And this thing was the sin of the house of Jeroboam, so as to exterminate and destroy it from the face of the earth.

-          1 Kings 13:34

So just how is the Federal Reserve like the sin of the house of Jeroboam?  For that matter, what is the Federal Reserve and who on earth is Jeroboam and the sin of his house of which I write? 

Well, you won’t have to wait long.  Those questions, Lord willing, I aim to answer in this post.

Jeroboam and the Sin of His House

Jeroboam was the first king of Israel, the Northern Kingdom, which split from the House of David after the accession of King Rehoboam, the son of King Solomon.   The proximate cause of the split was a tax revolt of the norther tribes due to their unhappiness at Solomon’s policy of heavy taxation and the arrogant response of Rehoboam, Solomon’s successor, when Jeroboam and other representatives from the north asked him for relief.  The split of the United Kingdom into warring Northern and Southern Kingdoms is recorded for us in 1 Kings 12.

The ultimate cause of the split was the will of God.  Solomon had rebelled against God, having his heart drawn aside into idolatry by his many foreign wives, and the splitting of the kingdom was God’s punishment for Solomon’s unfaithfulness.

In 1 Kings 11, the prophet Ahijah had prophesied to Jeroboam that God he would tear the kingdom out of the hand of Solomon and give him ten tribes, leaving one for David’s successor.  The Lord even promised Jeroboam that he would build him an enduring house provided he did what was right in the Lord’s eyes.

But disbelieving God, Jeroboam quickly fell into the sin of idolatry, as had Solomon. 

In Jeroboam’s case, he was concerned that if residents of the Northern Kingdom kept going to Jerusalem to worship, their hearts would be turned from following him and return to the house of David.  To prevent this, Jeroboam invented a whole new religion.  He made two golden calves, putting one in Bethel and the other in Dan, “made priests from every class of people, who were not of the sons of Levi,” and made sacrifices at a time, “which he devised in his own heart.” 

Jeroboam was confronted by a prophet of the Lord, who in dramatic fashion denounced the king while he was in the act of sacrificing.  When Jeroboam stretched forth his hand and called for the prophet’s arrest – this was the Old Testament version of cancel culture – his hand withered, “so that he could not pull it back to himself” and the altar split in two and the ashes poured out of it. Jeroboam then asked the prophet to restore hi hand, which the prophet did. 

Now one would think that such a powerful demonstration of God’s power and anger would have moved Jeroboam to repentance.  But this did not happen.  In 1 Kings 13:33, 34 we  read, “After these event [the withering of Jeroboam’s hand and the altar splitting in two] Jeroboam did not turn from his evil way, but again he made priest from every class of people for the high places; whoever wished, he consecrated him, and he became one of the priests of the high places.  And this thin was the sin of the house of Jeroboam, so as to exterminate and destroy it from the face of the earth.”  

The Sin Didn’t Stop with Jeroboam

Jeroboam reigned as king of Israel for twenty-two years.  Scholars differ on the dates of his reign, one putting it at 922-901 BC, while another gives the dates 931-910 BC.  Samaria , later the capital of the Northern Kingdom, fell to Assyria om 722 BC, so in either case the Northern Kingdom would continue for another 179 – 188 years after Jeroboam.  But although Jeroboam was succeeded by many other kings of Israel, none of them departed from his sin of establishing a false religion in the kingdom right at the outset.  One could even say that the sin of Jeroboam was endemic to the Northern Kingdom.

You can see this from reading through the remainder of the books of 1 and 2 Kings.  A search using the term “sin of Jeroboam” on BibleGateway yielded 24 occurrences in these two books. 

-          And He will give Israel up because of the sins of Jeroboam, who sinned and made Israel to sin (1 Kings 14:16)

-          He did evil in the sight of the LORD, and walked in the way of Jeroboam, and in his sin by which he had made Israel sin (1 Kings 15:34)

-          For he walked in all the ways of Jeroboam the son of Nebat, and in his sin by which he had made Israel sin (1 Kings 16:26)

-          But Jehu took no heed to walk in the law of the LORD God of Israel with all his heart; for he did not depart from the sins of Jeroboam, who had made Israel sin (2 Kings 10:31)

“Walked in the way (or ways) of Jeroboam” also returned several results.  For example, King Ahaziah, Ahab’s son, “did evil in the sight of the LORD, and walked…in the way of  Jeroboam the son of Nebat, who had made Israel sin.” 

