Reply To: Who rules the world?
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From my understanding, pretty much all shares are in the name of Cede & Co, unless you actually hold a paper title. But vast majority of stock holders don’t today. As such, you can’t easily check. I guess you could call up your securities intermediary (like Questrade) and ask “Hey, those 1,000 shares of XYZ company, are they in my name? If so, can you send me a notarized copy of those shares in my name so I can check?”
However, The ABCs of the UCC on Article 8 goes through how it works in the indirect holding system. You don’t really hold stock, which is a security, you hold a “security entitlement” to that stock. In fact, the book even goes into what can happen if a broker doesn’t have enough credited shares to cover all their customer’s security entitlements. It also talks about Jumbo Certificates, and Uncertificated Securities. It’s only 110 pages, and fairly expensive for a book that size, but the info in it is blockbuster, and as I mentioned before, it’s published by the American Bar Association. You can find it on Amazon and other bookstores, and directly on the ABA website. It’s written for lawyers and legal professionals, but I think any layman could pretty easily understand it. I’d say it’s worth the 35 bucks or so.
As far as the Fed goes, I’m sure there are corrupt officials within it, but for the most part, they are probably doing exactly what they are “supposed” to, in regards to The Federal Reserve Act, and other legislation. The two major issues are first, did Congress have the authority to delegate part of their power to a private entity? Not contract for services, mind you, but delegate power to a private entity? With that idea, you may want to listen to Justice Scalia’s answer to this hypothetical question from Senator Lee (first 7 minutes or so)
The second issue is how exactly the Federal Reserve creates “money” in the first place. This has been discussed in many places, but you might want to check Congressman Patman’s remarks in the 1932 congressional record (there’s websites that have reprinted them, but you can download the record from Congress dot gov, and read it straight from the source. Note, those PDFs are huge files, since they are photos of old papers, with tiny text, and thousands of pages per book). Tom Shauf’s books are also good, he was a CPA who went over what happens when a “loan” takes place in the current system.
As for Bretton Woods, my understanding was that foreign countries (and probably other foreign agents) could redeem Federal Reserve Notes for gold, but that “US Citizens” could not. So, “Quasi Gold Standard” is probably the correct term. The France/Germany “bank run” you describe might have lead to a serious reduction, and maybe fear of total depletion of gold reserves, hence the trigger of the “Nixon Shock.” It was shortly after this that The Gold Reserve Act was amended, and “US Citizens” could hold gold again, and could more freely trade it.
An interesting case in this regard is “United States vs. One Solid Gold Object In the Form of a Rooster.” Clearly an In Rem case under Admiralty, and as it was before the “Federal Rules of Civil Procedure,” still used Admiralty terms like Libellant and Libelee. You can search Google Scholar under the case section, if you want to read it.