Engdahl - Gods of money : Wall Street and the death of the American century

Copyright 2009 F. William Engdahl

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without prior written permission of the publisher and author.

Edited by Margot L. White

Published by edition.engdahl
Wiesbaden, Germany
0049-611-505-6169

ISBN 978-3-9813263-1-4

eBook ISBN: 978-3-9813263-5-2

Printed in USA

To Stephen J. Lewis who taught me that in the world of international
finance things are rarely what they seem and whose years of tutoring
in the workings of political economy informed this book

And to John Williams, whose relentless dedication to economic
honesty sustained my own work for the past two decades

Table of Contents

This is not a book that explains how to survive the financial crisis or perhaps why gold is a sound investment in times of turmoil. Others have done that better. This book is not a conventional account of money and banking or even economics. Rather, it is a history of power, more precisely, of the colossal abuse of power in the hands of a tiny elite who have constituted themselves as the Gods of Money. This book is a history of the tiny clique of international bankers who created Wall Street and who control it today, as they did the City of London until the First World War.

This volume is a chronicle of the rise to positions of unheard-of power on the part of individuals who considered themselves a power onto themselves, separate and above the mere laws of man.

The Book of Matthew in the New Testament states, No one can serve two masters. He will either hate one and love the other, or be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon. (Matthew 6:24). From the very beginnings of the founding of the United States as a Constitutional Republic in 1789 following the War of Independence against Great Britain, powerful money interests resolved that Biblical conflict by anointing themselves as simply the Gods of Money, a higher law unto themselves, above all other mere mortals. Step-by-step, through the power of their money, they sought to corrupt the foundations of the Constitution, attempting to recoup by credit and financial fraud what they had lost on the field of battle.

In a November 2009 interview with the London Sunday Times , Lloyd Blankfein, the Chairman and CEO of the worlds most profitable bank, Goldman Sachs, defended his banks record profits at a time when most financial institutions were struggling to survive. He commented that he was merely a banker doing Gods work. More than a century earlier, John D. Rockefeller, the founder of the Standard Oil monopoly, when asked by a nave reporter how he had become the worlds wealthiest man, snapped back without hesitation, God gave me my money!

Books have been written attempting to define the most fundamental question, what is money? The fact that so many different answers and so many different books exist demonstrates that the true nature of something most of us take for granted, is not at all clear at least to academic economists.

The reason is the fact that contemporary study of economics as taught in all major universities in the Western world today has little or nothing to do with economic reality, nor with the political role of international finance, and its geopolitical agenda, in shaping that economic reality. That should not be surprising, as the financial powers, the great and powerful international bankers of the City of London and of Wall Street and their kin, have endowed the appropriate professorships to ensure that what is taught will protect their order, even going so far as to endow a Nobel Prize in Economics to serve their interests.

Money is nothing more and nothing less than a political creation, a promise to pay between two or more parties, enforced, to a greater or lesser degree by the power of a state. Ultimately money, especially in a world where money is a pure paper commodityfiat money so-calledis a question of confidence, confidence ultimately in the full faith and credit of the Government of the United States of America. And that confidence has been backed always, ultimately, by military power, political power, power to buy or control the lawmakers and administratorsPresidents, Congressmen, judges.

The edifice that has developed within the United States over the course of the past one hundred and fifty years is one where an inordinately powerful small circle of international bankers, the powers of Wall Street and the money center banks allied to it, has shaped the lives of the American public, prepared them for wars far from American shores, literally controlling what people buy and produce and most dangerously, even what they are allowed to think. The late American historian, Carroll Quigley noted, The aim of the international bankers was nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences . (Tragedy & Hope, p. 324).

In 1862 in the early months of the American Civil War, a memo was discreetly circulated among Englands wealthy aristocrats and bankers. It stated the cold assessment of the banking powers of the City of London regarding events in the United States:

Slavery is likely to be abolished by the war power and all chattel slavery abolished. This I and my European friends are in favor of, for slavery is but the owning of labor and carries with it the care of the laborers, while the European plan, led on by England, is that capital shall control labor by controlling wages. The great debt that the capitalists will see to it is made out of the war, must be used as a means to control the volume of money. To accomplish this, the bonds must he used as a banking basis. We are now waiting for the Secretary of the Treasury to make this recommendation to Congress. It will not do to allow the greenback, as it is called, to circulate as money any length of time, as we can not control that. But we can control the bonds and through them the bank issues. (cited in Lindbergh, Banking, Currency and the Money Trust)

In 1913, Minnesota Congressman Charles August Lindbergh Sr., father of the famed aviator, wrote Banking, Currency, and the Money Trust , in which he accurately described the political agenda of the Wall Street international bankers who were shaping the creation of a new central bank and with it, control over the nations economy.

As a Republican member of the US Congress Lindbergh wrote exposing the secret machinations of powerful Wall Street financial interests, their efforts to sneak through a piece of legislation that, more than any other single bill, has shaped the future history of the nation and much of the Worldthe Federal Reserve Act. It was passed by an almost empty Congress and signed into law by President Woodrow Wilsona crony of Wall Streeton Christmas Eve, 1913. Lindbergh described the influence of what he accurately named the Wall Street Money Trust in that de facto bankers coup dtat: