I'm into Niall Ferguson's history of the world of finance. He tells an interesting story that I'd like to relate here tangential to our stories about Jews and usury.
You really can't talk about the history of persecution of Jews without eventually coming to the old prejudice that they are the 'international bankers' that control various aspects of world affairs. There's a little truth in that, but there is no particularly Jewish way to control the world, but there is the bond market. Masters of the bond markets are big balling shot callers, and back in 1800s, the Rothschilds were such giants. It turns out that there are still a bunch of them around today.
Anyway, it turns out that one of the most well known uses for government issued bonds is for the raising of capital during wartime. As Ferguson tells the story, the Rothschilds who had kicked butt by funding the Brits in their defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo were rather fat and happy after that time - having mastered enough of the market to beat out the Barings, their competitors. So while war was profitable for them around that time, when 1860s rolled around and various financiers were placing bets on the American North or South, the Rothschilds famously stayed out of the game.
Well somebody saw that as a big opportunity and decided to help the South issue and sell bonds. These particular bonds were collateralized by cotton. So over the course of the war, as cotton supplies dried up a bit, they became more valuable because the price was set at the prewar amount. If I remember correctly it was 6pence a bushel and went up as high as 26pence. So you can imagine the value of a bond going up when you could redeem it for cotton at about one fourth the going rate.
Well it turned out that long before the war was completely over, the South lost a battle at New Orleans. Then suddenly the price of these bonds collapsed and so did the economy of the South. Why? Because now that the Union Army controlled the Mississippi River, they weren't likely to let any cotton get through. That spelled economic disaster for the South, long before the shooting was over.
The Rothschilds called it. Speculators lost all their money, and Confederate dollars, even though they were based on the Gold Standard, long before the US had a Federal Reserve, soon became worthless. The rest, as they say, is history. But now you have some insight as to how some money played (or didn't play as in the case of the Rothschilds) into the determination of great events.
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