The Federal reserve - enemy #1

This is the first edition of my [FED-THREAD] :-p
Its my opinion, that it is the prime reason for our state of affairs or should I say "World affairs"...
Compare the following excerpt to the Bear Sterns deal and Freddy and Fannie and others. Please notice the names and banks and actions and see if you notice a pattern? I'll be updating this in the near future with more interesting coincidences.
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Bankruptcy and Conrail merger

The American financial system was seriously shocked when after only two years of operations, Penn Central declared bankruptcy on June 21, 1970. It was the largest corporate bankruptcy in American history up until that time. [ http://en.wikipedia.org/w... ]

Penn Central was the nation's largest railroad with 96,000 employees and a payroll of $20 million a week. In 1970, it also became the nations biggest bankruptcy. It was deeply in debt to just about every bank that was willing to lend it money, and that list included Chase Manhattan [ http://en.wikipedia.org/w... ], Morgan Guaranty [ http://en.wikipedia.org/w... ], Manufacturers Hanover [ http://en.wikipedia.org/w... ], First National City [ http://en.wikipedia.org/w... ], Chemical Bank [ http://en.wikipedia.org/w... ] and Continental Illinois [ http://en.wikipedia.org/w... ].
Officers of the largest of those banks had been appointed to Penn Central's board of directors as a condition for obtaining funds, and they gradually had aquired control over the railroad's management. The banks also held large blocks of Penn Central stock in their trust departments. The arrangement was convenient in many ways, not the least of which was that the bankers sitting on the board of directors were privy to information, long before the public recieved it, which would affect the market price of Penn Central's stock. Chris Welles, in the "The Last Days of the Club"[ http://www.amazon.com/Pas... ], describes what happened: On May 21, a month before the railroad went under,
"David Bevan [ http://www.beardbooks.com... ], Penn Central's chief financial officer, privately informed representatives of the company's banking creditors that its financial condition was so weak it would have to postpone an attemptto raise$100 million in desperately needed operating funds through a bond issue. Instead, said Bevan, the railroad would seek some kind of government loan guarantee. In other words, unless the railroad could manage a federal bailout, it would have to close down. The following day, [Chase Manhattan's] trust department sold "134,300" shares of its Penn Central holdings. Before May 28, when the public was informed of the postponement of the bond issue, Chase sold another "128,000" shares. David Rockefeller [ http://en.wikipedia.org/w... ], the banks chairman, vigorously denied Chase had acted on the basis of inside information.
More to the point of this study is the fact that virtually all of the major management decisions which led to Penn Central's demise were made by or with the concurrence of its board of directors, which is to say, by the banks that provided the loans. In other words, the bankers were not in trouble because of Penn Central's poor management, they [were] Penn Central's poor management. An investigation conducted in 1972 by Congressman Wright Patman [ http://en.wikipedia.org/w... ], Chairman of the House Banking and Currency Committee, revealed the following: The banks provided large loans for disastrous expansion and diversification projects. They loaned additional millions to the railroads so it could pay dividends to its stockholders. This created the false appearance of prosperity and artificially inflated the market price of its stock long enough to dump it on the unsuspecting public. Thus, the banker-managers were able to engineer a three-way bonanza for themselves. They received dividends on essentially worthless stock, earned interest on the loans which provided the money to pay those dividends, and were able to unload 1.8 million shares of stock--after the dividends, of course--at unrealistically high prices. Reports from the Securities and Exchange Commission showed that the company's top executives had disposed of their stock in this fashion at a personal savings of more then $1 million.
Had the railroad been allowed to go into bankruptcy at that point and been forced to sell off its assets, the bankers still would have been protected. In any liquidation, debtors are paid off first, stockholders last; so the manipulators had dumped most of their stock while prices were relatively high. That is a common practice among corporate raiders who use borrowed funds to seize control of a company, bleed off its assets to other enterprises which they also control, and then toss the debt-ridden, dying carcass upon the remaining stockholders or, in this case, the taxpayers... [ http://www.amazon.com/Cre... ] p.41-43