[Firestarter]

William Engdahl - A Century of War

In this post the first part of my summary of a book by William Engdahl that explains a lot of things that have happened from the end of the 19th century till the beginning of the 20th century, including information on the IMF…


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Iran oil, the Ottoman Empire – WW I
In the 1870s, the German Reich stopped playing according to the British model for economic destruction. This made Germany a threat. From 1850 to in 1913, German total domestic output increased fivefold and the per capita output increased by 250%. Between 1871 and 1913, the German population saw a steady increase in its living standard.
After the report by the Koch commission, the Reichstag in June/July 1896 approved legislation that restricted financial speculation.
For most of the 19th century England dominated the seas. The emergence of Germany as a preeminent modern shipping nation, was threatening the British domination of the seas.

In 1882, the black heavy sludge we today know as petroleum “rock oil” had little commercial interest other than as fuel to light the new mineral oil lamps.
Britain’s Admiral Lord Fisher was one of the first to conclude that Britain must convert its naval fleet to the new oil fuel. He argued that oil power would allow Britain to maintain decisive strategic advantage in future control of the seas.
By 1905, British intelligence and the British government had finally realised the strategic importance of oil but had no oil of its own. Fisher was ordered to establish a committee to “consider and make recommendations as to how the British navy shall secure its oil supplies.

In 1889, a group of German industrialists and bankers, led by Deutsche Bank, secured a concession from the Ottoman government to build a railway through Anatolia from the capitol, Constantinople. In 1899, the Ottoman government agreed that the German group could continue with the next stage of the Berlin–Baghdad railway project.
Germany was also becoming a close ally of France, but then the Dreyfus affair was staged to sabotage the relationship between Germany and France.

For information on the Dreyfus affair: https://www.lawfulpath.com/forum/viewtop...=31&t=1415

For Britain this was a huge threat to their world dominance. It would also cut Russia off from her western friends, Great Britain and France. It is not surprising to find enormous unrest and wars throughout the Balkans in the decade before 1914, including the Turkish War, the Bulgarian War and continuous unrest in the region.

For information on how the mass murdering “Young Turks” freemasons destroyed the Ottoman Empire: http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthread....-1914-1923

In 1901, the Shah of Persia (Iran) granted the Australian William Knox d’Arcy by royal decree a monopoly for 60 years, to probe, pierce and drill in the Persian soil for an amount equal to some $20,000 cash and the Shah received a 16% royalty from the sales of the petroleum.
In 1905, British “spy ace” Sidney Reilly persuaded d’Arcy to sign over his exclusive rights to Persian oil with the Anglo-Persian Oil Company. Scottish financier Lord Strathcona was used as a front man by the British government as the majority shareholder of Anglo-Persian, while the government’s stake was kept secret.

By 1902 it was known that the Mesopotamia region (today Iraq and Kuwait) of the Ottoman Empire contained resources of petroleum.
In 1899, the British government offered “protection” to the Sheikh Mubarak al-Sabah of Kuwait.


By 1912, German industry and government had realised that oil was the fuel of the future. At that time, Standard Oil’s Deutsche Petroleums Verkaufgesellschaft (of Rockefeller) controlled 91% of all German oil sales.
In 1911, the young Winston Churchill succeeded Lord Fisher as First Lord of the Admiralty. Churchill used Fisher’s arguments to campaign for an oil-fired navy.
In 1913, the British government secretly bought a majority stake in Anglo-Persian Oil (today British Petroleum).

On 3 August 1914, Germany declared war on France, and German troops entered Belgium en route to attack France; on August 4, Britain declared war against Germany.
When WW I erupted, Britain was effectively bankrupt, according to a letter from Sir George Paish to Lloyd George dated 1 August 1914:

The credit system upon which the business of this country is formed, has completely broken down, and it is of supreme importance that steps should be taken to repair the mischief without delay; otherwise, we cannot hope to finance a great war if, at its very commencement, our greatest houses are forced into bankruptcy.

Britain’s secret weapon was the special relationship with the Wall Street banking house of J.P. Morgan & Co.

By January 1915, 4 months into the Great War, the British government had named J.P. Morgan & Co. as its exclusive purchasing agent for all war supplies from the US. As purchasing agent alone, Morgan took a 2% commission on the net price of all goods shipped. By 1917, the British War Office had placed purchase orders totalling more than $20 billion through the house of Morgan.
It became a giant credit pyramid on top of which sat the house of Morgan. Firms such as DuPont Chemicals grew into multinational giants by their ties to Morgan. Remington and Winchester arms companies were also Morgan “friends”.’

