The Bank for International Settlements: Part I – Early History

"Tower of Power - Bank for International Settlement, Basel, CH" by M_Bartleby is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

In 1966, Carroll Quigley was one of the US’s leading historians and a theorist on the evolution of civilisations. Having earned B.A, M.A., and Ph.D. degrees at Harvard University, he went on to teach at Princeton University, and then at the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, before retiring in 1976. He also served as a consultant to the U.S. Department of Defense, the United States Navy, the Smithsonian Institution, and the House Select Committee on Astronautics and Space Exploration in the 1950s.

Quigley’s magnum opus, Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time, was published by Macmillan Company in 1966. In that book, he stated matter-of-factly:

“…the powers of financial capitalism had another far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences. The apex of the system was to be the Bank for International Settlements in Basle, Switzerland, a private bank owned and controlled by the world's central banks which were themselves private corporations.” [emphasis added][i]

I believe that the only misleading element of the author’s assertion lies in the use of the phrase “was to be”. It gives the impression that the bankers’ intended plan did not come to fruition. The world has in fact been operating in accordance with the central banks’ ambitions, and we are now hurtling towards the final stage – the implementation of a global neo-feudal monetary system combined with the formalisation of central bank control.

This article is the first in a series whose objective is to persuade you that no nation is sovereign. If that is the case, then how and to whom have nations ceded sovereignty? I have chosen to begin answering that question by setting out a high-level history of the Bank for International Settlements. Thankfully, the hard work on that has been done by others. The service, such as it is, that I shall try to provide is to knit together some of that work in an easily digestible narrative (no pressure there!), and with enough persuasive evidence.

If you accept the line of thinking that no nation is sovereign, it must lead to a revised geopolitical paradigm that forces us to critically assess whether great powers are acting independently of global financial interests. Crucially, it offers a new, and I believe much-needed, paradigm for futurists to engage with. Instead of uncritically accepting ‘multipolarity’, we should ask how real is multipolarity? Is the showdown between the BRICS and NATO blocs a Punch and Judy show? Or when examining the potential outcomes of the ongoing genocide in Gaza, instead of asking what NATO wants or what the Axis of Resistance wants, we could also ask, what do the Owners and Controllers of Global Financial Capital (OCGFC) want?

A more complete history of the financial takeover of the planet starts much earlier than the formation of the Bank for International Settlements in 1930, but I’ve chosen to start there because the BIS is the head of the snake. A close-up view of the BIS and its underlying central bank structure should be enough to convince you that we are going to hell in a handbasket. The rest, as they say, is details.

Most of recorded history reflects a world in which great powers have ruled by brute force, the two levers of which are economic and military. In times when powers had full or near-full control of both those levers, they were sovereign. Quigley described the criteria for the existence of a sovereign state as “its ability to defend its boundaries against external aggression and to maintain law and public order among its inhabitants inside those boundaries.” [ii] In the context of a liberal democracy, an important addendum to that definition of sovereignty would be the ability of political power embodied in the nation state to implement social and economic policies along democratic principles.

There are two main reasons why the second part of the sovereignty definition has never truly happened. The first is, as I have argued in a previous piece, that the divine right of Kings simply morphed into the divine right of parliaments or governments controlled by plutocracies. The second reason is the subject of this piece – the solidification of a hierarchy within the plutocracies in which central banks emerged as the kingmakers and ultimate powers. This éminence grise takes the form of a banking cartel represented by central banks.

Before we dive into the history of the BIS, and seeing as the BIS is the capo di tutti capi of central banks, let’s first do a quick ABC of central banking itself. We’ll refer to the titan of central banks – the US Federal Reserve, or the Fed, as it is commonly referred to. I’ll then explain why I believe the mad bankers trump the mad generals in the insane asylum called planet Earth.

Central Banking 101

John Truman Wolfe, a senior US banker before he turned his skills to business management and investment advice, has written a book titled The Coming Financial Crisis: A Look Behind the Wizard’s Curtain. It provides a plain-English explanation of many facets of global international finance, a key pillar of which is central banking.