At no time did any of the kings who reigned in the Northern Kingdom break the pattern of the sin of the house of Jeroboam.  They all walked in his “original sin,” and the whole nation went into captivity because of it.

The Sin of the Federal Reserve

The sin of the Federal Reserve (and all other central banks) has at least one thing in common with the sin of the house of Jeroboam.  Once established by Jeroboam, his idolatrous religious system proved impossible to get rid of.  Even zealous King Jehu, the only king of the Northern Kingdom about whom God had anything good to say, could not bring himself to end the Jeroboam’s false religion.  In like fashion, the Federal Reserve, although manifestly a corrupt, unchristian, and unconstitutional system from its founding in 1913 right up to the present, has so far proven impossible so much as even to audit, let alone get rid of. 

The Federal Reserve was corrupt from the beginning.  Just as with Jeroboam’s false religion, there was no point at which the Federal Reserve (henceforth, the Fed) was not corrupt and dishonest and sinful.  According to Fed critic G. Edward Griffin in his book The Creature from Jekyll Island – I highly recommend this very readable critique of the Fed – the founding of the Fed was quite literally a conspiracy, with some of the most powerful bankers and politicians in America along with Paul M. Warburg of the Rothchild banking dynasty meeting under secretive circumstances on Jekyll Island in Georgia in November 1910 to hammer out the details of what would become the Fed.  Griffin describes this meeting as the, “birth of a banking cartel to protect its members from competition.”

Of course, that’s not how it was sold to the public. Taking pains not to use the term “central bank,” the conspirators sold the Fed – even the name Federal Reserve is a con, for the Fed is not owned by the federal government, it is a private bank owned by the Fed’s large member banks and it has no reserves apart from money it creates out of thin air in a sort of twisted version of creation ex nihilo – to the American people as a way of stabilizing the banking system which had been rocked by a major crisis in 1907.  In truth, the Fed was conceived as a  way of transferring the risk of a banking crisis from the bankers themselves to the American people, but of course the Jekyll Island crowd wasn’t about to let that cat out of the bag. 

Once established by the Federal Reserve Act, passed by Congress in 1913, the Fed set up shop and his been operating ever since.  During that time, the dollar has lost 98-99% of its purchasing power.  It’s important to note that this loss of purchasing power of the nation’s currency is not some unforeseen bug, but a feature, of the system.  The depreciating currency – and in a debt based fiat currency system such as we have in America the currency must be debased otherwise the system would collapse - is essentially a giant transmission belt that serves to strip mine purchasing power from the wages and saving of ordinary Americans and deposit that stolen wealth into the pockets of the wealthiest of the wealthy.

It should be said here that as Christians we do not criticize the wealthy because they are wealthy.  If a man become rich by honestly serving his fellow man, very well.  There is no sin in earning a lot of money.  But it’s quite another matter to steal a lot of money.  And this is what the Fed was set up to do from the very beginning. 

Just as Jeroboam’s false religion was corrupt and idolatrous from the very beginning and at no time had God’s sanction, so too is central banking - whether conducted by the Fed, the Bank of England, the European Central Bank, the Reserve Bank of Australia, or the People’s Bank of China, it matters not which one we speak of; they are all corrupt – a fraud and a curse upon the nations in which it is practiced, and this includes nearly all nations on earth. 

But there is at last another way in which the Fed is like the sin of the house of Jeroboam.  Not only was the Fed, like Jeroboam’s false religion, corrupt from the beginning, but it has persisted from presidential administration to presidential administration. 

It matters not whether the president is Republican or Democrat, conservative or liberal, a man who promises to cut the size of government or vastly expand its powers, the Fed keeps running in the background, churning out dollars with a click of the mouse.  At the present time, the Fed is committed to buying at least $120 billion (that’s right, $120 billion) per month in federal government debt and mortgage backed securities.  To put that in some perspective, Jeff Bezos, whom Forbes Magazine named the richest man in the world for the fourth consecutive year in 2021, has a fortune listed at $177 billion.  In less than two months’ time, the Fed prints another Jeff Bezos sized fortune. 