Had President Woodrow Wilson not signed the Federal Reserve Act into law on 23 December 1913, it is questionable whether the US could have committed the resources it did to a war in Europe. In August 1914, the house of Morgan and the City of London shaped the US Federal Reserve System in the months just before outbreak of the Great War.
In August 1917, the Federal Reserve mobilised sales of Liberty Loans and bonds, to finance US government war costs. By 30 June 1919, these Liberty Loans and bonds totalled the breathtaking sum of $21.5 billion.
Morgan & Co. quietly shifted their private British government loans over to the general debt of the US Treasury when the US officially entered the war, making the British debts the burden of the American taxpayers after the war. But, in a great example of justice, Morgan had a major stake in the post-war Versailles reparations financing.

At the time of the Versailles peace conference in 1919, Britain owed the US $4.7 billion in war debts, while its own domestic economy was in a deep post-war depression, its industry in shambles, and domestic price inflation 300% higher after the 4 years of war.
The British national debt had increased more than nine fold, between 1913 and the end of the war in 1918, to the then-enormous sum of £7.4 billion.

During WW I, Sir Mark Sykes made a deal with French negotiator Georges Picot (the Sykes–Picot accord), under which Britain would get control over “Area B”, from what today is Jordan, east to most of Iraq and Kuwait, the ports of Haifa and Acre, and the rights to build a railway from Haifa through the French zone to Baghdad.
France got control over “Area A”: Greater Syria (Syria and Lebanon), including Aleppo, Hama, Homs and Damascus, the oil-rich Mosul to the northeast, including the oil concessions then held by Deutsche Bank in the Turkish Petroleum Gesellschaft.
After 1918, Britain maintained almost a million soldiers stationed in the Middle East. By 1919, the Persian Gulf had become a “British Lake”.

In 1920, Morgan partner Thomas W. Lamont noted with satisfaction that, as a result of WW I, “the national debts of the world have increased by $210,000,000,000 or about 475 per cent in the last six years, and as a natural consequence, the variety of government bonds and the number of investors in them have been greatly multiplied”.

WW I was planned and succeeded in reallocating the raw materials and physical wealth of the entire world, especially the areas of the Ottoman Empire with significant petroleum reserves. In 1912, Britain commanded only 12% of world oil production through British companies. By 1925, she controlled the major part of the world’s future supplies of petroleum.
The newly carved Middle East boundaries were dominated by British government interests through Britain’s covert ownership of Royal Dutch Shell and the Anglo-Persian Oil Company.
Engdahl systematically claims that the Anglo-Dutch Shell is controlled by Britain. I have read that Queen Wilhelmina was “the richest woman in the world” at that time and the majority shareholder in Shell and Shell chairman Deterding was a Dutchman - I’m not convinced by Engdahl on this...


The Round Table, RIIA, CFR
The Round Table, founded in 1910, was anti-German and pro-Empire. Instead of the costly military occupation of the colonies of the British Empire, they argued for a repressive tolerance, calling for the creation of a British “Commonwealth of Nations”. Member nations were given the illusion of independence, enabling Britain to reduce the high costs of far-flung armies.
The Round Table included such notables as Foreign Secretary Albert Lord Grey, British secret agent Arnold Toynbee, and H.G. Wells.

The Round Table’s think tank, which was formed by Lionel Curtis in Versailles in May 1919, became the Royal Institute for International Affairs (Chatham House). The RIIA received an initial endowment of £2,000 from Thomas Lamont of J.P. Morgan.
The same circle at Versailles also decided to establish an American branch of the London Institute, to be named the New York Council on Foreign Relations (CFR); initially composed almost entirely of Morgan men and financed by Morgan.


Treaty of Versailles – 1920s
Wall Street lawyer John Foster Dulles had authored the infamous German “war guilt” clause Article 231 of the Versailles Treaty.
John Foster Dulles calculated that Britain and the other Allied powers owed the US $12.5 billion at 5% interest. Britain, France, and the other Entente countries, in turn, were owed by Germany, according to the Versailles demands, the sum of $33 billion!
The figures were beyond the scale of imagination at that time. The sum, 132 billion gold marks, was finally decided in May 1921.

