Thomas Jefferson - Banks more Dangerous than Armies

Read some of the many things Thomas Jefferson said about how Banks controling money is very bad.

Remember the Federal in "Federal Reserve" is no different than the
Federal in "Federal Express"



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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 wake up homeless on the continent their fathers occupied. The issuing power of money should be taken from the bankers and restored to Congress and the people to whom it belongs. I sincerely believe the banking institutions having the issuing power of money are more dangerous to liberty than standing armies.

We are completely saddled and bridled, and the bank is so firmly mounted on us that we must go where they ill guide.

The dominion which the banking institutions have obtained over the minds of our citizens...must be broken, or it will break us.

(Letter to James Monroe, January 1, 1815).

"Paper is poverty,... it is only the ghost of money, and not money itself." --Thomas Jefferson to Edward Carrington, 1788. ME 7:36


"The trifling economy of paper, as a cheaper medium, or its convenience for transmission, weighs nothing in opposition to the advantages of the precious metals... it is liable to be abused, has been, is, and forever will be abused, in every country in which it is permitted." --Thomas Jefferson to John W. Eppes, 1813. ME 13:430

"I now deny [the Federal Government's] power of making paper money or anything else a legal tender." --Thomas Jefferson to John Taylor, 1798. ME 10:65


"The incorporation of a bank and the powers assumed [by legislation doing so] have not, in my opinion, been delegated to the United States by the Constitution. They are not among the powers specially enumerated." --Thomas Jefferson: Opinion on Bank, 1791. ME 3:146


"[The] Bank of the United States... is one of the most deadly hostility existing, against the principles and form of our Constitution... An institution like this, penetrating by its branches every part of the Union, acting by command and in phalanx, may, in a critical moment, upset the government. I deem no government safe which is under the vassalage of any self-constituted authorities, or any other authority than that of the nation, or its regular functionaries. What an obstruction could not this bank of the United States, with all its branch banks, be in time of war! It might dictate to us the peace we should accept, or withdraw its aids. Ought we then to give further growth to an institution so powerful, so hostile?" --Thomas Jefferson to Albert Gallatin, 1803. ME 10:437

============ ofcourse now its the other way round - it dictates the war we should be accepting ================

"Certainly no nation ever before abandoned to the avarice and jugglings of private individuals to regulate according to their own interests, the quantum of circulating medium for the nation -- to inflate, by deluges of paper, the nominal prices of property, and then to buy up that property at 1s. in the pound, having first withdrawn the floating medium which might endanger a competition in purchase. Yet this is what has been done, and will be done, unless stayed by the protecting hand of the legislature. The evil has been produced by the error of their sanction of this ruinous machinery of banks; and justice, wisdom, duty, all require that they should interpose and arrest it before the schemes of plunder and spoilation desolate the country." --Thomas Jefferson to William C. Rives, 1819. ME 15:232