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The Creation of the Federal Reserve

Here's part two. 

It ran on Gold World on September 29, 2006

Federal Reserve Bank History

A Midnight Train to Georgia and the Creation of Free Prosperity

Author's Note: This story is the second in a series of articles about the creation, the workings, and the ramifications of the Federal Reserve Bank- one of the least understood but most powerful institutions ever created. We hang on its every word and our financial markets rise and fall on its every decision. Even the very value of the dollar itself is in its hands. Yet about it we know so little...

"The matter of a uniform discount rate was discussed and settled at Jekyll Island."--Paul M. Warburg

BALTIMORE, MD - Looking back over history it is fascinating to see the degree by which the plans of very powerful men alter the course of nations. But as interesting as it is, it is even more stunning to realize that these ideas are rarely, if ever, the product of middle class thinking.

The creation of the Federal Reserve was no different. It all began in a New Jersey train station on a night in November 1910.

Leaving from a Hoboken Railway station were a group of the nation's leading financiers and a powerful Congressmen and his staff. And although few of them knew it at time they were headed for Georgia, 1000 miles away.

Their mission was a secret and in the end it would change the nation forever.

And while a few reporters suspiciously witnessed the gathering of the powerful, none of them bothered to report on the exodus. The men, they were told, were simply going duck hunting.

But to be sure this was no ordinary hunting trip. The railcars themselves were sealed and the blinds were drawn. And each member of "the hunting party" was instructed to at no time to use his own last name or to use that of any of the others.

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