Sound Money Project Interview Series: Dr. Judy Shelton (Full Version)

well I think you bring up a great point when you connect the fact that our government is promising so much to so many and at the same time we let the government control the value of our money and all of that would really go against the grain with our founders who did not see it is the government's task to supply everything to everybody they saw the government's task to be to protect private property and that's why they wanted limited government because they knew it's just the nature of having power that causes people in power to abuse the privilege I think we're now at a point where we have to ask if we can even trust government to regulate the value of our money it makes sense to start talking about Madison because one thing the founders realized right off the bat was that if if governments and at that time we're talking about colonial governments or independent states if they can issue debt and then force people to accept that debt and use it as legal tender that is if they can issue that and then say you have to accept this as money that gives the government an exorbitant privilege which is extremely vulnerable to abuse so one of the first things he wanted to do is to say if we're going to have a country we understand a common currency is a great thing it will help us trade with each other but one thing we will never do again is allow the government to run up debt and then to issue notes that are really claims to that debt and the debt is the excess of spending over revenues we will not allow the government to issue debt to cover that excess spending and force people to use it as legal tender so the definition of a dollar had nothing to do with with paper or loans or contracts the government tried to put out to cover its debt the definition of money was money as a measure it's a unit of account it's a store of value it's a medium of exchange in other words what Thomas Jefferson wanted to do because he's the the man who said let's define the money unit of the United States in fact his early notes were called the establishment of a money unit for the u.s. a money unit was going to be an unchanging measure just like the number of minutes in an hour the number of inches in a yard or a foot Jefferson wanted to say let's have a uniform measure that that defines our currency and he decided that in order to to make it constant and unchanging it should be defined in terms of a weight of gold or silver a precise weight and he vision that to be a universal standard in the same way other weights and measures would be well the changes took place over two centuries but in the last 10 years as you refer to it those are years that that represent an era when the federal reserve has has become such a dominant overpowering force that we really don't question its ability to manipulate the value of money and mostly what the Federal Reserve does and it works for the federal government and remember the Federal Reserve is an agency of our government its chairman its vice-chairman every member of the board of governors are appointed by the president confirmed by the Senate so this government agency decides what is the the value of the dollar and their idea is that if it loses 2 or 3 percent a year no problem they have decided that that a little bit of inflation is just fine they refer to benign inflation not realizing or realizing but deciding it's more important to maintain this policy tool of government the ability to manipulate money but think of a person buys a house and if you keep it for even 10 years at 2% a year we'll call that the minimal inflation that the Fed thinks is is so innocuous 2% in 10 years 20 percent there's a distortion think think of a foundation for a building and it's moving and it's getting off kilter 2% but after 10 years it's 20% off and some people own houses for 20 years and sometimes inflation like right now the most recent level of inflation as of last month annualized for this year a year when there should be no pressure on prices the last thing you'd expect is inflation when there's unemployment when consumer demand is down we still have three and a half percent inflation so think of a building on a foundation and it's being moved in in years twenty or thirty percent off of that foundation these distortions ultimately lead to a crash and it's no wonder that the housing industry was where it started this time even and in fact even if you don't see the effects of this this so called benign inflation in the price of consumer goods it tends to pull the excess money that the Fed creates by financing the government's debt pools and assets like housing like commodities you see the price of gold go up butBut it it's it's distorting it's a form of government intervention into free markets that I think is is more damaging than almost any other area where government treads into the private sector the moral implications of money that is not sound I think are the most serious aspect of government manipulated money just in our society say democratic capitalism the most important component is in capitalism is is what you do with capital and think of what that is its financial seed corn it's the amount that you decide not to consume because you think if I plant this if I invest it if I use it to fund some new project I hope the project's going to be successful I don't know for sure but if it is we're all going to be a lot better off that's using capital for a more prosperous future and it's