Since Versailles, the Reichsbank printed money to cover the state deficits, inflation was rising and Versailles had stripped Germany of her most vital economic resources. All her valuable colonies, her entire merchant fleet, a fifth of her river transport fleet, a quarter of her fishing fleet, 5,000 locomotives, 150,000 railroad cars and 5,000 motor trucks were taken by the Allied powers (most of it by Britain).

The French were given the 25% share of the Deutsche Bank in the old Turkish Petroleum Gesellschaft by Versailles.
The remaining 75% of the huge Mesopotamian oil concession was directly in the hands of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company and Royal Dutch Shell.
Henri Deterding’s Royal Dutch Shell had an iron grip on the oil concessions of the Dutch East Indies, Persia, Mesopotamia (Iraq) and most of the Middle East.

The Sinclair Refining Company, with son of the former president Theodore Roosevelt Jr. on its board and his brother, Archibald Roosevelt, aas vice president of Sinclair Oil, secured the prised Baku oil concession (from under the nose of Royal Dutch Shell). William Boyce Thompson, director of Rockefeller’s Chase Bank in New York, was also on Sinclair’s board.
But then suddenly in April 1922, the Teapot Dome scandal erupted, implicating Sinclair, Fall, and even President Harding. Within a year Harding himself had died under strange circumstances. The Coolidge presidency dropped Sinclair and the Baku project, and plans to recognise the Soviet Union.

In 1922, Walther Rathenau was making a deal with the communist Soviet Union that in return for leniency on the war reparations claims on Germany, Germany would sell industrial technology to the Soviet Union.
Within 2 days of its formal announcement, on 18 April at Genoa, the German delegation was presented with an Allied note of protest that Germany had negotiated the Russian accord “behind the backs” of the Reparations Committee.
On 22 June 1922 (something numeric 6/22/’22?), Walther Rathenau was assassinated. Following the murder of Rathenau, the gold mark rate by July 1922 plunged to 493 Marks per US dollar, by December, the Mark had fallen to 7,592 to the dollar.

Then, in January 1923, the Reparations Committee voted 3 to 1 that Germany was in default of her reparations payments. On January 11, Poincaré ordered the military forces of France, with participation from Belgium and Italy, to occupy German industrial Ruhr by force. It took until the end of 1923 for French troops and engineers to bring production in the Ruhr to even a third of the former level of 1922.
In a smart move Britain had formally opposed France, Belgium and even the newly installed Mussolini government of Italy (!). Germany ceased all reparation payments to France, Belgium and Italy for the duration of the occupation, but maintained its payments and deliveries to Britain.
Directly after the Ruhr occupation, in January, the Mark dropped to 18,000 to the dollar; by July, the Mark had collapsed to 353,000 per dollar; in August, 1 Mark was worth $4.6 million; on 15 November 1922, the Mark was at 4.2 trillion per dollar. The savings of the entire population were destroyed.

In October 1923, US secretary of state Charles Evans Hughes, former chief counsel to Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, recommended a new scheme to President Calvin Coolidge to continue the reparations pyramid of debt collection which had been shaken since the April 1922 Rapallo shock. On 1 September 1924, the Dawes reparations plan formally began.
Under the Dawes Plan, Germany paid reparations for 5 years, until 1929. At the end of 1929, she owed more than at the beginning.
With their risk thus all but nil, the London and New York banks began a vastly profitable lending to Germany, money which was recycled back to the banks of New York and London in the form of reparations with commission and interest. It was a vast international credit pyramid at the top of which sat New York and ultimately the City of London.


The seven sisters oil cartel
In 1927/1928, a peace agreement was signed between the major Anglo-American oil corporations at the Scottish castle of Shell’s Henri Deterding - the “As Is” or Achnacarry agreement. John Cadman for the Anglo-Persian Oil Co. and Walter Teagle president of Rockefeller’s Standard Oil were also present.
British and American oil majors agreed to accept the existing market divisions, end destructive competition, and to set a secret world cartel price.
By 1932, all 7 major Anglo-American companies “The Seven Sisters” had joined the Achnacarry cartel — Esso; Mobil; Gulf Oil; Texaco; Standard of California; Royal Dutch Shell; and Anglo-Persian Oil Co.


Wall Street crash, Montagu Norman, Creditanstalt – WW II
In 1929, governor of the Bank of England Montagu Norman asked the governor of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, George Harrison, to raise U.S. interest rate levels. This later caused the Wall Street stock market crash in October 1929.

