F. William Engdahl -- GODS OF MONEY -- Chapter 14

F. William Engdahl
Strasse der Republik 17 Wiesbaden Hessen 65203 GERMANY

Dear Reader,

I want to share a section from my book, Wall Street and the Death of the American Century. The death of former Federal Reserve and US Treasury official, Paul Volcker, at age 92 has led to much misplaced praise of his legacy. What is rarely mentioned is the true role he played in what I consider the most fateful and damaging monetary decision of the past half-century, the decision to decouple the US dollar from gold and to open the floodgates to the greatest peacetime inflation in US postwar history. I hope you find it interesting as we live with the consequences today.

I would ask you to consider buying the book or one of my other books noted at the top of my website. Otherwise if you are able to I greatly appreciate any support contribution via my website PayPal to allow us to maintain free content in a time of growing media suppression of free thought on the internet.

With best regards,

William Engdahl

www.williamengdahl.com

  

http://www.williamengdahl.com/books.php

Copyright © F. William Engdahl. All rights reserved.                                             

Chapter Fourteen:  

                  Nixon walks away from Bretton Woods

You’ve shown how the United States has run rings around Britain and every other empire-building nation in history. We’ve pulled off the greatest rip-off ever achieved.

         --Herman Kahn of Hudson Institute in 1971 when informed how US   payments deficits could be used to exploit other countries [i]

1971: Beginning of the endgame

The early 1970s were a watershed in policy for the American establishment. Dramatic measures were needed to ensure the continued domination of the United States as global economic and financial superpower. It was not at all obvious how they would do it. Soon enough however, the powers that dominated Wall Street developed a strategy.

With Lyndon Johnson’s war in South-East Asia escalating, along with its costs, international banks and central banks accelerated their selling of dollars and buying of gold. By 1968 the Federal US budget deficit, fed by exploding costs of the war, reached an unprecedented height of $30 billion. Gold reserves continued to fall precariously close to the legal floor of 25% allowed by law under the Bretton Woods treaty. Political disarray within Johnson’s Administration increased the financial flight as Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, widely viewed as the architect of a “no-win war” strategy, handed in his resignation.

The Vietnam War strategy had been deliberately designed by Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy, along with Pentagon planners and key advisers around Lyndon Johnson, to be a “no-win war” from the onset, in order to ensure a prolonged buildup of the military sector of the US economy. The American voter, Washington reasoned, would accept large costs for a new war against an alleged ‘encroachment of Godless communism’ in Vietnam, despite the gaping US budget deficits, as long as this produced local jobs in defense plants.

Under the US-dictated Bretton Woods rules, by inflating the dollar through huge spending deficits at home, Washington could, in effect, force Europe and other trading partners to ‘swallow’ US war costs in the form of cheapened dollars. So long as the United States refused to devalue the dollar against gold to reflect the deterioration of US economic performance since 1944, Europe had to pay the cost by accepting dollars at the same ratio as it had some 20 years before despite a huge inflation over that period.

To finance the enormous deficits of his Great Society program as well as the Vietnam buildup during the 1960s, Johnson, fearful of losing votes if he raised taxes, simply printed dollars by selling more US Treasury bonds to finance the deficits. In the early 1960s, the US federal budget deficit averaged approximately $3 billion annually. It hit an alarming $9 billion in 1967 as the war costs soared, and by 1968 it reached a staggering $25 billion.

The European central banks began to accumulate large dollar accounts during this period, which they used as official reserves, the so-called Eurodollar accumulation abroad. Ironically, Washington in 1961 had requested that US allies in Europe and Japan, the Group of Ten countries, should ease the drain on US gold reserves by retaining their growing dollar reserves instead of redeeming the dollars for American gold, as mandated under the terms of Bretton Woods.

The European central banks in turn earned interest on these dollars by investing in US government treasury bonds. The net effect was that the European central banks thereby in effect 'financed' the huge US budget deficits of the 1960s Vietnam War they so opposed.[ii]

‘Hot Money’ in offshore Eurodollar markets

Beginning in the late 1950s the major New York banks had greatly increased their power and influence through a series of bank mergers.  Rockefeller’s Chase National Bank had merged with the Bank of Manhattan to form Chase Manhattan Bank, headed by John J. McCloy, Rockefeller’s attorney and a Rockefeller Foundation Trustee as well as Chairman of the New York Council on Foreign Relations. McCloy had recently returned to New York after serving as US High Commissioner in Germany. The National City Bank of New York took over the First National Bank of New York to form City Bank of New York, later Citibank, under the chairmanship of James Stillman Rockefeller.

Other large New York banks, including Chemical bank, Manufacturers Hanover Trust and Bankers Trust, underwent similar mergers and consolidations. According to a 1961 US Department of Justice report, the five largest New York banks, dominated by the two Rockefeller banks, controlled 75% of all deposits in the nation’s largest city, the world’s international financial center. [iii]

The remarkable concentration of money power into those few New York banks by the 1960s would prove decisive in determining international political and financial developments for the ensuing four decades into the 21st Century and the financial securitization crisis of 2007.

To facilitate this extraordinary concentration of financial power, the US Government exempted banks from US anti-trust laws prohibiting undue concentration or cartelization.[iv]

By the 1960s these newly consolidated and enormously influential New York banks moved to create a new offshore market for dollars outside the United States -- the new ‘Eurodollar’ market, a name for dollars held abroad in Europe.

During the late 1960s the New York banks, led by Chase Manhattan and Citibank, began to develop a use for the billions of dollars accumulating overseas in London and Continental European banks. Through astute lobbying by the New York banks, loans made by foreign branches of American banks to foreign residents had been declared exempt from the new 1964 US Interest Equalization Tax designed to curb US bank lending abroad and to stop the dollar drain. The exemption of course meant that the dollar drain continued unabated.

As a result, US banks scrambled to establish branches in London and other appropriate centers. Once again, the City of London, despite the weakness of the British economy, had maneuvered to become a centerpiece of world finance and banking through development of the vast new and unregulated dollar banking and lending market with its center in London. [v]

The increasing efforts of Washington to persuade overseas dollar holders not to redeem dollars for gold led to a growing volume of dollars more or less permanently overseas, mostly in Western Europe or London. London's sagging fortunes began once more to brighten as the City of London, the banking district, began to corner the market in expatriate US dollars. The Bank of England and London banker Sir Siegmund Warburg, founder of the influential British merchant bank, S.G. Warburg & Co., were at the heart of the growing Eurodollar offshore money market. With the assistance of his friends in Washington, especially Undersecretary of State George Ball, Warburg had cleverly lured the dollars into what was to become the largest concentration of dollar credit outside of the US itself.