great for all of society even if the person the entrepreneur who wants to do that is doing it for in the Adam Smith's and selfish reasons he wants to make a profit but the point is we we've learned that our whole society benefits of people say I'm going to take a risk and maybe I don't even have the capital I have to convince someone else to invest in my idea and it's going to pay off so much that I'll pay him back I'll earn a profit everyone will benefit and that's how we'll raise the standard of living for society all of that depends in the idea that it's worth it it's worth it to sacrifice today instead of consuming everything it's worth it to put something aside if there is inflation and and now this is even exacerbated because the future inflation is also related to the zero interest rate policy the loose money policy the Federal Reserve think of what happens to someone who makes this moral decision to save for a better future they turn in the money to the bank the bank is supposed to find these great investments these worthwhile entrepreneurs and make the judgment it's risky but we think it's going to pay off the saver gets zero interest so there's no compensation for doing it you might as well consume today eat drink and be married because you're stupid if you if you sacrifice today and you get no interest on it but second it's even worse than that you're an outright sucker because when you get your money back it's worth less so the inflation which is I think the most obvious way if people differentiate between sound money that keeps its value and money's subject to inflation ie the government's ability to manipulate it to produce too much of it because they think by intervening they'll get a better result or they think by buying a government debt that will help the government handle these excessive burdens that's taken on unwisely all of that undermines the very moral sense of of capitalism and when you say democratic capitalism well in a democracy you supposed to have equal rights where we all earn our money and it's up to us to make those decisions of whether to save or invest the government is taking away your ability to plan your ability to count on a store value it's it's your money what if you took it today and you decided just to keep it not to invest it not to expose it to any risk but to put it onto your mattress you take it out in ten years and even at 2% inflation it's worth 20% less well for a government that was set up to protect private property rights they've just taken without due process 20% of what you earned it's worth 20% less through no fault of your own but because they've not just allowed but they're relying on their ability to have the money depreciate I think it's highly immoral it feels amazing to recognize that what would have worked for a country that had gone bankrupt the Soviet Union is now very close to what the US needs what Europe needs were really seen money meltdown and that book was written in 1994 and I think now maybe it came out too soon I think we're really seeing the fruits of a system that has allowed governments to be undisciplined to have no automatic correction of fiscal irresponsibility we've given all of these monetary powers to government I was just reading last night a new book called currency wars and it's amazing because I see in that book references by the author to the very things I was writing about even in the fairly recent past this idea for Russia to have a goal back ruble I really think the first country that starts to link its currency to gold now has a chance especially with the new new technology people can use their smartphones to purchase things now and Google is working on this and I can well imagine we're getting close to that world that Friedrich Hayek talked about where you have competitive currencies and as people are bailing out of the euro and we know the dollar only looks relatively good next to the Euro because it's being compared to a currency that potentially has two weeks to exist so the dollar itself we know has these huge problems and we see emerging countries like like Brazil and Russia or China very unhappy in a dollar denominated world and one can well imagine that international monetary reform will come up on the agenda what what if what if the euro does dissolve or continues to be an almost an unusable currency as people are looking for alternatives at what point will we say rather than then go back into individual currencies for those countries wouldn't we be better to move forward to some kind of a new system and at that point I think the fear is that the International Monetary Fund or some supranational organization some some global central bank will try to emerge that would be the worst outcome the lesson should be to go in precisely the opposite direction instead of having more government control over money more ability to manipulate it to cover the sins of government what we should do is go back to the intentions of the founders who said the private economy is supposed to work for individuals they should all have equal rights the role of government is to protect private property rights that's why we have limited government and I think people should demand a reliable form of money and I can't imagine a more universal accepted surrogate for money in the world than then gold it has always been seen that way you could have a sophisticated system that would work readily with financial markets as they are today but would somehow link a acknowledged unit of account