On Sunday, Breitbart News Executive Chairman Stephen K. Bannon hosted his Christmas Special and discussed the 100th anniversary of the Federal Reserve.
Broadcasting on Sirius XM Patriot Radio channel 125, Bannon’s first guest was Craig Smith, CEO of Swiss America and author of the new book The Great Debasement: The 100-Year Dying of the Dollar and How to Get America’s Money Back.
According to Smith, the establishment of the Federal Reserve in 1913 is responsible for the debasement of the American dollar. He argued the Federal Reserve, by printing trillions of paper dollars that are not backed by a gold standard, is effectively counterfeiting and depressing the value of our dollar. Smith specified, “The U.S. Dollar was transformed from being as good as gold to being a mere piece of debased paper with no intrinsic value, issued by a country whose debts now exceed its entire national income.”
In his book, Smith reflects on the fact that before the Federal Reserve was established, there was an “honest measure” of silver or gold to back every dollar that was printed. Moreover, between 1820 and 1913, the dollar actually increased in power, but now the dollar has diminished to only two cents of the 1913 value. Smith referred to our currency now as “elastic money.” Furthermore, he suggested that “the dollar has become a faith-based currency in which fewer and fewer people believe.”
The Keynesian approach of printing money in conjunction with the establishment of the IRS in the same year transformed the country into something other than what our Founding Fathers intended. Smith sees pending disaster for the dollar and America but posited that a return to a gold standard may be the way for America to survive and prosper in the fast-approaching transformed world.
With great prescience, Benjamin Franklin, said at the birth of our Republic, “When the people find that they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the Republic.”