What happened last time the bankers crashed the stock market. The 1930s.

THE NEW DEAL WAS A RACKET

If the New Deal was a racket, then by definition it means that the Great Depression was caused by the same people who profited from it. Or in other words, it was “an inside job.” You don’t have to believe it, but that’s the conclusion I’ve reached, and we don’t have to look very far for evidence of it, because they admit it: former two-term Fed chairman, Ben Bernanke, acknowledged in a 2002 presentation that the actions of the Fed caused, prolonged, and exacerbated the Great Depression:

The first episode … was the deliberate tightening of monetary policy that began in the spring of 1928 and continued until the stock market crash of October 1929. This policy tightening occurred in conditions that we would not today normally consider conducive to tighter money: … the business-cycle trough had only just been reached at the end of 1927 … commodity prices were declining, and there was not the slightest hint of inflation. Why then did the Federal Reserve tighten in early 1928? [Good Question!] A principal reason was the Board’s ongoing concern about speculation on Wall Street. The Federal Reserve had long made the distinction between “productive” and “speculative” uses of credit, and the rising stock market and the associated increases in bank loans to brokers were thus a major concern. [Except all through the 20s the Fed encouraged speculation through its rules and rates and never seemed to have a problem with it.]

Moreover, Friedman and Schwartz went on to point out that this tightening of policy was followed by falling prices and weaker economic activity: ‘During the two months from the cyclical peak in August 1929 to the crash, production, wholesale prices, and personal income fell…’ Of course, once the crash occurred in October…the economic decline became even more precipitous.

The next episode … occurred in September 1931, following the sterling crisis. In that month, a wave of speculative attacks on the pound forced Great Britain to leave the gold standard. [“Attacks” is an interesting and telling choice of words.] Anticipating that the United States might be the next to leave gold, speculators turned their attention from the pound to the dollar. Central banks and private investors converted a substantial quantity of dollar assets to gold in September and October of 1931. The resulting outflow of gold reserves (an “external drain”) also put pressure on the U.S. banking system (an “internal drain”), as foreigners liquidated dollar deposits and domestic depositors withdrew cash in anticipation of additional bank failures. Conventional and long-established central banking practice would have mandated responses to both the external and internal drains, but the Federal Reserve…decided to respond only to the external drain. As Friedman and Schwarz wrote, “The Federal Reserve System reacted vigorously and promptly to the external drain. . . . On October 9 [1931], the Reserve Bank of New York raised its rediscount rate to 2-1/2 %, and on October 16, to 3-1/2%—the sharpest rise within so brief a period in the whole history of the System, before or since.” This action 27

stemmed the outflow of gold but contributed to what Friedman and Schwartz called a “spectacular” increase in bank failures and bank runs, with 522 commercial banks closing their doors in October alone. The policy tightening and the ongoing collapse of the banking system caused the money supply to fall precipitously, and the declines in output and prices became even more virulent. [Curious, don’t you think, that the Fed caused this by going against long-established practice?]

[The] third episode occurred in April 1932, when the Congress began to exert considerable pressure on the Fed to ease monetary policy, in particular, to conduct large-scale open-market purchases of securities. The Board was quite reluctant; but between April and June 1932, it did authorize substantial purchases. This infusion of liquidity … as Friedman and Schwartz noted (p. 324), “… [was] followed shortly by an equally notable change in the general economic indicator…. Wholesale prices started rising in July, production in August. Personal income continued to fall but at a much reduced rate. Factory employment, railroad ton-miles, and numerous other indicators of physical activity tell a similar story. All in all, as in early 1931, the data again have many of the earmarks of a cyclical revival…. Unfortunately … most [Fed officials] did not consider the policy to be appropriate…. Hence, when the Congress adjourned on July 16, 1932, the System essentially ended the program. By the latter part of the year, the economy had relapsed dramatically.” [So they deliberately axed a policy that was clearly working.]

