"A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of
credit is privately concentrated. The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our
activities are in the hands of a few men who, even if their action be honest and
intended for the public interest, are necessarily concentrated upon the great
undertakings in which their own money is involved and who, necessarily, by very
reason of their own limitations, chill and check and destroy genuine economic
freedom."
-- Woodrow Wilson, campaign speech, 1911. Two years later he signed into law
the Federal Reserve Act of 1913.