The resulting London Eurodollar market was also ‘offshore,’ meaning it was outside the jurisdiction of US national laws or central bank supervision.

New York banks and Wall Street brokerage houses set up offices in London to manage the blossoming new Eurodollar casino, far away from the eyes of US tax authorities. The international branches of the large New York banks got cheap funds from the Eurodollar market as well as large multinational corporations. Washington during the early 1960's willingly allowed the floodgates to be opened wide to a flight of the dollar from American shores into the new ‘hot money’ Eurodollar market.

Buyers of these new Eurodollar bonds, called Eurobonds, were anonymous persons, cynically called ‘Belgian dentists’ by the London and Swiss and New York bankers running this new game. These Eurobonds were ‘bearer’ bonds meaning  no buyers’ names were registered anywhere, so they were a favorite for investors looking for tax avoidance, or even for drug kingpins or other unsavory characters wanting to launder illegal profits. What better way to hold onto your black earnings than in Eurodollar bonds, with interest paid by General Motors or the Italian Autostrada Corporation? An astute analyst of the Eurodollar process noted, “the Eurodollar market was the most important financial phenomenon of the 1960s, for it was here that the financial earthquake of the early 1970s originated.” [vi]

A major turning point in the relation of the major New York banks to their rapidly growing accumulation of Eurodollars took place in 1966. Like most major new turns of postwar US financial policy, it began with the Rockefellers’ Chase Manhattan Bank.

Chase moves on Lebanon

A confidential internal memo was circulated within the bank in 1966 on the subject of the disadvantages that American, i.e. New York, banks had in capturing the lucrative international market for ‘flight capital.’ The memo pointed to the advantages enjoyed by Swiss banks that dominated the lucrative market in managing and profiting from the hidden fortunes of dictators like Marcos in the Philippines, Saudi princes, drug barons and the like. The memo proposed that Chase open up a foreign entity to capture a major share of the booming offshore flight capital, or ‘hot money,’ for itself. Citibank had already begun such lucrative ‘hot money’ banking activity in connection with Bernie Cornfeld, the fraud artist and founder of Investor Overseas Services.[vii]

The Chase internal memo identified Beirut, Lebanon as the model location. Beirut was dominated by one bank, Intra Bank, and its affiliated Casino du Liban, the world’s largest gambling and money laundering enterprise at the time, exceeding even Las Vegas. [viii]

Lebanon’s Intra Bank became insolvent under suspicious circumstances in 1966. At a time when the bank needed to borrow to cover stock and gold trading losses, the King of Saudi Arabia, rarely known to make bold decisions without first checking with Washington, abruptly withdrew his substantial deposits. Then Chase Manhattan Bank initiated a freeze on Intra Bank’s deposits in New York as hostage to outstanding loans. The Beirut bank was forced to stop payments on October 14, 1966. Its depositors transferred their funds to the Beirut branch of Chase Manhattan for “safety.”

Chase then sent an intermediary, Roger Tamraz, an ambitious Lebanese-born man who at the time was a young executive with Wall Street’s Kidder Peabody & Co. Tamraz successfully re-floated the large Lebanese bank. The bank had been founded in Beirut in 1951 and owned Beirut Port Authority, Middle East Airlines, as well as Casino du Liban. The collapse of the bank had brought the Lebanese economy to a halt and sent shockwaves throughout the Middle East. It was the world’s largest bank catastrophe since World War II. [ix]

Chase Manhattan’s venture into Lebanese offshore hot money’ banking marked the onset of a major shift by the powerful New York money center banks away from government regulators and tax obligations. The profits were staggering.  Because they were offshore and were de facto permitted by US authorities, they were completely uncontrolled.

That foray into offshore banking marked a sea change in New York banking practice that would explode in importance during the next three decades and beyond. Chase Manhattan, Citibank and other major US money center banks were to launder hundreds of billions of dollars of illicit hot money, no questions asked, whether the funds originated from US-friendly dictators like the Philippines’ Ferdinand Marcos, Iran’s Shah Reza Pahlavi, Mexico’s Raúl Salinas de Gortari, or Juárez drug cartel money being transferred to Uruguay and Argentina, or from countless other controversial and politically sensitive transactions.[x]

It was clearly only a matter of time before the foundational structure of the postwar Bretton Woods system cracked.

The crack finally occurred on August 15, 1971 when President Richard Nixon announced to the world that he had ordered the Gold Discount Window of the New York Federal Reserve to be permanently shut. Foreign holders of dollars had without warning been robbed of their right to gold by the unilateral act of the US President, and in violation of a treaty obligation of the United States.

Nixon’s dollar coup

In August 1971, Nixon was acting on the advice of a small circle of Rockefeller-linked advisers, including Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, a life-long appendage of the Rockefeller interests, and budget adviser George Shultz, later Secretary of State and chairman of the vast Bechtel construction giant. The small circle also included Jack F. Bennett of the Treasury who went on to become a director of Rockefeller’s Exxon Oil Co., and Treasury Under Secretary for International Monetary Affairs and former Chase Manhattan Bank executive, Paul Volcker, a life-long enabler of Rockefeller interests. Volcker went on eight years later, at the urging of David Rockefeller, to become Jimmy Carter’s nominee to head the Federal Reserve. [xi]

Nixon's unilateral action on gold convertibility was reluctantly accepted in international talks that December in Washington, by the leading European governments, Japan and a few others. They saw little choice as the dollar was the pillar of the world financial system. The talks resulted in a temporary compromise known as the Smithsonian Agreement, which Nixon called  “the most significant monetary agreement in the history of the world.”

The US had formally devalued the dollar, but not anywhere near the amount Europe felt was needed to reestablish global equilibrium. They devalued by a mere 8% against gold, placing gold at $38/fine ounce instead of the long-standing $35. The agreement also officially permitted a range of currency value fluctuation of 2.25 percent instead of the original one percent of the IMF Bretton Woods rules. The French had called for a gold price of $70.