In 1931, France ordered its banks to cut short-term credit lines to Creditanstalt, following rumours of a run on the deposits of Creditanstalt (owned by the Rothschild family) broke in the Vienna press, in May 1931, this toppled the fragile Creditanstalt and a credit crisis shook all of Europe.
The man who controlled US monetary policy at the time, former Morgan banker Benjamin Strong, an intimate personal friend of Britain’s Montagu Norman, met with Volpi and the Bank of Italy governor, Bonaldo Stringher, to dictate the Italian “stabilisation” program. The ensuing banking crisis, economic depression and the tragic developments in Austria and Germany were dictated virtually to the letter by Montagu Norman of the Bank of England, the governor of the New York Federal Reserve, George Harrison, and the house of Morgan and friends in Wall Street.

Capital began to flow out of Germany in ever greater amounts. On the demand of Montagu Norman and George Harrison, the new Reichsbank President Hans Luther imposed rigorous credit austerity and tightening in the German capital markets to let the collapse of the large German banks continue.
By July 1931, some 2 months after the collapse of the Vienna Creditanstalt, the Basle Nationalzeitung reported that the Danat-Bank was “in difficulties”, which caused a full panic run so it also collapsed.

After their first meeting in 1924 until Norman’s death in 1945, Hjalmar Schacht and governor of the Bank of England Montagu Norman were close friends.
In 1931, the German Alfred Rosenberg travelled to Britain to meet the editor in chief of the influential London Times, Geoffrey Dawson, that gave Hitler invaluable positive publicity. More important were his meetings with Montagu Norman and Henri Deterding. The introduction to Norman came from Hjalmar Schacht.
The final London visit of Alfred Rosenberg was in May 1933, he went directly to the country home in Ascot of chairman of Shell “Sir” Henri Deterding, arguably the world’s most influential businessman. Royal Dutch Shell secretly had intimate contact with, and provided support to the German Nazis.
In early 1933, Montagu Norman quickly strengthened the Hitler government with vital Bank of England credit. Norman also visited to Berlin in May 1934 to arrange further secret financial stabilisation for the Nazi regime. Hitler made Norman’s friend Schacht both his minister of economics and president of the Reichsbank.

For more on who brought Adolf Hitler to power in Germany: https://www.lawfulpath.com/forum/viewtop...f=7&t=1340


Iran 1941-1954 - Mossadegh and the Shah
Britain, through its Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, retained a stranglehold on Iran throughout the first half of the 20th century.
During the Second World War, Stalin’s Soviet Union assisted Britain to invade Iran. A month after British and Russian forces occupied Iran in August 1941, the Shah abdicated in favour of his son, Mohammed Reza Pahlevi, who was disposed to accommodate the Anglo-Russian occupation.
Tens of thousands of Iranians died of hunger while 100,000 Russian and 70,000 British and Indian troops were given priority in supplies.
General M. Norman Schwarzkopf (father of the commander of the US forces in the 1990–91 Desert Storm) trained Iranian national police force during a six-year period, until 1948.

Russia was granted an exclusive oil concession in the northern part of Iran bordering Azerbaijan, while Royal Dutch Shell got another concession. In the midst of selling Iran to the oil vultures, in December 1944 the Iranian leader, Dr. Mohammed Mossadegh, introduced a bill in the Iranian parliament which would prohibit oil negotiations with foreign countries.
The resolution passed, but it didn’t decide on the concession of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company in southern Iran, from all the way back in 1901.

In 1947, the government of Iran suggested that the original concession must be changed according to the principles of justice and fairness, so that the Anglo-Iranian Oil Co. would increase the share paid to the government of Iran that was only 8%. Britain flatly refused to meet Iran even half way.
In April 1951, Mossadegh became prime minister and his nationalisation plan was finally approved by the Majlis on 28 April 1951. Britain promptly threatened retaliation and within days British naval forces arrived near Abadan. In September 1951, Britain declared full economic sanctions against Iran, including an embargo against Iranian oil shipments as well as a freeze of Iranian assets in British banks. The British embargo was joined by all the major Anglo-American oil companies. Prospective buyers of nationalised Iranian oil were warned that they would face legal action on the grounds that a compensation agreement had not yet been signed with Anglo-Iranian Oil Co.
Iran oil revenues, plummeted from $400 million in 1950 to less than $2 million between July 1951 and the fall of Mossadegh in August 1953. Britain brought the case be brought before the World Court for arbitration, but Mossadegh, himself a lawyer, argued his case successfully, and on 22 July 1952 the Court denied Britain jurisdiction.

