The Creature from Jekyll Island by G. Edward Griffin Ch 1

Hey guys, I just started reading The Creature from Jekyll Island (5th edition) and I'm hooked. This is a book written by G. Edward Griffin and it entails taking A Second Look at the Federal Reserve. This post will include a breakdown of chapter 1. Lets get to it...

Chapter 1 The Journey To Jekyll Island

The book starts off in the year 1910 (3 years before the Federal Reserve was created) on a private railway car owned by Nelson Aldrich. Nelson Aldrich was a senator from Rhode Island (pictured below) who was considered to be the political spokesman for big business. He was also an investment associate of JP Morgan. The reason for his travels was a hunting trip...or at least that's what he wanted people to believe. He gave instructions to 5 other individuals to meet him on the train. These strangers had been instructed to arrive separately, avoid reporters, and should they meet inside of the station, to pretend they did not know each other. First names only were to be used. Together, these 6 men represented an estimated 1/4 of the total wealth of the entire world. The roster of the Aldrich car included:

1. Nelson W. Aldrich: Chairman of the National Monetary Commission, business associate of JP Morgan, father-in-law to John D. Rockefeller Jr

2. Abraham Piatt Andrew: Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury

3. Frank A Vanderlip: President of the National City Bank of New York, the most powerful of the banks at that time, representing William Rockefeller

4. Henry P. Davidson: Senior Partner of JP Morgan Company

5. Benjamin Strong: Head of JP Morgan's Bankers Trust Company

6. Paul M. Warburg: representative of the Rothschild banking dynasty in England & France, and brother to Max Warburg who was head of the Warburg banking consortium in Germany & Netherlands

These men had zero interest in hunting...this was all a ploy. The true purpose of this journey was to structure and operate a banking cartel. In more specific terms, it was to create the blueprint for the Federal Reserve System. The reason for the secrecy was due to the fact that if they were exposed publicly working together to write a banking bill, there would be no chance of passage by Congress. This meeting took place in November of 1910 on Jekyll Island off the coast of Georgia.

A cartel is a group of independent businesses which join together to coordinate the production, pricing, or marketing of their members. The purpose of a cartel is to reduce competition and thereby increase profitability. This is accomplished via a shared monopoly over their industry which forces the public to pay higher prices for their goods or services than would be otherwise required under the free-market. These bankers enemy was competition.

Competition was coming from a new trend in the industry to finance future growth out of profits rather than from borrowed capital. Free market interest rates set a realistic balance between debt & thrift. The balance between debt & thrift was the result of a limited money supply. Banks could create loans in excess of their actual deposits, but there was a limit to that process. And that limit was ultimately determined by the supply of gold they held.

Banks wanted low interest rates. In order to this they would need to intervene with the free market and tip the balance of interest rates downward, to favor debt over thrift (much like today's "cheap money" & near 0% interest rates). To accomplish this, the money supply had to be disconnected from gold and made more plentiful AKA more "elastic."

The banks needed uniformity so that no individual bank could be blamed for failure to meet its obligations. The blame could be shifted to the "economy" or "government policy" or "interest rates", or "trade deficits" or the "exchange value of the dollar" or even to the "capitalist system itself." The banks did not fail because the system was weak. The system failed because the banks were weak.

A method was needed to force all banks to have similar risk thresholds, and when the inevitable disaster occurs, to shift the public blame away from themselves. The problem needed to be blamed on the national economy rather than private banking practices. This would open the door for tax money, rather than bank funds, to pay off losses.

5 main challenges were faced by this powerful group on Jekyll Island:

1. Stop the growing influence of small, rival banks & insure that control over the nation's financial resources would remain in the hands of those present

2. Make the money supply more elastic to reverse the trend of private capital formation & to recapture the industrial loan market

3. Pool the meager reserves of the nation's banks into one large reserve so that all banks will follow the same loan-to-deposit ratios (this would protect at least some of them from currency drains & bank runs).

4. Should eventual collapse occur of the whole banking system, shift the losses from the owners of the banks to the taxpayers (sound familiar: think 2008 Financial Collapse. NOTE: The 1st Edition of this book was written in 1994, 14 years BEFORE taxpayers had to "bail out" the banking industry)

5. Convince Congress that this scheme was a measure to protect the public

Henceforth, the cartel would operate as a "Central Bank." However, they would devise a name that would avoid the word "bank" altogether and would conjure the image of the federal government itself. Furthermore, they would create the impression that there would be no concentration of power. Paul Warburg created the fundamental features of the Federal Reserve Act and became known as the "father of the system." Banks could create currency solely on the basis of "commercial paper" which is banker language for IOUs from corporations.

The accepted version of history is that the Federal Reserve was created to stabilize our economy. Textbooks state that the Federal Reserve sprang from the panic of 1907 when multiple banks failed and went into bankruptcy. Private banks were "unsafe and unstable." However, since the inception of the Federal Reserve, it has presided over the crashes of 1921 and 1929; the Great Depression of '29-'39; recessions in '53, '57', '69, '75, & '81; a stock market "Black Monday" in '87; and a 1000% inflation which has destroyed 90% of the dollar's purchasing power. This incredible loss in value was quietly transferred to the Federal Government in for the form of hidden taxation, and the Federal Reserve System was the mechanism by which it was accomplished. This system has FAILED under both political parties. The System is merely a cartel with a government facade. The Federal Reserve System is a legal private monopoly of the money supply operated for the benefit of the few under the guise of protecting and promoting public interest.

This is the end of Chapter 1. Pretty scary to see how things turned out today and that we are all still "slaves" to these bankster cartels. Could crypto currency be the savior that we have been looking for? Could Bitcoin and decentralized blockchains break the chains from the Federal Reserve's strangle on all of us? Will we ever go back to a gold standard? And if the power goes back to the people and we become our own "central bankers" will this end the perpetual war caused by the Military Industrial Complex in collusion with big government? So many tough questions. Please share your thoughts and if you enjoyed reading this one please feel free to upvote and resteem. The more people who become aware, the sooner we can break free from the Federal Reserve. Thanks for reading.

Chapter 2 Breakdown

Chapter 3 Breakdown

Chapter 4 Breakdown

Chapter 5 Breakdown

Chapter 6 Breakdown

Take care and stay safe out there,
Pete