In 1913, the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank was created as a direct result of that secret meeting, its goal to take control of the banking system and the money supply of the United States. Since the Fed was created, the dollar has lost close to 95 percent of its value.

In 1933, the US government by executive order confiscated the gold of all Americans. (This confiscation of gold by the US was to be later repeated on an international level. But instead of only forcing Americans to abandon gold as it had in 1933, in 1971 the US would force the entire world to do so.)

In 1944, a meeting in Bretton Woods, N.H., led to the creation of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, their role to do to the world what the Federal Reserve Bank does to the United States.

In 1971, President Richard Nixon’s greatest heist was -- not Watergate -- but signing an executive order declaring that the United States no longer had to redeem its paper dollars for gold. With that, the first phase of the takeover of the world banking system and money supply was complete.

By 1985, Ronald Reagan's second term, the nation slipped to net-debtor status. When Reagan took over, the national debt was less than $1 trillion. By the end of the Reagan reign, the federal debt was $2.6 trillion.

By 1992, the federal debt was more than $4 trillion. (And by 2008, it was just under $11 trillion.)

In 2001, the War on Terror was declared after 9/11. In the following 24 months, the Bush administration added more debt to the nation than had been built up in the first 200 years of its existence.

In 2008, economic turmoil in the USA and the world began, much of this directly related to the above events.

When countries cannot pay their debts, they do not pay them. But the debts do not cease to exist. They are merely "paid" by someone else--the creditor.

In the case of America's debts to foreign nations, this can be achieved in three ways: the currency in which the debt is denominated can be devalued against other currencies; the currency can be made less valuable through inflation; or the debt can be repudiated. One of these things--or all of them--is likely to happen.

Grant Montgomery: Grant's Rants on the Credit System