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. But you come very close to it, being between the lines, the gist of my part. And a working paper that I wrote in 1994 at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, and I've learned later, has been posted widely on the Internet. It's called Working Paper 9405, 9405, Working Paper 9405 for Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland. It's been later published in a few places. One version is by the Committee for Monetary Research and Education in Charlotte, North Carolina. You can email to cmre at worldnet.ate.net and ask for the paper under the title Constitutional Republic to Corporate State, the Federal Reserve Board in 1931 to 34. It was also later revised and published as an academic paper in the series, those who have access to the economics library. You can find it in Research and Financial Services, an annual volume, I think, is the number 10. Either 8 or 10, I forget which. But anyway, the title there was the Federal Reserve Board and the Banking Crisis of the 1930s. The editor of that period is George Cowley. Okay, so that's sort of where you can find prison texts. This will work. Some is not most of all, I'll take her today. I propose to Bob, as the general topic, the approach is as follows. First, you kind of have to understand what money is or as traditionally been thought to be, what a simple bank is and what a relationship is. You can quote money and quote. And then finally, what is the Federal Reserve, where it came from, what the intentions and framers of the Federal Reserve were and how they've evolved over the years. You kind of have to add them all up together. I think it's wrong to see the crime or the footage about one leg of the elephant and proclaim that you've got it all. You do have to understand, alas, a lot more to understand this topic than you might think you'll get with this kind of reading. First, this question, what is money? J.P. Morgan, a little banker, was asked that question during the National Monetary Media hearings that preceded the Federal Reserve Act in about 1912. Morgan thought for a moment and said, Mr. Chairman, you asked me what is money. Gold is money. Everything else is credit. Okay. In the old days, there was how old, by the way. Anyone want to guess how far back you can go and record a human history and find included references to money? Well, the writing is probably about 2,500 and 3,000 B.C. It's the Babylonian Samarian writing. It turns out that your ancient text, as I used to when I was a French scholar. It's probably two-thirds of all the old documents that survive, or either from recordings of the miracle transactions, or speed recordings of the life. It turns out that you have nothing to do with money. It turns out that you have to be a Christian. I give you the reference that is the oldest one I know of that you can convince you to find. I brought the Gideon Bible down to my room. It turns to Genesis chapter 23. And it says there that after Sarah died, Abraham sought to buy a blessing place for Sarah. He wound up buying a cave in a field that he was a modern Hebrew and called Maskela. And he decided he had to buy it from the local Hittite tribe, who owned the territory at that time. They often give him the tomb, but he says, No, if I want to establish unchallengeable property rights for myself and my descendants, I have to pay for it, openly and unquestioningly, and at rural market value. If you give it to me, someone later on may come and say, We're taking back the gift. So I want to buy it. And the king then named it how green is Christ. He said, Okay, I'll check you 400 shekels of silver. In those days, I was considered an enormous sum. It would be like what? I suppose you had a piece of land the size of this wall room, 150 miles out in Virginia. And you said, How much do I do you take from the land here? And you said, Oh, $40,000 ought to do the trick. Well, it's pretty small keeping land, $40,000. But that's the equivalent in terms of the money of those days. What they were asking, Abraham, to pay. He bought a car and said, Okay, I'll pay it. And only a $20,000, They assembled all the locals of the Hittites in his room, for an assembly hall. And with everybody watching, Abraham steps up to the balance scale and chains off the silver on the scale, paying off the 400 shekels' value. It's funny to do that. There's nobody to challenge this property right. Because everybody had seen him table. When there's something like that, do it in front of hundreds of businesses. Here's the key phrase. Verse 16, Genesis, May God ask any grief. He made him the song name to the audience, securing us the sons of God. Four hundred shekels of silver, current money with the virgin. There is money. Not just money, but current money. Hence, the virgin started in both. What was that stuff? Current money with the virgin. The virgin, the virgin. You know, this may seem to be the hangman, but the man who is in the virgin. The virgin, the virgin's Bible, is translated. Most literate people would have known what that phrase meant, so I can use that phrase often in the translation. But current money with the virgin, this lady, the virgin, the virgin. Well, in the virgin, the virgin. What is money? Well, in the ancient world, was money something that the king or the local locals handed out as street corners in an initial distribution, or paid out as payroll checks, and then the people used it for their current transactions? Or rather, did the people have money or something they were using as money first, and then the government tried to get it from them by way of taxes? Anyway, this is the ancient debate, and it's smooth and still today. Is money something that the people customarily and by tradition have, and then the government tries to get it from them. Only for good purposes, to be sure. The rival theory, and one that's still wildly popular among modern identity companies, that even that it's trying to some extent on the modern uniform commercial toast, is what we might call the legal tender theory. Money. That is, money is whatever the local government says it is. To me, forward, by the way, what, when was that passage that Genesis is describing, that's around Abraham, occurring, about 2000 B.C. maybe? It came forward a few hundred years, a few hundred, several hundred years, to the time of Aristotle, of course, that's in Athens, B.C. Aristotle wrote in a, what's called the biblical Indian epics, and a chapter on justice, a dissertation, a short dissertation on money, the origins of money, because money essentially arises out of the carter system. A copter might exchange shoes for a carter to build his house, for example, and they have to reckon the number of shoes you have to pay to get a house. Over time, accounting systems arise, in which you reckon that it would be easier to use some standard, useful measure, given the account, as the measuring product, of the old world, they used cows, they used grain, so many bushels of grain, equal so much as value of silver, and so on. And dealing with money from the customary, a traditional perspective, that's how it came about, through evolution away from carter. You want to read the modern economic description of the rise of carter exchange, and its transformation into a modern money system. Read Alfred Marshall, the turn of the century, English economist, this book, Money Threat of Commerce, that the same story appears in Expressible to Economics, published in 1920, in their last edition. He's quite as part of the fourth, I used to sort of the last, the old-minded classical economist, and he was also John Maynard Keynes' teacher, so indirectly, he had some influence on the modern world. That's far from, well, Paul's briefly just before Aristotle. Sometimes, possibly as far back as, say, 1,300 B.C., some of the recent civilization city-states began to use coins, silver coins, stamped by the king, local king, for the impressions of the likeness. These began to circulate among the people and be used as money. From that story began the lives of what he now think of as modern government, creative or government-oriented money. As a client of the founding of the American Republic, what kind of money was there in America? Was there a federal government money? Well, not a till revolution, of course. The Continental Congress first began meeting, I believe, in 1774, and they had used whatever was sent to them by the state as money. That's the thing, maybe the hills. The colonies didn't really have a means of creating silver coins, gold coins, of themselves. It didn't have much to speak of. Adam Smith writes in the last chapter of the Wealth of Agents published in 1776 that one of the mistakes made by the British government and British merchants is to try to extract gold and silver from the colonies when in fact they have none. And so we used borrowed the money, used Spanish coins that happened to circulate here, death coins. Whatever came our way would be used as the only hard money circulated. During the revolution, the Continental Congress was authorized the circulation of the case of money to Continental currency, which depreciated rapidly around 1779, 1780, and the great non-worthy Continental derived and that of that educationary experience. For all of this is precious signs of the founding of Roberts that we've done around that summer in Philadelphia in 1787. And again, the debate the question of what kind of money shall the new Republic have. And by the way, as Bible's properly quite out as an introduction, where in the Constitution is the money power why? Is it an executive branch power, or is it a congressional why Congress shall have the power to regulate the value which coin money and regulates the value of foreign points, right? It doesn't pay the president. It doesn't pay the treasury secretary. So that was the decision on that narrow question. And a lot of people have the impression that the Constitution also says, and by the way, nothing but gold and silver shall ever be legal in the United States. does it say that? No, it says no state shall make anything except gold and silver or legal president. They wanted to show off the state issue to pay for money, but that is made in the colonial resolution. Okay, what about the U.S. government, federal government, and paper money? This issue was debated on the floor of the Constitutional Convention, and the gist of the debate was his father, even his surprising result, even for those who normally think of it, like George Jason say. The debate came down roughly to this, with people that we might loosely associate today with an investment banking trial, which is New York, or once we, New York, local real estate promotion and development crowd. I suppose