If the BIS, as the central bank of central banks, is the head of the snake of global financial capital, it’s worth summarising what central banks really are, how they create money, and why they do it. Many of you know this already, but for those who don’t, it may help to make sense of the true role of central banks in our lives, and to therefore understand what the BIS really does as the head of that snake. I will quote Wolfe, who has done poetic justice to the subject:

“…the Federal Reserve [the US central bank] is a private corporation. The shareholders of the Fed are the large multinational banks, many of which are headquartered in New York.

The Fed’s real purpose is to create money in order to lend it to the United States government. Given that it is a private corporation, the Fed’s money is basically a corporate currency. At its core, it’s no different than if Microsoft started to print bank notes that Congress designated as legal tender for the exchange of goods and services.

When the government spends more than it takes in, it must borrow the difference. The Fed prints up dead presidents and lends them to [Uncle] Sam (it’s mostly digital money these days). And of course they charge interest on the money they loan, so it is in their interest to spend more than it takes in.

One of the primary reasons a country goes in debt is to finance a war. Wars are costly. They create deficits which require borrowing – from the Fed. If there isn’t a war, someone can simply start one.”[iii]

That’s a good segue into the next section.

“The sinews of war are infinite money” – Cicero

Let’s ask a question that goes to the heart of this new geopolitical paradigm. Why are bankers in suits more powerful than generals with armies, guns and bombs? Because without the bankers to allocate the money for manufacturing their killing toys and to pay large armies, the generals are powerless. What’s more, the generals don’t understand the science of money despite the fact that money and finance are as essential to a modern economy as water and electricity. The bankers control the money lever and they have succeeded in blinding us with their science.

The bond between military power and economic power is an essential one – military power cannot grow unless it is bankrolled by financial power. Military power is in fact subordinate to financial power. Money is a proxy for energy in the sense that you can divert human energy towards a goal or project by throwing money at it. Turn off the money spigot and the project splutters to a halt. That does not mean that money guarantees the success of the project, but merely that money is a very effective means of directing human energy towards a purpose.

That’s why the wars that really matter are bankers’ wars. The bankers control a complex human energy-directing machine. This means it is highly unlikely that a major conflagration can take place without the blessing of the money powers. It is not necessarily the case that the bankers will have backed a side in the conflict but rather that, regardless of the outcome, the bankers’ position is strengthened. As we shall see, no-one is better at playing both sides than a banker. And history has repeatedly shown that at the end of the game, the banker emerges victorious.

In a nutshell, the banking cartel, through their central banks, control the money supply, the interest rate, and the issuance of debt to governments. They therefore exercise enormous control over economic policy and the allocation of resources within an economy. They have the power to make or break countries with interest rate and currency manipulation, money supply expansion or contraction, and debt slavery. This would be bad enough, but what if all the major central banks of the world got together and formed a central bank of central banks to coordinate their control of the entire global economy with absolutely no oversight by anyone other than themselves?

Well, they have, and that central bank of central banks is innocuously and misleadingly named the Bank for International Settlements (BIS).

Let’s explore the story of the global banking coup d'état and what it means for the prospect of freedom. I will draw extensively on Adam Lebor’s history of the BIS – Tower of Basel: The Shadowy History of the Secret Bank that Runs the World.

There are no sovereign nations – only sovereign international organisations

Located in Basel, Switzerland, The BIS was established in January 1930 for three main reasons. The first, and ostensibly the most important, was to administer German reparations payments for the First World War. The second was to facilitate cooperation between central banks. The third was to act as a bank for central banks.[iv] The second and third were the real reasons. The first was a pretext to get the project off the ground.

The bank’s key architects were Montagu Norman, who was governor of the Bank of England, and Hjalmar Schacht, president of the German Reichsbank. Its founding members were the central banks of Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Belgium, a consortium of Japanese banks, and a consortium of US banks effectively representing the US Federal Reserve Bank. By using its cartel member banks, the Fed was able to distance itself from the project, a political expediency that addressed the general antipathy in the US at that time to internationalism. The US banks were JP Morgan, First National Bank of New York, and the First National Bank of Chicago.[v]

Norman commissioned the editor of The Economist, Walter Layton, to draft the BIS’s constitution, which was to guarantee the bank’s independence from politicians. When Layton reported back to Norman that he had failed to “work out some form of words that would place the bank beyond the reach of governments”, Norman responded peevishly, “Why do you insist it can’t be done?”

