Despite my views about the value to society of greater publicity for the affairs of corporations, there was an occasion, near the close of 1910, when I was as secretive -- indeed as furtive -- as any conspirator.

I do not feel it is any exaggeration to speak of our secret expedition to Jekyl Island as the occasion of the actual conception of what eventually became the Federal Reserve System.
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Discovery, we knew, simply must not happen, or else all our time and effort would be waste. If it were to be exposed publicly that our particular group had got together and written a banking bill, that bill would have no chance whatever of passage by Congress.

It must not be felt that these heads of the world's chief central banks were themselves substantive powers in world finance. They were not. Rather, they were the technicians and agents of the dominant investment bankers of their own countries, who had raised them up and were perfectly capable of throwing them down. The substantive financial powers of the world were in the hands of these investment bankers (also called 'international' or 'merchants' bankers) who renamed largely behind the scenes in their own unincorporated banks. These formed a system of international cooperation and national dominance which was more private, more powerful, and more secret than that of their agents in the central banks...

But while wars and revolutions have been useful to international bankers in gaining or increasing control over governments, the key to such control has always been control of money. You can control a government if you have it in your debt; a creditor is in a position to demand the privileges of monopoly from the sovereign. Money-seeking governments have granted monopolies in state banking, natural resources, oil concessions and transportation. However, the monopoly which the international financiers most covet is control over a nation's money.

Whenever a business firm borrows big money its creditor obtains a voice in management to protect his investment. Like a business, no government can borrow big money unless willing to surrender to the creditor some measure of sovereignty as collateral. Certainly international bankers who have loaned hundreds of billions of dollars to governments around the work command considerable influence in the policies of such governments.