So as you can see, it is now a matter of orthodoxy in economics that the Fed caused and exacerbated the Great Depression. The only question really is whether you believe it was done deliberately, with malice aforethought, or whether you agree with Bernanke by chalking it up to “misguided doctrines.” It seems to me just on the basis of Bernanke’s remarks that it was deliberate: (1) they tightened the money supply without good reason; (2) they went against standard practice; and (3) they quickly abandoned policies that were proving helpful. Bernanke also says that by 1931 the Fed had “foresworn any responsibility for the U.S. banking system.” That seems odd. Why would that be? Well, Bernanke assures us that “The problem within the Fed was largely doctrinal: Fed officials appeared to subscribe to Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon’s infamous ‘liquidationist’ thesis, that weeding out “weak” banks was a harsh but necessary prerequisite to the recovery of the banking system.” But then he goes on to explain how self-serving that doctrine really was:

Moreover, most of the failing banks were small banks (as opposed to what we would now call money-center banks) and not members of the Federal Reserve System. Thus the Fed saw no particular need to try to stem the panics. At the same time, the large banks—which would have intervened before the founding of the Fed [and were really in control of the Fed]—felt that protecting their smaller brethren was no longer their responsibility. Indeed, since the large banks felt confident that the Fed would protect them if necessary, the weeding out of small competitors was a positive good, from their point of view.

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And they just admit that in public? Bernanke calls it a “misguided doctrine.” But that’s ridiculous. The Fed was created in order to bring stability to the banking system. That is and was its raison d’être. [Though of course the history of the Fed’s creation indicates that it, too, was a kind of racket, having been justified on the basis of a banking panic manufactured by J.P. Morgan and others.] Here’s an analogy to elucidate the insanity here: imagine a few people drown at your local swimming pool. So they hire a lifeguard to stop people from drowning. Then all of a sudden a ton of people drown, and you ask him why he didn’t try to save any of them, and he just shrugs and says, “Bro, haven’t you ever heard of Darwin? Like, survival of the fittest, man.” That’s not a misguided doctrine, that’s criminal negligence. But then suppose you found out that the lifeguard had taken out insurance policies on everyone and was getting richer every time someone drowned—in other words, that he profited from their deaths. Would you just chalk that up to being misguided? Because that’s what Bernanke did.

Another indication we get that their (in)actions were quite deliberate is when we learn who seems to have benefited or emerged unscathed from the 1929 stock market crash: Bernard Baruch, for starters. And as we saw above, the firm he started out at A.A. Housman, was E.A. Pierce during the crash and later became Merrill Lynch. According to Wikipedia, “Following the Stock Market Crash of 1929, E.A. Pierce made a number of strategic acquisitions. E. A. Pierce acquired the brokerage business of Otis & Co. and C.D. Robbins & Co. both in 1930. It was also in 1930 that Pierce acquired the brokerage business of Merrill Lynch & Co. along with most of the firm’s employees including Edmund C. Lynch and Winthrop H. Smith. By the end of 1930, E.A. Pierce was the largest brokerage firm and premier “wire house” in the U.S.” So they cleaned up. I am now of the opinion that one of the main purposes of the business cycle and periodic economic contraction is to create an opportunity for the families in power to consolidate their wealth (or steal newly created wealth) and boost their market position.

And here we get a nice little fable about how Joseph Kennedy weathered the crash:

If you believe that, I guess you’ll believe anything. As usual, rich insiders were tipped off to the coming crash by their cronies who engineered it, and the people hurt most were those shoeshine boys and other regular Joes who had been

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propagandized and reassured all through the 1920s by the same people who engineered the crash that investing in the stock market was smart and safe. Just like the Union Générale fiasco or all the little old French ladies who lost their life savings in the Panama Canal scandal I covered in my Dreyfus paper. Just like the way they made untold millions on insider trading on 9/11. They will exploit any and every angle to make some dough at your expense. And if there isn’t an angle, they’ll come up with one—like the millions they reap setting up donation websites for fake victims of fake tragedies like Sandy Hook or Boston. Angles on top of angles. The sheer amount of chutzpah is staggering.

The Dollar Devaluation

And what did they do with their money when they made early exits from the stock market? Here we get to the one issue that puzzled me the longest. One of the things they did was to buy gold, as we saw in above in Bernanke’s remarks. When the business plot is recounted, we are told that their chief concern was returning the U.S. dollar to the gold standard, and much of the money for the plot allegedly came from backers of the Committee for a Sound Dollar and Sound Currency, who were allied with the Du Ponts and J.P. Morgan.

In March of 1933, at the outset of his presidency, Roosevelt declared a bank holiday in an attempt to stop rushes on banks. People didn’t rush banks simply to withdraw their money as cash. A bank rush back then involved people trying to convert their cash to gold. At that time, dollar bills were directly exchangeable for gold or gold certificates. So people were rushing to banks to convert their dollars for gold, and the banks were quickly running out of gold. Soon after the bank holiday was over, Roosevelt passed an executive order making it illegal to possess more the 5 troy ounces of gold, basically forcing people to turn in their gold for cash at $20.67 per ounce, a price that had been set in 1913 when the Fed was created. At that point, the dollar was still anchored to the price of gold, but ordinary citizens could not withdraw gold, or even own it in substantial quantities (until the 1970s when the dollar went off the gold standard completely). In January, 1934, the Gold Reserve Act was passed that increased the price of gold from $20.67 to $35 per troy ounce. We are told that the purpose of the devaluation was to help jump start the economy and also strengthen the US banking system by encouraging imports of gold.

