Do You Know Where Your Money Comes From?

Understanding this issue is critical for anyone who aims to be a serious student of sustainability - the control of the money supply, and how it is spent into the economy [created] is of paramount importance to understanding debt, growth and consumption...

...incredible how these sentiments are articulated over and over through history, across cultures and the political spectrum, and it persists to this day!

Quotes from Money Masters on the Origin and Nature of Money by:

US Presidents

Thomas Jefferson [in the debate over the Re-charter of the Bank Bill, 1809]:

'If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks...will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.... The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs.'

and:

'I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies.'


James Madison:

'History records that the money changers have used every form of abuse, intrigue, deceit, and violent means possible to maintain their control over governments by controlling money and its issuance.'


Andrew Jackson:

'If congress has the right under the Constitution to issue paper money, it was given them to use themselves, not to be delegated to individuals or corporations.'


Abraham Lincoln:

'The Government should create, issue, and circulate all the currency and credits needed to satisfy the spending power of the Government and the buying power of consumers. By the adoption of these principles, the taxpayers will be saved immense sums of interest. Money will cease to be master and become the servant of humanity.


Theodore Roosevelt:

'Issue of currency should be lodged with the government and be protected from domination by Wall Street. We are opposed to...provisions [which] would place our currency and credit system in private hands.'


Woodrow Wilson [who signed the 1913 Federal Reserve Act wrote a few years later]:

'I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country. A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is concentrated. The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men. We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated Governments in the civilized world no longer a Government by free opinion, no longer a Government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a Government by the opinion and duress of a small group of dominant men.'


Politicians

Napoleon Bonaparte, Emperor of France, 1815:

'When a government is dependent upon bankers for money, they and not the leaders of the government control the situation, since the hand that gives is above the hand that takes...money has no motherland; financiers are without patriotism and without decency; their sole object is gain.'


Otto von Bismark (1815-1898), German Chancellor, after the Lincoln assassination:

'The death of Lincoln was a disaster for Christendom. There was no man in the United States great enough to wear his boots and the bankers went anew to grab the riches. I fear that foreign bankers with their craftiness and tortuous tricks will entirely control the exuberant riches of America and use it to systematically corrupt civilization.'


Bankers


William Paterson, founder of the Bank of England in 1694, then a privately owned bank:

'The bank hath benefit of interest on all moneys which it creates out of nothing.'


Mayer Amschel Rothschild (1744-1812), founder of the House of Rothschild:

'Let me issue and control a nation's money and I care not who writes the laws.'


The Rothschild brothers of London writing to associates in New York, 1863:

'The few who understand the system will either be so interested in its profits or be so dependent upon its favours that there will be no opposition from that class, while on the other hand, the great body of people, mentally incapable of comprehending the tremendous advantage that capital derives from the system, will bear its burdens without complaint, and perhaps without even suspecting that the system is inimical to their interests.'


Economists & Entrepreneurs

Henry Ford, founder of the Ford Motor Company:

'It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and money system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.'


John Kenneth Galbraith, former professor of economics at Harvard:

'The study of money, above all other fields in economics, is one in which complexity is used to disguise truth or to evade truth, not to reveal it. The process by which banks create money is so simple the mind is repelled. With something so important, a deeper mystery seems only decent.'