Gold & Silver Cool Slightly After Month-Long Rally

Mike Maharrey: Greetings. I'm Mike Maharrey, a reporter and analyst here at Money Metals, and I'm very excited to be joined today by G. Edward Griffin. For this audience. He's probably best known for his book, the Creature from Jekyll Island, but he has actually written a large number of books on a wide range of subjects from health and nutrition to the location of Noah's Ark. So quite a prolific body of work. He's also worked in film and produced a number of film documentaries and is still out there doing stuff. And very excited to have you on the show. How are you today?

G. Edward Griffin: Well, I'm doing well, Mike, and thanks for inviting me.

Mike Maharrey: Well, absolutely. It's really exciting to talk to you. I think that anybody who is interested in what's going on with the economy and whatnot has to be interested in the Federal Reserve because it's such a linchpin to so much that's going on. Your book was so groundbreaking at the time in kind of exposing the origins of that august institution. And I like to start just, I don't want to assume that everybody in the audience has read the book, and I'm going to guess that a lot of people may not even be familiar at all with the story of how the Fed emerged. So can you just in a relatively concise way, just sum up for somebody who doesn't know anything about the Fed, explain how did this central bank come to be?

G. Edward Griffin: But yeah, that's the impossible task to boil it down to

Mike Maharrey: It. It really is because there's so much.

G. Edward Griffin: There's so much. But the highlight is first of all, I think people, if they're not familiar with the Fed at all, they probably don't even know what it is.

Mike Maharrey: That's fair.

G. Edward Griffin: And I was in that position, by the way, at one time. I made it all the way into young adulthood, had been married, had a couple of kids before I ever even cared what the Federal Reserve was. But I assumed as most people do, that it was an agency of the federal government

G. Edward Griffin: And that it was somehow involved with regulating the banks and the money system all for my benefit. How far from the truth that was indeed. So that's what I thought. And most people think it has something like that in its character. But in essence, the truth is quite the opposite. First of all, the Federal Reserve system is not a government agency. It is a private institution that was chartered by the federal government that created the Federal Reserve Act back in 1913. Just like states chartered corporations in their states, the federal government can charter also. And this is one of those where they created the Federal Reserve Corporation, literally, and it's a private institution, but it was created by the federal government and authenticated by it. But it is in essence an association like a labor union or something like that of bankers, of banking systems companies. And the correct word for it, it is a cartel. It's a cartel of banks. And in that sense, it's kind of shocking to put it in context of the right word, because it means that in essence, it's no different than a banana cartel or an oil cartel. It happens to be a banking cartel,

Mike Maharrey: A money cartel,

G. Edward Griffin: A money cartel and privately owned. And it gets even more weird when you assume that this cartel would be subject to oversight and regulations and control by the federal government that created it. And here again is another shocker, at least it was for me, and that it is quite not that way. In fact, it's actually more the other way around. It started off just being an institution that was chart independent. The government had no power over it whatsoever except to abolish. It was written into the charter that the federal government would have no control over its policies, although it would go to great length to make it appear that it was a government agency and that the elected, the electorate had somehow some magical control over it through their elected representatives when in fact it did not. So that's where you start with that kind of an assumption and you realize that, well, wait a minute, what we need to know more about this puppy.

Mike Maharrey: Yeah, absolutely.

G. Edward Griffin: Especially since when it was created, they had convinced these ignorant politicians in Washington to give it the power to create the nation's money supply. Now, that is a mind boggler, right? By itself traditionally is a power limited to the sovereign, which means the government, the source of all authority. But in this case, the sovereign, meaning the federal government delegated that power to this private cartel. And it was absolutely an amazing, phenomenal move that has had profound consequences for the American people and largely throughout the world as well, because it has developed and thus cut to the chase it has developed to become what I consider to be a criminal organization because what it's doing is not in the interest of the American people, and it's doing what cartels always do, and that is to further the benefit to the members of the cartel period, hard closed period. And so doing it has legally plundered the American people. And so that's the short version, but there's a lot of gaps to be filled in the middle.

Mike Maharrey: Yeah, absolutely. But you make some really good points, and I think I'm sure that a lot of people aren't even aware that the whole idea that the government can charter a corporation is questionable from a constitutional standpoint. That was a huge debate early in the Republic. In fact, arguably one of the first big debates was Hamilton wanted to create this national bank, and people like Madison and Jefferson were like, no, there's no power in the Constitution for you to charter a corporation much less a bank. And yet here we are with this. I think you described it very accurate, this cartel that effectively manipulates and manages and monopolizes our money, which is crazy. Now the whole thing was created in secret, right? This isn't like something that happened on the news and everybody was aware of it. It was pretty shady in its origins, right?