If there is any aspect of this whole story that left me with a sliver of doubt that maybe there was a sliver of truth to the business plot, it was this: Standard histories tell us that FDR’s decision to “weaken” the dollar went against the advice of all of his advisers except one, an obscure agricultural economist from Cornell University named George Warren. Was it possible that FDR loyally implemented the desired policies of his Wall Street cronies except on this one issue, and that they really were peeved enough about it to plot his ouster? I

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actually entertained the possibility until I got to page 137 on Josephson’s book. After detailing how Hearst, Du Pont, and Morgan worked together to win FDR’s election in 1932 and some business brawling between Hearst and the Rockefellers (of dubious authenticity), we get this:

Hearst, through his ownership of a controlling block of stock in Homestake Mining Company as well as investments in other gold mining property, is one of the largest, or perhaps the largest, individual gold producer in the world. If he could increase the earnings of these companies, Hearst would be able to salvage his estates. That required a revaluation, a rise in the Treasury price, of gold….

Hearst would not release the [delegates he controlled] except to a candidate who would agree to revalue gold. Roosevelt agreed to do so as the first act of his Administration…. However systematically F.D.R. violated his promise to the nation’s voters, he rarely was permitted by the Dynasty to fail to live up to the letter of his pledges to his financial backers and bosses. He revalued gold as the first act of his Administration, after closing the banks…. The revaluation of gold meant eventually that persons or groups permitted to retain ownership of gold, and producers of new gold, received an increased price of $15, or 75%, per ounce. But the rank and file of the citizenry, every man, woman and child who owned gold which was surrendered, bonds, savings, insurance or liquid cash, were robbed to the same extent.

For the banking groups who retained gold or who exported it to foreign countries in advance of the gold order, the revaluation meant huge profits. Such banks as Rockefeller’s Chase National Bank exported billions of dollars’ worth of gold bullion successively to France and England, beginning in October 1929. They profited when they increased the price of gold in France, when they manipulated the rise in the pound sterling in England…and when they returned the gold the United States they gave themselves $15.00 an ounce more for their gold, as a reward for helping to bring on the 1929 crash and the depression by exporting gold.

Ah yes, of course! Anyone holding dollars saw the value of their money decline. However, for anyone still holding gold, its value increased substantially. Who do you suppose benefited? Now just imagine you had exported a bunch of gold the year before at the price of $20.67. A year later that gold is worth $35 and you sell it back to the US Federal Reserve. We are assured it was a win for the US Economy, but obviously it was a win for anyone who bought the gold and exported it. And of course we have seen that all of the most powerful bankers had family and business ties across the Atlantic (this also includes the Morgan Grenfell acceptance house in London). It takes little imagination to see how they would have profited from this move. But wait, there’s more:

It was imperative for [Hearst] that Roosevelt should be repeatedly reelected. But he knew that his continuous championship of Roosevelt would drive his [Hearst’s] numerous enemies into the opposition.

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The task of making Hearst a real asset to Roosevelt’s re-election campaigns instead of a potential liability and of perverting public opinion, was placed before a group of outstanding publicity men. They advised that Nazism and Fascism was becoming extremely unpopular in the United States and F.D.R. was following public opinion in opposing them. They suggested that Hearst and his publications launch a sham fight on Roosevelt, and at the same time pretend to support Nazism and Fascism, thus throwing the Anti-Nazis and Anti-Fascists into the Roosevelt camp…. With great ostentation and publicity, [Hearst] announced a visit to both Hitler and Mussolini, the outcome of which was the appearance in Hearst’s publications, under control of the Rockefeller interests, of articles by Goebbels, Goering, Gayda and others. As…expected, the gullible public aged at Hearst and flocked to the standards of Roosevelt, blind to the fact that he was giving them another of the same brand of dictatorship…. The antagonism between Hearst and Roosevelt was utterly sham and an absurd hoax, as can be discerned from the things that Hearst was doing simultaneously for the Roosevelt family [some of which he goes on to detail.]

