Fed Backers Seek Power More Than Wealth | Print | E-mail
Written by John F. McManus
Thursday, 24 December 2009 00:01
The prime architect of the Federal Reserve was German immigrant Paul Warburg. Arriving in America in 1902 with brother Max, he married into the family controlling Kuhn, Loeb and Company, America’s prime international banking firm. By 1907, he was earning $500,000 annually, an enormously generous salary at a time when there was no income tax and inflation had not begun eroding the value of the dollar.

Already conversant with the power possessed by European central banks, Warburg insisted for the next few years that America needed a similar banking establishment. He teamed up with Rhode Island’s Senator Nelson Aldrich and, in 1910, the two were among the seven who met secretly at Jekyll Island, Georgia, to plot creation of the Federal Reserve. Enacted by Congress supposedly to curtail the power of the “money trust,â€