Healthy Money Healthy Planet - library.uniteddiversity.coop

and narrated by Bill Still, and available at www.themoneymasters.com. This
documentary traces the origins of the political power structure that rules the
world today.
11 Quoted on www.globaljusticemovement.org/money, as sourced from
Frederick Merton, The Rothschilds, A Family Portrait, New York: Atheneum, 1962.
Meyer Amschel Rothschild was born in 1743 as Meyer Amschel Bauer, but later
changed his name to Rothschild, meaning ‘red shield’, which was the sign
displayed above the door of his late father’s moneylending and goldsmithing
business, established in 1750. When Meyer died he left behind US$200 million,
the largest personal fortune ever accumulated in Europe at that time. The five
sons of this powerful financial dynasty – Amschel, Salomon, Nathan, Kalmann
(Karl) and Jacob (James) – also all became involved in banking.
12 Letter from Alexander Hamilton to Robert Morris, 30 April 1781, quoted by
John H. Makin in The Global Debt Crisis: America’s Growing Involvement, New
York: Basic Books, 1984, p246.
13 Quoted in Hamilton’s Blessing by John Steele Gordon, New York: Walker and
Co., 1997. Gordon notes that as early as 1781, at the age of 26, Hamilton had
observed in a letter to Robert Morris (the so­called ‘financier of the Revolution’)
that ‘A national debt, if it is not excessive, will be to us a national blessing … It
will … create a necessity for keeping up taxation to a degree which, without
being oppressive, will be a spur to industry’ (originally quoted in The Federalist,
1788).
Chapter 2
1 World Bank, Global Development Finance 1999, Washington, DC: World Bank,
1999, accessible at www.worldbank.org/prospects/gdf99.