James Tapper

The Government will collect £331bn in income tax this year, and spend £333bn on welfare. In other words, we now spend more on people not working than we raise from those who do. And the cost? Debt per person has risen from £11.5k in 2000 (inflation adjusted) to over £41k today.

Everyone from libertarian bloggers to Ivy League professors will tell you that Alexander Hamilton created the blueprint for the modern Federal Reserve. This is the greatest financial lie in American history. Hamilton's Bank of the United States and today's Federal Reserve are as different as honey and vinegar. Hamilton did not build an oligarchical central bank to endlessly print fiat money and bail out Wall Street speculators. Instead, he engineered a revolutionary system of Sovereign Public Credit designed to drive the physical industrialization, infrastructure development, and technological advancement of a new nation. Here is the exact data synthesis showing why Hamilton’s system was the absolute antithesis of the modern Fed: 1. It Could Not Monetize Government Debt: The Federal Reserve routinely buys U.S. debt, acting as an engine to grow endless federal borrowing. Hamilton’s Bank was strictly prohibited from monetizing government debt. 2. It Did Not Print Fiat Money: The Federal Reserve unconstitutionally prints its own money (Federal Reserve Notes). Hamilton’s Bank was forbidden from doing this and operated strictly on money issued by the U.S. Treasury under the Constitution. 3. It Was Heavily Audited: Today’s Fed operates independently with zero true oversight. Hamilton’s Bank had its books regularly audited by the U.S. Treasury, which was empowered to intervene against any unsound practices. 4. It Was Not a "Lender of Last Resort": The Fed sets monetary policy and bails out degenerate financial gambling. Hamilton's Bank had no power to set monetary policy—that belonged exclusively to Congress and the Treasury—and it existed to provide commercial loans to manufacturing, agriculture, and transportation. 5. It Was a Bulwark Against Speculation: Hamilton designed the bank to explicitly "succor the wary and industrious" while discrediting "usurious lenders and usurious borrowers". The core difference between these two systems lies in the fundamental definition of wealth. Modern central banking operates on the British imperial model, where value is nominally located in the money itself. The day-to-day operations of this system are driven by usurious and speculative monetary schemes to maximize private profit. Hamilton understood that money has no intrinsic value; it is merely a tool to facilitate the creation of true value. In his 1790 Report on a National Bank and his 1791 Report on the Subject of Manufactures, Hamilton argued that the ultimate source of all wealth comes from mankind’s creative discoveries and physical production. He stated clearly that "the intrinsic wealth of a nation is to be measured, not by the abundance of the precious metals contained in it, but by the quantity of the productions of its labor and industry". When George Washington made him Treasury Secretary, the young United States was completely bankrupt, suffocating under $77.1 million in debt. Instead of imposing crippling austerity, Hamilton executed a brilliant economic maneuver. He consolidated the state debts into one pile, funded them at par, and used that secured debt on deposit in the National Bank as collateral for the issuance of new loans. This created a "conveyor belt" of sovereign credit flowing directly from the U.S. Treasury, through the Bank, and into productive investments like factories, canals, and agriculture. The system functioned by utilizing future payments on credit to make long-term investments in physical infrastructure possible. By linking credit directly to physical output, this system stimulated "the activity of the human mind, by multiplying the objects of enterprise". Hamilton put this into practice by helping to found the Society for Establishing Useful Manufactures in 1791, creating an entire industrial complex in Paterson, New Jersey as a pilot project for public-private development. Furthermore, a portion of national tariff revenues was intentionally earmarked for "Bounties and Premiums" to directly fund the work of scientists and inventors creating technological breakthroughs. The system Hamilton built was designed as a direct weapon against the British Empire's economic model of "free trade" and raw material extraction. A Hamiltonian national bank provides sovereign governments the power to create productive credit and direct it to create new physical wealth, which subsequently extinguishes the debt. It acts as a capital budget for the nation, utterly distinct from the central bank model which simply monetizes debt to fuel asset bubbles. The Federal Reserve system we suffer under today is an oligarchical architecture designed to extract wealth and fund a parasitical financial elite. To rebuild American prosperity, we must stop pretending that endless fiat money printing from a private central bank is normal. We must return to a Hamiltonian framework of Sovereign Public Credit, where capital is directed exclusively toward infrastructure, manufacturing, and the boundless potential of human creativity.

