The next stop on our cold day tour of D.C. was the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, the place where billions of banknotes, without any backing of gold, or even sufficient goods and services, are printed at the request of the Federal Reserve (the Fed) which engages in fractional reserve banking and controls our money supply and interest rates.
The Fed, despite the name, is not really associated with the federal government as people think, it is a private corporation composed of twelve federal reserve banking regions with individual member-banks which are also corporations with shareholders. The Chairman of the Federal Reserve does inform Congress periodically about interest rates and whether the price of lending and borrowing money is going to change.