Creature From Jekyll Island by G. Edward

most ingenious of them all: to have one nation deliberately inflate its currency at a rate greater than the other nation so that real purchasing power, in terms of international trade, moves from the more inflating to the less inflating nation. This is a method truly worthy of the monetary scientists. It is so subtle and so sophisticated that not one in a thousand would even think of it, much less object to it. It was, therefore, the ideal method chosen in 1925 to benefit England at the expense of America. As Professor Rothbard observed: In short, the American public was nominated to suffer the burdens of inflation and subsequent collapse [the crash of 1929] in order to maintain the British g o v e r n m e n t and the British t r a d e union m o v e m e n t in the style to w h i c h they insisted on b e c o m i n g accustomed.

At the inception of the Federal Reserve System, there had been a brief struggle for power but, within a few years, the contest was decisively won by the head of the New York Bank, Benjamin Strong.

Strong, it will be recalled, previously had been head of Morgan's Bankers Trust Company and was one of the seven participants at the secret meeting on Jekyll Island. Professor Quigley reminds us that 'Strong owed his career to the favor of the Morgan bank.... He became Governor of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York as the joint nominee of Morgan and Kuhn, Loeb and Company.'2

Strong was the ideal choice for the cartel. Not the least of his qualifications was his alliance with the financial powers of London.

When Montagu Norman was made the Governor of the Bank of England in 1920, there began a close personal relationship between the two central bankers which lasted until Strong's sudden death in 1928.

Norman was considered by many to be eccentric if not mentally unbalanced. Quigley says:

Norman was a strange man whose mental outlook was one of successfully suppressed hysteria or even paranoia. He had no use for government and feared democracy. Both of these seemed to him to be threats to private banking, and thus to all that was proper and precious in human life.... When he rebuilt the Bank of England, he 1- Rothbard, Crisis, pp. 131-32.

2- Quigley, Tragedy, p. 326.

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THE CREATURE FROM JEKYLL ISLAND

constructed it as a fortress prepared to defend itself against any popular revolt, with the sacred gold reserves hidden in deep vaults below the level of underground waters which could be released to cover them by pressing a button on the governor's desk. For much of his life, Norman rushed about the world by fast steamship, covering tens of thousands of miles each year, often travelling incognito, concealed by a black slouch hat and a long black cloak, under the assumed name of 'Professor Skinner.'...

Norman had a devoted colleague in Benjamin Strong.... In the 1920s, they were determined to use the financial power of Britain and of the United States to force all the major countries of the world to go on the gold standard [with an artificial value set for the benefit of England] and to operate it through central banks free from all political control, with all questions of international finance to be settled by a g r e e m e n t s b y such central b a n k s w i t h o u t i n t e r f e r e n c e from governments.1

Strong and Norman spent many holidays together, sometimes in Bar Harbor, Maine, but usually in Southern France, and they crisscrossed the Atlantic on numerous other occasions to consult with each other on their plan for controlling the world economy.

Lester Chandler tells us: 'Their associations were so frequent and prolonged and their collaboration so close that it is still impossible to determine accurately their relative roles in developing some of o ,

the ideas and projects that they shared.' The Bank of England provided Strong with an office and a private secretary during his visits, and the two men kept in close contact with each other through the weekly exchange of private cables. All of these meetings and communiques were kept in strict secrecy. When their frequent visits drew inquiries from the press,, the standard reply was that they were just friends getting together for recreation or informal chats.

By 1926, the heads of the central banks of France and Germany were occasionally included in their meetings which, according to Norman's biographer, were 'more secret than any ever held by o

Royal Arch Masons or by any Rosicrucian Order.'

1. Quigley, Tragedy, p. 326.

2. Lester V. Chandler, Benjamin Strong, Central Banker (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1958, reprinted by Arno Press, A New York Times Company, 1978), p. 259.

3. John Hargrave, Montagu Norman (New York: Greystone Press, 1942), p. 108.

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THE LONDON CONNECTION 425

SECRET MEETING OF 1927

The culmination of these discussions took place at a secret meeting in 1927 at which it was agreed that the financial lifeblood of the