So the whole Hearst vs. Roosevelt controversy was manufactured from top to bottom. It was just a pose. Truly nothing these people say can be believed. They are willing to say or do anything to pull the wool over your eyes and manipulate you, and they really don’t care what you think of them. I doubt the specific motives Josephson details here were really at play. For example, we are to believe that there was a major business dispute between the Rockefellers and the Hearsts, and yet everything Hearst did seemed to benefit the Rockefellers just as much.5 I also doubt that it was “publicity men” who guided this maneuver, unless that means Intelligence propaganda operatives. And certainly if Nazism andFascismwerebecomingunpopularintheU.S.,itwasbydesign. Theydidn’t simply figure out a way to ride the free-wheeling wave of “public sentiment”. And the manufactured rift between Hearst and Roosevelt can be understood as yet another means by which they sought to shape public sentiment against Nazism and Fascism and to blind them to the fact that they were simply getting another flavor of the same medicine.

New Deal Policies

But what about the New Deal? Surely it can’t have been such a boon for businesses – just look at how much they fought the New Deal. As we just learned, nothing these people say can be believed. They are masters of reverse and double-reverse and triple-reverse psychology. So whether or not business

5 I suppose it’s possible that there are genuine business disputes between the families. They may have a more or less united front when it comes to bamboozling the masses, but there is no reason to assume that their ranks are free of competition or factionalism. Business is business, after all. It is hard to imagine disciplined solidarity among a bunch of greedy psychopaths. It may even be that different factions favor different philosophies of rule—some preferring the velvet glove over the iron fist. But on such matters we can only speculate.

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appeared to fight the New Deal is irrelevant. You have to look at what was achieved.

“So then how about the Wagner Act?” you will say. “Organized labor achieved a major victory. Finally, after decades of struggling, they finally won the right to engage in collective bargaining.” If you’ve been paying close attention to Miles’s research, you should understand that labor unions in the US have long been controlled from the top. They pose no real threat to big business. If anything, they can be used as a cudgel against competition. Indeed, the term “racket” first came into popular usage in the U.S. in the context of so-called “labor racketeering.” It means using the threat of a strike to extort money or other concessions from an employer. We are told it is the mafia that does this, but that is just more misdirection. If the Mafia and/or the unions are controlled by the trillionaire families as Miles has argued, then we know who is really behind the shakedown.

But didn’t unions lift wages and secure better working conditions? How could that benefit business? Well, at some point they figured out that it was actually to their benefit to lift wages. After all, if you want a market for your products, you need to pay the workers enough money to buy your stuff. They learned that by raising wages they could create even more wealth, which they could steal back in a million different ways. After all, wouldn’t you rather be at the top of the pyramid in New York City than Tegucigalpa? What is more, there is probably no better way to co-opt people than to align their interests to yours. The people who are least likely to upset the Matrix or ask any uncomfortable question are those who are drawing a fat paycheck. In any case, even if you want to count collective bargaining rights as a hard-won victory, it was very short-lived. By the 1980s U.S. labor unions had become more or less irrelevant to the lives of most working Americans, and they have only become more so with each passing year.

Look, I’m not saying that the standard of living for the average American didn’t improve after World War II. And certainly New Deal programs like social security and the Wagner act played a role. But these improvements and reforms were at least as much given as they were won. And I assume they were given because, at the time, our governors viewed it as being in their own interests. Perhaps they worried that they overdid it with the Great Depression and were concerned about losing their grip on power. They seem to have reversed course in recent decades, with the standard of living falling dramatically in real terms since the 1960s, so it looks like they are still arguing about that one.

But what about all the regulations passed during the New Deal? Surely businesses didn’t view those as being in their interests. After all, don’t they always balk at regulation? Again, don’t believe anything they say. Let me ask

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you this: if you are in control of the government, what do you have to fear from regulation? As we’ve seen, Roosevelt was a Wall Street guy. His cronies had nothing to fear from him, just as they had nothing to fear from government regulations. The only people who really have anything to fear from regulations are their competitors; regulations are a great way for big business to stymie competition. The higher the start-up costs, the harder it is for people to compete against you. Regulations are used by big business to solidify their market advantage. Or as Sutton declaims: “regulatory agencies are devices to use the police power of the state to shield favored industries from competition, to protect their inefficiencies, and to guarantee their profits.” Not that I think Sutton’s desire to get rid of all regulations in some kind of libertarian wet dream is any solution, either. That would only accelerate the tyranny of the market and the tragedy of the commons. I’m not sure what the best solution is, but I do know that they have once again provided us with a forced, false choice: heads they win, tails we lose.