a new form of money to gold which is politically neutral and I'm afraid I wish it would be a dollar that's linked to gold but unless the government shows that it's it's willing to once again have automatic discipline in its fiscal behavior it would be very hard for the u.s. to agree to redeem its own currency in gold but I'd like to start nudging it that way but it remains to be seen whether we can live within our means and abide by a gold convertible system the Bretton Woods Agreement was was really an incredible event and it's speaking of international monetary reform it's really helpful I think to realize that you can do it in the middle of a crisis the first memo laying out how to structure a new international monetary system was written one week after the bombing of Pearl Harbor so we're going back to December 7th 1941 and within a few weeks after that the assistant to the Treasury secretary at the time came up with the memo saying what we really need to do is give hope to the allies who are fighting this war which looked very iffy at that point how it would end up and if those allies think that they get through this war and we're back to what we had during the 30s that's not much to look forward to because during the 30s the year of the Great Depression you had a breakdown in currency relationships the gold standard had fallen apart and and so countries engaged in competitive depreciation meaning they would cheapen their currency print too much of it in order to make their goods more attractive on the trade front and they would do it at the expense then of other countries and that turned into a spiral of everybody depreciating their currency flooding the world with currencies so money lost its meaning and there was a breakdown in trade so the idea early on as we were getting into World War two was let's let's have a vision for the future something that's worth winning the war and they decided that an International Monetary Fund would establish fixed exchange rates among currencies so you couldn't run them up there down against each other fixed exchange rates but somehow that would have to be anchored well should everyone agree to redeem into gold that's one way that's the classic international gold standard every country voluntarily says if we blow it in our budgeting if we blow it on fiscal you can always if you don't trust our currency you can always turn it in for the gold so every country bore its own errors on itself that was a good system but that was seemed too difficult for these countries going into war and so the u.s. said look you just make your currency redeemable at a fixed rate into dollars and we have the strength we will make sure that the dollar remains convertible into gold at a fixed rate in fact if you don't believe us at any point you foreign countries can turn in those dollars for gold and the rate is $35 you get an ounce of gold and that was that was the agreement that was Bretton Woods and it worked great for about 20 years that was the the post-war period was fantastic all these countries came together to a resort in New Hampshire called Bretton Woods they signed on to it they had to put a certain amount of gold with the International Monetary Fund and they said we're going to be part of the system we will maintain this fixed rate with the dollar why did it fall apart by the late 60s the US was in Vietnam at the same time we undergone s'en President Johnson we wanted vast spending programs a Great Society it was an era we called guns and butter we were paying for the butter which was to make people's lives better we were paying for the guns to fight the war we started running budget deficits and by 1971 now we have President Nixon in our allies in Europe and around the world who had signed on to the Bretton Woods system we're saying you're inflating so we are accumulating your dollars because your dollars are buying our goods but we don't want these dollars we think they're worth less and less every year because you keep inflating to cover your excess expenditures and so we're going to turn them in we're going to turn them in we'd rather have the gold and we also want to put you back on a dish and approach and it got to the point where Nick said on a Sunday went up to Camp David with his advisors and he announced later that day were ending a system where any Bretton Woods you cannot turn them in anymore for gold and for Americans I think they just thought well I I guess those other countries were taking advantage of us we don't want to give them our gold but for those other countries this was called the Nixon shock what's what's the system now for them it was like having the Euro disappear I mean the the currency order is gone and we went into this vacuum of no system but right about then we had a theory that floating rates were somehow a good thing and I think that has not proven to be true not at all I think that has covered the excesses of government spending of all things that shouldn't be floating I think a unit of account a measure is is the most important a measure has to be fixed has to be constant but that ended after 71 it was an incredible moment I wished everyone could have seen it when congressman Ron Paul asked Chairman Ben Bernanke that question now that the Federal Reserve is required twice a year to report to Congress as to what it's doing on monetary policy this is normally a very boring exercise I think a lot of our congressmen don't feel comfortable discussing monetary policy but congressman Ron Paul