to always want to see asset values rising in nominal terms, even as they're not licensed in real terms. They said we should not prohibit the issue of paper money. It's a useful measure in times of distress of the government. However, Dr. Hamilton was probably the leading spokesman for the convention for that point of view. of course there was anybody who became the first country secretary. The rival point of view, the Jeffersonian faction's point of view, was essentially we shouldn't pay for money, anything that belongs to the slaves of Egypt, the forewarsmen of the apocalypse, among the great evils of the world. But if there were a war or other national emergency of some magnitude, we do not want to explicitly tie the hands of Congress. And so, the issue remains silent in the Constitution. Okay. A parapranslation of that from the perspective of a constitutional scholar would be, the Jeffersonians decided that they didn't have the hopes to cram down with absolute prohibition of paper money. They would leave it silent. And so, it's been a good faith of the executive and the judiciary going forward to prevent the usage of paper money outside, wartime, outside, upon national emergencies. Well, in fact, as time went on, what grief was, in 1798, December, Alexander Hamilton did draft the secretary of the treasury, a proposal for the creation of a sort of central bank. He called it a national bank, the first bank of the United States, and sent the general over to Congress for his approval. Hamilton scholars had won the first congressional election in 1788. He controlled the House by about a two-month margin, and the states voted by state, of course, in those days, and the state legislature's appointed senators, and the Senate, the Senate, maybe 7-6 or 8-5. So, whatever he wanted, he could get in the financial realm. So, the national bank bill sails on through Congress, and last in George Washington's desk, and he left quite more to do with it. There were a vote, by the way, for the name was of the residing officer after constitutional dimensions. who was the chairman of that during that summer? Robert Washington. He was there, he heard the state on page of money in national banking that we talked about. Another fair of the court of constitutional through the city convention. What did it say in the Constitution that Congress shall have the power to charter a national bank or a central bank? It's not fair. Was it brought up? Yes, it was. And from an interesting source, James Madison, following on a proposed amendment by Benjamin Franklin for a day in August, James Madison suggested that one of the clauses in Article I, Section 8, be amended to allow the federal government to charter corporations for useful purposes. And he had inclined building roads, cutting canals, and so on, and maybe to create a national university one day. Others stood up and objected that, Mr. Madison, you do not understand the mind that the way people think in affairs of finance and money. They will take that corporation charter clause that you just mentioned, and they will interpret it as the authority to create a central bank or a national bank, and we don't want that. Hamilton, sorry, Madison, agree. The Hamiltonian faction confirmed among themselves and decided that it would be better to withdraw the proposition than to have a reported vote against it, lest at some future date somebody like me would stand up and say well they brought it up and he voted no one so how can you say it in the constitution? It was withdrawn and that was the incident. So anyway, Hamilton introduces national bank bill, Bill Reitman Washington's death. Washington was there, he knew about this debate that I just described to you. But he turns to the Secretary of State Jefferson, the best lawyer of the cabinet, and says you write me an opinion on this thing, I don't know quite what to do with it. And Jefferson writes back a very nice, brief outline style opinion saying that the federal government has no power to charge corporations, especially not a central bank. It was brought up in both and withdrawn as he voted down. It's hard to find this within the powers exclusively in the constitution. And I remind you, Mr. President, that if we approve this change, we will across beyond strict construction of the constitution. To take a single step beyond the powers narrowly confined for Congress is to open a capitalist field of power. It's sort of like once you decided to step outside the bounds of strict legality, say, what rules bind you then? First one. So, anyway, as he had, though, Jefferson gave Watson his way out. He said, if, however, you think it's a close call in your mind, then I would urge you to go ahead and support the bill, sign the bill, because at time, the ego power should not be used or abused by the executive on anything that was close to the constitutional limits of congressional power, the executive should go along with what Congress wanted. In a nutshell, that's what it said at the end. Hamilton, then, was asked to write an opinion against Jefferson, and there was a long opinion on the national bank. That is a classic reasoning of those who follow this who thought about money and banking. These two opinions, by the way, by Jefferson and Hamilton, were not published at the time. Remember, they were given the George Washington for his private usage and guidance in deciding whether to find the national bank bill. They remained in Washington's personal papers. A cousin of Washington named John Marshall was viewing Washington's personal papers at his death to the wish that he write a biography of Washington. And so, the first official biography of Washington was published in 1807 after Marshall had already begun chief justice. And an appendix in one of the volumes, he, Marshall, summarizes this debate I've just described. Later, in 1819, in a court case called McCulloch v. Marilyn, Spring Court opinion, Marilyn, Spring Court opinion, the single most important Spring Court opinion ever in my opinion. In Scott Daffy and Law School, his spot were praised that Daniel Webster, the mental counsel of the bank, used in the Spring Court argument, who said runners the power to tax and the power to destroy the state of Maryland and tax the bank of the United States branches in Maryland than the states made, essentially to block whatever the federal government wishes to use the next state by just taxing it. We can't have that can't we? Mark said no, for Ryan and Webster power to tax and power to destroy the government or the federal government will affect the state had no right to tax the establishment of the federal government. There is end of argument. But the longer part, I call it, is about the Hamilton versus Jefferson debate. The first part, of the National Bank Constitutional is about and Marshall said, that we consider issues like this long after the first vote. The National Bank Bill was signed by Washington in 1791. Here it is 1819. It's 28 years later. Why are we first considering the constitutionality of the National Bank today? But I'm willing to do it, Marshall said. Clear usurpations of constitutional authority may be challenged even after a delay longer than this. Why do I not have the Justice Department? These days are very difficult. anyway, Marshall, having in his possession those two opinions of Jefferson and Hamilton, summarized Jefferson's arguments, and then went on to quote extensively for a hint from Hamilton's opinion, without citing it as the course of course. And it wasn't until about 10 years later, around 1828, that these opinions were finally published. and Andrew Jackson vetoed a bill that was rechartered to the Second Bank of the United States in about 1832. He vetoed it on the ground with whatever John Marshall said. He, Jackson, crossed the bank was unconstitutional. It was outside the powers of Congress to create benefits. If you've never read his veto message on the Second Bank, it's a nice little opinion. The members of the Hamiltonian point of view always point to it as handing and raving by populist demagogues. He was drafted by Roger Tawney, attorney general at the time, who later was appointed to the Supreme Court. Tawney Tawney and Tawney and Van Groom died. Tawney was inspired in 1836. He was later debating what to do with the treasury's money, funds paid into the treasury's taxes. He was decided to create a sub-treasury for an independent treasury system. The treasury used to have branches in the major cities of the United States. More or less, where they are branches of the federal reserve today. And so, if you were to the treasury, you just marched into your nearest treasury grant and make payments. How many of you have been to Federal Hall in New York City on Wall Street abroad? Besides New York where George Washington was first sworn in as President of the United States and is out there. The modern Federal Hall was over 100 years old. But the building was erected as one of those sub-treasury branches. So, if you've ever been in Federal Hall, you've been in any sub-treasury. There was a central bank in the United States between 1836 and 1913. So, how would we survive in those days? Well, somebody said really well. And, that issue was debated. My personal opinion is we didn't do badly, especially after the National Bank system was created during the Civil War. As a means of the National League of the North during the Civil War, Treasury Secretary Sal and Chase proposed that President Levin proposed a system in which nationally chartered banks, not dependent on the states or their powers, would be created. And these banks would be allowed to circulate their own notes to be used as currency. as long as those notes were backed in terms by a full deposit of a recent equal amount of U.S. bonds at the Treasury or sub-treasury branches. And, how much rolls has resumed about 13 years after the Civil War, that meant that those bonds had to be payable in gold. So, from about 17, 1879 onwards, under the old National Bank system, a National Bank that circulated some currency as long as they were pulled back by a deposit of gold paying bonds at the U.S. Treasury Department. Connected credit was more limited then than it is today. There was no equivalent credit card. Every time a millionary did not get credit, but what credit there was was cheaper than it did today is the account of borrowers to 3, 4, 5%, and that's the problem of doing away with modern central bank money issuing systems and trying to go back to either extreme central bank and national bank systems fully back to a positive goal. Or to purely private money system. If you did that, you have to decide how easy is credit going to be to come by. This credit is hard to get in those systems. Remember the investment