In May 1953, US President Dwight Eisenhower, turned down Mossadegh’s request for economic aid, on advice of his secretary of state John Foster Dulles and CIA director Allen Dulles. On August 10, Allen Dulles met with the US ambassador to Tehran, Loy Henderson, and the Shah’s sister in Switzerland.
In 1953, after a five-year absence, Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, Sr. arrived in Tehran to see “old friends”. He promised army generals he had earlier trained power after a successful coup against Mossadegh. Under code name Operation AJAX, the CIA with British SIS overthrew of Mohammed Mossadegh in August 1953.
The young Reza Shah Pahlevi returned to power, and economic sanctions were lifted.

In April 1954, the Anglo-American companies, joined by France’s state-owned CFP, started negotiations with the government of Iran to secure a 25-year agreement for exploitation of oil on 100,000 square miles of Iranian territory.
British Petroleum (previously named Anglo-Iranian Oil) was given 40% of the old d’Arcy concession; Royal Dutch Shell got 14%; the major US oil companies divided 40% of the oil between them; and France’s CFP got 6%.


Enrico Mattei - ENI
One European company expressed interest in purchasing oil from Mossadegh’s nationalized oil supply. It was Italy’s Ente Natzionale Idrocarburi (ENI) of Enrico Mattei that was founded in February 1953.

In 1955, Mattei successful negotiated a share of the oil of Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula with Egypt’s new leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser, which by 1961 had grown into a considerable 2.5 million tons per year of crude oil.
In August 1957, Mattei made a deal with the Shah - he offered an unprecedented 75% of total profits to the National Iranian Oil Company, with ENI (only) 25%. The new joint venture Société Irano-Italienne des Pétroles (SIRIP), got the 25-year exclusive right to explore and develop some 8,800 square miles of promising petroleum prospects in non-allocated regions in Iran.

By 1958, total proceeds from ENI’s Italian natural gas sales alone topped $75 million per year. Instead of spending precious Italian dollar reserves on imported oil and coal.
Between 1959 and 1961, gasoline prices in Italy dropped 25%, which significantly aided Italy’s post-war economic revival.

On 27 October 1962, under suspicious circumstances a private airplane crashed after taking off from Sicily en route to Milan killing Enrico Mattei, who was on his way to make deals with Iran, Egypt and the Soviet Union for oil supply.
He had already signed agreements with Morocco, Sudan, Tanzania, Ghana, India and Argentina. At the time of his death, Mattei had been preparing a trip to meet with the president John F. Kennedy, who was then pressing the US oil companies to reach an agreement with Mattei.


From Bretton Woods to 1968 - Gold fixed dollar
The US came out as the “world leader” from WW II.
A little known fact of the 1944 Bretton Woods deal was the creation of a gold exchange system. Under this system, each member country’s national currency was connected to the US dollar. The dollar rate was permanently fixed at $35 per ounce of gold.

From 1947 on, the Marshall plan was used by Western Europe to buy oil, supplied primarily by US oil companies, more than 10% of all Marshall aid. Between 1945 and 1948, they more than doubled the price of oil from $1.05 per barrel to $2.22 per barrel.
There were huge differences in the prices, at the time Greece paid $8.30 per ton for fuel oil, Britain paid only $3.95 per ton.

In late 1957, the US underwent the first deep post-war economic recession, which lasted into the mid 1960s.
While Europe was forced to pay excessively high interest rates to attract US dollars, as the dollar price was fixed, the US lowered its interest rates. Investors grabbed up “cheap” industrial companies in Western Europe, South America or Asia for higher profits abroad, as dollars flowed out of the US.
From 1957 to 1965, US annual net capital export into Western Europe mushroomed from less than $25 billion to more than $47 billion. Between 1962 and 1965, US corporations earned 12 to 14% on their investments in Western Europe.

JFK proposed a new bill to impose a tax of up to 15% on American capital invested abroad. When it finally passed in September 1964, they had made a seemingly innocent amendment, which exempted one country — British colony Canada! Montreal and Toronto thereby became the centres for an enormous loophole which ensured that the US dollar outflow continued, through London-controlled financial institutions.
Bank loans made by foreign branches of US banks to foreign residents were also exempt from the new US tax. So US banks quickly established branches in London and other major cities across the globe.

