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FLETCHER: Chairman Eccles, when do you think there is a possibility of
returning to a free and open market, instead of this pegged and
artificially controlled financial market we now have?
ECCLES: Never. Not in your lifetime or mine."
Congressman Jerry Voorhis is quoted in U.S. News, August 31, 1959, as
questioning Secretary of Treasury Anderson, "Do you mean that Banks,
in buying Government securities, do not lend out their customers’
deposits? That they create the money they use to buy the securities?
ANDERSON: That is correct. Banks are different from other lending
institutions. When a savings association, an insurance company, or a
credit union makes a loan, it lends the very dollar that its customers
have previously paid in. But when a bank makes a loan, it simply adds
to the borrower’s deposit account in the bank by the amount of the
loan. The money is not taken from anyone. It is new money, recreated
by the bank, for the use of the borrower."
Strangely enough, there has never been a court trial on the legality or
Constitutionality of the Federal Reserve Act. Although it is on much the
same shaky grounds as the National Recovery Act, or NRA, which was
challenged in Schechter Poultry v. United States of America, 29 U.S.
495, 55 US 837.842 (1935), the NRA was ruled unconstitutional by the
Supreme Court on the grounds that "Congress may not abdicate or
transfer to others its legitimate functions. Congress cannot
Constitutionally delegate its legislative authority to trade or industrial
associations or groups so as to empower them to make laws."
Article 1, Sec. 8 of the Constitution provides that "The Congress shall
have power to borrow money on the credit of the United States . . .
and to coin Money, regulate the value thereof, and of foreign Coin,