And to say the Fed prints the money really isn’t accurate.  It would be better to say that it clicks the money into existence, because all the newly created money is brought into existence on a computer.  They don’t even bother running a printing press.

But back to the notion that the Fed is much like Jeroboam’s sin.  No presidential candidate in my lifetime – with Ron Paul being the one exception – has ever seriously talked about ending the Fed. 

When Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton were running for president in 2016, Clinton criticized Trump’s comments on the Fed saying, “You should not be commenting on the Fed actions when you are either running for president or you are president.”  Clinton couched her remarks as protecting markets, but one suspects there was more to it than that.  Presidents aren’t supposed to talk about the Fed, because the Fed is supposed to be independent.  But while Fed supporters like to speak of the Fed’s independence from the political process, a more honest word to use would be “secretive.” Those who run the Fed act more as if they belonged to a secret society than public servants.  And that’s not surprising given that their labors are directly damaging to the legitimate interests of the American people.  Because of this, they must keep the hoi polloi in the dark about all their money printing schemes, the real reason for rising prices [rising prices are not inflation; inflation is Fed money printing which results in rising prices, but you’re not supposed to know that], corporate bailouts and the rise in wealth disparity. 

But even populist Donald Trump did not lay the axe to the root and call for an end to the Fed.  When Trump complained about the actions of then Fed Chairman Jent Yellen, he was upset only because he believe that the Fed was acting to help Hillary Clinton, not because Trump himself had any objection to the Fed. 

The Fed engaged in massive money printing under George W. Bush, Barak Obama, Donald Trump and is engaging in massive money printing under Joe Biden.  And not only does the Fed print massive amounts of new currency under all administrations, Democrat or Republican it doesn’t matter, but it does so at a faster and faster pace.  Indeed, because of the debt-based nature of our monetary system, cash must be borrowed into existence at a faster and faster pace to pay the growing interest on the existing debt.  It’s a bit like having tiger by the tail.  Once you grab that tail, you can’t let go.  Once you begin a debt-based financial system, which America did with the creation of the Fed, you can’t stop adding debt.  Such systems are a sort of cul-de-sac, a dead-end road to financial perdition.       

To sustain the unsustainable system of debt increasing at a faster and faster pace just to service the interest on the existing debt, central banks the world over have suppressed interest rates to near zero and even below zero.  That’s right, in today’s world of central banking, you get paid to borrow and punished to save.  This is a financial version of what Isaiah warned about, calling good evil and evil good.  This cannot continue indefinitely.

End the Fed

In his recent column “The Woke Fed,” Ron Paul wrote once again about the coming economic crisis and that the crisis would, “either be precipitated by or result in the rejection of the dollar’s world reserve currency status.”

But more disturbing than this is that Paul noted that the inevitable collapse of our current monetary system result in it being replaced, “with a government even more authoritarian than the current one.”  Paul doesn’t say so explicitly, but he’s likely referring to the creation of a new system of Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDC’s) by which the monetary elites will hope to remain in power once the current system implodes. 

Just as Israel desperately needed to repent of its idolatry by removing the false religions system of Jeroboam, so too does the United States need to repent of our monetary sins, end the Fed and allow the free market to determine what monetary system we should have going forward.  Note well, I do not say the government should institute a system of sound money, but rather the government should get out of the way wan allow the free market to determine what money is best. 

The idea that the government should not be involved in the manufacture of money may stride some readers as odd.  After all, don’t all governments manufacture money.  Most all of the them do, or use money manufactured by other governments, but this does not mean they are right in so doing.  To say that all governments print money simply is a descriptor of what they do.  But this is not to say they ought to do it.  Only that they do it.  

According to the Bible, there are only two function os government, punish evildoers and reward the good. There’s nothing there thay says anything about printing money, or in the case of the United States, chartering a private bank, the Fed, to regulate the money. 

Just as idolatry is always wrong, so too is it always wrong for politicians and central bankers empowered by them to regulate a nation’s money supply.  The bankers and politicians will always abuse their position.  Just as idolatry is evil and cannot be reformed, so too is central banking both evil and irreformable.  For the health of the nation, both must be done away with entirely  

Let us, therefore, end the Fed.    

