| The Creature from Jekyll Island: A Second Look at the Federal Reserve |  | Author: G. Edward Griffin
Publisher: Amer Media
List Price: $19.50
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as of 11/22/2009 12:11 CST details
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Seller: manassephraim
Rating:  239 reviews
Sales Rank: 793328
Media: Paperback
Edition: 2nd
Pages: 608
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.9
Dimensions (in): 9 x 6.5 x 1.7
ISBN: 0912986182
Dewey Decimal Number: 332.110973
EAN: 9780912986180
ASIN: 0912986182
Publication Date: September 1995
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
Where does money come from? Where does it go? Who makes it? The money magicians' secrets are unveiled. We get a close look at their mirrors and smoke machines, their pulleys, cogs, and wheels that create the grand illusion called money. A dry and boring subject? Just wait! You'll be hooked in five minutes. Reads like a detective story - which it really is. But it's all true. This book is about the most blatant scam of all history. It's all here: the cause of wars, boom-bust cycles, inflation, depression, prosperity. Creature from Jekyll Island is a "must read." Your world view will definitely change. You'll never trust a politician again - or a banker.
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 239
 A picture of Rockefeller buying the land for the UN. Priceless! November 21, 2009
Bridget M. Panzer (WI)
My favorite part of the book is the picture of Rockefeller buying the land for the UN building in NY.it is Priceless. It just proves that the Rockefeller and Rothschilds are in control.
 Researcher November 20, 2009
J. von Linden (Upstate NY, US)
Long, detailed, sometimes hard to follow but it is the truth revealed. Take the time (line it up with what the Constitution does not agree with) and you will be rewarded
Don't Pay Attention to the Men Behind the Curtain November 19, 2009
M. Haller
Often times children's stories are ways to illustrate complicated things in a simplified manner. "The Wizard of Oz" has a main character "Dorothy" from America's heartland "Kansas" follow a yellow brick road (gold) in a pair of "silver" (in the book) slippers to the Emerald City (greenbacks) and discovers a man manipulating things behind a curtain. The "Creature from Jekyll Island" pulls back the curtain and shows the men behind the curtain, warts and all. They are not "All Powerful Wizards", they are just men. It's a very good read.
 Excellent But Still Not Deep Enough November 15, 2009
Richard H. Moore (USA)
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
I have no dispute with the facts in this book, but with its theory. Noble metals (gold and silver) to back currency are as much an illusion as anything else. Consider the example of having a chest of gold on board the Titanic - which is worth more, the gold and silver or a seat on a lifeboat?
Now, let's put that into contemporary terms: which is worth more, gold and silver, or fresh water and clean fuel?
Hopefully, this is simple enough to get the point across trenchantly. Don't be deceived by the "noble metal" illusion. These are all just commodities like anything else. Any good or service can be used to back up money because money is just a token for the exchange value of transactions. The total supply of money is worth exactly what you can trade with it - no more, no less.
Now, let's look at what has been done with all the fancy instruments invented for "hedges". They boil down to a simple linear equation: y = ax + b. This is also the equation for linear regression of a set of data points with b equal to the average deviation, or error term. Traders make money by exploiting the spread. Derivatives are simply bets on bets. If someone buys a stock, they bet on success of a firm. If someone bets against the firm, then there is a zero sum game. Except, if the bets against the firm exceed the bets for the firm, then if the firm fails, who pays off the bets? That's when markets collapse completely. Go back and look at the stats - derivatives exceeded the value of underlying assets.
Worse, exotic instruments were created to bet on the bets on bets. These are "derivatives" in the sense of calculus. In calculus, the derivative is the formula for the slope of a curve. It's a way to make volatility linear. Mathematically, you can substitute nonlinear factors into the simple linear equation to get the "instantaneous" result - which is a market transaction at a moment in time. High velocity trading simply does this even faster by going to second, third, fourth, etc. "derivatives". Meanwhile, the integral of the curve is the area under the curve (asset value) down to the abscissa (x axis). The error term "b" is also known as the y-intercept - that's where the linear regression line crosses the y axis. Smart traders know they can make money in up or down markets because the absolute value of the integral is what the game is about - just do "negative" transactions to counterbalance "positive" transactions (e.g., short sales).