By declaring to world dollar holders that their paper would no longer be redeemed for gold, however, Nixon set into motion a series of events that would rock the world. Within weeks, confidence in the Smithsonian agreement had also begun to collapse.

Gold itself has little intrinsic value. It has certain industrial uses and is attractive as jewelry. But historically, because of its scarcity, it has served as a recognized standard or store of value against which different nations have fixed the terms of their trade and therefore their currencies. When Nixon decided no longer to honor US currency obligations in gold, he opened the floodgates to a worldwide Las Vegas-style speculation binge of a dimension never before experienced in history.

Instead of calibrating long-term economic affairs to fixed standards of exchange, after August 1971 world trade was simply another arena of speculation about which direction various currencies would fluctuate. The United States was now free to create as many dollars as it wished, no longer bound by need to back the new dollars with gold. So long as the rest of the world would take the US paper dollars, the game proceeded. So long as the United States remained the Western world’s major military power, the world swallowed the inflated US dollars. It saw little choice during the Cold War. Should US-linked countries occasionally forget, they would be rudely reminded by Washington or its Wall Street emissaries.

As a consequence, the total volume of US dollars in world circulation ballooned over the next 20 years. From a rather steady level that had persisted from 1950 through to the end of the 1960s, the volume of dollars expanded exponentially after 1971, increasing by more than 2500% by the end of the 1990s. That printing of dollars was the source of an escalating global inflation. For the New York bankers, their control of the expanding dollar market was a source of vast power and profit. [xii]

The suspension of gold redemption and the resulting international ‘floating exchange rates’ of the early 1970s solved nothing in terms of the basic problems of the US economy. It only bought some time for the US financial powers to decide their next moves. By 1972, massive capital flows again left the dollar for better returns in Japan and Europe. Then on February 12, 1973 Nixon finally announced a second devaluation of the dollar, of 10 percent against gold, officially pricing gold where it remains as of 2009, at $42.22 per ounce.

The devaluation did little to stem dollar selling. However, in May 1973 on a resort island outside Stockholm, a highly secret meeting took place that gave the dollar a new lease on life, a lease at the expense of world industrial growth.

Wall Street and Washington power elites around Secretary of State Henry Kissinger decided to impose a dramatic shock on the world economy in order to rescue the falling dollar as the asset of world trade and finance, and restore it as a pillar of the American economic imperial strategy.

Saltsjoebaden: the Bilderberg plot

The design behind Nixon's August 15, 1971 dollar strategy did not clearly emerge until October 1973, and even then, few people other than a handful of insiders grasped the connection. The New York financial establishment used Nixon’s August 1971 de-monetization of the dollar to buy time, while policy insiders prepared a bold new monetarist design, a ‘paradigm shift’ as some preferred to call it. Certain influential voices in the American financial establishment had devised a strategy to rebuild a strong dollar, and once again to assert and expand their relative political power in the world, just when it had seemed that they were in decisive rout.

In May 1973, with the dramatic fall of the dollar still vivid, a group of 84 of the world's top financial and political insiders met at the secluded island resort of the Swedish Wallenberg banking family, at Saltsjoebaden, Sweden. This gathering later came to be known as Prince Bernhard's Bilderberg Group.  At the meeting, the group heard an American participant outline a ‘scenario’ for an imminent 400% increase in OPEC petroleum revenues. The purpose of the secret Saltsjoebaden meeting was not to prevent the expected oil price shock, but rather to plan how to manage the about-to-be-created flood of oil dollars, a process US Secretary of State Kissinger later called “recycling the petro-dollar flows.” [xiii]

Bilderberg annual meetings had been initiated in utmost secrecy in May1954 by an elite trans-Atlantic establishment group which included David Rockefeller, George Ball, Dr. Joseph Retinger, Holland's Prince Bernhard, and George C. McGhee, then a diplomat with the US State Department and later a senior executive of Rockefeller’s Mobil Oil.

Named for the place of their first gathering, the Hotel de Bilderberg near Arnheim in the Netherlands, the annual Bilderberg meetings gathered top elites of Europe and America for secret deliberations and policy discussions. Consensus was then “shaped” and carefully propagandized in subsequent press comments and media coverage, but never with reference to the secret Bilderberg meetings themselves. The Bilderberg process was one of the most effective vehicles of postwar Anglo-American policy-shaping. [xiv]

At the 1973 meeting, the American speaker was Walter Levy, a consultant to the Rockefeller Standard Oil companies, Levy explained to the Bilderberg meeting on Atlantic-Japanese Energy Policy what was to happen. After projecting that future world oil needs would be supplied by a small number of Middle East oil-producing countries, Levy declared prophetically that,

The cost of these oil imports would rise tremendously, with difficult implications for the balance of payments of consuming countries. Serious problems would be caused by unprecedented foreign exchange accumulations of countries such as Saudi Arabia and Abu Dhabi.

The speaker added,

A complete change was underway in the political, strategic and power relationships between the oil producing, importing and home countries of international oil companies and national oil companies of producing and importing countries. [xv]

He then projected an OPEC Middle East oil revenue rise, which would translate into just over 400 %, the same level Kissinger was soon to demand from the Shah of Iran.

In May 1972, a year before the Bilderberg Saltsjoebaden talks, the Shah had met with Kissinger and President Nixon in Teheran. Nixon and Kissinger promised the Shah he could buy any US military equipment he wanted from the US defense arsenal except nuclear weapons, and he would be permitted to do it without US Congressional OK.

In order to finance the huge purchases, the Shah would need vastly higher oil revenues. Chase Manhattan Bank, of course, was Iran’s bank, the Shah’s personal bank, National Iranian Oil Company’s bank, the Pahlavi family bank, and the Pahlavi Foundation’s bank. The entire financial empire of the Pahlavi regime was a Rockefeller operation from top to bottom. [xvi]

It was to take just a year after the May 1972 meeting between Kissinger, Nixon and the Shah before Wall Street’s strategy emerged, laid out for the elite powerbrokers of Europe and the United States at the Bilderberg meeting at Saltsjoebaden.