“But we will certainly do whatever has gone out of our own mouth, to burn incense to the queen of heaven and pour out drink offerings to her, as we have done, we and our fathers, our kings and our princes, in the cities of Judah and in the streets of Jerusalem.  For then we had plenty of food, were well-off, and saw no trouble.”

-          Jeremiah 44:17

In his book Logic, Gordon Clark noted a number of informal logical fallacies.  On page 17, he mentioned, among others, a fallacy called in Latin post hoc ergo propter hoc, or as we would say it in English, “after this, therefore because of this.” This logical error, hereafter the post hoc fallacy, involves asserting that, because event B took place after event A, that A is what caused B. 

Now it’s true that there can be a cause and effect relationship between an earlier event and a late event.  In Jeremiah 44, the prophet, speaking for God, states, “You have seen all the calamity that I have brought on Jerusalem…because of their wickedness which they have committed to provoke Me to anger.”  God makes it entirely clear in this passage that the prior disobedience of the people of Judah was the cause of his bringing judgment on Jerusalem.  We don’t have to guess at why the Babylonians leveled Jerusalem and burned the temple in 586 BC, God tells us explicitly both the cause and the effect. 

Later in chapter 44, we get the reaction from the people to whom Jeremiah was prophesying.  As it turned out, they didn’t much care for his sermon. Part of their response to Jeremiah was a classic case of post hoc fallacy.  See if you can spot it.

But we will certainly do whatever has gone out of our own mouth, to burn incense to the queen of heaven and pour out drink offerings to her, as we have done, we and our fathers, our kings and our princes, in the cities of Judah and in the streets of Jerusalem.  For then we had plenty of food, were well-off, and saw no trouble. But since we stopped burning incense to the queen of heaven and pouring out drink offering to her, we have lacked everything and have been consumed by the sword and by famine (Jeremiah 44:17-18).

Did I say, see if you can spot it?  Reading this passage further, it seems to me that there are two post hoc fallacies to be found.  In the first place, the people argue that their burning incense and pouring out drink offerings were the cause of their prosperity when they were in the land, when, in fact, it was God’s grace that provided for them.  Second, they attributed their current state of exile to their worshipping the queen of heaven, when, in fact, the cause of their exile was God’s punishing them for their disobedience.  

I bring up the preceding Biblical example of post hoc fallacy to introduce the main point of this post, which is to refute the linkage, put forward by mainstream financial reporters, the outbreak of the Corona virus in China is reason for the recent stock market sell off and spike in the price of gold. 

Stocks Down, Gold Up – Obviously, It’s Coronavirus!

A quick look at two headlines from Friday on CNBC will give you a good sense of just how hard the mainstream financial media is pushing the coronavirus-as-end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it meme.

In the first place, CNBC wants you to believe that Friday’s, and the week’s, stock selloff was due to coronavirus.  “Dow drops more than 200 points, posts losing week as coronavirus fears resurface,” was how they put it.  Similar headlines could be found earlier in the week as well.  Now some may argue, “the headline doesn’t explicitly say, “Coronavirus causes 200-point drop in the stock market. It merely says that stocks went down as coronavirus fears went up.”  Technically, that’s true.  CNBC doesn’t make an explicit causal link between coronavirus and stocks going down.  But the intent, in my opinion, of headlines of this sort is to plant the seed in the reader’s mind that there is a cause and effect relationship at work.  Just read through the article to see what I mean.

On the same day as the headline above, CNBC ran another headline, this one reading, “Gold surges 1.5% on growing coronavirus concerns.”  Not only does coronavirus have the ability to drive down stocks, but it can cause gold to spike as well. 

In both cases, sinking stock and rising gold, CNBC is asking its readers to accept coronavirus as the cause.    First came coronavirus, then stocks went down and gold went up.  Post hoc, ergo propter hoc.

Now, am I saying that coronavirus could have no effect on stocks or gold?  After all, it appears that the illness has caused significant economic disruption in the world’s second largest economy.  Could not such a disruption cause stocks to go down and at the same time cause gold – gold is considered a “risk off” asset, one that does well when “risk on” assets such as stocks are doing poorly – to go up? Yes, it could.   

But while coronavirus could cause stocks to go down and gold to go up, it is not, in my view, the primary reason for these events.