The greatest financial revolution of our lifetime didn’t happen on Wall Street, and it wasn't debated on the floor of Congress. It happened when the United States Federal Reserve quietly assassinated LIBOR. For half a century, the global economy was held hostage by an interest rate set by a shadow cartel of banks in the City of London. It was the ultimate subversion of American sovereignty, a system designed to extract wealth and export control. But a silent financial coup has reclaimed the US dollar. Here is the untold story of the death of LIBOR, the weaponization of SOFR, and the explosive, real-time return of the true American System of economics. The Forgotten American System To understand what we just won back, you must first understand what was stolen from us. The American Revolution wasn't just a political war; it was an explicit, philosophical rebellion against the British Empire's economic model of free-trade imperialism, speculative finance, and raw material extraction. Our Founding Fathers, led by Alexander Hamilton, engineered a revolutionary alternative: The American System. This system relied on absolute national sovereignty over banking and the issuance of public credit to fund physical infrastructure, manufacturing, and scientific advancement. Hamilton’s National Bank was the exact opposite of the modern central banking cartel; it was strictly prohibited from monetizing government debt for financial speculation. Later, Abraham Lincoln revived this system with his Greenback policy to build the transcontinental railroad, proving that human creativity and productive labor—not stockpiled gold or speculative usury—are the true sources of a nation's wealth. The American System was designed to foster human potential, rejecting the British imperial model of parasitic rent-seeking and artificial scarcity. The Offshore Hijacking However, over the late 20th century, America surrendered its economic sovereignty to the very financial empire it once defeated. The mechanism of control was the "Eurodollar" market—trillions of US dollars held in offshore foreign bank accounts, operating completely outside the jurisdiction and regulation of the United States. To regulate this massive, shadow banking system, the London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR) was created. By 1986, LIBOR dominated the globe. It dictated the price of global dollar debt, allowing a handful of London banks to skim a massive vig off the world economy while systematically stripping the US Federal Reserve of its power. Because the entire world's debt was indexed to LIBOR, the Fed became a helpless dog wagged by its offshore tail. US monetary policy was constantly forced to chase offshore rates, bailing out foreign Eurodollar markets whenever they seized up to prevent domestic contagion. This was the ultimate betrayal of Hamilton and Lincoln. It aligned US monetary policy with European globalist objectives, fueling a system that stripped the American middle class of its wealth to subsidize a transnational financial oligarchy. The Kill Shot: Enter SOFR The turning point arrived in 2017, when a silent, coordinated effort began to break this colonial blackmail once and for all. Under the Trump administration, FOMC Chair Jerome Powell began the relentless transition away from LIBOR to the Secured Overnight Financing Rate (SOFR). This was not a mundane bureaucratic update. It was a financial declaration of independence. Unlike LIBOR, which was an uncollateralized rate manipulated by London banks, SOFR is a market-driven rate based strictly on domestic US repo markets and backed by actual Treasury collateral. By officially sunsetting LIBOR and fully implementing SOFR across US financial markets by 2022, the Federal Reserve achieved the impossible: it fundamentally decoupled onshore US dollars from offshore Eurodollars. Reclaiming the Republic The implementation of SOFR severed the direct link that allowed European banking powers to hold US credit markets hostage. Your home equity line of credit, your auto loan, and domestic corporate debt are no longer tied to the derivative books of offshore banks like Deutsche Bank or Barclays; they are tied directly to the Fed's policy rate and local US bank balance sheets. This single structural shift returned ultimate monetary power to Washington. Because the Fed no longer had to instantly bail out foreign markets to protect domestic lending, Jerome Powell gained the superpower to relentlessly hike interest rates. By aggressively raising the Fed Funds Rate to 5.5% and holding it there, Powell began starving the highly-leveraged Eurodollar system of vital liquidity. He weaponized the US dollar to crush the offshore shadow banking system that had parasitized American wealth for decades. The Hamiltonian Revival We are witnessing the violent, real-time death of the globalist monetary order. The transnational elite—often referred to as the "Davos Crowd"—relied entirely on zero-cost Eurodollars to fund their neo-feudal agendas, enforce global compliance, and dictate terms to sovereign nations. Without the Fed acting as their unconditional lender of last resort, their entire architecture of control is collapsing under the weight of higher interest rates. The switch from LIBOR to SOFR is the foundational step in reviving the true American System 2.0. By taking back control of the price of the US dollar, the United States has reclaimed its sovereign right to dictate its own economic destiny. We are moving away from a post-industrial era of uncollateralized, speculative debt and returning to a system where capital has a real cost. This forces investment back into physical production, hard assets, infrastructure, and domestic industry. The era of the offshore empire dictating American prosperity is over. Hamilton’s vision is finally rising from the ashes, and the rebuilding of sovereign public credit has just begun.

A great pleasure to contribute to such an excellent volume along with my MMT comrades.