By Al Coryell
PoHo correspondent
I left you in Part 1 of this series with the statement the U.S. "…has not had a truly free-market economy since 1913". Hopefully you were able to draw the inference that that was the year the Federal Reserve System was created by the Federal Reserve Act of 1913. It was created to perform as a quasi-public banking system, i.e., a central banking system for the United States. In its infancy, the U.S. tried and failed several times to establish a central banking system. But a series of bank panics, in 1873, 1893, and 1907 provided the needed public approval for the creation of the Federal Reserve System in use today.
What the public was unaware of, however, was the ultimate cost that a Federal Reserve system would eventually impose on them…
This article appears in Aug 19-25, 2009.