The Washington Post and the Coming Economic Crash

The Washington Post is one of the world’s "great" newspapers. But to the American-European financial establishment, it is much more than that. It is one of their house organs, with close ties to the U.S. government intelligence community. The Post's job is to shape the news the way the East Coast establishment wants it shaped. No one should think for an instant that rookie reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein would have been allowed to unmask President Richard Nixon if the intelligence/financier elite hadn't decided it was time for the cursing Californian to go. Nixon's crime? Probably not so much the dirty tricks and use of the IRS to hound those on his "enemy list" as much as his use of the Federal Reserve under Arthur Burns to radically ease credit in order to create a mini-economic boom in time for the 1972 presidential election. The Federal Reserve, you see, is an institution the establishment guards jealously as their own private preserve, one that not even presidents can tinker with.

After the Washington Post was founded in 1877, it became the first daily newspaper in the nation's capital. Eventually it went bankrupt and was purchased at auction by a California-born financier named Eugene Meyer in 1933. It is not generally recognized, but Meyer had played a key role in some of the most destructive economic events in U.S. history.

The Post's official history on its website tells nothing about Meyer's background before buying the newspaper. In fact, Meyer was one of the linchpins of the New York financier establishment from the time he graduated from Yale in 1895 and went to work for the New York banking house of Lazard Freres, where his father was a partner. By 1915, Meyer had amassed a personal fortune of $40 million, gigantic for the times.

Just two years before, in 1913, Congress had enacted the Federal Reserve Act. Contrary to its name, the Federal Reserve is not a government agency. Rather it is a privately-owned central banking institution to which Congress ceded its constitutional authority to issue currency and set its value. This came after 50 years of gradual concentration of American financial power in the hands of Wall Street and European bankers, eventually including J.P. Morgan, his Rockefeller allies, and the Rothschilds, following passage of the National Banking Acts of 1863-4 during the Civil War.

The United States government financed its role in World War I by borrowing through the Federal Reserve. The national debt was $1.191 billion in 1915. By 1919, it had soared to over $25 billion. It was Eugene Meyer, as head of the War Finance Corporation, who presided over the creation of this permanent mortgage of America’s future. Later, President Coolidge named Meyer chairman of the Federal Farm Loan Board, and President Hoover made him chairman of the Federal Reserve, where he served from September 16, 1930, to May 10, 1933.

It was at the Federal Reserve that Meyer carried out perhaps his worst mischief. Despite the crash of the stock market on October 29, 1929, by the spring of 1930 a recovery was underway. Unemployment that year was under nine percent. A return to prosperity, said the press, "was just around the corner."

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