G. Edward Griffin - The Creature from Jekyll Island
A second look at the Federal Reserve
Griffin enrolled in the College for Financial Planning in Denver, Colorado, and became a Certified Financial Planner in 1989. He described the U.S. money system in his 1993 movie and 1994 book on the Federal Reserve System, The Creature from Jekyll Island. This popular book has been a business bestseller; it has been reprinted in Japanese, 2005, and German, 2006. The book also influenced Ron Paul during the writing of a chapter on money and the Federal Reserve in Paul's New York Times number-one bestseller, The Revolution: A Manifesto, which recommended Griffin's book on its "Reading List for a Free and Prosperous America".
The title refers to the November 1910 meeting at Jekyll Island, Georgia, of seven bankers and economic policymakers, who represented the financial elite of the Western world. The meeting was recounted by Forbes founder B. C. Forbes in 1916, and recalled by participant Frank Vanderlip as "the actual conception of what eventually became the Federal Reserve System". Griffin states that participant Paul Warburg describes the Jekyll Island meeting as "this most interesting conference concerning which Senator Aldrich pledged all participants to secrecy".
Griffin's work stresses the point which Federal Reserve chair Marriner Eccles made in Congressional testimony in 1941: "If there were no debts in our money system, there wouldn't be any money." Griffin advocates against the debt-based fiat money system on several grounds, stating that it devours individual prosperity through inflation and it is used to perpetuate war. He also described a framework of central bankers underwriting both sides of an ongoing war or revolution. Griffin says that the United Nations, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the World Bank are working to destroy American sovereignty through a system of world military and financial control, and he advocates for United States withdrawal from the United Nations.
Edward Flaherty, an academic economist, characterized Griffin's description of the secret meeting on Jekyll Island as "conspiratorial", "amateurish", and "suspect". Griffin's response was that Flaherty had miscategorized the book with other publications and had labeled all criticisms of the Federal Reserve as the results of conspiracy theory.
Griffin's advocation of a free-market, private-money system superior to the Fed caused economist Bernard von NotHaus to deploy such a system in 1998. Griffin states that von NotHaus's private silver certificates, known as Liberty Dollars, are "real money".
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