A Swedish winter in May

Present at Saltsjoebaden for the May 1973 gathering were, of course, David Rockefeller of Chase Manhattan Bank, by then the acknowledged ‘chairman of the board’ of the American establishment; close Rockefeller ally, Robert O. Anderson of Atlantic Richfield Oil Co.; Lord Greenhill, chairman of British Petroleum; Sir Eric Roll of S.G. Warburg, co-creator of Eurobonds; George Ball of Lehman Brothers investment bank, the man who some ten years earlier as Assistant Secretary of State, had advised Siegmund Warburg of London’s S. G. Warburg & Co. to develop London's Eurodollar market; Zbigniew Brzezinski, the new Executive Director of David Rockefeller’s private Trilateral Commission and soon to be President Carter's National Security Adviser; Italy's Gianni Agnelli, a close Rockefeller business associate and head of the Fiat auto empire; and Germany's Otto Wolff von Amerongen, one of the most influential German postwar business figures and the first German to be named a director of Rockefeller’s Exxon Oil Co. Henry Kissinger had also been invited to the gathering.

The powerful Bilderberg elite group that met in Sweden in May 1973 had evidently decided to launch a colossal assault against industrial growth in the world, in order to tilt the balance of power back to the advantage of American Wall Street financial interests, and specifically to support the vulnerable dollar, the heart of their global financial and economic power. In order to do this, they would use their most valuable strategic weapon—their control of the world's oil flows.

The Bilderberg policy was put into effect six months later in October 1973 when US diplomacy was deployed to trigger a global oil embargo, shockingly enough, in order to force the intended dramatic increase in world oil prices. Since 1945, world oil trade had by international custom been priced in dollars because American oil companies dominated the postwar market. A sharp and sudden increase in the world price of oil, therefore, meant an equally dramatic increase in world demand for US dollars to pay for that necessary oil. In addition to making Exxon, Mobil Oil and the other Rockefeller companies into the largest corporations in the world, it would make their banks—Chase Manhattan, Citibank and a handful of others—into the world’s largest banks.

The Rockefeller-dominated American financial establishment had resolved to use their oil power in a manner no one could imagine possible. The very outrageousness of their scheme was to their advantage. No one could conceive that such a thing could possibly be deliberate. It was. [xvii]

Kissinger's Yom Kippur ‘Oil Shokku’

On October 6, 1973, Egypt and Syria invaded Israel, igniting what became known as the ‘Yom Kippur’ war. The Yom Kippur war was not the simple result of miscalculation, blunder, or an Arab decision to launch a military strike against the state of Israel. The entire series of events leading up to the outbreak of the October war had been secretly orchestrated by Washington and London, using powerful ‘back door’ diplomatic channels developed by Nixon's National Security Adviser, Henry Kissinger.

Kissinger effectively controlled the Israeli policy response through his intimate connection with Israel's Washington ambassador, Simcha Dinitz. Kissinger had also cultivated channels to the Egyptian and Syrian side. His method was simply to misrepresent to each party the critical elements of the other’s position, ensuring the outbreak of war and the subsequent Arab oil embargo.

King Faisal of Saudi Arabia had repeatedly made clear to Kissinger and Washington that the consequence of the US continuing its one-sided delivery of US military supplies to Israel would be an OPEC embargo on oil supplies to the United States.[xviii] Faisal did not make the threat to his American friends lightly.

US intelligence reports, including intercepted communications from Arab officials, confirmed their buildup for war. Kissinger, who was by then Nixon's intelligence czar, reportedly suppressed the reports.

The war brought about the very oil price shock discussed at the Bilderberg deliberations of the previous May in Saltsjoebaden, some six months before outbreak of the war.

OPEC and the Arab oil-producing nations would be the scapegoats for the coming rage of the world over the resulting oil embargo to the United States and Europe and an ensuing huge increase in oil prices, while the Anglo-American interests that were actually responsible, stood quietly in the background, ready to reap the windfall.  [xix]

In mid-October 1973 the German Government of Chancellor Willy Brandt told the US Ambassador to Bonn that Germany was neutral in the Middle East conflict and would not permit the US to re-supply Israel from German NATO military bases. On October 30, 1973 Nixon sent Chancellor Brandt a sharply worded protest note, reportedly drafted by Kissinger:

We recognize that the Europeans are more dependent upon Arab oil than we, but we disagree that your vulnerability is decreased by disassociating yourselves from us on a matter of this importance...You note that this crisis was not a case of common responsibility for the Alliance, and that military supplies for Israel were for purposes which are not part of alliance responsibility. I do not believe we can draw such a fine line....  [xx]

Washington would not permit Germany to declare its neutrality in the Middle East conflict. But, significantly, Britain was allowed to clearly state its neutrality, thus avoiding the impact of the Arab oil embargo. London had maneuvered itself skillfully around an international crisis it had been instrumental in precipitating. Britain was clearly an insider in matters related to Anglo-American oil control. Germany, as a major European industrial exporter and oil importer had the potential to disrupt that very significant game. For that reason, Nixon and Kissinger made clear to Brandt who ran Germany -- and it wasn’t the German Chancellor.

In December 1973, as the dust was settling from the Yom Kippur War, the Saudi King sent his most trusted emissary, his oil minister Sheikh Zaki Yamani, to the Shah in Teheran to ask the Shah why Iran was demanding that such an extraordinarily high price be formalized at the upcoming OPEC ministers meeting. The price demanded by the Shah would raise OPEC prices, on average, a staggering and unprecedented 400% from the level before the crisis. When Yamani asked the Shah on behalf of his King, the Shah replied, “Tell your majesty that if he wants the answer to this question he must go to Washington and ask Henry Kissinger.” [xxi]

One enormous consequence of the ensuing 400% rise in OPEC oil prices was that the risky North Sea investments of hundreds of millions of dollars by British Petroleum, Royal Dutch Shell and other Anglo-American petroleum concerns could produce oil at a profit.  It was a curious fact of the time that the profitability of the new North Sea oil fields was not at all secure until after Kissinger's oil shock. At pre-1973 world oil prices, the North Sea projects would have gone bankrupt before the first oil could flow.

By October 16, 1973 the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, following a meeting on oil price in Vienna, had already raised their price by a whopping 70%, from $3.01/barrel to $5.11. That same day, the members of the Arab OPEC countries, citing US support for Israel in the Middle East war, declared an embargo on all oil sales to the United States and the Netherlands--the location of the primary oil port of Western Europe.

Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq, Libya, Abu Dhabi, Qatar and Algeria announced on October 17, 1973 that they would cut their production below the September level by 5% for October and an additional 5%, per month, “until Israeli withdrawal is completed from the whole Arab territories occupied in June 1967 and the legal rights of the Palestinian people are restored.” The resulting massive shortages produced the world's first ‘oil shock,’ or as the Japanese termed it, ‘Oil Shokku.’ Notably, David Rockefeller’s good friend, the Shah of Iran was absent from the OPEC embargo producers. In effect, the Shah, dependent on US arms and other support, had agreed to “boycott the boycott” and to supply whatever the US and Britain needed.[xxii]

Significantly, the oil crisis hit full force just as the President of the United States was becoming personally embroiled in the ‘Watergate affair,’ leaving Henry Kissinger as de facto President, running US foreign policy during the crisis in late 1973.

The US Treasury ‘arrangement’ with Saudi Arabia on dollar pricing of oil was finalized in a February 1975 memo from Treasury’s Under Secretary for Monetary Affairs Jack F. Bennett to Secretary of State Kissinger. Under the terms of the agreement, the huge new Saudi oil revenue windfall would be channeled largely into financing the US government deficits. David Mulford, a Wall Street investment banker, was sent to Saudi Arabia to become the principal ‘investment adviser’ to SAMA, to guide Saudi petrodollar investments to the correct banks, primarily US banks in London and New York.

The Bilderberg scheme was operating fully as planned. The Eurodollar market that had been built up over the previous several years was to play a decisive role in the offshore petrodollar ‘recycling’ strategy. [xxiii]  Subsequently, Rockefeller’s Chase Manhattan Bank estimated that between 1974 and the end of 1978 the oil producing countries of OPEC generated a surplus from oil exports of $185 billion, more than three-fourths of which passed through Western financial institutions, the lion’s share through Chase and allied banks in New York and London, and from thereon as loans to the Third World.[xxiv] That was a staggering sum of dollar flows.

Kissinger, already firmly in control of key US intelligence estimates as Nixon's all-powerful National Security Adviser, had secured control of US foreign policy as well, having persuaded Nixon to name him Secretary of State in 1973 just prior to the October Yom Kippur war. Kissinger retained both titles and positions simultaneously, something not done by anyone before or since. No other single person during the last months of the Nixon presidency wielded as much absolute power as did Henry Kissinger.

Following a meeting in Teheran on January 1, 1974, a second oil price increase of more than 100% was added, bringing OPEC benchmark prices to $11.65. This was done allegedly on the demand of the Shah of Iran, who had been secretly ordered to do so by Henry Kissinger. The Shah knew he owed his return to power in 1953 to the CIA and to Washington’s backing. As noted, back in 1972 he had sealed his fate by making a secret weapons for oil deal with Nixon that would run Iran’s national revenues, as well as the Pahlavi’s, through Rockefeller’s Chase Manhattan Bank.[xxv]  Kissinger's own State Department had not been informed of Kissinger's secret machinations with the Shah. [xxvi]

From 1949 until the end of 1970, Middle East crude oil prices had averaged approximately $1.90/barrel. They had risen to $3.01 in early 1973, the time of the fateful Saltsjoebaden meeting of the Bilderberg group who discussed the imminent 400% future rise in OPEC's price. By January 1974 that 400% increase was a fait accompli.

After Nixon had eliminated the gold exchange mechanism in August 1971, the offshore Eurodollar market exploded to a size that began to dwarf the domestic US banking market. Then, by the mid-1970s, in the wake of the 400% OPEC oil price rise, the Eurodollar market reached an estimated $1.3 trillion pool of ‘hot money.’ Interestingly, by the end of the 1980s, the volume of international narcotics revenues alone -- which had to be laundered through such offshore ‘hot money’ banks -- exceeded an estimated $1 trillion a year. The big New York and London banks made sure they got the lion’s share of drug money.

The London Eurodollar banking market became the centerpiece of the huge Petrodollar recycling operation, lending OPEC oil revenue deposits from banks ‘offshore’ in London,  to Argentina, Brazil, Poland, Yugoslavia, Africa and other oil importing nations that were starved for dollars with which to import the more expensive OPEC oil after 1974.

The Money Trust’s counter-revolution     

As indicated, by the early 1970s the US economy was anything but robust. The August 1971 decision to unilaterally tear up the Bretton Woods Treaty and end dollar-gold convertibility was, in effect, the beginning of the end of the American Century, a system that had been based in 1944 on the world’s strongest economy and its soundest currency.

The dollar system, in its new incarnation as a paper or fiat currency, went through several phases after August 1971. The first phase, described earlier, could be called the ‘petrodollar’ currency phase in which the strength of the dollar rested on the 400% rise in oil on the world market priced in dollars, and on the highly profitable recycling of those petrodollars through the US and UK and a select handful of other international banks in the City of London, the offshore haven for Eurodollars. That phase lasted until about the end of the 1970s.

The second phase of the post-1971 dollar system was sustained on the Volcker interest rate coup of October 1979 and lasted until approximately 1989 when the fall of the Berlin Wall opened a vast new domain for dollarization and asset looting by Wall Street banks. That opening, combined with the colossal economic growth of China as a member of the WTO, opened the world economy to a drastic lowering of wages across the board, most dramatically in the industrial countries.

In 1997 yet another phase in the post-1971 dollar system was initiated with a politically-driven hedge fund attack on the vulnerable currencies of the high-growth ‘Tiger’ economies of east Asia, beginning with Thailand, the Philippines, Indonesia and spreading to South Korea. That phase was in large part responsible for a massive inflow of Asian central bank dollars into the US dollar to build dollar reserves as defense against a possible new speculative attack. The inflow of hundreds of billions of dollars of Asian capital after 1998 fuelled the US IT stock market bubble of 1999-2002.