G. Edward Griffin: Well, that's very right. Yeah. That's the reason I called my book The Creature from Jekyll Island, because Jekyll Island is a real island off the coast of Georgia, and it was a resort island in those days. It still is, but it was completely privately owned in those days by a small handful of what we would call billionaires today. The elitist and the Rockefellers and the big industrial powers had their winter cottages in Jackal Island because they were pretty well headquartered in New York. Well, it gets cold in New York in the wintertime. So these guys always split south to go down to Georgia, and they had mansions down there and a very large and beautiful clubhouse.

I called the Jekyll Island Clubhouse. They were all members of it. It was a private island. And so that's where they went to put together this organization, this cartel called the Federal Reserve primarily. So they would not be under the watchful eye of newspaper reporters or other politicians or just curiosities seekers. So it was highly secret. I think probably very few wars of history have ever been concocted under greater conditions of secrecy than this one. They even went to the extent of they all got on board Senator Aldridge's railroad car, let's put it that way, in New Jersey. And so they all had to meet at the New Jersey Railroad Station, and they were given orders that when they got to the station, they would not come in groups or together, not be seen together to come separately and not to talk to each other if they should happen to bump into each other.

They didn't want to call attention to themselves. And because they knew that newspaper reporters always would hang out at the railroad station to get a quick picture or a statement from some celebrity moving in and out of New York. And they were further instructed that when they got on board Senator Aldridge's private railroad car, that when they spoke to each other, they were not to address each other by their full names, to use first names only. And in one case, there are two of them just adopted code names entirely and a lot of things like that. And said, why are that well obvious what it was, because later on, a couple of those people there actually were prompted to write about it and boast about it.

Of course, the information also found their way into the biographies of some of these very powerful people. And so it's easy if you want to do a little research to get an eyewitness account of how much secrecy and planning went into this meeting. And they explained it very well. They said very clearly that if the word had gotten out that this particular group of top financiers, the heads of the greatest banks in America were getting together in a private meeting and holding up for 10 days or so, that they start asking questions, what's going on? And they did not want that at all. And one of them carried a shotgun in a big black case just in case he would be stopped by a reporter. He was prepared to say, well, I'm just going on a duck hunting trip. In that case, that was Paul Warburg, by the way. And the funny thing is we find out from his biographers that he never fired a gun in his life. Oh my

Mike Maharrey: Gosh. That's funny.

G. Edward Griffin: He borrowed that just for camouflage

Mike Maharrey: A prop, right?

G. Edward Griffin: A prop. Yeah.

Mike Maharrey: It's funny to me because when I hear something like that, a bunch of people high powered, heavily connected political people are going to this length to do something in secret. My radar goes off. I'm thinking there's something shady going on. This is something I need to look. And yet, when you tell the story, so many people are like, oh no, it was no big deal. Why do you think it is that people have such a hard time grasping that this is at least sketchy at best and probably dangerous in reality? Why are people resistant to kind of seeing what, to me is clearly a cautionary tale?

G. Edward Griffin: Well, given that a lot of thought, and I have come to the conclusion, it's a very simple answer, and that is because if they recognize that there's skullduggery going on, then they have a responsibility to find out what it is and to do something about it, and it kind of disrupts their normal life. Everything is fine. Leave me alone, la, la, la, la, la la.

Mike Maharrey: Right, right. Yeah, that makes sense to me. It's still funny because the people are going to come after you. Oh, this guy. He's some kind of whackado. And again, it seems so obvious to me when you were doing research for the book and people should know, there was actually, the film came before the book. You actually did a documentary film that came out the year before the book. Is that right?

G. Edward Griffin: Let me think. I never really produced a documentary film on that. I've had some speeches. My lectures have been recorded, and some of them have had images plastered over my,

Mike Maharrey: And maybe that's what I got that from. I can't remember what source I saw that regardless. You mentioned the fact that as a young man, you don't know anything about a central bank and who really cares. When you started digging in and doing the research, what is something that surprised you the most? So, you were like, wow, this even because obviously you had some inkling that there was kind of shady, but what's something that really surprised you as you were doing your research?

G. Edward Griffin: Well, there were a lot of surprises. Let me think of the biggest surprise. Well, you I'll parrot pretty much what you said. The thing that attracted my attention most was the secrecy surrounding this meeting. What I said a moment ago is just a short version of all of it. It was tremendous amount of deception going on, not only to conceal the fact of the meeting, but to prevent any information about the meeting taking place from being made public for quite a while thereafter. It was obvious that there was something big going on, and that was the shocker to me. As you just very well described,

I always assumed if people do something in secret, there's something to hide. I wanted to find out what were these guys trying to hide? And well, of course, it was so big, you can't imagine it. It's too big to see really. And that is the fact that they were taken over control of the federal government of the United States through the monetary system. Well, naturally, you don't want to tell everybody, Hey, everybody, look what we're doing. By the time we're through with this job, we're going to own the government because we will have control of the money system. Yeah. Let me add one more thing, one more thing. It's sort of an appendage to that. After the period of time, it took maybe, oh, 30, 40, 50 years after that this thing evolved. It started at relatively harmless proportions. Paul Warberg had said that they had to make concessions for the original proposal because there was some opposition in Congress. And Warburg said, “Hey, give 'em their concessions.” And the response, “Well, we can't do that. That's going to interfere with our ability to do what we want to do.” And he said, “Come on guys, relax. Our job is to get the bill passed. We can fix it up later. That was his exact phrase in writing.”

Well, so they made it relatively harmless in the beginning, but since that time, the Federal Reserve Act has been amended over a hundred times, and it has become something that was far more gruesome and frightening than I think even they imagined it would be possible to do. So you follow that trail all the way to today, and you come to the most startling of all things for me, and that is to realize that instead of the federal government controlling the Federal Reserve system, the Federal Reserve system controls the government, and it's really that way, although you'd never guess it by reading your newspaper,

Mike Maharrey: Right?

G. Edward Griffin: Yeah. So that's a shocker.

Mike Maharrey: Yeah. Well, I understand enough about monetary policy to understand and recognize that if it weren't for the mechanizations of the Federal Reserve, the federal government wouldn't be able to borrow and spend money to the extent that it does. I mean, isn't the Fed in a sense, an enabler of big government? I mean, you can't run wars and have a huge welfare state without a lot of borrowing and spending, and you can't do that without money creation. And the Fed does that in spades.

G. Edward Griffin: Well, that's right. Yeah. You have to fund all this thing, and the population will never put up with that kind of taxation, so you have to disguise it as inflation, and that's where the central bank comes in. Of course, theoretically you can do that without a central bank. You could just nationalize the Federal Reserve system.

And some people advocate that. I don't, because that's just shifting the chairs on the deck of the Titanic. It is not who creates money out of nothing. It's the fact that somebody creates it out of nothing. Yeah. That's the problem. That's the problem. And I don't care whether it's those big bad bankers or those nice trustworthy politicians, it's going to come out the same way.

Mike Maharrey: Right, exactly. I think the fact that there is a central bank involved in it, though it does, I think it makes it easier for them to hide what they're doing in some ways.

G. Edward Griffin: Well, much more because it's more complicated because it's not the government look, it's an agency, it's independent, and it seems like there's give and take on this and somebody's controlling it and watching it and all that facade, which is not true. It's window dressing.

Mike Maharrey: Right. Every time I hear Jerome Powell talk about a Fed independence, I simultaneously snicker and cringe. Yeah. Is there anything in the book when it came out, and again, it came out in the early nineties, is there anything in there that people kind of scoffed at you about that you look at it now and it's so obvious that you feel just completely vindicated because nobody can deny it anymore?

G. Edward Griffin: Yes, there is. There are two things, and they're relatively small, but to me they're big. I mean, this is my baby. When I did this book, of course I was and still am the first to acknowledge that I'm the last person in the world qualified to write a book like that.

I had no training in banking or money, no interest in it. I thought that was all taken care of by the politicians and so forth. So I had to start from ground zero, and as I'm going through this thing and learning as I dig deeper and deeper that the topic is much bigger than I thought it was until finally I almost gave up. I thought, this is too big for me, little old me. I don't understand this stuff, but I continue to plunge through. I thought, boy, when this book is finally published, I'm going to be slaughtered by the real knowledgeable people are going to pick this apart and expose me as a fraud that I am

Mike Maharrey: The old imposter syndrome. Right?

G. Edward Griffin: Yeah. So I was scared to death when the book finally hit the streets, and I was on a book tour and I was waiting for the ax to fall, and I got a call from a local radio station in some little town on the East coast and asked if I would come into the studio and be interviewed. Oh, sure. That's why I was out there on the book tour. But when I got there, there was another guy sitting there at the table and I was introduced to Professor Egghead or whatever his name was from the local university, and he was a professor of money and banking.

