Update: After reading Alan Greenspan's book I realize that not all central bankers are bad, but I still believe there are a lot of dirty people in international banking.

Even markets that seem like they should be somewhat honest and forthright are not. Consider the Federal Reserve - a deceptively named private bank which holds a monopoly over currency supplies in spite of likely having no actual reserves. All the evils of a corporation heavily exist in a privatized for profit central bank. Some of the past US central bankers, seeking to keep their power, have stated things like:

Nothing but widespread suffering will produce any effect on the congress...Our only safety is pursuing a course of steady restriction - and I have no doubt that such a course will ultimately lead to restoration of the currency and a recharter of the bank. - Nicholas Biddle.

Shortly after Nicholas plunged the US economy into a deep depression he was caught making comments like the above in public. Back then the media was far more honest (ie: less sold out and owned by bankers) than the current media, and Andrew Jackson won enough support to pay off the bank and prevent it from being rechartered. Shortly afterward there was an assassination attempt on Jackson's life. The assassin bragged that rich bankers from Europe put him up to the test and promised to protect him if he were caught.

After President Garfield spoke out against private bankers he was assassinated.

The civil war may have also been largely caused by powerful bankers from Europe. Slavery was not a major issue prior to the war according to Lincoln. Lincoln, who opposed a privately owned central bank, was assassinated only 5 days after Lee surrendered to Grant.

After the civil war the US was quite prosperous, but powerful bankers pushed congress to contract the money supply
1866 - 1.8 billion in circulation - $50.46 per capita
1867 - 1.3 - $44
1876 - 0.6 - $14.6
1886 - 0.4 - $6.67

The tightening of the money supply caused deep depression.

Through cycling interest rates and money supplies central banks can create false markets then extract the profit from the work of others when they re-tighten the monetary supply. The boom bust business cycle is used for central banks to exploit profits from citizens and companies alike. The bankers in the Federal Reserve more-less have insider info on how to bet for or against sectors of the economy (on top of having a 100% profit margin plus interest on the central bank credits to the government).

The Federal Reserve pays for government bonds by the issuance of electronic credits based literally on nothing. How pathetically inept is the US government to allow an arbitrary 3rd party to have 100% + profit margins on creating the currency needed to run that government?

England was at war for 56 of the first 119 years after the bank of England was created. Many banks finance both sides of a war. Many times the loans are placed with the guarantee that the winner will pay the debts of the loser.

Nathan Rothschild had started selling English stocks and bonds after the defeat of Napoleon to misdirect the market while he secretly started buying assets at a fraction of the price. As Napoleon Bonaparte stated:

The hand that gives is above the hand that takes. money has no motherland; financiers are without patriotism and without decency: their sole object is gain.

Ernest Seyd admitted that in 1872 he was set to bribe US congressmen to demonetize silver. By 1873 gold was the only accepted form of coin money in the US. Since gold was quite scarce and monopolized, putting America on the gold standard allowed the owners of gold to manipulate the markets.

In 1933 private ownership of gold in the US was confiscated by the government (for the price of $20.66 an ounce). After most gold was turned in the price per ounce was raised to $35, but only foreigners could sell gold at the new higher price. Then over the years gold was likely smuggled out of Fort Knox to wealthy foreigners associated with international bankers at cheap prices. In 1982 Regan commissioned a group to study the feasibility of going back to a gold standard. They reported that the US treasury had no gold at the time. This is a perfect example of why true patriots chose to fight or ignore bad laws.

In 1891 the American Bankers Associate sent out a memo stating that on September 1st 1894 they would cause a deep depression to seize assets at pennies on the dollars. And it happened.

There has been a nongovernment ran US central bank at least 4 times. In 1913 the current one was put in place. WWI occurred a year after the federal reserve was created. Within the first 25 years of its existence the Federal Reserve caused 3 major economic downturns, including the great depression.

In April of 1929, Paul Warburg, the father of the Federal Reserve, sent out a secret memo to friends stating that "a collapse and nationwide depression was certain." In August of 29 the fed began to tighten money. Rockefeller, JP Morgan, and others just happened to be lucky in getting out of the stock market in 1929. On October 24th, 1929 big New York bankers called in their 24 hour broker call loans. That day was known as black Thursday.

After the crash, instead of lowering interest rates the fed continued to contract the money supply by 1/3 from 1929 to 1933. While America was suffering in depression 10s of billions of US dollars were sucked out of the US economy to prop up Germany (which had assets largely owned by international bankers that bought them for next to nothing after WWI).

All the above obvious market manipulation shows that privately owned central banks do not breed any sort of stability (and in fact just the opposite), which shows just how useless they are.

Money is not a finite commodity but a means to barter. Since I was a little kid I went back to the town that I grew up in and noticed so many payday loan stores that never existed when I was a kid. Why are all of these scammy loan businesses popping up?

If you want to learn more about the economic fraud that is the Federal Reserve (and if the 16th amendment may even be illegal) check out The Money Masters - where many of the above points came from - (also on Google Video here and here).