Layton’s excessively reasonable response was that he thought it was “the right of every democratic government to reserve its freedom of action”. In the end, he was defeated by Norman, who succeeded in establishing a constitution that to this day enshrines the bank’s absolute independence from governments and politicians.[vi]

Lebor notes in Tower of Basel that the Hague Convention “guaranteed that the BIS would be the world’s most privileged and legally protected bank. Its statutes, which remain in force to this day, essentially make the BIS untouchable.” Quoting article 10 of its charter:

“The Bank, its property and assets and all deposits and other funds entrusted to it shall be immune in time of peace and in time of war from any measure such as expropriation, requisition, seizure, confiscation, prohibition or restriction of gold or currency export or import, and any other similar measures.”[vii]

The BIS was thus founded by an international treaty sanctioned by national governments that wrote it a blank cheque. The BIS’s immunity has been tested and found to work very well. When Argentina went bust in 1991, a number of bond creditors sued the Argentine government for funds that its central bank had placed with the BIS, out of reach of creditors. Switzerland’s highest court upheld the BIS’s immunity from disclosing or releasing the funds.[viii]

John Truman Wolfe, former US banker and investment advisor, sums up the BIS:

“The BIS is completely above the law. It is like a sovereign state. Its personnel have diplomatic immunity for their persons and papers. No taxes are levied on the bank or the personnel’s salaries. The grounds are sovereign, as are the buildings and offices. The Swiss government has no legal jurisdiction over the bank and no government agency or authority has oversight over its operations.”[ix]

Only a form of circular logic, or begging the question, can justify placing any institution above the law. Put more plainly, there is no justification for placing an institution above the law other than for the express purpose of legalising criminality. A BIS senior manager applied circular logic when he explained to Lebor that:

“It’s very important that an institution that is mainly dealing with the central banks of sovereign countries should have full immunity in its financial transactions from the jurisdiction of national legal systems, as do the IMF and World Bank.”[x]

An “institution that is mainly dealing with the central banks of sovereign countries” is, needless to say, not an explanation for the BIS’s immunity. It is merely a very short description of what the BIS does. The statement is therefore a baseless assertion that the BIS should be beyond scrutiny. The statement amounts to this: “The BIS is above the law because it is the BIS.” We would of course fall out of our chairs laughing if Al Capone had made a similar statement to a judge along the lines of: “The mafia requires full immunity from the jurisdiction of national legal systems because secrecy is vital to our operations.” And yet the BIS is populated by a peculiar breed of human that thinks we should keep a straight face when they make similar utterances.

It is worth pausing to reflect on the Kafkaesque absurdity of the world’s most powerful international financial institution being completely above the law and beyond the scrutiny of the people most affected by its decisions. When the BIS and its member central banks make decisions affecting such fundamental issues as the money supply, debt levels, and interest rates, there is nothing you or your supposedly democratically elected officials can do about it. But we are told that we live in democracies.

The BIS of course is not unique in this regard. The UN, the World Bank and the IMF all operate on the same principle. When it proves too bothersome to enact a national law to implement policies granting the plutocrats more control, national legislation can be bypassed by lawmakers simply asserting that the policies must be followed by virtue of the individual nation’s membership of the relevant international club – a club that doesn’t have to ask you how you feel about its policies. Any objection by local electorates is met with a shrug by government stooges who point to the international institutions and their regulations in the way that Moses pointed to the tablets he brought down from the mountain.

In other words, nations are ‘sovereign’ but they are governed by institutions that are more sovereign than nations. It doesn’t take a genius to work out that the sovereignty of the supranational institutions cancels the sovereignty of the nations to which they dictate policy. In this hierarchy of sovereignty, nations cede their sovereignty to international institutions like the BIS and the UN.

Worse still is how this ruse was pulled off. The supreme sovereignty granted to the international clubs was quietly wrapped up and handed to them by the nations themselves whose elected representatives never consulted the people to whom they claim to be answerable.

We need to keep breaking this down to its essentials if there is to be any hope of correcting course. There are three parties in this game called Pass the Power.

First, there is an ignorant and docile public (of whom I was once a member and probably still am in many respects) who are unaware that a blank cheque to govern the world has been given to a gang of venal bankers.

Second, there is a body of elected representatives – our plantation managers operating under the respectable name of ‘government’ – who gave the blank cheque to the venal bankers. The plantation managers’ job is to manage the interests of the plutocrats they diligently serve while persuading the fools who elected them that they are trying, albeit fecklessly, to act in the fools’ best interest. And fools are notoriously easy to fool. Which is why they’re called fools.

Third, there is a gang of plutocrats who own the entire plantation and delegate management of it to their plantation managers (politicians) and the supremely sovereign international institutions that work for them.

The plantation managers, aka ‘politicians’, and venal plutocrats are not going to stop being wolves. They have too much to gain by continuing to be wolves, and too much to lose if they don’t. The only real hope of changing this dynamic is if the fools, realising how much they have to lose by continuing to be fools, stop being fools.

The international bank that said “Heil Hitler”

By June 1932, two and a half years after the BIS had been set up, its main purpose – the administration of German reparations – had withered away. Reeling from a broken economy and a debt crisis, Germany was unable to pay. European governments agreed to cancel German reparations, except for one final payment.[xi]

Founded under an international treaty, and with statutes that were virtually immutable, the BIS had been designed to stay in business against all the odds. Untouchable and with little opposition to its continued existence, the BIS was now free to pursue its primary mission as the coordinating bank of central banks.

Hjalmar Schacht, as head of the German Reichsbank, was quick to harness the BIS’s potential to help Germany achieve its goals under a newly emerging Nazi regime. Using his seat on the BIS board, he smoothed the way for key German financial and industrial appointments to the BIS board, including Kurt von Schröder, one of the most powerful and influential bankers in Nazi Germany, and Hermann Schmitz, CEO of IG Farben, the German chemicals conglomerate.[xii]

Merle Cochran, an American diplomat who monitored the BIS, expressed the view in a telegram to the State Department in May 1939 that the Nazis “believe that the BIS offers them their best contact with the outside world. They want to have capable representatives in the BIS in order to break the way for [an] approach to more normal business and monetary relations with the important countries of the world.”[xiii]

As Europe slid into war in 1939, questions began to be raised about the relationship between the Bank of England’s governor Montagu Norman, and the head of the German Reichsbank, Hjalmar Schacht. Despite growing international tensions, relations between the central bank governors in Basel remained “entirely cordial”, according to Cochran. One of Cochran’s sources at the BIS was the German assistant general manager, Paul Hechler, who diligently signed his correspondence “Heil Hitler.”

The BIS not only ensured that the German Reichsbank remained a central pillar of the global financial system during the war, but also served as an intelligence conduit for Germany through its international peers on the BIS board.

The morals of banking – business is BISness

Nazi persecution of Jews and state-organised theft of Jewish businesses is described in BIS documents purely as a technical question.[xiv]

Prior to Germany’s annexation of the Czechoslovak Sudetenland province in September 1938, the National Bank of Czechoslovakia had prudently transferred its gold to two accounts at the Bank of England. Its faith in the probity of the BIS proved to be gravely misplaced.

Three days after the Wehrmacht marched into Prague on 15 March 1939, a Reichsbank official ordered the directors of the National Bank of Czechoslovakia, under threat of death, to transfer its gold held at the Bank of England’s BIS account to the Reichsbank’s BIS account. The Czech directors believed that the Bank of England would not honour the instruction, it being obvious that it had been issued under duress. However, Montagu Norman had no interest in whether Czechoslovakia was free or a Nazi colony. Oddly, the gold held by Czechoslovakia in a BIS account was not deemed to be a national asset and was transferred to the Nazi Reichsbank.[xv]

Unfazed by the uproar this caused in London, Norman was indignant at the suggestion that the British government might have some say in the bank’s affairs.

The BIS’s eagerness to accommodate Nazi territorial annexations did not extend to Soviet ones. Following the Red Army’s invasion of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia in June 1940, the Soviets ordered the BIS to transfer the conquered territories’ gold to the Soviet Union’s state bank. Thomas McKittrick, the BIS’s new American president, refused despite the precedent that had clearly been set by the Czech scandal.[xvi]

I do not believe there was anything personal about McKittrick’s refusal to accommodate Russia’s demands. It was driven simply by loyalty to transnational finance, of which Russia was not yet a fully paid-up member. Russia did not belong to the BIS central bank club at that time.

Under McKittrick’s tenure, the BIS was an active arm of the Reichsbank. It carried out foreign exchange deals on its behalf, accepted looted Nazi gold until the final days of the war and recognised the German occupation of France, Belgium, Greece, and the Netherlands.

McKittrick also repeatedly passed economic intelligence to the Reichsbank leadership.[xvii] Emil Puhl, vice president of the Reichsbank and BIS board member, described the BIS as the “only real foreign branch” of the Reichsbank.[xviii]

A startling point that Lebor makes is just how much the BIS had come to rely on the Reichsbank for its survival during the war. The war was not good for the BIS’s balance sheet, and by 1943 its business volume had fallen to less than 5% of pre-war volumes. Lebor reports that “the bank was kept going by the interest payments it received from the Reichsbank, which eventually accounted for 82% of its income.”

Playing both sides in the threesome between military intelligence, Wall Street, and the banks

The incestuous relationship between intelligence services, Wall Street and banking that emerged before and during World War II is a phenomenon that has since repeated itself ad nauseam.

As I have argued under the heading “The sinews of war are infinite money”, economic power and military power are two sides of the same coin, and the bankers have an uncanny knack of coming out on top regardless of who wins the war. It makes sense that they would be intimately tied up with the intelligence services when it matters the most.

Enter the infamous Dulles brothers, Allen and John Foster Dulles, who began their careers as Wall Street banking lawyers and ended up running the CIA and the US Department of State, respectively.

The Dulles brothers were scions of one of the most powerful families in the United States. Both their uncle and grandfather had served as Secretary of State. Allen Dulles completed a stint with the Foreign Service and by 1930, he and his brother, John Foster Dulles, were partners at Sullivan and Cromwell, the most powerful law firm in the US, if not the world. They brokered deals to refinance the rebuilding of Germany after World War I, and had business links to premier German banks and industrial firms like IG Farben and Siemens.

John Foster Dulles went on to become US Secretary of State in the Eisenhower administration in the 1950s. Together, the two brothers would ensure that the Nazi bankers and industrialists with whom they had worked during the war were seamlessly integrated back into powerful positions in the new Federal Republic of Germany.[xix]

Allen Dulles returned to Bern, Switzerland, in November 1942, not as a banker, but to set up the Swiss station of the Office for Strategic Services – the forerunner of the CIA. As a spymaster, his objective was to use his assets at the BIS to harvest information for the US and the banking cartel he had served as a Wall Street lawyer. The first person Dulles met on his way to Bern was Thomas McKittrick, the president of the BIS.[xx]

McKittrick, while visiting the US in April 1943, was pumped by the OSS chief for information about Nazi Germany’s economy and the Nazi leadership, the role of the BIS and the Swiss connection[xxi]. In Autumn of 1941, McKittrick had shared important information about the significance of America’s Lend Lease program with Emil Puhl[xxii], vice president of the Reichsbank and fellow BIS board member, leading Puhl in September 1942 to describe the BIS as the “only real foreign branch” of the Reichsbank.

