Category File
Economic Conspiracy
2 documented theories filed under this subject.
- Strawman TheoryRoger Elvick, the North Dakota farmer who assembled the strawman theory, was sentenced to five years in federal prison in 1991. No US court has ever ruled for anyone on this basis. The claim is that the state creates a second, corporate ‘you’ at birth, identified by the capital letters on official documents, which holds your debts and is backed by a secret Treasury account the right filing can reach.
- Did Government Housing Policy Cause the 2008 Crash?One member of the official crisis inquiry dissented from his nine colleagues, arguing that federal housing policy was the indispensable cause of the crash. The majority found little support for it. Both positions are on the public record, and economists have been testing them ever since.
- The Ponzi Government ConnectionThe Ponzi Government Connection was the belief that Charles Ponzi was not merely an independent swindler exploiting international reply coupons, but a disposable public face placed in front of a deeper fraud system tied to government institutions, postal mechanisms, or protected financial interests. In this theory, Ponzi’s notoriety served to isolate blame onto one flamboyant operator while shielding the larger machine that made the scheme possible. The historical record shows that Ponzi’s plan centered on a real international postal instrument—the international reply coupon—and that federal postal inspectors investigated the fraud. The conspiracy version turned those genuine institutional links into evidence that Ponzi was acting inside, or on behalf of, a government-connected pyramid structure.
- The Mormon and the Federal Reserve PactThis theory claimed that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or an interconnected network of Mormon finance in Utah, became a hidden reserve structure standing behind the American monetary system. In its strongest form, the story alleged that the Church’s stores of tithes, grain, land, and bank influence made it a kind of emergency backup bank for the United States. The theory drew on several real historical facts: Marriner S. Eccles, one of the most important architects of the modern Federal Reserve, came from a Mormon Utah banking dynasty; the Church developed a reputation for financial self-sufficiency and debt reduction; and the Latter-day Saint welfare and grain-storage system created a visible image of reserve capacity outside normal federal institutions. Conspiracy versions combined those strands into a hidden pact between church power and central banking.
- The Great Reset of 1929The Great Reset of 1929 was the theory that the Great Depression was not merely a collapse caused by speculation, structural weakness, monetary contraction, and financial panic, but a controlled burn of the economy designed to wipe out smaller wealth, reorganize ownership, and tighten elite command over credit and industry. The label “Great Reset” is retrospective, but the theory itself interprets the crash and depression as a deliberate clearing operation. In this view, mass unemployment, bankruptcies, and bank failures were not simply tragic outcomes; they were the mechanism by which an old economic landscape was destroyed and a more centralized one prepared. Because the crash of 1929 really was preceded by speculation and followed by enormous financial concentration and institutional reform, the theory has remained one of the most durable elite-management narratives of the era.
- The Planned DepressionThe Planned Depression was the belief that the Great Depression was not an uncontrolled collapse but a deliberately induced contraction in which the Federal Reserve and allied financial interests shrank the money supply, tightened credit, and triggered foreclosure in order to absorb farms, homes, businesses, and productive assets at distressed prices. In this theory, the crash of 1929 was only the public spectacle; the true mechanism was monetary strangulation. The theory drew strength from the real historical fact that the money supply fell sharply between 1929 and 1933, banks failed in waves, and ownership shifted dramatically as borrowers lost access to credit. The conspiracy version converted monetary failure into intentional liquidation.