The final phase of the dollar system after August 1971 was the Alan Greenspan Revolution in finance, which he launched after the collapse of the IT stock market bubble in 2001-2002, By his strong support of the revolution in finance, mortgage and other assets as security to issue new bonds, Greenspan helped engineer the ‘securitization revolution’ which ended with the collapse of his real estate securitization bubble in 2007.

David’s Trilateral scheme

However, the year 1973 and the resulting oil shock marked the most pivotal turning point in the overall strategy of the powerful American establishment around David Rockefeller and his brothers.

The decision of the powerful circles around the Rockefellers and the Anglo-American oil cartel and allied bankers to engineer a major shock to global oil prices during the October 1973 Yom Kippur war would buy several more years of life for the dollar as the foundation of the global economic and trading system, but it was a precarious foundation. Even bolder actions were needed to secure the financial dominance of the giant banks and multinationals around the Council on Foreign Relations and the Rockefellers.

In 1973 David Rockefeller was Chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations and head of the family’s Chase Manhattan Bank. He believed it was necessary to broaden the political base of American influence by creating a new international organization that would be private and by-invitation-only, like their Bilderberg meetings. But, unlike Bilderberg, which was restricted to American and European decision-makers, Rockefeller’s new organization would have three poles—North America, Europe and Japan -- with which to bring the emerging vast Asian market under their control. It was aptly named the Trilateral Commission.

With Japan emerging as the economic wonder of Asia, it was felt that the Japanese markets and goals had to be brought into closer coordination with the strategic goals of the New York power circles.

Membership in the elite Trilateral Commission was more or less taken from David Rockefeller’s Rolodex. Founding members included primarily influential business associates of the vast international Rockefeller interests or politicians close to, British merchant banker and Eurodollar creator, Lord Roll of Ipsden Italian FIAT chief Gianni Agnelli, and Royal Dutch Shell’s John Loudon. Rockefeller chose his close friend, geopolitical strategist Zbigniew Brzezinski, to be the first Executive Director. The list also included Wall Street bankers, Alan Greenspan and Chase Manhattan’s Paul Volcker and a then-obscure Governor of Georgia named Jimmy Carter. [xxvii]

Indicative of its concerns, a Trilateral Commission Task Force Report, presented at their 1975 meeting in Kyoto, Japan, was called An Outline for Remaking World Trade and Finance. It stated:

Close Trilateral cooperation in keeping the peace, in managing the world economy, and in fostering economic development and in alleviating world poverty, will improve the chances of a smooth and peaceful evolution of the global system.[xxviii] 

Another Trilateral Commission document read:

The overriding goal is to make the world safe for interdependence by protecting the benefits which it provides for each country against external and internal threats which will constantly emerge from those willing to pay a price for more national autonomy. This may sometimes require slowing the pace at which interdependence proceeds…More frequently however, it will call for checking the intrusion of national government into the international exchange of both economic and non-economic goods. (emphasis added, w.e.). [xxix]

The Rockefeller’s Trilateral agenda was, overall, the agenda of the US establishment that had been announced the same year by David Rockefeller’s brother, John D. III, in a book modestly titled, The Second American Revolution.

In 1973, John D. Rockefeller III had published the family’s landmark policy declaration in preparation for the American Revolution’s Bi-Centennial in 1976. In the book, the elite of the Money Trust declared their ‘Second American Revolution,’ appropriately published by the Council on Foreign Relations, chaired by David Rockefeller.

John D. Rockefeller’s book called for a radical reduction in the powers of government, for expanded ‘privatization’ of functions long performed by the state, “moving as many government functions and responsibilities toward the private sector as possible.” It was a clear call for abandonment of New Deal Keynesian policies—at least the use of the state to correct imbalances in social distribution of jobs and income that had existed since the 1930s. [xxx]

Rockefeller’s 1973 call served as the signal for launching a national media propaganda campaign against alleged Government inefficiency, incompetence, and obstruction,  using the inevitable bureaucratic inefficiencies of social services as a smoke screen to end all oversight and regulation of banking and large commercial transactions. The book used carefully selected examples that every citizen could recognize to build support for essentially destroying the traditional and necessary role of the state in regulating commerce and the pubic welfare, to the advantage of the pure and unfettered profit-maximization of private companies and banks financing those companies. It was a Darwinian world they unleashed where the fittest were the biggest and naturally the ones with the clout to destroy their competitors.

The ‘Trilateral President’

In 1976, the Rockefeller agenda for a ‘second American revolution’ made a significant advance: David Rockefeller’s protégé at the Trilateral Commission, Georgia peanut farmer turned Governor, Jimmy Carter, won an upset election against incumbent Gerald Ford who had taken over when Nixon was driven from office by the Watergate scandals. Carter promptly went on to staff his key cabinet positions with 26 members of Rockefeller’s Trilateral Commission, including Vice President Walter Mondale, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, Defense Secretary Harold Brown, and Treasury Secretary Michael Blumenthal.

As President, Carter's entire foreign policy, much of his election strategy, and some of his domestic policy came directly from Rockefeller’s Trilateral Commission. The architect of Carter's foreign policy from 1975 was his National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski who had resigned as Trilateral Commission Executive Director in order to take the post. Brzezinski wrote Carter's major speeches during the campaign, and crafted Carter’s foreign policy with assists fromTrilateralists Vance, Brown and Blumenthal. The watchword for Carter's foreign policy from 1975 on was "clear it with Brzezinski." Carter would ask when given a memorandum on foreign policy, "has Brzezinski seen this...?"[xxxi]

The predominance of so many Trilateral Commission members in the Carter Administration led some media to refer to it as the Trilateral Presidency. It more accurately should have been called the David Rockefeller Presidency. It was Carter who began the Rockefeller group’s long process of Government deregulation and privatization that his successor, Ronald Reagan, would make the centerpiece of his Presidency.