To illustrate what I mean, consider that case of an overly indebted man who has a personal financial crisis due to an unexpected car repair bill.  The man has been living beyond his means for years, but has successfully shuffled his debts around, staying just one step ahead of bankruptcy.  Now ask yourself, was the unexpected car repair the reason this fellow suddenly found himself in financial dire straits, or was it the years of profligate living?  I would argue that it was the years of profligacy that were the real cause.  The unexpected car repair bill was just the thing the happened to expose the underlying problem, one that had been building for a long time before his car suddenly had mechanical problems.

In like fashion, the West’s financial system has been deteriorating for years, while at the same time stocks are hitting record highs and safety assets such as gold and silver are, comparatively speaking, performing very poorly.  In the opinion of this author, this is an artificial situation.  Stocks, in fact, should be much lower, while gold and silver should be much higher.  A better explanation for the current stock market troubles and breakout in the gold price is required. 

 It’s the Fed! It’s the Fed! It’s the Fed!

I mentioned above that the current valuation of the stock market is artificial, that is to say, it is not based on market forces.  Stocks aren’t the only asset in a bubble, either.  At the same time, we have a stock market bubble, we also have a bond market bubble and a housing bubble.  There are so many assets in bubble territory – by bubble, I simply mean the assets in question are overvalued - that some financial observers are calling it the “everything bubble.” 

In the late 90’s we had the tech bubble.  Any stocks with .com in their name immediately shot up to stratospheric valuations, only to come crashing down in 2000.  In the 00’s, we had the housing bubble, when real estate zoomed up in value, only to tank in 2008 during the financial crisis.  In fact, the 2008 crisis was closely related to the popping of the housing bubble.     Now we have the everything bubble, with stocks, bonds and real estate all at record valuations. 

So how is it possible to have so many markets in bubble territory?  The root cause of the everything bubble is the same as that of the .com and housing bubbles – it’s the Fed. 

Ever since the 2008 crises, the Fed, together with the Plunge Protection Team (PPT) and the Exchange Stabilization Fund (ESF), has used its enormous power and influence, not only to prop up favored markets, but to suppress those out of favor.  It has done this through money printing – quantitative easing, or QE – market manipulation – some of the Fed’s manipulations are overt, such as cutting interest rates, while some of them are covert and speculative; for example, a recent headline in ZeroHedge reported that then Fed Chairman Janet Yellen said in 2017 that the Fed “might be able to help the U.S. economy in a future downturn if it could buy stocks and corporate bonds”; what are the odds this is already going on in secret? -  and good old fashioned propaganda. 

So what’s the problem with market rigging?  There are several, one of the most pernicious of which is this:  Once you start rigging, you can’t stop.  Market rigging, you see, is a lot like telling a lie.  Just as you can’t tell only one lie, so too you can’t just rig one market.  Rather, you have to rig all markets. 

If you want to create the (false) perception that the economy is doing great, you have to push up stocks and housing.  The most effective way to push up stocks and housing is to artificially support the bond market.  The Fed, by purchasing bonds through QE, artificially raises the price of bonds, which has the effect of artificially lowering bond yields.  When bond yields are held down, this pushes cash into the stock market where it can find a better return than it can in the bond market.  Lowering bond yields also lowers the interest rate of home loans, making it easier for people to borrow more money to buy a house.  More money flowing into the housing market means higher housing prices. 

At the bottom of all this is Fed money printing.  If the Fed did not have the ability to create money out of nothing and then to use that newly created (counterfeited) money to purchase US Treasuries (and quite possibly other assets), stocks, bonds and real estate would all be much lower.

But as was mentioned above, once the Fed started on its program of market manipulation – the Fed’s market manipulation began in earnest with the 2008 crisis, but it had been going on for at least 20 years before that – it found it could not stop. 

Market rigging, you see, is a bit like having the proverbial tiger by the tail - Once you grab it, you can’t let go or you get eaten.  Likewise, once the Fed started rigging markets, it found it couldn’t stop.    

This is not for lack of trying.  Beginning in December 2015, the Fed started to inch up interest rates up from 0%.  This program went on through December 2018, at which point the markets crashed.  This prompted Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin to convene an emergency meeting of the PPT  on December 24, 2018.  Remarkably, when markets reopened the day after Christmas, the Dow shot up a record 1,100 points.  But if you think this was the PPT’s doing, you’re a conspiracy theorist. 

