R.M. Gidney, controller at large, entered the bank at a yearly salary of $4,000 and now receives a yearly salary of $15,000, or an increase of 275 per cent.
I.W. Waters, manager personal service department, entered the bank at a yearly salary of $2,250 and now receives a yearly salary of $7,200, or an increase of 220 per cent.
James Rice, manager government bond department, entered the bank at a yearly salary of $1,800 and now receives a yearly salary of $5,500, or an increase of 205 per cent.
L.H. Hendricks entered the bank on a yearly salary of $6,000 and now receives a yearly salary of $18,000, or an increase of 200 per cent.
Incidentally Benjamin Strong, the governor of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, has had his salary increased from $30,000 per year to $50,000 per year—more than six times the pay of a United States Senator!
Ask any corporate manager, any practical banker, or any efficiency expert if they permit, or if they know of any such stupendous salary increases—increased and maintained in a time of general disaster and enforced economies. If this isn't strutting bureaucracy running amuck with public money, what is it?
Take now a look at the total expense account—which you are helping to pay—of the Federal Reserve System for the year 1921. It amounted to the stupendous sum of $36,066,065, or an average of $3,005,500 for each one of the twelve regional satrapies! You can't measure it—because there is nowhere on earth any other banking expense account by which to measure it! Like an Andean peak it towers aloft in solitary splendor. But you can look at some of the items. Here they are. The New York Federal Reserve Bank heads the list of extravagance with an expense account of $8,167,780, and the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank was the most modest—and not any too modest at that—with an expense account of $1,325,867. It cost you for bank officers' salaries $2,383,994, for clerk hire $15,201,393, for special officers and watchmen $789,879 and for "all other" $1,102,984. What that "all other" item of $1,102,984 really is, is deep buried in Federal Reserve archives. When you get through with bank officers, bank clerks, special officers and watchmen, you would think that included about all possible bank employees, but Federal Reserve ingenuity slips over $1,102,984 under the cloak of "all other!"
It cost you $7,750 for Federal Reserve Governors to "confer," $4,443 for Federal Reserve Agents to "confer" and $10,522 for the Federal Advisory Council—whatever that is—to "confer." "Conferences"—in bureaucracy—come high, don't they? And it cost you $168,556 to hold directors' meetings with 173 out of 254 of them living in the same town where the bank or its branch is located. Traveling expenses cost you $357,962—some travelers these Federal Reserve tourists are!
These bureaucratic "expenses" of a parasitical system hooked on to your banking system are stupendous, titanic, gigantic! They are indefensible—and undefended too—from any possible standpoint of efficiency, economy or necessity. Look them over in cold blood. Look over the stupendous salary raises—both in amounts and in percentages—in the New York Federal Reserve satrapy and compare them with any private business on earth. Private stockholders—not commandeered by law and not chained by act of Congress—would drive out any such maladministration of extravagance. You know it.