bankers and real estate promoters I referred to earlier? How do you think they feel when you say boy, interest rates don't fall down to 2 or 3%, but it's going to be real hard to get credit? How do investment bankers and promoters feel on such things? They don't like it because it tends to address nominal asset dollars. So whenever these propositions come up, guessing the main opposition always is. As time gets to 1913, in a nutshell, what had happened was there had been a few banking panics. Read the writings of those who argued for the creation of the Federal Reserve and the modern central banking system. In 1913, they were active in 1879 onward, it's a story of unremitting panic, never-ending depression, with never enough money available, never enough credit available. In 1907, there was financial panic in New York, rising from the usual reason. The major bank that raised too many loans to borrowers who were essentially frauds and promoters, particularly the major of the Hitterbacher had to organize rescue efforts to save the New York clearinghouse itself. They went to Congress after the panic was over and proposed that the banks of New York or any other city where there was a clearinghouse association be allowed to issue the emergency currency for about six months, backed not by the deposits of both aid bonds of the treasury, but instead private citizens' obligations as long as they were nominally payable in gold. There was a means of transforming private monetary instruments into officially authorized currency. The next several years, there were academic studies, some funded by the purple banking interest in New York, some funded by Parmer and other agricultural interests in the West, and there was a hot debate on monetary reform, this national monetary official self-hearing, treatises, and so on. Finally, in 1912, 1913, the issue comes to a head. war. There were four original mainstreams of thought that fed into the Federal Reserve Act. Remember my analogy of the elephant, and the four legs, and the trump and the mails for the moment. You're wrong. Grab one leg and say, this is it, this is the gospel, this is the truth, and nothing else matters. You're wrong. There are four competing streams, and it's sort of like that debate on the Constitutional Convention floor that I was describing. How do you parse that? How do you translate it today? Is the issuance of paper money by the central government authorized? Well, finally, ban on investment bankers and real estate developers, I stand up and say, have pieces not explicitly prohibited? And so it is, the way the Federal Reserve Act takes us together. What a fair faction, as you will often hear, that is representing, say, the foreign banking terrorists, the European bankers, the J.P. Morgan crowd, the August Dolan crowd, and they hire these scholars, and they hire them William, Jekyll Island, Georgia, and they come up with a draft of the Federal Reserve bill, and they run to Washington, they crack it down the road to all the congressmen, spread their money around, and everybody signs on, and what we have is the modern Federal Reserve. There's nothing other than the foreign bankers conspiracy against the United States. How many of you think that? I'm not surprised, but you're wrong. You've got one leg of the altar. Okay? Now you've got to think, we've just elected a semi-populist president of the United States, the Groguels, and the first candidate of the Democratic Party in 12 years at that point, 16 years, was Dean William Vance Bryan. And Bryan's faction controlled Congress, the housing, right? So you think they're just going to roll over it like that when they say, well, you're going to that foreign bankers bill, you better vote for it. So, they had their own view. What did they want? They wanted an agricultural credit system to be created by the federal government. They kind of wanted the old populist party of 1892 platform. They wanted the right to the pocket green and warehouse inspected by the government, get a receipt, and then have the right to walk into the local national bank and then that receipt and say, you must give me wealth money national currency up, say, 85% of the market value of this receipt. That's what the buying tax wanted. And they wanted it so much, they would sign on for just about anything that provided an agricultural lending facility. Then there was sort of what we'll call the 1913 version of the shadow committee on banking regulation. My buddies of the academic world made it to them. And they said that a study of this issue intellectually had led us to post reports on the banking situation. Who was the leader of that faction. They were in his home state, under Carter Glass of Virginia, then a representative and he chairmanized the most important number on the House Banking Committee at the time. Carter Glass had an academic expert named Parker Willis at Columbia University who helped him wrap the plan for Glass reform. My view is the final reserve act of 1913 has more lines of text in it, more substantive provisions in it from the glass version of the bill and of the competing factions. So here's another of those laid for the elements. Pure reform. But the glass one, he wanted the money power broken up and spread out in New York City. He didn't want to concentrate it in capital to manage. He didn't trust New York bankers any more than he possibly