Yep, Bobert. All smoke and mirrors. When dollars were taken off the gold and silver standard they became virtually worthless, and it's been all smoke and mirrors ever since. When I was a child you could redeem an American dollar in silver coin at any bank. Those were silver certificates, and that was real money.

The Fed creates fiat money...not real money...and they create massive amounts of it, mostly through huge loans to Third World countries who can never pay it back and through other scams like the real estate bubble. The Third World countries and other debtors end up staggering under an unpayable mass of debt, but the banks don't care as long as they get their interest payments.

Finally the whole thing starts to implode, because it's just a pyramid scheme. The government then rushes in (at the behest of the banks) to "save" the situation. The way they save it is by bailing out the banks with MORE borrowed money. That increases the national debt, which is already so huge that it staggers the imagination...and the banks get more interest...and the public pays ALL of it, through taxes and inflation.

And the boom and bust cycle rolls on once again.

Obama and Bush both rolled over and capitulated to the banks, and that tells me right there who really runs the government.

Imagine what you or I could do, Bobert, if we could create money out of thin air the way the banks do. Why, we could make a 12 billion dollar loan next week to Rumania, say, at a nice competitive interest rate. And where did that $12 billion come from? Well, it just magically appeared from thin air as an "asset" on our bank's balance sheet the moment the loan was signed and confirmed. Suddenly there were 12 billion more digital dollars floating around in the world's computers...and the government did not mint or print those dollars...but there they are on the balance sheet. Wow. And think of the interest payments! Yippee! We're rich. Meanwhile the Rumanians use much of the magic $12 billion dollars to pay off some of their old outstanding interest charges on previous such loans, they siphon off more for corruption and personal favors in Rumania, and maybe a bit of it is actually used for something worthwhile. Who knows? But we don't care, because we just acquired $12 billion more dollars in our assets and we're getting interest too. Let's make 20 more such loans to 20 other countries right away.

Holy shit. Talk about a money tree. Why doesn't everyone become a banker with a system like this in place?