The Return of the Gold Standard

April 12, 1866, nearly one year to the day of Lincoln’s assassination, Congress went to work at the bidding of the European central-banking interests. It passed the Contraction Act, authorizing the Secretary of the Treasury to begin to retire the Greenbacks in circulation and to contract the money supply.

Authors Theodore R. Thoren and Richard F. Warner explained the results of the money contraction in their classic book on the subject, “The Truth in Money Book”:

“The hard times which occurred after the Civil War could have been avoided if the Greenback legislation had continued as President Lincoln had intended. Instead, there were a series of ‘money panics’ – what we call ‘recessions’ which put pressure on Congress to enact legislation to place the banking system under centralized control. Eventually the Federal Reserve Act was passed on December 23, 1913.”

In other words, the Money Changers wanted two things: 1) the re-institution of a central bank under their exclusive control, and, 2) an American currency backed by their gold.

Their strategy was two-fold: first of all, to cause a series of panics to try to convince the American people that only centralized control of the money supply could provide economic stability; and secondly, to remove so much money from the system that most Americans would be so desperately poor that they either wouldn’t care or would be too weak to oppose the bankers