knows his stuff and he said to Bernanke how do you define a dollar now that's a really loaded question for for constitutional scholars they know they know that Jefferson defined a dollar as this many grains of gold or this many grains of silver they know it was defined in these precise terms so Ron Paul knew exactly what he was doing when he said to the head of our central bank which takes responsibility for the value of the dollar he said how do you define a dollar and the amazing answer the Chairman Bernanke gave was well a dollar is it's what it will buy it that can vary from moment to moment that's the opposite of what the founders had in mind it's it's not what it buys moment to moment a dollar is a measure it's it's specific what it will buy gets into demand and supply which is constantly changing very dynamic process but the one thing we know is the unit of account is is absolutely defined in terms that never change so it was amazing as they pursued this conversation then then Ron Paul I thought rather cleverly said why does the Federal Reserve hold gold gold certificates and because actually the US Treasury has 261 million ounces were the largest gold holders in the world as an official reserve country and the the response by Bernanke was well it's it's it's just an asset I mean right up there with mortgage-backed securities and other government agency debt and Treasury bonds at the Fed holes and Ron Paul said well why don't you hold diamonds I thought that was very telling but the gold is a legacy of what had always been the anchor for us money we can appreciate the intent of those congressmen who are currently trying to put some kind of limit on the Federal Reserve they sense that the Fed is out of control it's almost a rogue agency and that it has become so dominant so powerful of course that financial markets are really paralyzed unless they they know what Ben Bernanke is thinking for an agency that was created in 1913 to play a very passive role of temporarily providing liquidity basically when farmers seasonally needed more money and the banks would run out of cash then it was a feds role to make sure that we could provide the cash knowing it was always backed by future productivity now the Fed is this behemoth so I appreciate when individuals say well we have to do then start raining them in maybe Congress has has given up its own responsibility defined by the Constitution to regulate money we farm that out to the Fed the feds gotten Potomac fever so now we're going to start raining them in and and so you have proposals for instance let's change the feds dual mandate do all meaning they have two tasks the first one is to maximize employment the second is to to have stable prices and and so these well-intentioned congressmen say let's eliminate the maximize employment because sometimes those might be at odds and let's just say the Fed should have stable prices it's nice but it's meaningless I even think it's it's damaging because it's a palliative it's it's a false remedy that might give you a sense that you've actually accomplished something but I guarantee right now if you asked Ben Bernanke or anyone on the Federal Open Market Committee if you had the mandate only for stable prices would you do anything differently no it would they would do nothing differently so I think that remedy is trying to tell the Fed to follow a rule that doesn't make sense either and I appreciate that the the Taylor rule named after John Taylor he has gone back and showed that during Alan Greenspan's time as as head of the Fed we had relatively benign inflation and it was a nice time for economic productivity so if we were to write a formula basically regression analysis a formula saying when inflation x' is and productions this and prior interest rates are this inflation's that and you run it through a good chunk of machine here's the rule and if the Fed sticks to that rule then we would do better he suggests we deviated from that rule and that's why we ran into problems but the rule is just a formula based on what had happened earlier and I think every Fed Chairman would say oh but this is an emergency so it's a new situation now we weren't counting some new event so we don't want to be locked into a rule that's one thing the other is if you have a rule then you don't need a Federal Open Market Committee why should you have a small group meeting and private to decide what policy should be to use discretion and I think it's impossible to say that they're abiding by a rule unless you make the rule automatic in which case you don't want people who meet privately to make any decisions about it the beauty of really a gold standard was that since no Fed Chairman can be of Nishant they're very very intelligent but they're not a missing it's saying that we think the the wisdom of the market and all the millions of people who are actually operating using money and using credit if any one of those those persons at the margin says you know I think it's getting frothy out here that last loan when I saw my bank maid looked very iffy to me maybe they're creating too much credit too much purchasing power you know the money supplies going up I don't trust it I think I'd rather have the gold that person at the margin turns in money takes out gold well what's happened the money supply just contracted so now maybe it's a little bit better calibrated to the real level of productivity then if someone else says well you know I see lots of opportunity out there and I think there are