In Chapter 6, entitled ‘Usury on the Great War’, I’ve selected the following paragraphs which I believe are both shocking and self-explanatory:
WHEN the whistle blew for the start of the Great War in August 1914 the Bank of England possessed only nine millions sterling of a gold reserve, and, as the Bank of England was the Bankers’ Bank, this sum constituted the effective reserve of all the other Banking Institutions in Great Britain.
The bank managers at the outbreak of War were seriously afraid that the depositing public, in a panic, would demand the return of their money. And, inasmuch as thedeposits and savings left in the hands of the bankers by the depositing public had very largely been sunk by the bankers in enterprises which, at the best, could not repay the borrowed capital quickly, and which in several and large-scale instances were likely to be submerged altogether in the stress of war and in the collapse of great areas of international trade, it followed that if there were a widespread panicky run upon the banks, the banks would be unable to pay and the whole credit system would collapse, to the ruin of millions of people.
Private enterprise banking thus being on the verge of collapse, the Government (Mr. Lloyd George at the time was Chancellor of the Exchequer) hurriedly declared a moratorium, i.e. it authorized the banks not to pay out (which in any event the banks could not do), and it extended the August Bank Holiday for another three days. During these three or four days when the banks and stock exchanges were closed, the bankers held anxious negotiation with the Chancellor of the Exchequer. And one of them has placed upon record the fact that ‘he (Mr. George) did everything that we asked him to do.’ When the banks reopened, the public discovered that, instead of getting their money back in gold, they were paid in a new legal tender of Treasury notes (the £1 notes in black and the 10s. notes in red colours). This new currency had been issued by the State, was backed by the credit of the State, and was issued to the banks to prevent the banks from utter collapse. The public cheerfully accepted the new notes; and nobody talked about inflation.
Internal memo for bank employees 3rd August 1914
The British Greenback – Bradbury Notes
Emergency Bradbury Treasury Notes (printed only on one side)
To return, however, to the early war period, no sooner had Mr. Lloyd George got the bankers out of their difficulties in the autumn of 1914 by the issue of the Treasury money, than they were round again at the Treasury door explaining forcibly that the State must, upon no account, issue any more money on this interest free basis; if the war was to be run, it must be run with borrowed money, money upon which interest must be paid, and they were the gentlemen who would see to the proper financing of a good, juicy War Loan at 31/2 per cent, interest, and to that last proposition the Treasury yielded. The War was not to be fought with interest-free money, and/or/with conscription of wealth; though it was to be foughtwith conscription of life. Many small businesses were to be closed and their proprietors sent overseas as redundant, and without any compensation for theirlosses, while Finance, as we shall see, was to be heavily and progressively remunerated.
Human misery at its worst – the more the misery, the better the profits for the bankers and the happier they are! The time has come to end this criminality. The immediate issuance of debt-free and interest-free treasury notes by governments ‘of the people’ will collapse this insanity forever!
So there we have it in a nutshell! The real values of the private bankers and the City of London exposed for all to see. Whilst hundreds of thousands of British soldiers were dying on the killing fields of Flanders and elsewhere doing what they saw as their patriotic duty, British bankers, safely out of danger and not sharing the appalling conditions on the Western Front, were only interested in one thing – how to make obscene profits from Britain’s desperate efforts to win the war. To say that the private bankers and the City of London have the morals of sewer rats is to be extremely unkind to our little rodent friends. But this is the clincher.As a direct result of the greed and treason of the British private bankers in preventing the continuance of the Bradbury Treasury Notes, Britain’s National Debt went up from £650 million in 1914 to a staggering £7,500 million in 1919.
And this is where it all gets particularly interesting. The following is an extract from the official and current HM Treasury’s Debt Management Office website….and it appears to be completely at odds with the account given by the Rt. Hon. Thomas Johnston.
The threat of World War One pushed British banks into crisis; exacerbated further as half the world’s trade was financed by British banks and as a consequence international payments dried up. In response to this crisis, John Maynard Keynes (the renowned economist), persuaded the Chancellor Lloyd George to use the Bank of England’s gold reserves to support the banks, which ended the immediate crisis. Keynes stayed with the Treasury until 1919. The war years of 1914-18 had seen an increase in the National Debt from £650 million at the start of the war to £7,500 million by 1919. This ensured that the Treasury developed new expertise in foreign exchange, currency, credit and price control skills and were put to use in the management of the post-war economy. The slump of the 1930s necessitated the restructuring of the economy following World War II (the national debt stood at £21 billion by its end) and the emphasis was placed on economic planning and financial relations.
Why is there is no mention whatsoever of the £300 million of Bradbury debt-free paper Treasury Notes issued in 1914? Instead, it says Lloyd George, on the advice of John Maynard Keynes, used the Bank of England’s gold reserves which, according to Johnston, only amounted to £9 million. What is going on here? Who is telling the truth? Could it be that HM Government, the puppets of the City of London, don’t want you to know about the simple but effective concept of debt-free and interest-free Treasury Notes?