End The Fed: Monetary Myths and the Machinery of Control

Ryan Haylett

Let’s talk about the greatest sleight of hand ever pulled in the name of “stability.”

Ryan Haylett

In the early 1900s, America’s financial system was chaos. Banks failed regularly. Depositors lined up outside, desperate to pull their savings before the vaults went empty. The Panic of 1907 nearly brought the system down, and in the aftermath, the political and financial elite decided something had to change. But the “solution” wasn’t designed for the average person—it was built for the banks themselves. That solution was the Federal Reserve, created in 1913.

Ryan Haylett

The Fed isn’t a normal government agency. It’s a hybrid—part public, part private. The Board of Governors is appointed by the president, which makes it look like democratic oversight. But the twelve regional Reserve Banks are owned by private member banks. These banks hold stock in the system, collect dividends, and directly influence monetary policy. It’s a structure that looks like accountability from a distance but functions as insulation from it.

Ryan Haylett

The power of the Federal Reserve rests in money creation. Here’s how it works: when the federal government needs funds, it issues Treasury bonds. The Fed buys those bonds—not with money it earned, but with money it creates electronically. In other words, dollars are born as an entry in a ledger. Those dollars enter the banking system, and through fractional reserve lending, private banks multiply them further by issuing loans many times larger than their reserves.

Ryan Haylett

Every dollar that exists starts as debt. That's all the George Washingtons in your wallet are. When the Fed creates money by buying bonds, the government owes both the principal and the interest on that debt. But only the principal enters circulation. The interest does not. This means the system always requires more borrowing to cover what already exists. It is mathematically impossible for all debts to be repaid. The economy must continually expand, or the structure begins to collapse.

Ryan Haylett

This design ensures a perpetual cycle: governments borrow, the Fed creates dollars, banks expand credit, and citizens spend their lives paying down obligations that can never be cleared. Money itself is not wealth—it’s a claim on future labor, backed by law and enforced by courts. What most people carry in their wallets or see in their bank apps are IOUs tied to someone else’s debt.

Ryan Haylett

The Federal Reserve wasn’t created in a political vacuum. It came out of closed-door negotiations between the most powerful financial families in the country and the politicians who relied on them. The Jekyll Island meeting of 1910, where the blueprint for the Fed was drafted, included representatives of J.P. Morgan, the Rockefeller empire, the Kuhn, Loeb & Co. banking house, and the Warburg family from Germany. These were dynasties with direct ties to both Wall Street and European finance, and their goal was clear: centralize control of credit in a way that protected big banks from collapse while allowing them to expand their reach.

Ryan Haylett

The Morgans dominated railroads and heavy industry finance. The Rockefellers had already built a near-monopoly on oil through Standard Oil and were moving aggressively into banking. The Warburgs, through Paul Warburg, brought the European model of central banking to the United States. Kuhn, Loeb & Co., with Jacob Schiff at the helm, financed railroads, utilities, and was deeply embedded in international markets. Together, these families and firms weren’t just participants in the economy—they were its architects.

Ryan Haylett

Politicians played their part as well. President Woodrow Wilson signed the Federal Reserve Act into law, later admitting in private that he feared he had handed too much power to the banks. But other political figures gave cover in the years before and after. Senator Nelson Aldrich—whose daughter married into the Rockefeller family—championed the legislation. He was essential in carrying the bankers’ plan through Congress.

Ryan Haylett

When the system they designed met its first true crisis during the Great Depression, President Herbert Hoover was at the helm. Hoover believed in voluntary cooperation between business and government, resisting direct intervention in the economy. His administration leaned heavily on the Fed and private bankers to manage the crisis. Instead of stabilizing, the Fed contracted the money supply, worsening bank failures and accelerating unemployment. Hoover’s refusal to challenge the financial elite or break with orthodox policy deepened the collapse. His loyalty to balanced budgets and creditor interests over direct public relief revealed the tight alignment between political leadership and banking power.

Ryan Haylett

This wasn’t accidental. From the beginning, the Federal Reserve was shaped to serve the largest financial institutions and the families behind them. The result was a structure where a handful of private dynasties and their political allies could dictate the direction of the national economy. The myth of a “free market” masked a system engineered to consolidate power at the top, leaving the risks and the costs to be absorbed by everyone else.

Ryan Haylett

The crash of 1929 didn’t come out of a clear blue sky. It was engineered by the very elites who had built the Federal Reserve and controlled credit. In the years leading up to it, easy loans and rampant speculation pumped the market full of leverage. Then, when it suited their interests, the same bankers who fueled the bubble pulled the plug—calling in margin loans, withdrawing capital, and leaving ordinary investors exposed. What followed wasn’t just a correction; it was a controlled demolition of the economy. The Great Depression wasn’t the failure of a free market. It was the success of a rigged system, designed so that the risks fell on millions of ordinary families while the architects positioned themselves to consolidate even more power.

Ryan Haylett

When the stock market collapsed, millions of Americans expected the newly established Federal Reserve to step in and stabilize the system. That was the promise of its creation: a lender of last resort, able to expand credit and protect banks from collapse. Instead, the Fed did the opposite. It contracted the money supply. Credit dried up precisely when businesses and households needed liquidity the most.

