The greatest heist in world history... Seven men boarded a private railroad car in New Jersey on the night of November 22, 1910, under fake names, and by the time they reached Jekyll Island, Georgia, they had begun drafting the legislation that would hand control of American money to the banks that needed controlling. Nelson Aldrich organized the trip. He was a Rhode Island senator, the father-in-law of John D. Rockefeller Jr., and the chairman of the National Monetary Commission. He brought Paul Warburg of Kuhn, Loeb and Company, Frank Vanderlip of National City Bank, Henry Davison of J.P. Morgan and Company, and a handful of other men whose combined institutions held one-quarter of the world's investable wealth. They told no one. They used first names only on the island. The servants who staffed the Jekyll Island Club were replaced before arrival. The cover story, once the trip leaked years later, was that these men gathered to reform a broken banking system for the public good. How generous of them. They built a cartel with a government badge. The Federal Reserve would act as a lender of last resort, meaning your tax dollars and your inflated purchasing power would backstop the riskiest decisions made by the largest banks. Smaller banks, those that competed with Morgan and Rockefeller institutions, would face reserve requirements Washington enforced on their behalf. Credit expansion, which produces the boom-bust cycle you live through every decade, would now operate through a centralized mechanism immune from market discipline. Warburg, who had spent years lobbying for a European-style central bank in America, drafted the core structure. Aldrich carried it to Congress. Congress passed it as the Federal Reserve Act on December 23, 1913, after many members had already left Washington for Christmas recess. The scheme operated through rhetorical genius. They named it a reserve system, implying caution. They called it federal, implying public ownership. A private banking cartel now possessed the legal authority to manufacture money. You have been paying the interest on that arrangement ever since.