- Griffin, G. Edward.
The Creature from Jekyll Island.
Westlake Village, CA: American Media, [1994, 1995, 1998, 2002] 2010.
ISBN 978-0-912986-45-6.
-
Almost every time I review a book about or discuss the U.S.
Federal Reserve System in a conversation or Internet post,
somebody recommends this book. I'd never gotten around to
reading it until recently, when a couple more mentions of it
pushed me over the edge. And what an edge that turned out
to be. I cannot recommend this book to anybody; there are
far more coherent, focussed, and persuasive analyses of
the Federal Reserve in print, for example Ron Paul's excellent
book End the Fed (October 2009).
The present book goes well beyond a discussion of the Federal
Reserve and rambles over millennia of history in a chaotic
manner prone to induce temporal vertigo in the reader, discussing
the history of money, banking, political manipulation of
currency, inflation, fractional reserve banking, fiat
money, central banking, cartels, war profiteering,
bailouts, monetary panics and bailouts, nonperforming loans
to “developing” nations, the Rothschilds and
Rockefellers, booms and busts, and more.
The author is inordinately fond of conspiracy theories. As
we pursue our random walk through history and around the
world, we encounter:
- The sinking of the Lusitania
- The assassination of Abraham Lincoln
- The Order of the Knights of the Golden Circle,
the Masons, and the Ku Klux Klan
- The Bavarian Illuminati
- Russian Navy intervention in the American Civil War
- Cecil Rhodes and the Round Table Groups
- The Council on Foreign Relations
- The Fabian Society
- The assassination of John F. Kennedy
- Theodore Roosevelt's “Bull Moose” run
for the U.S. presidency in 1912
- The Report from Iron Mountain
- The attempted assassination of Andrew Jackson in 1835
- The Bolshevik Revolution in Russia
I've jumped around in history to give a sense of the
chaotic, achronological narrative here. “What does
this have to do with the Federal Reserve?”, you
might ask. Well, not very much, except as part of a
worldview in which almost everything is explained by the
machinations of bankers assisted by the crooked politicians
they manipulate.
Now, I agree with the author, on those occasions he
actually gets around to discussing the Federal Reserve,
that it was fraudulently sold to Congress and the
U.S. population and has acted, from the very start, as
a self-serving cartel of big New York banks enriching
themselves at the expense of anybody who holds assets
denominated in the paper currency they have been inflating
away ever since 1913. But you don't need to invoke
conspiracies stretching across the centuries and around
the globe to explain this. The Federal Reserve is
(despite how it was deceptively structured and
promoted) a central bank, just like the Bank of England
and the central banks of other European countries
upon which it was modelled, and creating funny money
out of thin air and looting the population by the
hidden tax of inflation is what central banks do,
always have done, and always will, as long as they are
permitted to exist. Twice in the history of the U.S.
prior to the establishment of the Federal Reserve,
central banks were created, the
first in 1791
by Alexander Hamilton, and the
second
in 1816. Each time, after the abuses of such an
institution became apparent, the bank was abolished,
the first in 1811, and the second in 1836. Perhaps,
after the inevitable crack-up which always results from
towering debt and depreciating funny money, the
Federal Reserve will follow the first two central banks
into oblivion, but so deeply is it embedded in the
status quo it is difficult to see how that might happen
today.
In addition to the rambling narrative, the production values
of the book are shoddy. For a book which has gone through
five editions and 33 printings, nobody appears to have
spent the time giving the text even the most cursory of
proofreading. Without examining it with the critical eye
I apply when proofing my own work or that of others, I noted
137 errors of spelling, punctuation, and formatting in the text.
Paragraph breaks are inserted seemingly at random, right in
the middle of sentences, and other words are run
together. Words which are misspelled include
“from”, “great”, “fourth”,
and “is”. This is not a freebie or dollar
special, but a paperback which sells for US$20 at
Amazon, or US$18 for the Kindle edition. And as I
always note, if the author and publisher cannot be
bothered to get simple things like these correct, how
likely is it that facts and arguments in the text can
be trusted?
Don't waste your money or your time. Ron Paul's End the
Fed is much better, only a third the length, and
concentrates on the subject without all of the whack-a-doodle
digressions. For a broader perspective on the history of money,
banking, and political manipulation of currency, see Murray
Rothbard's classic What Has Government Done
to Our Money? (July 2019).
August 2019 