many projects we haven't even tapped the potential then that person is very comfortable seeing the money supply grow larger and larger because he thinks it's covering productive potential so we need money and credit the goal is to have the right amount of money and credit out there for the real economy the productive economy the world we're having now is frightening in that there is a disconnect between financial markets and the games played by central bankers and finance ministers and politicians meeting frantically in Europe or here they're playing a different game where the Dow Jones goes up 200 points one day down 200 points and eggs up 200 is crazy gain they should be using casino chips they should be using tokens that is not the real economy the the real economy doesn't bounce up and down like that it's more like a slow-moving barge with 7 billion people aboard we just need money that works for the people who really want to use demand and supply who really want to respond to price signals who say I wouldn't pay this for it but if it gets to that price I buy well the only way prices speak the language of Commerce is if the money which is away that's what prices are so much money if the money is honest and communicating accurately and reliably then when you see prices go up and down you say ok now I now I buy or now I sell the real economy with real individuals who make all those decisions depends on sound money and that's where I think we're looking at this dangerous disconnect where we're really getting to the point where people will say money is too important to be left to the politicians we gave them the right to regulate money they've abused it they don't give us a good product and either through technology through these new as I say smartphone purchases we won't go back to the gold standard we'll go forward but I think the private sector will get sick of the way money is abused by governments and also just see no way out no way out from the fiscal irresponsibility which then forces central banks to accommodate it we're seeing it with the European Central Bank we're seeing it with our fed the government over spends and all the central banks can do is buy up that debt buy it up and every time they do the kicking more dollars out there and that idea of how do you define a dollar it's literally it's it Bernanke's right it's what it will buy but that's meaningless as far as planning because how can anyone know it'll buy ten minutes from now let alone ten years from now we need money that's a store value unit of account as well as a medium of exchange for global trade the idea of Treasury trust bonds is is an initiative that I thought long and hard about realizing that there are those who say this our current monetary system is impossible we need to go to a true gold standard immediately very sympathetic to that at the same time I worked with presidential candidates in the past and I know that it's very difficult to do something that bowl that radical in in one step so I have thought I'm really building on an idea of issuing Treasury obligations redeemable in gold an idea that came out in 1981 in the first year under Ronald Reagan Ronald Reagan had talked as part of his overall economic and agenda in terms of sound money and honest dollar and he even did an ad at the time he was running for president in 1980 saying we will never have dependable money until the US dollars once again linked to gold somehow so that this is part of the unfinished agenda of Reagan but for the specific idea I find this very interesting it was actually alan greenspan who wrote an opinion piece published in The Wall Street Journal in September of 1981 called can the u.s. go back to a gold standard and his idea was to say well we're running a budget deficit so if you went to one immediately you can well imagine that if the Fed continues to fund this deficit by issuing dollars pretty soon everyone will want to convert the dollars into gold and so you lose all your gold so his point was let's let's put a marker out there let's ease our way into it let's test this to see if we could move to a gold standard had the Treasury issue five-year notes where at at the end of five years you could redeem in gold so you're saying in advance you get this much gold and and he thought that was a good way to see at some point would people become indifferent between a US Treasury bond that paid in dollars or US Treasury bond that paid in gold because at the point where people say I don't care then you're you're a convertibility what you want is people to be indifferent because then they're saying the dollar is as good as gold for instance under Bretton Woods the idea was you should be indifferent between one ounce of gold and $35 indifferent if you start thinking that you'd rather have the gold well it's because you don't think those $35 are worth it anymore they've lost value relative to gold so so you can see that it makes sense that you would want to have people looking at a Treasury obligation of the US government and and if it's denominated in dollars which is what I'm suggesting but I would say on this new version you give them an option so for instance here's how it would work let's say the US Treasury announces a new instrument and what it amounts to is a five-year obligation at the end of which time you as the holder of this instrument if you buy it today will either get twenty four hundred dollars or an ounce of gold what would you pay for that well the person might say gee you know it