should say. So he wanted a system of regional reserve banks created. Eventually 12 were created. He did not want a federally appointed board of governors in Washington running the system. Turned out in final compromises Woodrow Wilson wanted that. That's the next step of the way, is what we'll call the traditional how do you get them out of the beltway mentality folks. Those who say we here in Washington knows better than anywhere else how they run things. And if you'll just do it our way, either you'll be happy or we'll make certain we never hear any complaints. outsporn ... well, that crowd around Wilson environment often wrecked the id of Louis production and as I'm sure everyone in the room would argue as following the income tax, That same mindset that, well, we can't have this agricultural lending institution, this emergency lending, 1907 panic, Aldrich Freeland Act, Hyde Institution. We can't have this foreign banker representative institution. We can't have that thing without a strong guiding hand of the federal government in Washington, directly accountable to whom? Congress executive judiciary, which the Constitution says it has to be Congress. So how can you get a simple bank appointed by the president that kind of plays ball with the administration always and is always going to be loyal to the administration way of doing things? How can you do that constitutionally? To create an interpretation, of course. So, by 1920, the doctrine had arrived at the Supreme Court. I'm going to be off all challenges in federal reserve that Congress may delegate one of its constitutional powers to the executive for either a defined term of years, years, five years, whatever, subject to manual review and reporting to Congress and subject to the appropriations process for its start-to-prime operation. Well, so the structure of the federal reserve passes that kind of constitutional test. Anyway, you've got the rough picture now over a race of the elements, but to make it work, you need a man whose mind was, shall we say, unburdened by particular commitment to any particular principle. You need a man who is a man who is open to compromise. A man who is going to take credit for being the intellectual author of this bank, and even though there is not a greater evidence that he ever wrote a single word, you get it through. Senator Robert O.N. of Oklahoma, and that's how he got through the penitence. Senator Robert O.N. of Oklahoma, and that was a reserve for a black woman. Senator Robert O.N. of Oklahoma, and that was a reserve for a black woman. They have his statue outside the building. Senator Robert O.N. of Oklahoma, and that was their bank, don't say much of a way except in New York, where they generally like that. Senator Robert O.N. of Oklahoma, and that's how it's just their hope that they sort of have it and use it up with other banks to figure it out. Senator Robert O.N. of the... Senator Robert O.N. daugh I asked the guy that didn't even tell you who he was. the cardboard glass portrait or ask the guys that could help wear a quad. Heck, ask the guys if they could even tell you who he was. Last time I saw it, the glass portrait was upstairs in a corner of a private night. This movement of glass portrait has occurred within the last 15 years or so. One of the problems, institutionally, is that the old guys may remember the debates that was validating the earlier sharp-and-pointed debates. And the old guys do things their way, it's a certain amount of convenience of getting, a certain amount of catching along. That's kind of what's happened to the Fed. If the old guys aren't around to remind you anymore what you're supposed to stand for, then it becomes very easy to do something else. So, let's get in a nutshell about how we got to move to the modern world. The 1933s, the 1913s, it was mostly glass, or I'll call it glass primarily, but with these other streams feeding into it. Okay. And what's too bad an institution as originally framed? For one thing, the Federal Reserve originally had legal tender money as a tower. The answer is no. They have lawful money status only for Federal Reserve Notes. There were four competing currency systems, down to 1933. Federal Reserve notes, National Bank notes, the ones I described earlier. U.S. notes, notes issued by the Treasury itself. And gold and silver coin were circulating. What year did all of that stop? 1933. 1933, under the powers of the Emergency Banking Act, which was vested in term of the Trading of the Earning Act in 1917, President Roosevelt essentially suspended private transactions in gold, suspended the redeemability of U.S. notes in gold or silver, which took me silver for a while after the Fed ended in the 1960s. 1950s. Um, the gold coin was withdrawn from circulation. Only Federal Reserve notes were left out there standing. And in a resolution adopted by Congress in June of 1933, confirming this outcome, Congress did pass a resolution saying, Yes, it is our intention that Federal Reserve notes shall be legal tender, which is a higher and stricter legal standard than lawful money. And that meant for that being forward, what you make God is on fact, federal reserve notes, your redeemable federal reserve notes, if that'll be legal tender ever since. Okay. Okay. Um, as trained in 1913, especially with that, and we've got to do this problem, you know, to my remarks and the place