What is the Federal Reserve system? How did it come into existence? Is it part of the federal government? How does it create money? Why is the public kept in the dark about these important matters? In this feature-length documentary film, The Corbett Report explores these important question and pulls back the curtain on America’s central bank.

All our lives we’ve been told that economics is boring. It’s dull. It’s not worth the time it takes to understand it. And all our lives, we’ve been lied to. War. Poverty. Revolution. They all hinge on economics and economics rests on one key concept: money.

It is the economic water in which we live our lives. We even call it ‘currency’; it flows around us, carries us in its wake. Drowns those who are not careful. We use it every day in nearly every transaction we conduct. We spend our lives working for it, worrying about it, saving it, spending it, pinching it. It defines our social status. It compromises our morals. People are willing to fight, die and kill for it.

But what is it? Where does it come from? How is it created? Who controls it? It is a remarkable fact that, given its central importance in our lives, not one person in a hundred could answer such basic questions about money as these.

From the time we are children, we are curious about the world and eager to learn about the way it works. And what could lead to a better understanding of the way the world works than a knowledge of money, its creation and destruction? Yet discussion of this topic is fastidiously avoided in our school years and ignored in our daily life. Our monetary ignorance is artificial, a smokescreen that has been erected on purpose and perpetrated with the help of complicated systems and insufferable economic jargon.

But it doesn’t take an economist to understand the importance of money. Deep down we all know that the wars, the poverty, the violence we see around us hinges on this question of money. It seems like a thousand piece jigsaw puzzle just waiting to be solved.

The puzzle pieces, taken together, create an image of the Federal Reserve, America’s central bank and the heart of the country’s banking system. Despite its central importance to the economy, relatively few have heard of it, and fewer still know what it is.