Almost immediately after the December 2018 market crash, Fed Chairman Jay Powell announced the reversal of the Fed’s policy of raising interest rates as well as an end to its Quantitative Tightening (QT) program of selling long dated US Treasuries.

Today the Fed once again is in full QE mode and, very likely, will be lowering interest rates in March.

As Proverbs tells us, “Treasures of wickedness profit nothing,” and, “Wealth gained by dishonesty will be diminished.”  In like fashion, while all the Fed’s machinations so far have been successful at propping up stocks and housing, these artificially inflated markets are very unstable and susceptible to crashing.  All it takes is for some unexpected event, a virus outbreak for example, to undo them. 

It’s not the cornovirus that’s the cause of our current bout of financial instability, it’s the Fed.

 Gold and Silver Suppressed

As mentioned above there are any number of financial assets that are now in bubble territory.  But two that decidedly are not are gold and especially silver. This is not an accident.  Just as the powers-that-shouldn’t be artificially inflate the value of favored assets, so too do they suppress the value of assets they don’t like, precious metals.  Gregory Mannarino, a trader and YouTuber whose work I follow, refers to these monetary metals as being in an “inverse bubble.”  That is to say, he believes their value is being artificially held down, and by the same people who seek to artificially inflate stocks, bonds and real estate. 

But just as artificially inflated bubbles in stocks, bonds and real estate are unstable, so too are inverse bubbles in gold and silver. 

Rather than seeing gold going up due to coronavirus, a more likely explanation is that the rise in gold is due to Fed money printing.  Gold started a major bull run as priced in US dollars around the end of May 2019, long before anyone had even heard of coronavirus.  Not only was this in response to the Fed’s actions to that point, but many observers think the smart money anticipated the Fed’s bailout of the banks via its program of supporting the Repo Market, which began in September and  is still ongoing.  

So Why Are They Pushing the Coronavirus Meme? 

If it’s true what I’ve said, that the problems in the stock market and the rise in gold are due, not to the coronavirus, but to the activities of the Fed, why is the media pushing the coronavirus meme? 

The answer:  The mainstream media’s main job is not to inform you, but to misinform you.

You see, fellow deplorables, we’re not supposed to know the secrets of the high priests at the Fed.  They are our betters.  They are our masters.  Our job, like ordinary Roman Catholics before the Reformation, is to accept what our masters at the Fed and in the media say, with implicit faith.  That is to say, our job is to take what they tell us at face value and never, ever ask uncomfortable questions. 

The masters of the universe have an unspoken rule: Whenever there’s an economic problem, a fall guy is needed.  The Fed must never be blamed.

Back in the 70’s there was a terrible bout of inflation that was the result of President Nixon pulling the plug on the Bretton Woods accord in 1971.  Even as a young boy, I remember hearing all the excuses for rising prices.  It was the oil sheiks of OPEC.  It was frost in the orange groves in Florida.  It was droughts, hurricanes and hailstorms. 

Anything but the truth, Fed money printing.

Think about that famous scene in the Wizard of Oz, where Toto goes and pulls back the curtain hiding the “Wizard” in his control booth.  “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain,” bellows the Wizard, trying desperately to keep Dorothy and friends from discovering that the Wizards was no Wizard at all, but just a man with a lot of special effects at hand.

That’s exactly the way we’re treated. 

And it doesn’t matter what your political persuasion is, either.

You could be the bluest of blue Bernie Bros who hangs on every word Rachel Maddow speaks.  Watch her program for years if you will.  Listen to all of Bernie’s stump speeches several times over.  You’ll hear them talk about income and wealth inequality, but you’ll never once hear them pin it on the real culprit, the Fed.

You could be the reddest of red staters, owning multiple MAGA hats and never missing a minute of Sean Hannity.  Yet you’ll never once hear him talk about the role the Fed plays in creating price inflation and how its policies have caused stagnant wages and reduced living standards for the very people Donald Trump claims to represent, ordinary working Americans.    

Even if you’re a middle of the roader and stick to mainstream network news, it’s the same sorry state of affairs.  Watch the evening news for decades on end if you will, but you’ll never learn a thing about how the Fed creates money from nothing and hands it out to its friends and how you pay for it.

