How did a group of private bankers devise, promote and ramrod a plan through Congress to take over the money and credit of the United States at a time when anti-trust laws were being invoked to curb corporate monopolies? Answer. With money, foreign connections, inside Congressional help, propaganda and a gullible president who believed their scheme to set up the Federal Reserve System was for the welfare of the United States. That's what his book is about. The story begins late in the first decade of the 20th Century and involves a secret and successful scam that would make any Hollywood cloak-and-dagger mystery pale by comparison. The perpetrators of the swindle include prominent New York bankers, a foreigner sent by European banking interests, a key senator and alleged front man for the Rockefeller interests. They pulled off a successful scheme to the take over the people's money and credit by forming the Federal Reserve System, a deliberate misnomer, since the institution formed was not Federal nor did it have the reserves its name implies. The machinations involved tops anything Alfred Hitchcock and other Hollywood mystery producers have ever come up with. It might even rival the great Edgar Poe, the master of ratiocination himself. The book delves into how it was done and sketches those who participated in the scheme often referred to as the greatest scam in history. It pulls together various accounts of the episode as well as biographies of some participants and quotes from one autobiography of a banker who was in on the fraud and who also was a former economics writer. The story is astounding because the bankers were able to establish a private cartel at the very time when the Sherman and Clayton Anti-Trust Acts were being invoked to dismantle corporate monopolies such as Standard Oil. They used as much secrecy as they could contrive to conceal their identity using first or phony names and disguising their trip from New York to an idyll