Hopefully, the message should be sinking in. These are sophisticated forms of the "theft" accomplished by simple inflation, which is the bankers' game as long as they can charge unbridled (i.e., "usurious") interest, as became the case after banking laws were "reformed" to eliminate the protections built in during the Great Depression. Now, my only point in this discussion is to make the point that gold and silver don't solve the real problem of money manipulation - and don't create value when there is no real social production of basic goods and services - the resources and provisions for social survival (see Bucky Fuller's Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth and his story of the Great Sea Pirates, along with his definition of "wealth").
Look at what the real competition is over today: control of energy markets and access to fresh water. Money can be run as a "debt" instrument or an "asset" instrument - whether banking is privately owned (which is a violation of the explicit language of the U.S. Constitution) or publicly owned (the way it was supposed to be - but every President who seriously tried to do something about that died in office).
So, my point is: read this book, but go beyond its analysis to the deeper truth. We could use the internet to create a completely alternate currency (exactly what is being done in some online "game" forums already), and that would work just fine - as long as the internet can be "trusted". That's just a higher speed form of Federal Reserve "trust" (or, manipulation, depending). But, since the internet - a government invention - is like the Federal Reserve - now privately "owned" - what do you think the prospects are?
As for gold and silver - remember the Hunt brothers? Physical commodities can always be physically manipulated in markets. Remember the "Oil Embargo"? The Big Oil Companies played shell games on the high seas - trading in the fuels on-board ships without ever landing the product, until the price was jacked up enough - exactly like "flipping" in the housing market. Any commodity (including gold and silver) can be manipulated this way. Besides, what good would it do in a vault? Gold is key to electronics these days.
The better long-run strategy for sustainability is to localize economies while globalizing currencies. Trade between collective entities externally. Internal economies have different scales of value - which is why purchasing power parity is a more important measure of a society's real wealth than GDP and similar measures. At the extreme, any society that can operate self-sufficiently is buffered against currency illusion. The economics show that total value can be increased through trade, but commonsense also shows that depending on potentially hostile partners for supply is stupid (like the U.S. buying helicopter parts for military planes from China).
But, the public is kept ignorant, hostile to truth, and docile to exploitation. We reject "socialism" for instance without question - even when in specific cases it works. The point of any situation is to base it on reality, not ideology and illusion. Markets have their place - as in local groceries - but there are such things as natural monopolies - e.g., energy, medical care, and the like. By the way, medical care is not health care. Health care costs nothing but good sense (a scarce commodity), while medical care depends on mass production of things like pharmaceuticals controlled by large manufacturers. My grandfather, an old country doctor, pointed out to me years ago why he never prescribed what he called "patent medicines" (patented to control the profits). He was taught in the earlier days when doctors learned pharmacology to individually tailor dosages based on specific reactions of individuals, not statistical results of populations. Statistically, a lot of people will die in large populations due to the same linear equation used for money: it's a function of the "error" or distance from the line of regression that is either your health, or your probability of healing from illness.
Hopefully, by now, you can figure out how statistics have been used as the instrument of oppression in the massification of the culture and economy. Go to school and get statistically stratified into social, occupational, and other forms of "class" by your IQ or other psychometric. Pretend this is valid. Accept it as truth (little "g" is "good" for you!). Now, apply statistics to all populations that modern management science can manipulate - for the buying and selling of labor, goods, services, and most of all, your freedom. Remember that banking is nothing but the buying and selling of money (there's a paradox). Money itself is the ultimate derivative because, even nominally backed by some commodity (it doesn't matter which commodity), in a "normal" economy, there will always be more money in circulation than commodity backing it. That's because money always has a "velocity" (the number of times it changes hands during any given period). Absent velocity, we're back to simple barter of actual goods and services. That's the pure level of subsistence and sustainability.
I have, of course, simplified this discussion to ignore all of the bionomics of nature - e.g., greenhouse emissions and exhaustion of natural and other resources by over-consumption or mismatch of population, technology, and nature based on the cultural behaviors - but the point should be pretty clear. "The truth shall set you free."
The Creature from Jekyll Island November 2, 2009
Citizen #2025 (Arizona)
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
I can't imagine anyone giving this book a negative review, unless they were a banker! I thought I understood money and wealth creation until I read "The Creature from Jekyll Island". I recommend it without reservation to anyone who desires to understand wealth, money and power through the lens of history and common sense.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 239
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