Ryan Haylett

The result was a cascade of bank failures. Depositors lined up outside of banks, only to find the doors locked and their savings gone. Thousands of banks failed between 1929 and 1933. Families lost everything overnight, and unemployment soared to 25%. The Fed had the tools to expand the money supply, but it chose not to. Whether out of ideology, fear, or loyalty to creditor interests, it allowed the economy to spiral downward.

Ryan Haylett

Then came one of the most radical moves in U.S. economic history: Executive Order 6102, signed by President Franklin Roosevelt in 1933. Citizens were forced to turn in their gold to the Federal Reserve. Private ownership of gold coins and bullion was criminalized. In exchange, people received paper notes backed not by gold, but by the promises of the banking system itself. The gold standard—once the anchor of American currency—was dismantled, and the government now held direct control over monetary value.

Ryan Haylett

This shift gave the Fed and the Treasury total discretion over money creation. Inflation and deflation could now be engineered from the top down. The dollar became an instrument of policy, not a store of real value. For the average citizen, the implications were devastating. Savings were wiped out, debts became harder to pay, and trust in institutions fractured. The supposed solution to instability—central banking—delivered deeper instability, with ordinary people paying the price.

Ryan Haylett

The Federal Reserve Act wasn’t the only seismic change of 1913. In the same year, the Sixteenth Amendment made the federal income tax permanent. That timing wasn’t coincidental. Central banking gave elites the ability to create money as debt; the income tax guaranteed a reliable revenue stream to service the interest on that debt.For ordinary Americans, this was a turning point. Before 1913, federal revenues came mostly from tariffs, excise taxes, and trade duties. You paid sales taxes on goods, but your paycheck wasn’t tapped by Washington every year. Once the income tax was law, the government gained a direct claim on the labor of every working citizen.

Ryan Haylett

So what does the Federal Income Tax Fund? Here’s the part most people miss: the bulk of income tax revenue does not go toward building roads, funding schools, or paying for hospitals. Those services are typically funded by state and local taxes—property taxes, sales taxes, and state income taxes.

Ryan Haylett

A portion of the federal income tax goes to interest payments on the national debt. This is the quiet siphon. Hundreds of billions each year go to bondholders—banks, hedge funds, foreign governments—that own U.S. Treasuries. It doesn’t reduce the debt, it just services the interest.

Ryan Haylett

Another massive portion of discretionary federal spending flows into the Pentagon, defense contractors, overseas bases, and weapons programs. If the United States governments wants to stick to its imperial tendencies, It needs to keep the empire armed.

Ryan Haylett

The average taxpayer assumes their federal income taxes are fixing infrastructure, building schools, funding community programs, or maybe even paying down the national debt. In reality:

Ryan Haylett

Public education is mostly state and local, not federal.

Ryan Haylett

Local infrastructure like roads, bridges, and utilities rely heavily on state budgets and municipal bonds.

Ryan Haylett

Healthcare outside of Medicare and Medicaid is mostly private or state-managed.

Ryan Haylett

Welfare and social safety nets are forced to compete with debt service and military spending.

Ryan Haylett

And absolutely none of your tax payer dollars go to paying down the principal of the national debt. It will never be paid off, and it was never meant to be paid off.

Ryan Haylett

The Bigger Picture is that the design is intentional. Federal income taxes are less about funding government services than about guaranteeing the federal government can meet its obligations to creditors. It’s a system where taxpayers’ labor is pledged to ensure continuous interest payments to the holders of government debt.

Ryan Haylett

Think of it this way: when you write that check to the IRS every April, you’re not just paying “for society.” You’re paying rent to a financial system that creates money as debt and then demands repayment with interest. You’re financing an endless cycle where the principal can never be retired, because only the debt is created—not the interest owed on it.

Ryan Haylett

Andrew Jackson warned that central banking would “make the rich richer and the poor poorer.” The marriage of the Federal Reserve and the federal income tax guaranteed it. Together, they created a pipeline: money conjured into existence at the top, and labor harvested from the bottom to keep the system solvent.

Ryan Haylett

Inflation further locked the system into place. When the Fed expands the money supply, the new dollars flow not into workers’ paychecks, but into financial markets and asset prices. Stocks rise, real estate appreciates, and the wealthy see their holdings multiply. At the same time, wages stagnate and consumer prices climb. This is not an accident of “market forces”—it is the mechanism by which the system transfers wealth upward.

Ryan Haylett

After the Depression and World War II, the United States emerged as the dominant industrial and military power. At the 1944 Bretton Woods Conference in New Hampshire, 44 allied nations met to design a new global monetary order. The agreement made the U.S. dollar the world’s reserve currency, pegged to gold at $35 an ounce. Other currencies were tied to the dollar, and international trade would be settled in dollars.

Ryan Haylett

For the U.S., this was an unprecedented advantage. The dollar wasn’t just money—it became the backbone of global finance. Nations needed dollars to buy oil, trade goods, and settle debts. America could run deficits and still enjoy global demand for its currency. Bretton Woods cemented U.S. financial hegemony.