While the Nazis on the BIS management and board had good reason to believe they were using the BIS to their advantage, the BIS president was also playing both sides. There was some grizzling by State Department officials and Congress about the role of the BIS and whether McKittrick should be allowed to return to Basel. In the end it amounted to nothing and, as usual, the bankers and the intelligence services got their way. McKittrick was allowed to return as he was seen as a back-channel between the US and anti-Nazi Germans.[xxiii]

Ultimately, he was allowed to return because he was an OSS asset under the protection of Allen Dulles, who ran the OSS office in Bern. Both he and Dulles were on the same side – not the US, but international finance. As Lebor put it:

“McKittrick, also known as OSS codename 644, traded information out of loyalty – not to the Allied cause or the national interest of the United States, but to transnational finance, a creed shared by America’s spymaster.” [emphasis added][xxiv]

On his way back to Basel, McKittrick flew to Rome. The US was at war with Italy and McKittrick was a citizen of an enemy country, yet none of that mattered. As McKittrick himself recalled:

“I was met at the airport as if I was the king of something. Nobody looked at my passport; they just waved their hands at it.”

He enjoyed a sumptuous dinner with the BIS’s Italian secretary general before being whisked onto a train to Switzerland.

The Wallenberg banking family of Sweden benefitted enormously from Sweden’s neutrality in the war. Lebor’s examination of the BIS records reveals that “the Wallenberg business empire was the most important transnational finance channel between Sweden and Nazi Germany.” The most important lesson McKittrick learnt from the Wallenbergs was how to play both sides at once. The Swedes were adept at profiting from being one of Nazi Germany’s key trading partners while also feeding intelligence to the Allies, “thus guaranteeing that regardless of whoever won the war, the Wallenberg banking and business empire would survive and thrive.”[xxv]

Even the Nazi German bankers at the BIS were less concerned about Nazi defeat than they were about landing on their feet after the war. An OSS telegram in May 1944 recorded the fears of Emil Puhl, vice president of the Reichsbank and BIS board member, as expressed to McKittrick:

“The latter [Puhl] was extremely depressed, not so much by the idea of Nazi defeat, but by the situation which Germany will have to contend with later. The Reichsbank has been engaged in work on plans for the reconstruction, and evidently they are unable to see where an effective beginning can be made.”[xxvi] [emphasis added]

Puhl need not have worried. A February 1945 OSS memo from a senior official to Allen Dulles confirmed that:

“Negotiations are underway to bring hostilities to a speedy conclusion and to preserve the industrial substance of the Reich.”[xxvii]

In fact, by 1943, most German industrialists realised the war was lost. Georg von Schnitzler, an IG Farben board member, used the BIS – the IG Farben CEO, Hermann Schmitz, was on the BIS board – to send a message to the Allies that the bombing of German industry had to stop.[xxviii]

Regarding the bankers’ strengthened post-war position, no time was wasted in building a new international financial system. The July 1944 Bretton Woods meeting of Allied nations agreed to the formation of the International Monetary Fund and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, which became part of the World Bank.

There is little doubt in my mind as to who is really in charge, not just in peacetime, but during a major war. Bankers have the power to sanction war by financing it, or to veto war by not financing it – that is to say, by not providing the ‘sinews of war’. In deciding whether to provide the sinews of war, there are only two concerns for a banker. First, that they profit from the actual war. Second, that their post-war position is strengthened.

Post-war reconstruction and the related financing is just as important as the war profits. Profiting from war does not require the banker to back a particular side, and it is far more preferable for the risk-averse banker to be confident in simply backing the war itself rather than a winner.

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In Part II, we will cover the BIS’s post-war rise and its role in the globalists’ project of European union.

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[i] Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time, Macmillan Company, New York, 1966, Ch VII, pg. 324

[ii] Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time, Macmillan Company, New York, 1966, Ch XIX, pg. 1092

[iii] John Truman Wolfe, The Coming Financial Crisis: A Look Behind the Wizard’s Curtain, Lisa Hagan Books, 2016, Ch 6, pg. 121, 122

[iv] Adam Lebor, Tower of Basel: The Shadowy History of the Secret Bank that Runs the World, Public Affairs, New York, 2014, Ch 4, pg. 41

[v] Adam Lebor, Tower of Basel: The Shadowy History of the Secret Bank that Runs the World, Public Affairs, New York, 2014, Introduction, xviii