I thought, uh-oh, this is my execution. I'm going to be publicly taken apart and destroyed. And so okay, on the air sign lit up and the moderator or the host started with me. He said, “Well, Mr. Griffin, we have professor so-and-so here, and we want to hear the give and take between you people on this topic. Let's start with you. What is your message?” Well, I knew I didn't have a lot of time, so somehow I cobbled together probably about a three or four minute summary of the reasons that I was opposed to the Fed, such as it financed wars, it destroyed the purchasing power of the working man. The major points. I went through all of them, and so those are the reasons that I'm opposed to the Fed. Now, no explanation as to how that happened. It was just sort of a summary. And so the host turned to the professor. He said, “Well, what is your response to that?” And I'll never forget it. I'm sitting there all shriveled up waiting for it, the acts to come. And it was a long pause and he said, “Well, what he says is true, but we're living well, aren't we?” Oh, wow. That was his rebuttal.

I couldn't believe it. I thought, I've got this. I thought is that he admitted that everything I said was true and I have never had. Now, the other thing was some other professor early in the game sent me a letter and said that I had the wrong czar on page 222 in the book. It was not Czar Nicholas, it was Z Alexander or something. It was not the third, it was the fourth or something.

I thought, oh, how can I make such a big mistake as that? Okay, now to answer your question, those are the two things that even come close to being a confrontation of what I have done, and that adds up to zero. Right? Absolutely. I'm absolutely amazed. I'm just amazed because that is a very profound and complicated topic.

I think the only reason I survived is because I refused to get into the complications. I want to say, let's stick with the obvious overriding facts, and nobody cares about how many votes it takes to get such and such through the board of directors, and they want to know this is a who done it. I wrote it like a who done it. I described what the crime was, what the weapon was and what they did with the body.

Mike Maharrey: That's fantastic. What was your background going into the project?

G. Edward Griffin: Well, again, I'm probably the least qualified because my background was in theater and radio and television. I'd worked my way through college and as a radio announcer at the university. I had a job with WW JTV in Detroit as an assistant director. And I wanted to go to Hollywood and become the next Cecil b de Mills. Of course that didn't work out. That was my background. And so by that time I had a wife and a couple of kids to support and I thought, I better get a real job. So, I went into the corporate world and I was in the insurance business, in group insurance, writing insurance policies for corporations and their employees until I discovered what was really going on in the world and my crusader gene began to vibrate and quit my job, and that was a whole different story. So that was my background.

Mike Maharrey: Yeah, well that makes sense to me because as somebody who is interested in and communication, you know how to tell a story. And I think that's a problem with so many people that to try to tackle these kind of political finance, it's boring, but if you can tell it as a story, as you very wonderfully put it, you made it into a who done it that grabs people's attention. And anybody can do research, not anybody, but if you're a relatively intelligent person, you can do the research. So that makes sense to me because you have that storytelling ability and that definitely comes through in your writing. And even in talking to you, you have that ability to communicate. And I think that's still lacking, especially when it comes to the world of finance and money and politics. It's so dry and boring, and so it's refreshing to get it as a story because the facts are there, but people can relate to it and kind of absorb it.

G. Edward Griffin: Well, that's the way it is. It's who done it and we know who did it, and now we know how they did it. And the only question is are we're going to bring 'em to justice for it or not.

Mike Maharrey: So, here's a question kind of looking at the Fed as it is today. We've seen more and more interventions and deeper and more profound interventions in the economy with each crisis. So we've got the boom bust that you can kind of go back all the way to the.com, and then the fed intervenes and they cut interest rates and they create all this money and then it creates a boom, and then we have another bust. And the pandemic was just absolutely insane. You just consider they created $5 trillion just in quantitative easing. Do you think there's going to come a point where these guys are going to lose control of this and they're no longer going to be able to keep the monster that they've unleashed? Unleashed?

G. Edward Griffin: Let me think how I answer that question accurately. I think your question is, is the point going to come where they lose control of it? And the answer is, my opinion is no, because they've already passed that point. I think they already recognized that this process has gone so far that there's no way that they can continue to control it. It's going to blow up. It's under great signs of stress. Of course, the fact that it has the appearance of still holding together is a miracle.