Reportedly it was after Gerald Ford, on advice of his then White House Chief of Staff, Donald Rumsfeld, had decided to drop Vice President Nelson Rockefeller as his 1976 running mate, that David Rockefeller introduced Democrat Jimmy Carter to Trilateral Commission members at their meeting in Kyoto, Japan, referring to him as, “the next President.” [xxxii]

Clawing back New Deal concessions

The deepening US economic crisis of the 1970s was the motivation for the Rockefellers and other US establishment leaders to come up with radical new strategies. The US was faced with stagnation or even decline of its market strength and corresponding profit share globally and within the United States, still the world’s largest market for goods and services.  By 1975 the share of total wealth held by the wealthiest 1% of American households had fallen to its lowest since 1922, measured in terms of the combined housing, stocks, bonds, cash and other durable wealth.[xxxiii]

Their dramatic manipulation of world oil prices had been responsible for triggering the most serious postwar global recession. By 1975 it was clear that the world economy, in the wake of the declining profit rate, had entered what economists termed a ‘structural crisis.’ It included diminished growth rates, falling per capita productivity, a wave of unemployment, and cumulative high inflation.

From this crises emerged a new social vision or political philosophy called “neoliberalism,” appearing first within the countries at the center of the industrial world—beginning with the United Kingdom and the United States—and then gradually exporting to the “periphery,” or the so-called emerging markets of the developing world.

Neoliberalism had little to do with Keynesian ‘liberal’ economics. The neoliberal revolution that was launched in the mid-1970s was a project of the US establishment and their British counterparts. Specifically, it was a concoction of the Rockefeller brothers, based on the radical free market dogma of Milton Friedman, a member of the arch-conservative Mont Pelerin Society and then Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago, an institution founded decades earlier with Rockefeller Standard Oil money. Neoliberalism could more accurately have been called neo-feudalism.

Echoing John D. Rockefeller’s 1973 manifesto, Friedman’s neoliberalism, enshrined in his popular book, Free to Choose, called for untrammeled free markets and free trade, and attacked trade unions as a “throwback to a pre-industrial period.” [xxxiv]

The neoliberal revolution was, in essence, a globalized version of John D. Rockefeller’s Second American Revolution. The International Chamber of Commerce in Paris approved heartily of the global neoliberal mandate “to break down barriers to international trade and investment so that all countries can benefit from improved living standards through increased trade and investment flows.” [xxxv] It was the initial phase of what two decades later would be called “globalization.”

The powerful circles around the Rockefellers within the US financial establishment called explicitly for a global restructuring to their benefit, including:

new discipline of labor and management to the benefit of lenders and shareholders; the diminished intervention of the state concerning development and welfare; the dramatic growth of financial institutions; the implementation of new relationships between the financial and non-financial sectors to the benefit of the former; a new legal stand in favor of mergers and acquisitions; the strengthening of central banks and the targeting of their activity toward price stability, and the new determination to drain the resources of the periphery toward the center. [xxxvi]

The predominant feature of the new neoliberalism was not just its structural arrangements, but the creation of mechanisms to extend the dollar’s reach to the rest of the planet, the globalization of the dollar and of US finance behind it. The destructive process of market liberalization spread with devastating speed and efficiency, assisted by creation of new multinational institutions such as the World Trade Organization and massive trade pressures from Washington and its free market allies, especially Britain.

Milton Friedman’s dogma of monetarism was the theoretical expression of the new revolution, or more accurately, counter-revolution. The decisive year in the economic counter-revolution was 1979 when David Rockefeller got President Carter to name his protege, Paul Volcker, to become Chairman of the Federal Reserve. In October 1979 Volcker imposed the most radical monetarist policy in the history of the Federal Reserve as he allowed interest rates to soar by more than 300% into the 20% range, and held them high until the resulting inevitable Third World debt crisis erupted by August 1982, prompting him to reverse the rate policy.

The year 1979 was what some economists called the year of the neoliberal Coup. [xxxvii] Rockefellers, Volcker and their wealthy allies in the Wall Street Money Trust had been able to use the issue of runaway inflation -- an inflation for which their own 1973 Bilderberg oil pricing decision had been initially responsible -- to justify a monetary ‘shock therapy’ that allegedly would ‘squeeze inflation out of the system,’ as Volcker liked to phrase it.

In reality the high interest policy was imposed by the wealthiest members of the  establishment as part of their long-term strategy of clawing back the concessions forced from them during the Great Depression in terms of the creation of the Keynesian social welfare state, social security, and Government support for labor union organization.

The ‘Post-Industrial’ world of Wall Street

Confronted with stagnating domestic markets, declining abolute profits and the need to invest huge sums in order to bring their domestic US industries up to world standards, the Rockefeller circles opted instead to walk away from renewing their domestic US economic base, leaving it to become what their think-tanks called a ‘post-industrial society.’

Volcker‘s interest rate policy led to ‘real’-- that is, corrected-for-inflation -- interest rates of 6-8%, a staggering windfall boon for wealthy bond holders, the center of the financial system. It also created a recession and with it, a rising wave of unemployment in Europe and in the United States, which created the conditions for a new crackdown on labor implemented by both Reagan and Thantcher in the early 1980s, dramatically weakening the influence of trade unions on wage levels for decades to come.

The 1970s were a transition decade for the development of the American Century. As was noted, by the late 1960s, chronic deficits of the balance of trade appeared for the first time in the United States since World War II, related to the on-going postwar economic recovery by Europe and Japan. Surplus dollars were accumulating in the rest of the world and, thus, the threat of conversion of those foreign dollar earnings into gold was increasing. The dollar had to be devalued with respect to gold and other major currencies. The United States put an end to the convertibility of the dollar in 1971, introducing floating exchange rates.

By 1973 with the regime of floating exchange rates confirmed as permanent, Washington and its allies in London, and through the Bilderberg conference of May 1973, decided on the drastic, oil price inflation to support the falling dollar. By 1979, boosted by the Volcker Federal Reserve coup, they were able to reap staggering profits on their bond and other assets amid a rising dollar.

After 1980 when Republican Ronald Reagan took office, the US implemented this deliberate deficit policy with a vengeance. Reagan’s tenure initiated what became the most dramatic and permanent trade and budget deficits in US history.