[vi] Adam Lebor, Tower of Basel: The Shadowy History of the Secret Bank that Runs the World, Public Affairs, New York, 2014, Ch 1, pg. 14

[vii] Adam Lebor, Tower of Basel: The Shadowy History of the Secret Bank that Runs the World, Public Affairs, New York, 2014, Ch 2, pg. 20

[viii] Adam Lebor, Tower of Basel: The Shadowy History of the Secret Bank that Runs the World, Public Affairs, New York, 2014, Ch 16, pg. 260, 261

[ix] John Truman Wolfe, The Coming Financial Crisis: A Look Behind the Wizard’s Curtain, Lisa Hagan Books, 2016, Ch 2, pg. 41

[x] Adam Lebor, Tower of Basel: The Shadowy History of the Secret Bank that Runs the World, Public Affairs, New York, 2014, Ch 16, pg. 262

[xi] Adam Lebor, Tower of Basel: The Shadowy History of the Secret Bank that Runs the World, Public Affairs, New York, 2014, Ch 3, pg. 29

[xii] Adam Lebor, Tower of Basel: The Shadowy History of the Secret Bank that Runs the World, Public Affairs, New York, 2014, Ch 3, pg. 34, 35

[xiii] Adam Lebor, Tower of Basel: The Shadowy History of the Secret Bank that Runs the World, Public Affairs, New York, 2014, Ch 4, pg. 41

[xiv] Adam Lebor, Tower of Basel: The Shadowy History of the Secret Bank that Runs the World, Public Affairs, New York, 2014, Ch 4, pg. 52

[xv] Adam Lebor, Tower of Basel: The Shadowy History of the Secret Bank that Runs the World, Public Affairs, New York, 2014, Ch 5, pg. 60, 61

[xvi] Adam Lebor, Tower of Basel: The Shadowy History of the Secret Bank that Runs the World, Public Affairs, New York, 2014, Ch 6, pg. 79

[xvii] Adam Lebor, Tower of Basel: The Shadowy History of the Secret Bank that Runs the World, Public Affairs, New York, 2014, Ch 6, pg. 82

[xviii] Adam Lebor, Tower of Basel: The Shadowy History of the Secret Bank that Runs the World, Public Affairs, New York, 2014, Ch 6, pg. 83

[xix] Adam Lebor, Tower of Basel: The Shadowy History of the Secret Bank that Runs the World, Public Affairs, New York, 2014, Ch 2, pg. 19

[xx] Adam Lebor, Tower of Basel: The Shadowy History of the Secret Bank that Runs the World, Public Affairs, New York, 2014, Ch 7, pg. 93, 94

[xxi] Adam Lebor, Tower of Basel: The Shadowy History of the Secret Bank that Runs the World, Public Affairs, New York, 2014, Ch 7, pg. 97

[xxii] Adam Lebor, Tower of Basel: The Shadowy History of the Secret Bank that Runs the World, Public Affairs, New York, 2014, Ch 6, pg. 83

[xxiii] Adam Lebor, Tower of Basel: The Shadowy History of the Secret Bank that Runs the World, Public Affairs, New York, 2014, Ch 7, pg. 98

[xxiv] Adam Lebor, Tower of Basel: The Shadowy History of the Secret Bank that Runs the World, Public Affairs, New York, 2014, Ch 8, pg. 113

[xxv] Adam Lebor, Tower of Basel: The Shadowy History of the Secret Bank that Runs the World, Public Affairs, New York, 2014, Ch 8, pg. 117

[xxvi] Adam Lebor, Tower of Basel: The Shadowy History of the Secret Bank that Runs the World, Public Affairs, New York, 2014, Ch 8, pg. 115, 116

[xxvii] Adam Lebor, Tower of Basel: The Shadowy History of the Secret Bank that Runs the World, Public Affairs, New York, 2014, Ch 8, pg. 120

[xxviii] Adam Lebor, Tower of Basel: The Shadowy History of the Secret Bank that Runs the World, Public Affairs, New York, 2014, Ch 8, pg. 129, 130