Badlands Book Club: The Creature From Jekyll Island - Chapter 2

CannCon and Ashe in America dig into Chapter 2 of G. Edward Griffin's The Creature from Jekyll Island and the game has a name: Bailout. The crew breaks down how the Federal Reserve system allows banks to create money from nothing, loan it recklessly to corporations and foreign governments, and then use a series of plays, debt rollover, upping the ante, rescheduling, and the protect-the-public maneuver, to shift every inevitable loss onto the backs of American taxpayers. The FDIC gets exposed not as insurance but as a moral hazard machine that actually incentivizes reckless lending. Inflation gets called what it is: a hidden tax paid by the public to cover losses they never agreed to absorb. The 2008 mortgage crisis gets name-checked as a textbook example. The parallels to elections, campaign finance smurfing in Colorado, and consent to be governed round out a chapter that will leave you educated and furious in equal measure.