In hammering out its position in the multinational negotiations in 1973 to make floating exchange rates a permanent fact, Washington made clear it would use its military dominance within NATO and in Asia to extract maximum concessions from its trading partners. In its bilateral negotiations with South Korea in 1973, the US demanded terms that made it “obligatory for South Korean exporters to the American market to import a certain amount of raw materials from the United States.” [xxxviii]

________________________________________

[i] Michael Hudson, Super Imperialism: The Origins and Fundamentals of US World Dominance (London:  Pluto Press, 2003), p. xiii. Hudson’s account is part of his brilliant expose of postwar US financial manipulations that used staggering levels of US Treasury debt combined with chronic trade deficits to do what no other country could, by virtue of the fact the dollar was world reserve currency and the rest of the world was dependent on US military security. They had little choice but to buy hundreds of billions of dollars of US Treasury debt with its surplus trade dollars, in effect, as Hudson had pointed out to Kahn, forcing those countries to finance US wars and other exploits that were to the disadvantage of those nations buying the US debt. The decoupling of the dollar from gold in August 1971 was the critical step making that possible, although as Hudson points out, at first the policy circles in Washington and Wall Street did not realize it. The entire book is available online.

[ii] See F. William Engdahl, A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order (London: Pluto Press, 2004), p. 114.

[iii] Marcello De Cecco, International Financial Markets and US Domestic Policy Since 1945, International Affairs. July 1976, London, pp. 381-399.

[iv] F. William Engdahl, op. Cit., p. 386.

[v] Marcello de Cecco, op. cit.

[vi] Ibid. p. 398.

[vii] R.T. Naylor, Hot Money and the Politics of Debt (London: Unwin Paperbacks, 1988), p. 33.

[viii]  Ibid.  pp. 33-35.

[ix] Naharnet, Roger Tamraz Arrested in Morocco, Jan 29, 2009, Lebanese Forces Official Website, accessed in http://www.lebanese-forces.org/regional/Roger-Tamraz-Arrested-in-Morocco1002728.shtml.

[x] Raúl Salinas de Gortari [brother of former Mexican President Carlos Salinas de Gortari] was alleged to have laundered up to $130 million in drug money through Citibank and various Swiss banks during the time his brother was President of Mexico. Raul Salinas was later convicted of murder and sentenced to prison. See Citibanker for Salinas had been Star U.S. witness, Money Laundering Alert, April 1996, accessed in  http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/mexico/family/citibankaffair.html.

[xi] Ibid, pp. 127-128.

[xii] Richard Duncan, The Dollar Crisis (Singapore:  John Wiley & Sons-Asia, 2003), p., Figure 1.1.

[xiii] See David E. Spiro, The Hidden Hand of American Hegemony: Petrodollar Recycling and International Markets, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), p.147 ff.

[xiv] Ibid, Anonymous, Saltsjoebaden Conference, Bilderberg meetings, 11-13 May 1973. Robert D Murphy prepared the agenda for the 1973 Bilderberg meeting. Significantly, Murphy was the man who in 1922, as US Consul in Munich, had sought a meeting with then unknown Adolf Hitler and sent back favorable recommendations to his superiors in Washington. Murphy later shaped US occupation policy in postwar Germany as Political Adviser.

[xv] Saltsjoebaden Conference, Bilderberg meetings, 11-13 May 1973. The author obtained an original copy of the official discussion from this meeting. The normally confidential document was bought in a Paris used bookstore and it bore the signature of Bilderberg insider, Shepard Stone. Walter Levy, who delivered the Saltsjoebaden energy report at the meeting, was intimately tied to the fortunes of big oil. In 1948 as oil economist for the Marshall Plan Economic Co-operation Administration, Levy had tried to block a government inquiry into allegations that the oil companies were overcharging.

[xvi] Mark Hulbert, Interlock: The Untold Story of American banks, oil interests, the Shah’s money, debts and the astounding connections between them (New York: Richardson & Snyder, 1982), pp. 71-87.

[xvii] See footnote 9, below.

[xviii] Robert Lacey, The Kingdom: Arabia and the House of Saud  (New York: Avon Books, 1981), pp. 398-399.

[xix] Matti Golan, The Secret Conversations of Henry Kissinger: Step-by-step diplomacy in the Middle East (New York: Bantam Books Inc., 1976).

[xx] Henry A. Kissinger, Years of Upheaval (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1982).

[xxi] The account of this extraordinary exchange between His Excellency Sheikh Zaki Yamani and the Shah was relayed to the author in a personal discussion between the author and Sheikh Yamani in London in September 2000. Sheikh Yamani had been, in 1974, Saudi Oil Minister and spokesman for OPEC during the embargo.

[xxii] Mark Hulbert, op. Cit.

[xxiii] Jack Bennett, Memorandum, reproduced in International Currency Review, Vol. 20, no. 6. January 1991. London. p. 45.

[xxiv] Ann Crittenden, Managing OPEC’s Money, The New York Times, June 24, 1979.

[xxv] Sheikh Zaki Yamani, in a September 2000 private conversation with the author, cited above.

[xxvi] James Akins, interview regarding his tenure as Director of Fuels & Energy Office of US State Department at that time, later Ambassador to Saudi Arabia.

[xxvii] For more on the Trilateral Commission founding and members see F. William Engdahl, op. cit, Appendix I, p. 285.

[xxviii] The Trilateral Commission, An Outline for Remaking World Trade and Finance (New York University Press, 1975).

[xxix] C. Fred Bergsten, Interdependence and the Reform of International Institutions, International Organization, Vol. 30, No. 2 (Spring, 1976), pp. 361-372.

[xxx] John D. Rockefeller III, The Second American Revolution, 1973, Harper & Row, New York, pp. 103-112.

[xxxi] Lawrence H. Shoup, Jimmy Carter and the Trilateralists: Presidential Roots, excerpted from the book, Trilateralism, edited by Holly Sklar (Boston: South End Press, 1980), accessed in http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Trilateralism/JimmyCarter_Trilat.html.

[xxxii] Cyrus Vance, from a private discussion relayed in 1975 to the author in New York.

[xxxiii] Gérard Duménil and Dominique Lévy, The Neoliberal (Counter) Revolution, contained in Neoliberalism: A Critical Reader, edited by Alfredo Saad-Filho and Deborah Johnston (London: Pluto Press, 2004).

[xxxiv] Milton Friedman, Free to Choose (New York: Penguin Books, 1979), p. 271.

[xxxv] International Chamber of Commerce, Policy and Business Practices, accessed on ICC official website, http://www.iccwbo.org/policy/trade/.

[xxxvi] Gérard Duménil and Dominique Lévy, op. cit.

[xxxvii] Ibid.

[xxxviii] Ibid., p. 369.