So, I think their decision probably finalized a couple of years ago was to accelerate the destructive components of it so rapidly so that it would blow up under their direction so they can time it, but it would be part of a strategy to bring about another system that is even worse to replace it. So that I think their strategy was to destroy the existing monetary system and say, oh, this is terrible. How could this have possibly, those politicians just kept spending money and so yeah,

Mike Maharrey: Point the blame. Point the blame,

G. Edward Griffin: Yeah, we've got to do something about this, but we have a new system. It's called digital currency. It, it's digital's crypto and you can't create it. It's wonderful and we'll get the politicians out of it. We'll have the central banks run it and now we're dependable and so forth. I think the goal of a cashless society, not, I think I know the goal of a cashless society has been on their agenda for a long, long time. Probably at least a century and by a cashless society, let's define what that means. I'm not talking about not having dollar bills in your pocket or something like that. I'm talking about any tangible asset that you could use as a medium of exchange that would be dollar bills, coins and so forth. And digital currency is the ideal solution for that and for them, because especially now I'm not talking about credit card money, that's digital money, of course,

But at least you can exchange it for coins or something of tangible value coins or anything warehouse full of cheap white wine or something. It's an asset, but what they want to morph into and are morphing into is what they call a central bank digital currency. But now they decided to condemn that to popularize their wholesomeness. I guess that no, we're not going to have a centralized digital currency, we're going to outlaw that. But then if you read the really small print at the bottom of the page, it says, however, we're going to put out something that's the same as that, but we won't call it that.

Mike Maharrey: Right. Yeah. They're masters it at calling things, different things, quantitative easing. They come up with this terminology.

G. Edward Griffin: Why don’t they just say moneymaking.

Mike Maharrey: Yeah, exactly. When we started having the bout of price inflation after the pandemic, it was, oh, it's transitory. It's interesting. But no, absolutely. I can see exactly what you're saying. And for a person who wants to control things, and obviously that's in the genetic makeup of most politicians and central bankers, digital currency is a dream come true. You can totally control people. You can control what they spend. You can control how much they have. You can turn off their money.

G. Edward Griffin: That’s the thing, that's the element right there. It's the programmable money no matter what they come up with. If we're talking about the same guys that are running the show today, the same elitist that are running the show behind the scenes, whatever they come up with, it's not going to challenge their control over the population through money. It's going to enhance it. And the only enhancement left is to make it programmable so that they can throw a switch and you ain't got nothing because your account suddenly is empty or blocked

Mike Maharrey: You said the wrong thing or voted for the wrong guy. Yeah, exactly. Well, we'll keep our eyes open, but that's a very good insight. So, are you currently working on any projects now? I know you're still active out there, obviously you're talking to me.

G. Edward Griffin: Well, I'm very active. I wish I could be more active. Wish I had more hours in the day in the background. I'm still trying to finish my next book, but in the meantime, in the foreground, I'm doing everything I can to bring our next Red Pill expo to the stage, which is scheduled to be held on July 12 and 13 in Tulsa, Oklahoma. And I would urge anybody that wants to really get hold of the voltage wires and see how much voltage to meet people who are active in this field and exchange ideas, they should come physically to the Red Pill Expo in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Now it is going to be available online for free, so we want everybody in the world to get this information, but if you really want to get involved in doing something about it, you've got to hook up with other people. You've got to start to build a movement of an organization. So that's why we really encourage people to come to the physical meeting. And so you'll find that [email protected].

Mike Maharrey: Fantastic.

G. Edward Griffin: Just as a little background, that is kind of a funnel, you might call it as an introduction to the Red Pill University, which is sort of behind that. And that's a 24/7 thing. It's online and you can go to RedPillUniversity.org and it's sort of like Red Pill Expo only on steroids, and it's all the time, night and day every day. And if you want to dig deeply all the way to the Hardcore Center, that Conspiratorial Center, there's no conspiracy at all. It's out in the open and behind it all is Freedom Force International, which is an organization I created in 2002. That's sort of like the think tank behind the whole thing. And I think we're pretty well organized. All we need now is to bring together the people like yourself and so many hundreds of thousands of other people, millions of people who really do know what's going on or are a pretty good idea and who want to do something about it. Because just knowing about it is what's that good? That's of no value. We have to knock these people off of their purchase, so to speak. Absolutely. And replace them with good, honest people who have no ax to grind except liberty.

Mike Maharrey: Yeah, absolutely. Well, I really appreciate you taking a little time out of your day to talk to me. You are a blessing. Your work is so important. And when I first started getting involved in the quote Liberty movement, your book was one of the first things people started talking about. You got to understand what's going on with the feds. So you've already created a wonderful legacy and it's so exciting that you're still out there and still doing everything that you can to make the world a better place. So very much appreciated. And again, it really means a lot that you took the time to hang out with me for a little bit today.

G. Edward Griffin: Appreciate it. Well, thank you. It's my pleasure. And congratulations to you and appreciation to you for your helping to spread the word.

Mike Maharrey: Well, thank you. I really appreciate that. Alright, well you have a good evening and thank you so much.

G. Edward Griffin: Alright, thank you. Bye-Bye.