We have been sold a long-running fiction that one political party is a champion for business and free enterprise, while the other is a champion for the people and supports increased regulations and consumer protections. But the same people win either way: it’s those guys at the top of the “global elite banker” pyramid. The rest of us are just being played. It was the same thing with cousin Teddy’s “trust- busting” scam supposedly aimed at protecting small business and consumers from big monopolies. We are told that Rockefeller fought the break-up of the Standard Oil monopoly tooth and nail. But guess what? His wealth doubled overnight after Standard Oil was broken up, since his stock shares mushroomed with the creation of all the (33!) new companies.

Buy what about the Glass-Steagall Act—the one that separated commercial banking from finance, whose repeal we are told enabled the global financial collapse of 2008? Well to begin with, Glass-Steagall wasn’t what we are told it was and didn’t do what we are assured it did. Ditto with the “repeal.” You can see this video by James Corbett for more details. Although for various reasons I consider Corbett to be a limited hangout, this is a well-researched report that happened to come out as I was working on my write-up after completing my own investigation. One of the things he notes there, which I had also noticed, is that the Glass-Steagall act was co-sponsored by Senator Carter Glass, who was also a sponsor of the Glass-Owen act that created the Federal Reserve. Do you really think that the person who helped create the Federal Reserve later intervened to do something that would hurt the big banks?

To take a detour down the genealogy path, we first find that Henry Bascom Steagall’s page is managed by none other than Erica ‘the Disconnectrix’ Howton. We also find that the “Owen” of Glass-Owen was Robert Latham Owen. He also

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has Clarks and Whartons in his family line. The name Latham has come up in Miles’s paper on F. Scott Fitzgerald and his more recent paper on the nuclear program (as Lathom). Isabel Lathom was the wife of John Stanley, II (aka Sheriff of Anglesey and Sovereign of the Isle of Mann) and mother of Thomas de Stanley, 1st Lord Stanley. These same Lathams are likely connected to the world’s most profitable law firm, Lathams & Watkins. In addition, Arbuthnot Latham was one of the original 12 British accepting houses:

The Arbuthnot part of the Arbuthnot Latham name comes from the line of Scottish Peer Robert Arbuthnot, 1st Viscount of Arbuthnott (died 1655). He married Marjory Carnegie, who was the eldest daughter of David Carnegie, 1st Earl of Southesk. I would not be surprised if Andrew Carnegie comes from this line of Carnegies. His early bio certainly screams fiction, but his genealogy leads nowhere.

The Glass-Owen act, by the way, also created acceptance banking in the US. So it is fitting to find someone whose family name is linked to a British acceptance bank enabling their creation in the U.S. According to Antony Sutton: “Surely, Warburg’s leading role in the Federal Reserve System was not unconnected with his reaping the lion’s share of benefits from its acceptance policy…. [T]he policy of creating acceptances at subsidized artificial rates was not only inflationary, but was the most important factor, apparently a deliberate banking policy, leading to the inflation of the 1920s and the ultimate collapse in 1929, thus making FDR’s New Deal or national economic planning appear necessary. Further, this was, as Rothbard states, ‘…the grant of special privilege to a small group at the expense of the general public.’ In other words, Wall Street made American society go to work for a financial oligopoly.” I don’t have the stamina to unwind the role of acceptance banking, but clearly there is more to it than meets the eye.

And finally, no discussion of the New Deal as a racket would be complete without a mention of the National Industry Recovery Act, the centerpiece of what came to be known as the First New Deal. It created the National Recovery Administration, which was tasked with implementing the NIRA. The NIRA was basically a way to allow big business to regulate their own industries, set prices and wages, and draft codes that favored their interests. The NRA was eventually

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declared unconstitutional. It took inspiration from the War Industries Board established during WWI, which was run by Bernard Baruch and enabled him and his cronies to direct wartime military spending. As mentioned earlier, Baruch’s protégé and right-hand-man, Hugh Johnson, was put in charge of the NRA. I encourage you to read the Wikipedia page on the NRA and NIRA to get a feeling for the whitewashing and propaganda that accompanied this wet dream of leading industrialists and financiers.

The NRA is said to have originated in a plan first devised by Gerard Swope, who was appointed one of Johnson’s principal assistants at the NRA. Swope was President of General Electric from 1922 to 1939; GE being a company controlled by J.P. Morgan. Swope was an assistant to Johnson at the NRA. Walter Teagles, president of Standard Oil, was also appointed to a top position in the NRA. Are you starting to get the picture?

