Later on and for what real reason no one knows—except that it wasn't from soft-heartedness—a portion of the usurious loot was disgorged by the Atlanta Federal Reserve pawnbrokery. That isn't really interesting. What is really interesting is the super-supernal and subter-brutal gall to first extort it. Many a usurer when caught and cornered has disgorged loot—that's as old as usury. Jesse James' press agent could boast of as much. When grilled on this interesting subject the multi-initialed Governor Harding of the Federal Reserve Board chittered and chattered about "basic lines of credit" and "progressive rates of interest," but that doesn't chlorinate such sandbaggery. Any pawnbroker can mutter and mumble such phrases.
When a bank has to pay up to eighty-seven and a half per cent interest you can imagine what its customers must pay it.
And at the very time—during these very two weeks ending September 30, 1920—when this little Alabama National Bank right at the door of real production was being charged those Shylock rates for a paltry loan, banks in New York were getting as high as $100,000,000 handed out to them at from five to seven per cent. And yet you read about the Federal Reserve System "equalizing interest rates," "emancipating credit" and the like bunk! Why, it's enough to make Shylock and Pecksniff rend their cerements and jump from their graves and have another try at extortion and at applied hypocrisy. A difference of eighty per cent per annum between New York City—where nothing but parasitism is grown—and Alabama—where real wealth of real cotton grows—is some difference, isn't it? And the eighty per cent difference coddles parasitism and penalizes production. This isn't the only sandbaggery of extortion perpetrated by the Federal Reserve oligarchy. But it's a pretty good example, isn't it?
Now take a look at the twelve regional pawnbrokeries for the year 1921 in the order of their pillagements. Here they are:
You would expect to find—from the facts set forth in the first part of this chapter—that the most conscienceless of these gentry, the Atlanta super-Shylockery, would show the hugest pile of pillage, and it does! On a paid in capital of $4,189,500, it vampired and blood-sucked out a net profit of $5,496,000, or 131.18 per cent. What the other vampires blood-sucked out you can read from the above table. You know the net earnings made by banks where you live. You know that a net earning of 12 per cent is a large one, but here—in a year of general disaster and of huge losses—you have an average net earning for these twelve vampires of production of 79.56 per cent or over six times the average net earnings of National Banks for a long term of years!
Ask yourself if this enormous net earning percentage, made out of commandeered capital and out of conscripted deposits, isn't outside the realm of banking and in the realm of unconscionable vampire pawnbrokery? Ask yourself—in a land where pawnbrokers are licensed and restricted to two to three per cent a month or 24 to 36 per cent per year—if 79.56 per cent per year doesn't brand such a system as outrageous Shylockery?
But that isn't the worst of it. Before making these net earnings this Federal Reserve System sandbagged out an "expense account" of $36,066,065, or an average of $3,005,083 for each regional pawnbrokery. The most reckless expense squandermaniac was the New York sandbaggery with an expense account of $8,167,780, and the most economical was the Minneapolis satrapy with an expense account of $1,325,867. In a succeeding chapter reference will be made to these expense orgies. But ask yourself if, in a year of commercial disasters and of enforced economies, such leviathan expenses aren't an outrage? Ask yourself if such squandermania—imposed upon the producers of real wealth—by bureaucratic pillagement isn't alone and in itself an alarm clock?
Here is a table showing the location, the capital and the piled up pillagements of these twelve regional pawnbrokeries: