The world is full of scraps of paper today.- Benjamin Anderson, economist, Chase Manhattan Bank (1920 – 1939)April 1933 found America mired in a crushing economic depression, and newly elected president Franklin DeLano Roosevelt — who had declared the previous month he had a legal power derived from the Trading with the Enemy Act to assume control of our monetary system — responded by taking America off the gold standard. That the Act, an unexploded legislative relic left over from the First World War, was completely irrelevant to the situation at hand (there was no “enemy” to speak of as the nation was at peace) proved an easily passed over quibble.During FDR’s famous first hundred days, a blizzard of unread legislation sailed through Congress and what they missed was put into action by

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