End the Fed endthefed.co · 1913–present
The lines
finally crossed.
The richest 1% of Americans now hold about as much wealth as the entire bottom 90% — and the gap tore open in lockstep with the money printer. Here is the case for ending the Federal Reserve, told with the Fed's own data.
Share of U.S. Household Net Worth: Top 1% vs Bottom 90%
Source: Federal Reserve — Distributional Financial Accounts (DFA) · as of 2026-Q1
Shaded bands = QE eras. The Fed’s own data: divergence accelerates as the balance sheet expands.
This isn't an accident. It's mechanics. Here's why →
The Birth, 1913
A central bank, drafted in secret on a private island.
In November 1910, six men — Senator Nelson Aldrich, Treasury's A. Piatt Andrew, and bankers Frank Vanderlip, Henry Davison, Charles Norton, and Paul Warburg — boarded a private rail car under cover of a "duck hunt" and met at the Jekyll Island Club off Georgia. What they drafted there became the blueprint for the Federal Reserve.
The Federal Reserve Act was signed by President Woodrow Wilson on December 23, 1913. It followed the Panic of 1907 and the National Monetary Commission — and a century of American distrust of central banks.
This wasn't the first attempt. The First Bank of the United States (1791–1811) and Second Bank (1816–1836) both died. Andrew Jackson made killing the Second Bank his crusade — "The bank is trying to kill me, but I will kill it." He won. The irony: he's on the $20.
Movement text: G. Edward Griffin's The Creature from Jekyll Island dramatizes the meeting. We cite it as a movement document, not as established fact.
1910
The Jekyll Island meeting
Six men, one secret draft
1913
Federal Reserve Act signed
Dec 23, under Woodrow Wilson
3rd
U.S. attempt at a central bank
The first two were killed
The Great Dollar Decay
A dollar from 1913 buys about three cents today.
The Purchasing Power Decay Machine
What did your dollar become?
$100 from 1913 has the buying power of
$0
Source: BLS CPI-U (annual avg). Method: MeasuringWorth purchasing-power approach.
Since the Fed opened its doors, the dollar has lost roughly 96–97% of its purchasing power (BLS CPI). The Fed's mandate is "stable prices" — which it defines as 2% inflation per year.
Two percent sounds modest. Compounded, it cuts your money's value in half about every 35 years. "Stable" is doing a lot of work in that sentence.
The currency didn't lose value by accident. It was managed to.
The Inflation Time Machine
Watch a price climb, decade by decade.
Pick something ordinary and watch what it cost across a century. These climbs aren't the goods getting better — they're the dollar losing value, decade after decade since 1913. Same story as the rest of this site, made tangible.
1920 price
$0
2024 price
$0
Price multiple
×0
Representative U.S. prices, illustrative. Sources: BLS, Census, FRED, industry historical series.
The Gold Story
Seize it at $20.67. Revalue it to $35. Pocket the spread.
April 5, 1933: Executive Order 6102 required Americans to surrender gold coin, bullion, and gold certificates to the Federal Reserve at $20.67/oz — penalty up to $10,000 and 10 years. (To be precise: jewelry, collector coins, industrial use, and up to $100 in gold per person were exempt.)
January 30, 1934: the Gold Reserve Act revalued gold to $35/oz — a ~41% devaluation of the dollar, with the government capturing the difference on the gold it had just collected.
1944: Bretton Woods pegged the dollar to gold at $35 and the world to the dollar. August 15, 1971: the Nixon Shock closed the gold window. The pure fiat era begins — and most divergence charts start bending right here.
December 31, 1974: private gold ownership was finally re-legalized.
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What backs your money?
What backs your money?
Dollar vs. Gold, since the gold window closed
$1 held as cash vs. $1 held as gold in 1971. Source: gold-api.com (live spot) + LBMA/World Gold Council historical
$1 KEPT AS CASH (real)
$1 KEPT AS GOLD
The Money Printer
From less than $1T to nearly $9T — in a generation.
"Quantitative easing" means the Fed creates new bank reserves and buys assets — Treasuries and mortgage-backed securities — to push money into the financial system. Done honestly, here's what it looks like on the balance sheet. Scrub through it.
