The first World War had a major impact on the global financial structure. The United States had the resources and had invited the downtrodden workers of Europe to fill their vast empty spaces with energetic people avidly chasing the American Dream. Their factories grew at an exponential rate building the arms for the combatants. A new group of wealthy entrepreneurs entered the money game, establishing independent banks in the US. The New York Stock Exchange grew to rival London's FTSE. The domination of the money supply was being seriously challenged.

As a study of the great wars of history shows, when the soldiers come home and the munitions factories go into decline, the economies, even of the victors, suffer high unemployment and deep recession until they can be reorganized. In the USA, the technological revolution had used the war expansion for the development of new enterprises and they didn't have a relatively large number of soldiers returning with no hope for employment and the wherewithal to feed and house their families. The development of the automobile industry led by Henry Ford did for America what the development of railroads had done for Britain. Factories operated at full capacity while more and more innovations spurred investments into new industries. Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell made fortunes with the electrical appliances and telephone. Marconi gave us the wireless and in 1927, radio came on the air. The production of electricity became a dominant industry expanding exponentially through the "Roaring Twenties".

The old money people were being challenged for dominance of the very private control of the global money supply, and thus the dominant ownership of global industries, including those of the United States until the mid 1920's. They decided to act.

In 1929 the old money began a massive sell-off of stocks causing the stock market crash of 1929. They went further. They froze inter-bank credit. Almost overnight the burgeoning factories of America, along with the rest of the world, were unable to get credit and one after the other were boarded up and bankrupted. The new independent banks in the US saw their deposits falling while bankruptcies of their clients froze their income. The severe drought on the American prairies added impetus to the economic chaos. The era of the hobos riding the freight trains fleeing their lost homes in search of survival emerged. The young, brash upstart, the USA suddenly faced The Grapes of Wrath.

Old money quietly bought the worthless stocks and when they had control again, began reopening factories and easing credit restrictions but the old rivalries had not been solved by World War I, which ended in a stalemate. The young fiery orator from Austria decided to challenge the old order by creating a new order in Germany. In 1932 Adolf Hitler seized the reins of political power to create a military state using slave labour to reopen its factories and manufacture arms to challenge and conquer the old order in Europe. The Third Reich printed its own money. That had to be challenged at all costs, and making war on Hitler would be a profitable business now that the old order owned control of the banks and factories again.

The political classes of Britain had been using the Great Depression to press for more democratic rights, just as they had done in the economic chaos following the Napoleonic wars. The wealthy few of Britain didn't buy the arms and materiel to defend themselves from the Nazi aggressors. The government had to go hat in hand to the Americans to get credit to buy American arms. It is an oddity of the times that in the height of the war the King of England flew secretly into Germany to check on the family business. The Royal family was profiting from an arms industry that was making the bombs and bullets that were killing their subjects!

World War II accelerated the technological revolution. It gave us radar along with improved radio. Radar gave us the cathode ray tube that morphed into television. The jet engine gave us the modern airline industry.

Following WW I was the collapse of the Tsarist regime in Russia with the victory of the Bolshevik Revolution. This was tolerated as long as the Russians kept sending their sons to the eastern front to die by the millions in the challenge to the Nazis.

Following WW II this could not be tolerated. The single economic system based on the banking monopoly of Old Money carefully disguised as the free enterprise capitalist system had to maintain global dominance or face its demise. The Russians spurned their money system and created one of their own. That is why their currency could never be traded or used outside their borders.

The Cold War kept up the arms race: a most profitable enterprise. The threat of nuclear annihilation kept the freedom loving independent thinkers at bay while the escalation of the arms race kept the profits rolling in. The other messy little wars tied to the Cold War from Korea to Viet Nam and South and Central America to Africa and the Middle East helped sustain the boom.

When the expansion of industry and technology created a new wealthy class capable of challenging Old Money in the dominance game, it was time to shake the tree. Credit was tightened with high interest rates causing recession. Recession caused rapid falls in the stock markets. When Old Money had bought up enough cheap stock to maintain control credit was again made easy to let the entrepreneurs create more new sources of wealth.

The Cold War spawned the Space Race.

It also spawned the Internet.

The Internet has given us the tool to challenge Old Money in ways they simply could not anticipate. All of a sudden, practically overnight in historic terms, individual persons have access to more and better information than the most wealthy and powerful persons had only a few decades ago.

My question is: can we use our ability to communicate fast enough to create a system of exchange that does not keep driving us deeper and deeper into a debt that has been completely artificial from its very beginning?

Lincoln didn't free the slaves. He just gave them a bloody raise.

Money has gone from beans to metal to paper. And now it is plastic.

The Credit Card is the latest form of slavery.

Growth of the Tree

Before entering the labyrinth of branches of the money tree in the 20th century, it is worth noting how the 19th century set the stage, not only of the tree itself but the political alignments created by the developments of the British Empire and the technological revolution that spawned the chaos of the century we have just passed through.

Much of the drive to create the British Empire was centered in religious zeal. Britain, and its offspring the United States, were the crucibles of the spread of the protestant religions around the globe. Much of the British exploitation of other lands was led by the missionary movement. They set out to convert the world of savages into good Christians and teach them how to live in a civilized manner. The height of the Empire was the Victorian Age. When the heathens objected to the desecration of their gods and fought against this invasion of their world, the army was sent to protect the missionaries and the merchants accompanied them to teach the savages the proper way to do business and exploit their resources.

England was not all-powerful in those days but it forced the European Kingdoms to coalesce into political alliances to maintain their survival. The Europeans set out to compete in empire building on one hand, and holding their royal powers at home on the other. The old Byzantine empire became the Ottoman Empire and was gnawing at the underbelly of the Austro Hungarian Empire, forcing that motley collection of different ethnic cultures to seek other alliances, setting up the powder keg in the Balkan states that triggered World War I, and creating a new coalition of alliances that became the nation we know as Germany. The Russian Czars had let their power dissipate and the French were being torn by revolutions. The powerful empires were squabbling over the collection of tiny kingdoms on the peninsula that had been the home of the Roman Empire, so to prevent war they agreed to the creation of Italy to try to stabilize the region.

The technological revolution had sped up the flow of information with the telegraph and the organization of information and its dissemination with new improvements to the printing press. A group of aristocratic thinkers began to systematically study the world and the universe, calling themselves Natural Philosophers. The 19th century opened with the German Alexander von Humboldt and his artist friend Bonplant, touring the north of South America and Mexico collecting species of plants and animals unknown to Europeans. These challenged the prevailing dogmas of the times and inspired a young British aristocrat to tour the world in search of knowlege. Charles Darwin shattered the prevailing world view and set up the modern era of scientific study that became so overwhelming with new information it had to be broken into different scientific branches. Natural Philosophy first broke into separate studies of biology and the newly emerging study of chemistry. Darwin's Theory of Evolution challenged theology at its very roots. The study of fossils, along with the idea of natural selection, showed every thinking person that the world was not in stasis but was in a state of constant change resulting in the evolution of species.

This is when the money tree began sprouting more branches and the fight to control the money tree created the convolutions of the 20th century. As information sped up development, more and more money was needed to keep the wheels of industry and commerce greased and working. The banks were happy to keep lending more and more to create the expanding money supply as debts owed to them. The world sank deeper and deeper in debt to the shadowy silent persons whose only product was money.

Who were these people? How did they maintain such a vast confidence game when even religion itself could be challenged?