“If it’s not at the bottom of the page, it may be one he designed himself, or paid to have designed. You don’t have to use a theme with a copyright notice in Wordpress. (And most of the plugins don’t ever appear on the user’s browser, so you can…

Thanks for the digging.

It turns out the quote was very likely not from Jefferson.

Here is the link to the Snopes page about the quote:

http://www.snopes.com/quotes/jefferson/banks.asp

Indicentally, here is the quote:

“If the American people ever allow the banks to control the issuance of their currency, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of ALL PROPERTY until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers occupied.”

-Letter to then Secretary of the Treasury, Albert Gallatin, 1802

And yes, I do believe in the tooth fairy….

Speaking of the Exchange Stabilization Fund, I guess we should also expect it to bail banks out of their bad foreign bonds again. It’s a great racket: get banana republics to take on debt to pay US companies to build things there, then when the countries default, have the US taxpayer make the bondholders whole again.

But wait, under the new broader bailout language, “troubled assets” could include foreign bonds or anything at all. No more need to run these things by Congress piecemeal — their time is better spend grilling baseball players over steroids.

“The Department of the Treasury announced today that for the next year, it will insure the holdings of any publicly offered eligible money market mutual fund that pays a fee to participate in the program.
The agency received approval from President Bush to use the assets of the Exchange Stabilization Fund.

The Exchange Stabilization Fund was established by the Gold Reserve Act of 1934.

The act allows the secretary of the Treasury, with approval from the president, to “deal in gold, foreign exchange and other instruments of credit and securities” to promote international financial stability.”

The very mention of the Gold Reserve Act of 1934 caused warning bells to sound within me.

Thomas Jefferson saw it coming:

“If the American people ever allow the banks to control the issuance of their currency, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of ALL PROPERTY until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers occupied.”

-Letter to then Secretary of the Treasury, Albert Gallatin, 1802

Exclusive: Foreign banks may get help

By MIKE ALLEN | 9/21/08 7:24 AM EDT Text Size:
In a change from the original proposal sent to Capitol Hill, foreign-based banks with big U.S. operations could qualify for the Treasury Department’s mortgage bailout, according to the fine print of an administration statement Saturday night.

The theory, according to a participant in the negotiations, is that if the goal is to solve a liquidity crisis, it makes no sense to exclude banks that do a lot of lending in the United States.

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson confirmed the change on ABC’s “This Week,” telling George Stephanopoulos that coverage of foreign-based banks is “a distinction without a difference to the American people.”

This boggles my mind. I cannot quite imagine where this takes us. More of the same, I know, but this points to a magnitude of debt relief that I cannot comprehend.