These omissions are not by accident.  They are by design. 

The powers that shouldn’t be are quite happy that people are ignorant of the games the Fed plays and they want to make sure people stay that way.

Flooding the airwaves with false explanations of financial market activity is how they keep people in the dark. 

It’s not the coronavirus.  It’s the money printing.

It’s the Fed.     

It’s the Fed.

It’s the Fed.

And this is the condemnation, that the light has come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil.  For everyone practicing evil hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his deeds should be exposed.

• John 3:19-20

The words from John at the top of this post are readily recognized by Christians as coming from Jesus’ dialogue with Nicodemus, the Pharisee who came to inquire of him one night.  The immediate application of Jesus’ words is, of course, to himself as the light who came into the world and was rejected of men, for they loved evil and feared lest their deeds should be exposed.

But while Christ said these words in the context of explaining his person and purpose for coming in the flesh to Nicodemus, his comments have a wider application.  They are a specific case of a broader principle we see in Scripture, that of the Christian principle of openness and honesty.  Those who love the truth do what they do in the open.  They let their light shine before men that others may see their goods works and glorify their Father in heaven.  On the other hand, those who practice evil, those who have something to hide, they do their work in the dark, fearing to be seen by men.

One application of the principle of openness and light is the Christian idea of government as a servant of the people, not as their master.  When the disciples argued about who was the greatest, Jesus explained the Christian concept of leadership, which was radically different from the model the world offered.  Christ explained that the rulers of the Gentiles “exercised lordship” (lorded it over) them, but such was not to be the case among his followers.  Following Jesus example, those who would be first in the Kingdom of Heaven were to be servants of all.

With Jesus words in mind, it should come as no surprise that one of the side effects of the 16th century Reformation was a significant change for the better in civil government.  Writing in Christ and Civilization, John Robbins noted,

The revolution first accomplished in the churches could not be confined to them, but quickly spread to civil governments.  Not only was there a reduction in the power of churches in Protestant societies, but a reduction in the size and scope of civil government as well.  For example, Steven Ozment reports that “when the Reformation was consolidated in Rostock in 1534, it brought not only an end to the privileges of the clergy but also a government agreement to reduce its own number by about one-third,” and to submit to a detailed annual accounting (122).  Karl Holl, Professor of Church History at the University of Berlin (1906-1926), wrote, “…it was the Reformation that first set a rigid limit to the absolute power of the State.”

Now let those words sink in for just a moment.  If you’re like me and long to see the seemingly impossible, a return to limited, honest government, what took place at Rostock in 1534, the reduction of civil government by a third and its agreeing to submit to an annual accounting, appears as something not far from a miracle.

But just as the Christian Reformation brought about a “rigid limit to the absolute power of the State” in the 16th century, so too has the abandonment of Reformation doctrine in the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries led to the recrudescence of big, unaccountable government.

The current presidential election cycle in the U.S. has produced no end to the calls for bigger government.  Indeed, on the Democratic side the candidates have spent months fighting it out to determine who can give away more public loot the fastest.  For the first time in my lifetime, among progressive Democrats there have been open calls for socialism.

The Republicans talk a better game on this point.  President Trump, for example, publicly stated that American would never be a socialist country to loud applause.  Very well, let us hope he is right.  But since that speech, the president has added another branch to the military and praised a major infrastructure bill in his latest State of the Union address just a few weeks ago.  Indeed, at the end of January Politico reported that “The federal deficit under President Donald Trump will top $1 trillion this year” and project an average deficit of $1.3 trillion over the next ten years.  In the opinion of this writer, the actual deficits likely will be much larger.

And while government – federal, state and local - keeps getting larger and larger and more and more intrudes into our lives, regardless of whether the Republicans or the Democrats are in power, it also is becoming steadily more secretive.

While not the only example of secret government, the Federal Reserve could certainly be put forth as Exhibit A in this regard. Technically not part of the federal government – although chartered by the Federal Reserve Act, it is privately owned - the Fed, America’s central bank, has been shrouded in darkness even before it was officially voted into existence on Christmas Eve, 1913.  In the first chapter of The Creature from Jeykyll Island: A Second Look at the Federal Reserve, author G. Edward Griffin describes the 1910 secret meeting on Jekyll Island, Georgia, where powerful senators and financiers met to draw up plans for the Federal Reserve.  It was, in Griffin’s words, “a classic conspiracy.”

