The Money Power

How finance capitalists enslave the world
-- by: Frank Anstey, 1921, source: Australian Nationalist Archive
MHP hypertext version for non-profit educational use only

MHP Editor's Preface

About this book

This booklet, written by a member of the Australian Labor Party shortly after the end of World War I, describes the methods by which finance capitalists profited from the war, and manipulated the indebted governments into establishing the present system of fiat paper currency and credit. A century later, the story is much the same as one manufactured "financial crisis" follows another, national debts have exploded, and interest rates have fallen to historic lows.

"Profits are piled up in bank credits, re-invested and re-invested until the field of industrial activity is exploited to its limit. Money, in the language of the market, becomes "plentiful" and "cheap." In other words, the industrial outlets are diminishing, and the rate of interest, the "reward of Capital," is falling. It will fall to zero. Something must be done -- it is done. International hatreds are stimulated. People prepare for 'peace' by grinding the axe of bloody slaughter. Armaments are demanded, loans are raised, and the right to levy perpetual tribute on the nation is given in return. Even this is insufficient to mop up profits as rapidly as their accumulation.

So war comes; any pretext suffices. War must come. It is the product of the predacious instinct in every age and clime. But there is a difference. Under every other economic system, war placed the yoke of slavery on the conquered foreigner. Under capitalism, war is made the instrument of the enslavement of men of kindred race and blood."

"By their control of the institutions to which flow the savings of the people they are enabled to "finance" every industrial scheme in which they are interested. They can say who shall have credit and who shall not. They can boom or paralyse. They can inflate or restrict. They are the economic masters of the country. They are the financial backbone of every Ring, Trust, Combine, and price-raising conspiracy... By their process of amalgamation, fusion and absorption, a compact financial oligarchy becomes more and more the dominant fact. Thus there is built up in secrecy and silence a Black Masonic Order of Plutocracy, cemented in all its parts by the lust of power..."

For easier online reading, the text has been divided into separate chapters, some sections have been condensed, and other sections no longer of general interest have been omitted. The full text is available at the source listed above.