The rothschilds and the fed

In history, people have conspired. I'm sure that a private bank worked an angle on some facet of a government program: they always have, why would this be an exception?

However

To say that history itself is a conspiracy is another thing completely. The FED was created by the government because the banking system was....well, there was no banking system, just a clusterfuck of local kleptocracies huddling around piles of gold, issuing extremely volatile local currencies, and routinely exploding and screwing everyone over...including themselves. Even the exchanges were frequently screwed given that a currency could become worthless before the pony express arrived with the cash, indeed, if they weren't robbed first.

So, when it became clear that the states needed a better mechanism of coordinating their collective economies (ohhhh there's that scary word, "collective", must be a conspiracy) it was decided that a central bank would be created. The basic jist of thinking was "united we stand" and so they decided to shoulder a more uniform system with a better guarantee than mere commodities: the power of the government itself, which is, really, me and you and everyone around us. Regardless of specific issues, the government as it stands is a reflection of the net desires and action of generations of Americans. There are shortcomings for sure, and the failures now affect everyone instead of just one locality (hiyoooo housing crisis!!), but overall the country functions much better within the concept of 1+1=3 ----> 52 times over, for a net effect of VERY effective.

IMO

With the rise of high power computing, I see it as being entirely feasible that a segment of central banking decision making can be made more sensitive to local conditions while working within the existing construct. It's hard to innovate in this area, however, when the majority of people in this country have no clue how the system works and another subset wants to tear it down. If I were on the board of the FED, I'd seek input from the private sector or academia on building such an infrastructure. But I'm not, and this idea will never reach them, so it won't happen any time soon. Until then, the average person will continue to see the shortcomings (and again, there are many) of the federal system as some type of evil conspiracy.

The simpler reality, dictated by Occam's razor, is that plain old fashioned beaurocratic clusterfuckery is the root problem, perpetuated by the ignorance of the masses combined with the greed of those profiting from the current status quo and thus seeking to perpetuate it. We could easily build a better system or upgrade the current one, but hey, it's a thankless job just keeping it going, so I wouldn't hold my breath. The last major facet is the increasing interface with global markets for currencies: it's kind of useful to have a highly consolidated dollar value, so whoever finds an innovation around this will probably be the recipient of a Nobel prize. Or maybe not.

But you don't have to take my word for it.