Statistically speaking those pre-1913 deflationary cycles were not significant. The Great Depression and the Great Recession are statistically significant as well as numerous recessions in between.
Economic cycles are a force and fact of nature. The effect of the Fed has been to exacerbate the natural cycles and render them more volatile.
Yes they have staved off previous deflationary cycles but with the result of causing inflationary cycles, more emphatic booms and busts and a burden on taxpayers by buying Treasuries purchased from phantom dollars. Today they are doing the same, preventing a deflationary collapse at the expense of the existing and prolonged insolvency of federal and state governments, impossible to service sovereign debt and the consequence or resorting to hyper-inflation to extinguish the debt problem.
Bernanke himself said he doesn’t have a solution. They don’t know what they are doing but they certainly played a key role in bubbling certain targeted sectors of commerce and then pullingthe plug creating in effect profit opportunities for their crony investment bank members.
The Fed is the ringleader of the ultimate corruption, the ability to create money from thin air with no accountability save for window dressing hearings before Congress where no audits are compelled and no true oversight exists.
Just look at the recent disclosures of trillions to foreign governments and operatives by the Fed.
Each one of those dollars among the trillions competes with each of my dollars. If I want to buy copper on the world market, if I want to hire a ship captain to transport my products, if I want to purchase a business, then I have competitors who received free dollars from a concessionary that my government calls the Federal Reserve and which is not accountable.
No one can compete, no one can experience a truly fair market when there is an entity that can say “Presto!” and cause a billion dollars to appear from nowhere.
But the real damage done by the Federal Reserve is in the destruction of the value of the dollar. Today’s dollar is worth 2 cents of what a dollar was worth in 1913. That is all Fed driven and by their design.
Inflation is a tax and the Fed levies this tax.
The Fed deals today with a fiat currency. Every case example in history has shown that societies that depend on fiat currency collapse catastrophically.
The Fed was a creation from 1913, a year that also saw so many poor decisions such as making constitutional the income tax without apportionment.
There are solutions and designs of today that are of much better effect and efficiency than the poorly engineered tax and financing systems of 1913.
It’s time to End the Fed.
It’s time to amend the Constitution to repeal the 16th Amendment.
It’s time to enact the FairTax (http://www.fairtax.org/site/PageServer?pagename=about_faq).
Panic_of_1819 - 75% unemployment in philadelphia, tent cities in baltimore
Panic of 1837 - Half of banks failed, 5 year Depression
Panic of 1857
Panic of 1873 6 yr depression, 1/4 of all railroads bankrupt, 14% unemployment
Panic of 1884
Panic of 1890
Panic of 1893 5 year depression, 19% unemployment
Panic of 1896
Panic of 1901
Panic of 1910-1911