John Raskob, a V.P. DuPont and General Motors, was one of the top 3 people at the NRA in 1933 (at least according to Antony Sutton—I haven’t been able to confirm this elsewhere). General Motors was controlled by J.P. Morgan’s Guaranty Trust; the chairman of the board at GM was Pierre S. Du Pont, of the Du Pont Company, which in 1933 had about a 25 per cent interest in General Motors. So wherever we see Raskob doing something, we can assume it is at the behest of Du Pont and Morgan—or at least with their blessing. Raskob, as chairman of the Democratic party, was a big fund raiser in 1932 and behind-the- scenes operator promoting the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932. And although the NRA was presumably devised as a response to the Great Depression, according to Antony Sutton key elements of what became the National Recovery program were given a public airing in 1928 by John J. Raskob, Bernard Baruch, and other Wall Streeters. The promotion of what came to be known as Roosevelt’s NRA actually dates from the 1928 Raskob speeches made in the Al Smith Presidential campaign. So the cure appeared on the scene before the disease. Does anyone else smell a racket?

We are told that Raskob, DuPont and Morgan began to sour on Roosevelt by 1934 for being too friendly to labor and turned to oppose him and the Democratic party. This presumably sets the stage for their alleged coup, the business plot. But who else did we just see supported Roosevelt in his first election only to publicly turn against him? William Randolph Hearst. And what did we see in that case? It was just a pose to beef up Roosevelt’s street cred and boost his reelection chances. Same thing here. I call bullshit.

THE MEN BEHIND THE BUSINESS PLOT

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There is much to be learned by studying the people behind the business plot. As I wrap up the first installment of this 2-part investigation, I’m going to ignore the foot soldiers for now and focus on the two big names, Du Pont and Morgan.

Irenée Du Pont

First a little background on the Du Pont family from various Wikipedia entries:

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Are there any other indications that the Du Ponts were Jewish or from a crypto- Jewish descent? The only thing I could find is that Pierre Samuel’s great- grandfather was named Abraham and two of his children were named Abraham and Esther. But their genealogy hits a dead-end two generations earlier.

Now, two of Éleuthère sons were Alfred and Alexis. Alfred’s grandson, Irénée du Pont, was one of the Du Pont family members named as an alleged backer of the business plot. Alexis’s son, Eugene was the first head of the modern-day Du Pont corporation. His granddaughter, Ethel, married Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s son in 1937. It was rumored that they got engaged soon after FDR’s 1932 election victory, but this was kept secret until he won his second election (see Josephson page 141). Now we can understand why it was kept secret. It would have blown a huge hole in the business plot narrative. But even so, the fact they were married a few years later completely destroys the narrative to anyone with eyes to see and a brain to think. Are we supposed to believe that FDR just decided to let bygones be bygones? Or that the marriage was some kind of plutocratic kiss-and-make-up move?

As an aside, it’s interesting to note is that Ethel’s maternal grandmother was Ella Oswald Pyle, whose mother was Elizabeth O. Beggs, whose father was Israel Kurtz. So she was likely Jewish. Elizabeth’s mom’s parents were John and Emily Oswald. I could find no connection between them and Lee Harvey Oswald, but I suspect it is no coincidence. Here, just look at some of the famous people Lee Harvey is related to. You’ll notice that FDR is actually on there, as are Eleonore and Teddy. In fact, he is Teddy’s third cousin, once removed. That’s a surprisingly close relation (though on second thought, perhaps not so surprising).

J.P. MORGAN, Jr.

The congressional investigation into the causes of the 1929 stock market crash, which revealed among other things that Morgan and many of his partners had paid no income tax in 1931 and 1932, had this to say of his firm’s power: It was “a great stream that was fed by many sources: by its deposits, by its loans, by its promotions, by its directorships, by its pre-eminent position as investment bankers, by its control of holding companies which, in turn, controlled scores of subsidiaries, and by its silken bonds of gratitude in which it skillfully enmeshed the chosen ranks of the ‘preferred lists.’ It reached into every corner of the nation and penetrated into public, as well as business affairs. The problems raised by such an institution go far beyond banking regulation in the narrow sense. It might be a formidable rival to the government itself.’”

Nothing has really changed: J.P. Morgan Chase is currently the largest bank in the U.S. in terms of assets and the largest bank worldwide by market capitalization. And then of course there’s Morgan Stanley investment services, with revenues of $38 billion in 2016 and reputedly the world’s largest wealth management business.

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