Over the years, the Fed has jealously maintained it secretive nature.  One writer captured the mysterious nature of it quite well in the title of his book on the Fed, Secrets of the Temple: How the Federal Reserve Runs the Country.

Over the years various attempts have been made to open the Fed’s books and reveal the temple’s secrets, but to date they have come up short.  The last time Congress tried to pass a bill to increase Congressional scrutiny of the Fed, then Fed Chairman Janet Yellen wrote a three page letter to then Speaker of the House Paul Ryan and Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi complaining that the proposal would “severely impair the Federal Reserve’s ability to carry out its mandate to foster maximum employment and stable prices.”  Nothing ever came of that bill.

When overnight repo rates suddenly spiked from around 2% to 10%, the Fed immediately swung into action to tamp rates back down.  This intervention, which was originally supposed to last a few days or a few weeks at most, is still going on nearly five months later.

One odd thing about it:  There has never been a clear, official explanation concerning the reason the overnight rates spiked as they did.

Back in October 2019, presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren wrote a letter to Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin asking “why they [the Fed’s nightly bailouts of the repo market] were necessary.”  The letter made the news cycle for a day or two, then disappeared into the ether.  It seems that the powers-that-be sat Warren down and explained to her how things are, that one does not tug on Superman’s cape, even, and perhaps especially, a presidential candidate.

The Fed, it’s still shrouded in secrecy after all these years.

Just to be clear, this is not an endorsement of Elizabeth Warren’s presidential candidacy, but she was not wrong to ask for an explanation of the Fed’s actions.  Curiously, though, she went to the Secretary of the Treasury with her question, not to Jerome Powell, Chairman of the Fed.  The reason for her choice of action is unclear to this author.

To date, there still has been no adequate, official explanation why the Fed is bailing out the repo market in increasingly large amounts each night.  The official word is, move along folks, nothing to see here.

This has left truth seeking financial analysts to speculate about just what’s on fire to cause the spike in overnight lending rates an the now five months old bailout. One common suspect is Deutsche Bank (DB), the largest bank in Europe, which has been on fire for a number of years and almost certainly should have collapsed by now.  That it is still standing is evidence that DB is secretly being bailed out.  Given the Fed’s actions in 2008, it is not at all unreasonable to suspect that its bailout of the repo market is in some way related to keeping DB alive.

A Better Way

As was mentioned earlier in this post, Jesus’ words comparing the world’s approach to government – “the rulers of the Gentiles exercise lordship over them” – to the Christian approach to government, those who seek to lead are to serve, has a much wider application than just he church.

At the time of the Reformation, we began to see this put into action, as both the size and scope of government were reduced, and governments were subjected to an annual accounting.

But in the decadent 20th and 21st centuries, we have witnessed a reversal of the gains made during the 16th century.  Governments have grown ever larger, and governors have come to see themselves, not as the servants of the people, but as a privileged class to whom ordinary people must give obeisance.

In many nations throughout the West there is an increasing sense that government of the people, by the people and for the people - these words, by the way, known to most Americans as part of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, were not original with Lincoln, he was quoting John Wycliff who in 1384 wrote in the prologue of this translation of the Bible, “The Bible is for the Government of the People, by the People, and for the People -  has become a forgotten concept.

There is good reason for people to believe this.

But if Western nations are ever to recover some semblance of their lost liberties, that change will not come through the political process.  It will have to come through the pulpit.

Jesus said, “Therefore if the Son makes you free, you shall be free indeed.” Jesus’ primary reference here was spiritual freedom, but it is not a stretch to see in his statement political and economic implications as well.

It was the Reformation’s teaching of Justification by Faith Alone that first brought spiritual, and later, political and economic freedom to the nations it touched.  And it is the disappearance of Reformation doctrine in those same nations that has led to their increasing slide into political authoritarianism.

Quite possibly the most egregious example of the enslavement of once free nations in Europe and North America is the erection of a system of secretive central banking in those same nations over the past century or so.

Ron Paul tells us that we need to audit and then end the Fed.  To this I can only say amen.

But for that to happen, the American people have a lot of repenting to do.