Federal Reserve Total Assets (WALCL)
Source: FRED — Board of Governors (series WALCL) · as of 2026-06-17
$0.87T
Balance sheet, 2007
Before the crisis
$4.5T
After QE1–3, 2015
~$9T
Peak, April 2022
COVID-era QE
2026-06-17
As of (live, FRED WALCL)
The 12 Districts
One central bank, twelve regional faces.
The Federal Reserve is structured as twelve regional banks spread across the country, each identified by a number and a letter. That letter historically appeared in the seal printed on Federal Reserve Notes, marking the issuing district. The New York Fed is the operational hub — it conducts the System's open-market operations.
-
1
Seal · A
Boston
-
2
Seal · B
New York
Open-market operations run here
-
3
Seal · C
Philadelphia
-
4
Seal · D
Cleveland
-
5
Seal · E
Richmond
-
6
Seal · F
Atlanta
-
7
Seal · G
Chicago
-
8
Seal · H
St. Louis
-
9
Seal · I
Minneapolis
-
10
Seal · J
Kansas City
-
11
Seal · K
Dallas
-
12
Seal · L
San Francisco
Source: Federal Reserve System — the 12 Reserve Districts.
The Cantillon Effect
Who gets the new money first?
The Cantillon Effect
New money doesn't arrive everywhere at once.
Named for Richard Cantillon (1680s–1734): freshly created money enters at specific points and ripples outward. Those closest to the spigot spend it before prices rise. Wage earners get it last — after the price of everything has already climbed. Watch the wave.
Animation: money originates at the Federal Reserve, reaches banks, then Wall Street and asset holders, then corporations, and finally wage earners — by which time the price level has already risen.
Illustrative model of monetary transmission. The price line rises before the wage-earner's money arrives — that gap is the hidden transfer.
This is the bridge from "money printing" to that hero chart. New money is not neutral. It enters at the top of the financial system — banks, bond markets, asset holders — and the first recipients spend it at old prices.
By the time it reaches wage earners, prices have already risen. Asset owners closest to the spigot capture the gains; everyone else gets the bill. Run the numbers across 30 years and you get the divergence you saw at the top of this page.
33 Liberty Street: where the Fed's open-market operations meet the markets first.
Boom & Bust
Cheap money builds booms that have to break.
The Austrian view (Mises, Hayek): when the central bank suppresses interest rates below their natural level, it sends a false signal. Businesses pile into long-horizon projects that aren't really justified — malinvestment. The boom feels great. Then reality reasserts itself and the bust clears it out.
The dot-com bubble and the 2008 housing crisis are the cases most often cited. We present this as the movement's framework — and note that mainstream macroeconomics contests it.
2000
Dot-com bust
2008
Housing crisis
?
The next one
The Case for Ending It
Sound money, real accountability, or at least an audit.
Sound money
A gold or commodity standard ties the money supply to something that can't be printed at will.
Free banking
Competing private currencies, disciplined by redemption rather than decree.
Audit the Fed
Ron Paul's End the Fed (2009) and a generation of bills calling for full transparency.
Fixed supply
Bitcoin as a hard-capped alternative — mentioned, not shilled.
An institution with enormous power and limited direct democratic oversight is a strange thing to find at the center of a republic.
What the Other Side Says
The strongest case for keeping the Fed — stated fairly.
OPPOSING VIEW · STEELMAN
A fair reckoning has to engage the best version of the other argument:
- — Lender of last resort. A central bank can stop a bank-run cascade before it becomes a depression. The pre-Fed era had frequent, severe panics — 1873, 1893, and 1907 among them.
- — The COVID response. Many economists credit the Fed's 2020 actions with shortening a potentially catastrophic downturn.
- — Deflation has its own dangers. Falling prices can freeze spending and investment, deepening downturns.
- — Correlation isn't sole causation. The inequality in our hero chart is also driven by tax policy, globalization, and technology — not monetary policy alone.
We include this because a reader who watches us engage the counterargument has reason to trust our data. The disagreement is real. The numbers are still the numbers.
Decide for yourself
You've seen the data.
Now go read the sources.
Every chart on this site is built from public data — much of it the Federal Reserve's own. Don't take our word for it. Take theirs.
Wealth data as of 2026-Q1 · Balance sheet as of 2026-06-17 · Inflation 4.2% YoY