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and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures." According to the NRA
deci-
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sion, Congress cannot delegate this power to the Federal Reserve
System, nor can it delegate its legislative authority to the Federal
Reserve System to allow the System to fix the rate of bank reserves, the
rediscount rate, or the volume of money. All of these are "legislated" by
the Federal Reserve Board, meeting in legislative sessions to determine
these matters and to issue "laws" or regulations fixing them.
The Second World War gave the big bankers who owned the Federal
Reserve System a chance to unload on the country billions of dollars
printed early in 1930, in the biggest counterfeiting operation in history,
all legalized by Roosevelt’s government, of course. Henry Hazlitt writes
in the January 4, 1943 issue of Newsweek Magazine:
"The money that began to appear in circulation a week ago,
December 21, 1942, was really printing press money in the fullest sense
of the term, that is, money which has no collateral of any kind behind
it. The Federal Reserve statement that ‘The Board of Governors, after
consultation with the Treasury Department, has authorized Federal
Reserve Banks to utilize at this time the existing stocks of currency
printed in the early thirties, known as ‘Federal Reserve Banknotes’. We
repeat, these notes have absolutely no collateral of any kind behind
them."
Governor Eccles also testified to some other interesting matters of the
Federal Reserve and war finance at the Senate Hearings on the Office
of Price Administration in 1944: