Many expect Mr. Jerome H. Powell to be President Trump pick for Fed Chairman. Trump is resisting pressure by conservatives to make a larger change at the Fed. Many conservatives, including Vice President Mike Pence, preferred John B. Taylor, who is an economist at Stanford and an outspoken critic of the Fed’s monetary policy. Taylor previously served in the Treasury Department during the Bush administration. However, he is best known as an academic economist with no real experience hands-on. He wrote an approach to monetary policy, known as the “Taylor Rule,” where he suggested that the Fed should be raising rates more quickly. That was obviously based on the economic theory of the Quantity of Money leads to inflation. He also has closely advised House Republicans on legislation that would require the Fed to adopt such a policy rule taking a hawkish approach to monetary policy.

Representative Warren Davidson, a Republican on the House Financial Services Committee’s monetary policy panel, is one of the people who want a change in policy toward more conservative and austerity. He is circulating a letter opposing Yellen’s reappointment. Personally, I believe Yellen has done a good job. She has been under international pressure not to raise rates from the IMF and just about everyone else because Europe is still floundering and higher rates would be expected to push the ECB and emerging markets off into the deep-end of the pool.

Mr. Powell, on the other hand, has consistently supported the Fed’s campaign to stimulate economic growth. However, Powell expressed some reservations in internal debates about the extent of those efforts. In more recent years, Powell has backed the methodical unwinding of those efforts, and analysts expect he will seek to raise interest rates at about the same pace as Ms. Yellen.

I have written about the abuse of Civil Asset Forfeiture laws in the United States, which have mimicked now in Europe. Police are no longer used to protect society, but to target and harass society to raise money for the politicians. It is a shame that Trump has never been pulled over by the police. He would have received a taste of the attitude that confronts you.

The town of Castleberry, Alabama is just the tip of the iceberg. This tiny town of just 550 people has a police force 5 times the size of the national average per citizen. Why? They use every excuse to pull people over and confiscate whatever they can. The police have become the highway robbers that the Knights Templar were once formed to protect travelers on their pilgrimages.

The Knights Templar began a banking system because it became too dangerous to travel with money. These people would rob you giving rise to the term “highway robbery”. If you were in London and needed to send money to someone in Rome, you went to the Knights Templar and they would simply send a message and the local branch in Rome would make the payment for you and London took in your payment. This was how international payments began to surface after the Dark Age.

The French king seized the Papacy, moved it to Avignon in France, install a French Pope who then declared the Knights Templars were devil worshipers and seized all their wealth on Friday the 13th. They were all burned at the stake alive and the king got to keep all the money. This became the Financial Crisis of the 13Th-14th Century.

Looks like history repeats. We are back to highway robbery. Castleberry is by far not unique. %There are many small towns now doing the same thing to raise money for public officials.

QUESTION: Mr. Armstrong; I read you One-World-Currency report. It was truly fascinating. From an academic perspective, what came first in the formation of civilization; agriculture or cities? Where does money fit into this historical perspective?

Thank you;

FD

ANSWER: There has been a fair amount of assumption that went into the history we were all taught in school. What has emerged since is a different perspective, to say the least! There are megaliths at Göbekli Tepe which were erected by hunter-gatherers around 9000 BC or about 3,000 years before history starts to be recorded. Göbekli Tepe is a stone-age mountain sanctuary. It has turned everything upside down insofar as it was assumed that the city came first and then agriculture. It appears that agriculture came first which enable people to create cities.

Göbekli Tepe proves that there was a shift from animism, a belief that attributes a soul to plants, inanimate objects, and natural phenomena inasmuch as there is some supernatural power that organizes and animates the material universe, to centralized religion. In other words, there was a shift from an egalitarian society all people are equal to a hierarchical society arranged in order of rank. Clearly, there had to be a profound economic change and yes there would have to be some sort of monetary reward in the form of some resource to create such a shift from an egalitarian to a hierarchical society.

Göbekli Tepe is extremely important despite its obscure purpose and meaning. It is not the meaning that we need argue over. The incredible fact is that such a monument was constructed in the first place 9000BC. The simple fact of its existence proves historical assumption dead wrong. It matters not whether these pillars that are carved were some religious rite or just a decoration. More than 200 pillars in about 20 circles are currently known and only 5% of the site has been excavated. The astonishing fact is economic. Producing more than 200 pillars took a lot of man-hours. That means the workers needed a stable food supply and therefore agricultural cultivate MUST have been existence BEFORE cities were carved out of stone.

The construction of Göbekli Tepe would also have required some division of labor among overseers, technicians, and workers and management. Therefore, this required a hierarchical society. Therefore, social development in creating such structures must have precipitated, rather than resulted from, the shift to agriculture.

The assumption was that cities came first and then cultivation. Obviously, you had to feed the people to construct the cities first. My bet is on cultivation came first and food became money. Money moved from food to clothing. We see the first use of metal as money being Bronze imitating a sheepskin, which was the standard of value; i.e. Jason and the Golden Fleece.

Even the early Roman bronze Aes Signatum (5 pounds of bronze) pictures a bull. Cattle were also a main monetary unit of value prior to metal.