Financiers Quotes
Leaders of nations for years only trusted as truly patriotic those man—usually nobles of the aristocracy—who owned land. If an invader came and seized their land, they would lose their wealth. However money is fungible, and a banker can easily move his money abroad and join another nation or side in a war. If the country is ruined by war, the manufacturer cannot obtain labor or raw materials, The financier depends on none of these and so hs not the vested interest in the welfare of the nation.
Ford was then 74 years old and had become a very different man than in his youth when he was the hero of labor. He was very paranoid at this time. He even thought that financiers were actually backing the labor unions because their purpose was to go to war against Hitler who Ford greatly admired and supported. See {642379}. He claimed that the way they would do it is to fund the labor unions so most workers would join unions. This he thought would eliminate competition and lower workers’ wages. When workers’ wages were pushed low enough, the workers would demand American entry into the war to create government spending on armaments and a labor shortage to drive wages up again. There was not a single financier who was actually paying or lending any money to labor unions, and most industrialists other than Ford complained that labor unions would always demand higher wages. Ford’s son Edsel was the chief operating officer of Ford Motor Company, and did his best to work around his father to keep the company healthy and deal with a terrible labor relations problem his father caused.
1st Viscount Bolingbroke. See {627799} for the origin of the bias against merchants and money men. It also represents a rigidity of class structure that characterized England until very recently. The landed gentry were the first class citizens. Usually titles went with the land. In America, someone who would be successful as a merchant or a banker could achieve the highest of social status and political influence. This was not true in England where a merchant that was far more wealthy than a landed lord was not accepted by the aristocracy.
While Wilson is often thought of a humanist and a man committed to World peace and national rights of independence, he was also a committed economic imperialist. See {585454} for another example.
The two politicians were amazed as they learned more and more about some of industrial leaders of the country. This is the language they used in private communications.
This statement during the First World War so frightened the Woodrow Wilson administration that they jailed Debs for saying it and other similar statements like {640245}. The statement was generally suppressed with few newspapers carrying it. The problem for the administration was that enlistments might decrease and force them to draft the wealthy and their sons which was, with very few exceptions, not acceptable to the “upper classes”.
Germany was undergoing a hyper-inflation as the result of a mismanaged economy and the consequence of the First World War. Hitler immediately blamed America and the financers and profiteers. This has been the pattern of almost every government since then that was undergoing a monetary crisis of inflation or deflation—blame the international financers and the Americans.
During this crises, the taxpayers of America had to bail out most of the largest banks in the country whose profligate investment strategy had squandered their depositors and other customers money as a result of the spiral to reap higher and higher profits until they collapsed with the executives making millions in bonuses when their banks were losing money. They put millions of people out of work, and their greedy policies crashed the housing market and then the same banks evicted millions of families when the banks foreclosed on their mortgages with thousands of bank officers committing felonies in the foreclosure processes. This was to Blankfiein and many of the other leading bankers, “God’s Work”.
FDR was then a candidate for the Democratic Vice Presidential Nomination. This statement shocked some of the conservative French and British delegates and officials such as Ramsay MacDonald, Georges Bonnet, and Neville Chamberlain, but economist John Maynard Keynes strongly approved of Roosevelt Roosevelt’s statements. At issue was whether or not the major currency powers should confer frequently and set the international currency exchange rates or should the rates float and be determined at any point by the free market in currency. FDR held the latter view which was opposed to the positions of the conservative banker-oriented delegates from the European counties, However Roosevelt’s statement was considered “harsh” and “vituperative” by the conservatives and the entire conference collapsed over them. FDR admitted that perhaps he had been too strong and blunt in his language. An irony of this quotation is that 80 years later the positions of liberals and conservatives had both flip-flopped. It became the conservatives who adopted the FDR free market for currency exchange while many liberals called for government intervention and agreement on exchange rates to prevent instability.
Executed by the English for his part in the Easter Uprising. Connolly was a socialist advocate as well as a republican. He was one of the first revolutionaries to understand that military occupation was only a part of forces that kept a nation subservient to another. However, attempts to break those economic ties have almost always led to economic ruination.
It was not true in 1922, nor has it been true since despite the fact that this is claimed and sincerely believed by some Americans. This has been a canard of a small minority of conservatives and radical leftists.
