[Pelham]

“BTW I was listening to Glen Beck last night, for two minutes he was recommending the book, “The Creature From Jekyll Island”

Glenn Beck is attracted to conspiracy theories and G Edward Griffin certainly appeals to that itch. Jekyll Island apparently isn’t Griffin’s only foray into conspiracy tales. People love them. They are way more entertaining than actual dull history.

The man primarily responsible for the creation of the Fed was the same man who acted as America’s defacto central bank with all of the power that it conferred. And he was accountable to no one. He could have kept that power to himself and continued to have Presidents come to him hat in hand and plead with him to save America’s financial system from collapse.

He did that until the Panic of 1907 and then warned that America’s economy was getting far too big for his bank and his friend’s banks to rescue. America was the only major economy to lack a central bank. It needed a lender of last resort. He pushed the Aldrich-Vreeland Act of 1908 that created the National Monetary Commission. The Commission studied the banking systems in other advanced economies and issued reports suggesting how we could modernize ours. The result eventually led to the 1913 Federal Reserve Act.

It was fortuitous timing. The eruption of World War One in 1914 started another major panic. Europe began withdrawing huge quantities of gold from the United States which under the gold standard has a drastic deflationary effect.

Woodrow Wilson’s Secretary of the Treasury William McAdoo was able to use the Fed to halt this gold drain. Like Alexander Hamilton he was a bit of a financial genius and his action is what ultimately turned the previously second rate US dollar into the world’s premier currency displacing the British Pound.

The man who voluntarily sought to replace himself as America’s central bank was JP Morgan Sr.

[dennisw]

You have posted a good history lesson of the Fed. Only problem is that the Fed's mission to stop or moderate bank panics is a fraction of what they do these days/ If this is all the Fed does, then this would be fine by me.

Glenn Beck is attracted to conspiracy theories, and G Edward Griffin certainly appeals to that itch. Jekyll Island apparently isn’t Griffin’s only foray into conspiracy tales. People love them. They are way more entertaining than actual dull history.

I read the book 25 years ago and it not conspiracy theory. It is history as G Edward Griffin sees it, with a lot of collusion and conniving by key participants to get the Federal Reserve act passed. At Amazon I can see Griffin has books with his alternative cancer treatments, such as laetrile. I suppose those books have conspiracy mongering. For me the proof is in the pudding. He is 90 years old so his alt. health theories have panned out for him.

Similar to Linus Pauling who said to take 6 grams of vitamin C daily with lysine, lived to 92.