depends what gold is going to be in the future but that's what we're what we're talking about it we would begin to link the value of the dollar in the future to to gold and if you think that the Fed is going to be issuing way too many dollars over the next five years if you think they're going to be that gold is going to keep going up say six or seven or eight percent a year relative to the dollar I mean this year alone it's gone up 15 percent but so let's say you think that's going to at least continue if anything get worse you would much rather have that implies that five years from now gold could be worth 26:27 $3,000 so for you you might be willing to pay not just $2,400 today you might pay a premium because you're getting a future on gold five years from now you'll be able to say give me that gold for 2400 and I can immediately sell it for more and make a profit so now we're harnessing the expectations of the market into defining what they think the value of the dollar will be relative to gold in the future and at the same time it's a huge signal from the US government that for the first time in so many years we are linking the future value of the dollar to gold so you begin to to establish a beachhead to say the dollars value should be predictable in terms of gold but instead of running the risk of the US government saying today this is the rate of convertibility and risking that we set it too high or we set it too low and there's going to be either a flood of demand to buy or sell dollars for gold what you're doing is you're saying let's harness the expectations of the market this will tell the Fed this is a useful information tool this will tell the Fed what people expect about potential future pooling of excess money it's creating in a commodity a global commodity like gold and what the Treasury really needs to do in alignment with the Federal Reserve as a result of issuing what I would call these Treasury trust bonds they just have to exceed market expectations instead of doing even worse than the market expects they have to do better so at this point when we're in such a fiscal mess it's all about trajectory and having a lower deficit next year than the market expects doing better having less monetary stimulus than the market expects doing better and to start working our way so that someday in the future I would do this as a pilot program but someday in the future again we're trying to achieve that point where people don't pay a premium for the gold option because they fully expect the dollar will maintain its value in terms of gold now some people will say well this is just such a small step this isn't going to do it others will say this is so radical you're one of those gold bugs gold nuts because how can the treasury lock itself into anything involving gold I think this is strong enough to focus attention and to get people to saying why would we do this well because we're trying to get back to the values but forward to a new system of making money accurate and reliable once more we're giving government a chance maybe it's last chance to be responsible in issuing money and to not allow its fiscal imprudence to contaminate its monetary product you absolutely can't justify money moving around like that I mean it's crazy it's embarrassing that high officials in our government and European Parliament's talk about a global economy or in Asia we keep saying we believe in free trade and a global economy and then and then here you worry about a three percent tariff we've got to get rid of that and then you let the money values gyrate 10 20 30 percent that that's just it's ridiculous I think it makes a mockery out of true competition it makes a mockery out of the idea that it's an international marketplace it's like having the Olympics and saying oh everyone is welcome to compete and we're all equal and may the best person win who's really work the hardest and is the most talented and then you change the rules you know youyou jump 12 feet but we're gonna measure feet for you is this and you jump 12 feet we're gonna measure it like this why should anyone compete why should they have any respect for a system like that and no it's ridiculous that the dollar in the euro would gyrate like that against each other when the relative competitive levels of individuals in on that continent versus this changes and and should I mean we are trying to become more competitive on both sides but but that's the effort of people trying to be more productive or more innovative that's legitimate competition to have to talk about being competitive because the value of the currency has depreciated that that's not competing that's cheating and and we should call it as such it could have survived I don't know now if the euro will be able to survive I've great respect for Robert Mandel and he's the Nobel winning economist very much a force behind the supply-side movement and the success of the Reagan Revolution and and he did the intellectual groundwork for the euro based on the idea that you can have an optimal currency area if if people can move across borders if they can trade with each other and the good part of the euro is to have a common currency in the same way as I'm saying if you're going to have a global marketplace you all have to be using the same unit of account by which you define value for competing goods and services I mean that only makes sense you can have national currencies but they all then have to abide by the same central monetary unit of account system which is what an old gold standard did which is what Bretton Woods did which is what we need now instead of floating rates but the problem in Europe is even though they had the right idea with a common currency from an economic point of view from a historical point of view the idea for a common currency goes back to Eisenhower's wish after seeing two horrible wars take place on that continent to say you need a United States of Europe I mean you have to quit fighting each other for the same reasons Jefferson wanted a common currency you need something to help bind you so you trade with each other so you don't go to war with each other so there was a lot to recommend a common currency on both the social historical moral and purely economic and financial aspects but there was no automatic mechanism for correcting and you you still allowed under the the Euro rules the fiscal sins of government to compromise the integrity of the see and they had sort of a silly idea which was well if a country runs a budget deficit in excess of the 3% which we're allowing we will punish them what's the punishment we will find them well the the reason they're running the deficit is they don't have enough money so now you're saying we will find them and and it should have been very clear that there there was no automatic way to correct that if anything that then makes them run a larger deficit if they can't cut spending on their own then then making them run a larger deficit is not the solution and certainly not the path to monetary soundness so now they're talking about saving it by having what what's being called quasi automatic corrective measures well I can't imagine what those will be the the beauty of the gold standard is it was truly automatic and a government punished itself because people said I want to bail out of our currency I would rather have the gold and that automatically then reduced the money supply until we have something like that what's being discussed for the euro some kind of court some kind of higher court of law would decide if a country is overspending can you imagine how everyone will rebel at a German dominated court telling Greeks what they should spend for it does the opposite of what Eisenhower had hoped was instead of forging a peaceful alliance it exacerbates the tensions between sovereign nations so that's not the solution and whether they can find something in time enough to preserve the euro as more than just a political cover or an excuse for further fiscal abuse that remains to be seen I I met Bernard Vaughn not house recently and I had been following his case with great interest what's rather shocking to me is he issued these I would call them coins I think he was careful not to call them coins because he knew that he was coming very close to infringing on what the Fed sees is its area of authority but they were gold and silver people were accept accepting them as payment voluntarily he never claimed they were money but they were voluntarily accepting them and I think he was doing rather well with his his private minting he was he was investigated with people I think several agents waiting to see what he would do and questioning people who had accepted these tokens and payment and when he went through his trial which I thought would be the most fascinating trial I I called him the Rosa Parks of monetary policy because he's challenging challenging what the federal government has done with regard to carrying out its constitutional responsibility to maintain the value of US money he's challenging them and he was found guilty I think for some accounts I don't really understand counterfeiting or some other it didn't really make sense to me because nobody mistook these they don't look at all like like the coins produced by our mint but even worse he was called as he was sentenced he was called by the prosecuting attorney a domestic terrorist that I found frightening a domestic terrorist and the irony I mean it would be funny if it weren't so serious and and frightening with regard to the government's power relative to what the founders had in mind particularly in granting the money power to government the limited money power the dollar was losing value at the rate you refer to in the last ten years the vastly depreciating the purchasing power or the reliability of the dollar at the same time that these these gold alternative forms of money gold and silver were increasing in value I mean people were very comfortable or increasing in value only if you compare them to the dollar they stayed the same they were actual ounces of gold or silver or paper claims to gold and silver they didn't change they were really what the founders had in mind these unchanging measures to define in terms of gold and silver and yet the Fed was able to bring this suit and felt that he had encroached on its exclusive right to provide the money I I'll be very interested in his appeal and see how that goes but right now I think he's looking at many many years in prison for having dared to challenge the Federal Reserve you

Channel: Atlas Network

Views: 21,528

Rating: 4.9311423 out of 5

Keywords: Dr. Judy Shelton, Shelton, Atlas, Atlas Network, gold, economic, crisis, gold standard, treasury trust bonds, t-bills, treasuries, jefferson, founders, hamilton, constitution, end the fed, ron paul, sound money, Ron Paul (U.S. Congressperson), Economy, Reserve, Federal Reserve

Id: hdlZi2KPXhU

Length: 48min 58sec (2938 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 14 2012