[pdonis]

> other conspiracy theorists

The Federal Reserve Act of 1913 is not a "conspiracy theory", it's a fact. The events leading up to it are not a matter of serious dispute as far as I know. Of course the government and the Fed will give you a very different interpretation of those events, but their interpretation doesn't stand up to actual scrutiny.

> it is an instrument of private banks

It is both; it is part of the government (for the reasons I have already given), and it transfers wealth to private banks and financial institutions from everyone else by printing money. The private banks were tired of the government coming to them for a bailout every time there was a financial panic (the Panic of 1907 being the most recent one at the time), so they convinced Congress that creating a central bank would stop the panics. (It didn't, of course, but they convinced Congress that it would.) With the Federal Reserve in place, banks and financial institutions, as I've said, got wealth transferred to them whenever the Fed printed money, and also the burden of recovery from financial panics was transferred from the banks to the taxpayers (a recent example of course being the bailouts of 2008).