The US is now in a persistent war that will most likely only end when economic incentive for it goes away or the public cares enough to force the powers that be to end it.

How pathetically inept is the US government to allow an arbitrary 3rd party to have 100% + profit margins on creating the currency needed to run that government? Why are so many countries and individuals living in a state of persistent debt to arbitrary sources when money is not a finite commodity but just a means for barter? Money is usually created from nothing and based on nothing by arbitrary for profit companies.

Shouldn't the debt of most men be to their children more than to a few opulent sleazeballs who arbitrarily inherited a large portion of the world's wealth based on voodoo economics?

"Let me issue and control a nation's money and I care not who writes the laws." - Mayer Amschel Rothschild

This is probably quite an absurd post for an SEO blog, but it is just a reminder that markets can sway at any given time, and even allegedly valuable and trustworthy standards of value are heavily manipulated and can erode quickly. Smart business owners make their businesses fluid enough to be able to ebb and flow with large powerful market forces.

I used to work on a submarine, and one of the biggest design criteria for the sub was redundancy. Many businesses fail because they bank on one channel working forever. That is rarely the case.

Patrick Gavin recently offered an insightful post about keeping a spare website or two just in case an algorithm update whacks your site.

or at least most people in this thread think so. But then in other forum threads I have been referred to as a genius. I am glad someone believes in me more than I do ;)

If you find a good book (like A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History) sometimes you are not paying for what is in the book, but also what biases or other information are not included in the book (as any author, business model, or information format carries biases).

I think one of the biggest reasons many people fail is they try to satisfy everyone. Average people suck. Experience is the best trainer, but people discounting the value of other things typically tend to start from the framework of thinking their time is worthless. And so it is. Everything is overpriced. Until you die.

Andy Hagans has a great post about getting a new domain indexed and ranked.

Now a new domain probably isn't any better than the other one we had, and I wanted the launch to go right, dang it. So I grabbed it every trusted link that I could (quickly) -- Dir.yahoo.com, Sbd.bcentral.com, Business.com, a hosted adverpage on an older domain, and an in-content link from an old, ranking (trusted) related site that a friend owns (Thanks mate!)... Two days later, bam! 28 pages in, four days later, 160 pages in.

I wonder which friend gave him that trusted link ;)

The trend to ranking in Google is moving away from just get more more more more more more to getting less but higher quality links. After you get enough trusted links you will probably automatically pick up a few spammy links, but the value of actively building low quality links is diminishing daily (at least, if you care to rank well in Google).

Occasionally you will see people say that paying $300 for a link in the Yahoo! Directory is a rip off, and a couple years ago the economics leaned more toward getting many low trust links. But over the last few years there have been tons of bottom feeding business models which have sprung out of a link = a vote line of thinking to where Google needed to obfuscate the market and increase the cost of low cost links.

Indeed the concept of link = vote will still be sold for a great deal of time (similarly to how people still sell search engine submission software and services). Most of it is not honestly valuable, but if it is profitable and scalable and there is a market people will keep selling it.

Keep in mind that if many search spammers follow the same recipe then the relevancy algorithms might get rebaked, but for now

• for Google, with links less is more
• the cost of some trusted links (in terms of time, money, and/or editorial review processes) makes many of them prohibitively expensive for certain spam content models

In one of Matt's recent SEO videos he also mentioned the value of soft launching.

I believe that, in general, the attention span of most technologically enabled people is getting shorter by the day. In addition the increased number of content channels and communication associated with the web leads people to become more biased.
I have not done any research, so I may be wrong on those ideas, but this is what leads me to say that:

• Automated spam (email, blog comments, direct mail associated with registering for a trademark, etc) which may even look relevant forces you to judge things quicker.
• Search makes it easier to get "good enough" answers quickly.
• The web (and search) let you self select social groups with predefined similarities.
• There is a far greater number of news channels than there were just a few years ago.
• We tend to consume media that fullfills or reinforces our predefined worldview.
• RSS (and devices like Tivo) make it easy to consume media how and when you want to.
• Sites like YouTube make it easy to embed other's content within your site.
• Google Video now allows you to link to an exact second of a video in their collection.
• My shorter and more straightforward posts usually get more comments and more quality editorial links. I also notice many of the Digg homepage and Del.icio.us popular URLs are short and straightforward articles titled things like "10 ways to x".
• The increased number of social aggregation sites is making it easier for people to see what ideas spread, how they spread, and why they spread in near real time.
• My biased and/or controversial posts usually get more comments and more quality editorial links. (And thus are more easily found and locked into more self reinforcing positions.) Can you name a popular political blog that is not highly biased?
• As the amount of information on the web increases and search engines trust old content until new content proves its value the new content is forced to be of a higher quality than the old content to gain exposure. Being of higher quality generally means being more citation worthy. Which frequently means being more controversial.

If you have been on the web for a while have you found it easier or harder to meet people off the web that are outside your realm of trade? Have your media consumption habits become more or less biased since you started interacting on the web?