Ryan Haylett

But the design carried cracks. To maintain the peg, the U.S. had to hold enough gold to back the dollars in circulation. As America fought costly wars in Korea and Vietnam, expanded military bases across the world, and ran persistent trade deficits, dollars piled up abroad while U.S. gold reserves shrank. By the 1960s, foreign governments—most famously France under Charles de Gaulle—started demanding gold in exchange for their dollars, exposing how overstretched the system had become.

Ryan Haylett

By the early 1970s, the math no longer worked. There were too many dollars in circulation and not enough gold to redeem them. The U.S. faced a choice: devalue the dollar or abandon the peg. In 1971, Richard Nixon chose the latter, closing the gold window and formally ending Bretton Woods. The dollar floated free, untethered from any physical anchor, and became a purely fiat currency.

Ryan Haylett

This shift didn’t just change the American economy—it reshaped the world. It handed the Federal Reserve and Treasury unprecedented control over monetary policy, and it locked the rest of the globe into a system where U.S. debt and U.S. currency dictated the terms of trade. The era of managed scarcity at home became an era of dollar dominance abroad.

Ryan Haylett

From that point on, the U.S. economy floated on faith in the Federal Reserve’s management. The result was predictable: widening inequality, repeated credit bubbles, and a middle class forced onto an economic treadmill that moves faster every decade. Whether Democrats or Republicans held office, the underlying machinery remained untouched.

Ryan Haylett

The system we live under today is not capitalism in the romantic sense, nor is it democracy in practice. It is debt management by elites. Citizens are expected to spend their lives servicing obligations created out of nothing—student loans, mortgages, credit cards, medical bills—while the creators of the system harvest interest. Every paycheck is already spoken for. Every attempt to save is eroded by inflation. The result is a population running in place, unable to build wealth, unable to escape.

Ryan Haylett

And this dynamic doesn’t stop at U.S. borders. International institutions like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank replicate the same pattern on a global scale. Developing nations are offered loans under the guise of “modernization.” When the debts become unpayable, those nations are forced into structural adjustment: cutting social programs, privatizing industries, and selling off natural resources to foreign investors. Sovereignty is traded for solvency. This is empire enforced not by armies, but by balance sheets.

Ryan Haylett

Defenders of the system insist that competition and scarcity are “human nature.” But what they call natural is simply the logic of profit. Scarcity ensures demand. Debt ensures compliance. The carrot stays just far enough ahead to keep entire societies running after it, never allowed to catch up.

Ryan Haylett

The truth is that technological capacity today could support abundance. Automation, renewable energy, global communications—these tools could reduce labor, spread resources, and improve life across the board. But abundance undermines profit. So the system clings to debt, scarcity, and fear.

Ryan Haylett

Ending this cycle would require dismantling the foundations: the Federal Reserve, the monopoly on money creation, and the institutions that enforce it. In their place, a system of democratic oversight, public control over currency, and policies designed for stability and abundance could be built. That vision is radical only because we’ve been conditioned to accept a treadmill as normal life.

Ryan Haylett

Until then, we remain debtors in a system where money is power, and power is concentrated in the hands of those who create money. The chains are invisible, but they are no less real.

Ryan Haylett

If any of this sounds distant or abstract, just look at the last two decades. In 2008, when reckless speculation and fraud on Wall Street brought the global economy to its knees, the Federal Reserve didn’t hesitate. Trillions of dollars were conjured overnight to bail out the very institutions that caused the collapse. The public got foreclosures, unemployment, and a decade of austerity. The banks got bonuses.

Ryan Haylett

That’s not ancient history—it’s the same playbook. Quantitative easing, zero interest rate policies, corporate bailouts during the COVID-19 pandemic—all of it showed exactly who the Fed serves. When the financial elite are in danger, liquidity is infinite. When ordinary people need relief, suddenly the money isn’t there. The debt treadmill speeds up, while wealth at the top grows even faster.

Ryan Haylett

Student debt is another example.

Ryan Haylett

Trillions in obligations hang over a generation, preventing home ownership, suppressing family formation, and trapping millions in perpetual repayment. These loans are profitable to lenders, guaranteed by the government, and enforceable by law. For the Fed, they are another instrument of compliance—a way to ensure that young workers enter the economy already indebted, already tethered.

Ryan Haylett

And then there’s the response bubbling under the surface. Cryptocurrency, whatever its flaws, exploded because people wanted an escape hatch. Bitcoin’s central promise—that money could exist outside the Federal Reserve’s reach—spoke to a growing distrust of fiat systems. Whether crypto becomes a solution or just another speculative bubble, its rise shows the hunger for alternatives to a financial order built on debt and control.

Ryan Haylett

The machinery created in 1913 didn’t just survive—it evolved. The faces have changed, but the design is the same: risk privatized when it benefits elites, socialized when it harms the public. Debt as the constant, control as the outcome. The story of the Fed isn’t about economic stability. It’s about economic power—who holds it, and who pays for it.

Ryan Haylett

Until that structure is confronted, the cycle will continue. Panics, crashes, bailouts, inequality—repeat. The question isn’t whether the system is broken. The question is how long we’ll keep pretending it was built to serve us in the first place.