Thursday, July 21, 2011

No, Your Money Isn't Safe

By Zach Foster
Best read with companion article No, We're Still Not Protected

The companion article stated:

"The truth is that, while there are a few more restrictions on what the clowns on Wall Street can do, Americans are not better off than they were a year ago before the magical everything-proof shield was signed into law.  Banking is still highly unstable in the country, and the banks still exist as entities only because they were artificially revived in the form of massive bailouts.  All across the political spectrum, Americans are angry that the massive bailouts ever happened, and they haven’t forgotten that this bailout, spearheaded by Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner (who was present at the appointment ceremony for the head of the CFPB), happened under President Obama’s watch and he failed to take action against it."

Banking will never be stable in America until the Federal Reserve, whose hands are in every cookie jar, from Chase and Wells Fargo to your community bank, is fully audited and eventually dissolved, and the farce of fractional reserve banking is done away with.

Fractional reserve banking is one of the key factors causing the Great Depression.  Many people don’t know this, but the amount of money printed on their bank account statement is NOT the amount of money that exists in their community bank vault.  The standard reserve requirement for larger banks set by the Federal Reserve is ten percent,[1] meaning out of every hundred dollars a person saves in the bank, only ten of those dollars actually have to exist in a vault.  This system is a bridge of thin ice, since theoretically only ten percent of a bank’s customers need to take out all of their money in order for the bank to run out of money and close down (the true meaning of bankruptcy).

Economist Murray Rothbard makes a compelling case that fractional reserve banking goes hand-in-hand with inflation,[2] since the only way to account for the ninety percent of a bank’s money that doesn’t exist is to hastily print paper money, and printing more money further devalues the American dollar (this is exactly why America needs to return to the gold standard[3]).


The image used is artwork by the author.  It was compiled from various images from Wikimedia Commons as well as text added by the author.


[1] http://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/reservereq.htm
[2] Rothbard, Murray. “Take Money Back.”
[3] Paul, Ron. Gold, Peace, and Prosperity.  The Foundation for Rational Economics and Education. Pp. 31-32, 39

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