"Is The End Of The Road Nearly At Hand?"
By John Wilder
"Pa Wilder was a banker, and when we communicated via a while back, I’d send him long-ish messages about most everything. One time, I broached the economy with him. As a small farm banker with more than 50 years of experience, he was familiar with the way the system worked.
When I first heard that the Federal Reserve™ wasn’t owned by the government, but by the member banks, I asked him. I figured he’d tell me, “Nah, John, it’s really owned by the government, aliens aren’t real, go back to sleep – we won the war.” Nope. He then went through how each member bank was required to buy stock in the regional Federal Reserve Banks (as I recall) with at least 6% of their deposits.
Whoa. His bank owned a tiny part of the Federal Reserve Bank®. Certainly not much, but part of it. The Federal Reserve Bank© is a private institution. It was the 1913 mechanism to get the politicians out of the economy. The Great Depression shows how well it worked.
After World War II, there was a time of relative stability – Europe and Japan were shattered, and the United States had industry that was just waiting to stop making weapons and start making washers. The sudden influx of labor with the demobilizing G.I.s made a combination for economic growth. After they drank the bars dry and made a zillion babies.
Even with the added costs of Social Security, it worked. The economy was working so well that we could build an interstate highway system without breaking a sweat. The highway system even added to the economic boom by lowering the cost and time required to move goods, effectively shrinking the country.
However, every good party has to end. Johnson’s Great Society and financing for the Vietnam War out of “money we just made up” caused Nixon to end the last tether between gold and the dollar. Sure, the Fed® had been cheating about the amount of cash it had been printing, but when the bluff was called, Nixon had the option of sending all our gold to France or saying “just kidding”.
He chose the latter. I think it was a good idea, because it wasn’t like France was going to do anything about it, anyway. The result was the petrodollar – the idea that all international transactions in oil would take place in dollars. That also resulted in almost all transactions taking place in the dollar. The inflation of the 1970s was the result – it was before we figured out how to tax the world by printing dollars in a sorta responsible way.
So, people all over the world needed dollars, even though we were printing them like we were, well, the Fed™. As long as the Soviet Union existed, there was a counterbalance to the United States, so at least there was some check. But after they went tango uniform? That’s when the responsibility completely ended, the cash was printed, and the instability really started.
The Dotcom Bubble was the first – fed by cash from the Fed® with no place to go. And then it tanked. So the Fed™ printed a few trillion bucks. That led directly to . . .
The Housing Bubble. You probably have heard of it. But this was different – it actually lead to protests against the banks. A reprogramming was necessary – “put the bankers in jail” had to be stopped, because bankers like to use our money to buy themselves nice things like that tiny part of France where they don’t let Muslims in. Except the Saudis.
A reprogramming was needed – Occupy Wall Street™ had to turn to...something. That reprogramming of the Lefty rank and file was into “white people are awful” and it got the heat away from the bankers. And made movies suck.
Meanwhile, the money hijinks led to country after country having revolutions, from Libya to Egypt to Syria. Why? Because inflation in the United States (at that point) meant that people had to pay a nickel more for Cheetos®. In Egypt, that meant that one of the children had to be sold into medical experimentation.
The key to all of this was keeping the dollar as the key currency used in international transactions. To be clear, Russia was a big threat in this. Sure, Russia is ruled by corrupt folks who kill people who threaten them, but I can raise you a Jeff Epstein, a Hunter Biden, and Hillary.
The Russians certainly threatened all of this with Nordstream® and Nordstream II©. These pipelines pushed natural gas straight from Russia to Europe. Now, Russia could take euros for gas. Dollar not required. And scary. All the investment of the Left in Green Energy® led them to shut down nuclear power plants (Germany, I’m looking at you) and replace them with natural gas plants. And you see the results. (hint: Ukraine and certain underwater explosions.)
Now we find that we have a currency that’s becoming worth less every day, foreign folks are building ways to not take the dollar. So they need fewer of them. And want fewer of them in their pockets.
It doesn’t help that we’re in debt by (spins wheel) over $32 trillion bucks, the economy is distorted, and that Medicare® and Medicaid™ will soon cost more than Joe Biden’s hair plugs. And we’re going to double that in the next eight years, and double it again in the next eight. That’s $100 trillion dollars. Does anyone reading this believe we can last that long?
Pa Wilder said 20 years ago that he didn’t see how it could last. But many folks have gone broke by betting against the Fed™. That one day they can’t paper it all over? Nah. Don’t worry. It’ll be fine."
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