Blog November 2011
FDR at OWS
byThorvald Grung Moe, Visiting Scholar at the Levy Institute, delivered a lecture last week on fractional reserve banking and the landscape of alternative options. He ended with a quotation from FDR that’s worth repeating, particularly in the context of the “We Are the 99%” movement and stories like this about a return to business as usual (+10% or so) on Wall Street:
“I wish our banking and economists friends would realize the seriousness of the situation from the point of view of the debtor classes – i.e. 90 per cent of the human beings in this country – and think less from the point of view of the 10 per cent who constitute the creditor classes.“
(Letter from FDR to Treasury Secretary Woodin, September 30, 1933. As quoted in Ronnie Phillips, The Chicago Plan and New Deal Banking Reform.)