in question, then, as trained in 1913, was the Fed conceived of as part and parcel of some monstrous for rest of your esteem, allied to the income tax as a necessary component for oppressing the American people. The answer is no. In fact, at the time, the Fed was explicitly prohibited, thanks to glass of the reformed action, the Fed was explicitly prohibited from using U.S. government obligations as backing for its currency notes. The Fed was supposed to use either gold and silver for foreign exchange or private obligations that it acquired in the open market as the backing for federal reserve notes. The battle changed to 33. After 33, the Fed was allowed to issue currency in exchange for treasury obligations that it failed. Two parties have to collude for a bad expansion of the unbacked monetary system to work. The treasury has to issue bonds or other papers that the Fed then purchases. It's a two-party game. The Fed can't run it alone. Neither can the treasury be able to serve as a central bank. Both need the other. Each needs the other. And that's how the game works today. If the Fed wanted to expand the money supply, it has to buy more treasury obligations. The Treasury has to issue more applications if the Fed is not an average in the time. This is the surplus. The law of the surplus continues. This is an interstate hustle. The Fed didn't want to know what they buy if the treasury obligations go away. The answer is you could rethink Carter Glass's original formula and buy some private obligations. organic gold, silver, foreign exchanges, private obligations. It's not a bad package of currency. So, in a nutshell, that's kind of how we got to where we are today. I hope I've dispelled some of the myths about how the Fed was created, why it was created, what the constitutional basis for the Fed is. That's right. It's a lot of federal reserves constitutional, especially if it has a part of ownership component at the reserve thing. answer is, even if you think it's not, you have to overturn McCartney versus Merrill to get to where he wants to go. Because John Marshall explicitly ruled that the constitutional, sorry, the institutional structure of the Senate Bank of the United States was constitutional. The president appointed five of the 25 directors, presidenters, election 120 shareholders of the bank, and shareholders of the private sector entity. If that system's constitutional, so this is that. Okay? So, don't count me complaining that Congress ought to throw out the bed, unconstitutional, of the government. within the Constitution, is the best law of modern-day governance. So getting a colorful appearance is why I say, let's abolish modern-day governance. Maybe that's what we want to do. But you are so much that we have windmills, as long as you say, oh, that's the color of the lawn, the way this is where this is. You might have made that explicit to you. Where is the problem, now who knows? So I hope that clarifies a lot of your questions. You may just agree with a lot of what I said. I'm giving some backing for my view of the original Michael Thurston Act. I think, of course, especially along the heart of glass, as a former view, I recommend Tylee, especially to the governor's, his biopathy, called the heart of glass, a biopathy, by his longtime secretary, Trixie Smith, R-I-S-T-Y, Trixie Smith, and Laura Dean Smith, who's a author who was published in 1939, two years before glass died. A parallel thing you can look at is the 1920s writings of H. Parker Publix, that's why I am a liar of the University of Georgia, who was the principal drafts and what a lab of the last sections of the original 1913 act. He wrote a couple of books, opinions of the civil rights and others, amounting to the public service system, whatever it's intended for, how it is actually being used. There's a list for lawyers in the audience, there is a good old desk that the Federal Reserve used to publish here in Washington, I don't know if it's still two, it was called, uh, Lending Function of the Federal Reserve Bank, a history, by Howard Hackley, H. A. C. K. H. C. H. Y. The last first month of the year, 78 or so, uh, the best of history was a good panel in the room, and he created the fact that it's origin that the banking response to that 1907 panic and the desire to create currency backed by a credit obligation. So that's it. I'll take you to the next one. That's it for tonight, folks. Now, remember, listen to everyone, read everything, believe absolutely nothing, unless you can prove it in your own research. Just because he said it tonight, don't take for granted that it's true. Walker Todd worked for most of his life for the Federal Reserve Bank. Where do you think his loyalty lies? That'll give you just one clue as to why you should question some of the things that he says. I have no doubt that most of what he said is probably true. But there are some things that, uh, you'll find out tomorrow night when, uh, we get into the question and answer period, and he's sort of pinned to the wall by some pretty knowledgeable people in the audience. By the way, this whole thing took place February the 17th, 2001. This year, just last month, February the 17th in Virginia. Good night, folks. God bless each and every single one of you. Good night, Annie, Poo, and Allison. I love you. I love you. I love you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.