["Lords of Finance"]

[fiefoe]

Amazon's nerfed "Search Inside" feature makes quoting from a book 300% times harder than it used to be, especially for an audiobook. Try as I might, I couldn' t locate the part of the book that colorfully describes 'cypher-stroke' (?) that some people developed during German's hyperinflation period.

I wish Liaquat Ahamed had made the book more technical, not that I mind all those historical tidbits.

• Later  in life, the group used to refer to themselves as the "First Name Club."... The (bankers' cabal) met in Jekyll Island (to design the plan for Federal Reserve.)
• Within forty-eight hours of the kaiser's flight, twenty-five dynasties have abdicated within Germany.
• Kenneth Graham (was) shot during an unsuccessful robbery attempt at the Bank (of England), and the following year published The Wind in the Willows.
• The British delegation on the Reparations Commission, led by Lord Cunliffe and Lord Summer, who were by then nicknamed "The Heavenly Twins" because they were always together and insisted on such outrageously high figures and would not agree to a settlement of less than $55 billion.
• (During German's hyperinflation:) private printers were conscripted to print money.
• "In the whole course of history, no dog has run after its own tail with the speed of the Reichsbank."
• (The head of German central bank) boasted that he could increase the money supply by 66% in one day.
• During the Paris Commune.. the Banque had met the currency needs of both sides - not only of the legitimate government at Versailles but of the Commune itself. "The hardest thing to understand," wrote Friedrich Engels, amazed at the deference of those first Communists, "is the holy awe with which they remained standing outside the gates of the Banque de France."

__ Williams Jennings Bryan: "You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns. You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold."
__ Wells's observation that gold had "a magnificent stupid honesty".
__ Norman Angell's "Europe's Optical Illusion" / "fogbank of opinions"