August 8, 2012 – The economy has sparked a wide variety of truly bizarre conspiracy theories. People continue to believe them. The internet has given them a wider forum and audience, and has proved to be fertile ground for these ideas to spread.
These are the myths and conspiracy theories that just won’t die.
1) The Federal Reserve is a private corporation run for the profit of its shareholder banks.
This one’s been kicking around almost since the creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913. It’s the subject of a three hour documentary called “The Money Masters”. The reality: Nationally chartered banks do hold stock in their regional Federal Reserve Banks, and receive a small portion (6 percent of their stock) of the profits of their regional banks, which is presumably the origin of this theory.
2) Official inflation statistics dramatically understate the true rate.
As long as currency has existed there have been conspiracy theories about it. The more recent iterations are claims by people like John Williams at Shadowstats that the government has reconfigured the CPI to understate inflation, and claims that the Federal Reserve’s use of core rather than headline inflation leads to underestimation of the real rate and policy error.
3) There’s a conspiracy to suppress precious metal prices
Due to its use as a hedge against inflation, and the ongoing insistence that we return to a gold standard, there will always be a loud contingent of gold conspiracists. More recently, Ted Butler has led claims that the silver market is being manipulated by a small cabal of traders, and an organization called the Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee claims that central and private banks works to suppress press gold prices.
Keep Reading: The 12 Most Popular Economic Conspiracy Theories.
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Rush is right, the economic crisis was deliberately manufactured by the Democrats like Barney frank and Chris Dodd..to get back into power, and get Obama elected…
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