The City of London attracted the world’s financial flows with highest interest rates of any major industrial nation throughout the mid 1960s.
In 1961, the US, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Holland, Belgium, Sweden, Canada and Japan agreed to pool reserves in a special fund, the gold pool, to be administered in London by the Bank of England. The US Federal Reserve contributed only half the costs of continuing to maintain the world price of gold at the artificially low $35 per ounce price of 1934.
Financial speculators by the second half of 1967 were selling pounds and buying dollars to buy commercial gold in all possible markets from Frankfurt to Pretoria, sparking a steep rise in the market price of gold, in contrast to the $35 per ounce official US dollar price.
It appeared that even 80 tons of sold gold on the London market wasn’t enough to keep the fixed dollar price of Bretton Woods intact. On 18 November 1967, Britain announced a 14% devaluation of the pound from $2.80 to $2.40, the first devaluation since 1949. Once the pound had been devalued, speculative pressures immediately turned to the US dollar. International holders of dollars went to the gold discount window at the New York Federal Reserve and demanded their rightful gold in exchange.
The market price of gold rose even further. By the end 1967, Washington’s gold stock had declined another $1 billion to only $12 billion.

In January 1967, French president De Gaulle’s principal economic adviser, Jacques Rueff, came to London to propose raising the official price of gold. The US and Britain refused to hear such arguments, which would have meant a de facto devaluation of their currencies. The US and British press, led by the London Economist, attacked the French policy.
On 31 January 1967, a new law came into effect in France which allowed unlimited convertibility for the French franc.
Then France withdrew from the Group of Ten gold pool. France immediately became the target of riots, first by leftist students in Strasbourg, soon followed by students all over France. In coordination with the political unrest, US and British investment houses started a panic run on the French franc, cashing in francs for gold, draining the French gold reserves by almost 30% by the end of 1968.
Within a year, De Gaulle was out of office and France wasn’t a threat anymore.
In April 1968, a special meeting of the Group of Ten was convened in Stockholm where US officials unveiled the new “paper gold” substitute plan through the IMF, the so-called Special Drawing Rights (SDRs).


The oil inflation of 1973 – creating the petrodollar
In 1969, the US economy was again in a recession. In 1970, US interest rates were sharply lowered. As a consequence, speculative “hot money” sought higher short-term profits in Europe and elsewhere. As interest rates continued to drop, these outflows reached huge dimensions, totalling $20 billion.
In May 1971, the US recorded its first monthly trade deficit, triggering a virtually international panic sell-off of the US dollar.

On 15 August 1971, President Nixon formally suspended dollar convertibility into gold, effectively putting the world fully onto a dollar standard with no backing. The US also formally devalued the dollar a mere 8% to $38 per fine ounce gold.
The real architects of the Nixon strategy were the influential City of London merchant banksters, including: Edmond de Rothschild, Sir Siegmund Warburg, and Jocelyn Hambro, who saw a “golden” opportunity in Nixon’s dissolution of the Bretton Woods gold standard.

In 1972, the massive capital outflows of dollars to Japan and Europe continued. In 12 February 1973, Nixon announced a second devaluation of the dollar, of another 10% to $42.22 per ounce (where it remains to this day).
Between February and March 1973, the value of the US dollar against the German Deutschmark dropped another 40%.

In May 1973, the Bilderberg Group met at Saltsjöbaden, Sweden, the secluded island resort of the Swedish Wallenberg banking family. At his meeting of 84 high ranking members of international crime, Walter Levy outlined a ‘scenario’ for a drastic increase in OPEC petroleum revenues. He projected an OPEC Middle East oil revenue rise.
See 2 excerpts from the confidential protocol of the 1973 meeting of the Bilderberg group in Sweden. There was discussion about the danger that “inadequate control of the financial resources of the oil producing countries could completely disorganize and undermine the world monetary system”.
The second excerpt speaks of “huge increases of imports from the Middle East. The cost of these imports would rise tremendously”.


The purpose was not to prevent the oil price shock, but plan it in a process that US Secretary of State Kissinger later called “recycling the petrodollar flows”. Since 1945, world oil had been priced in dollars. A sudden sharp increase in the price of oil, therefore meant an equal increase in world demand for US dollars to pay for that necessary oil.

Bilderberg policy used a global oil embargo, to create a 400% increase in world oil prices. On 6 October 1973, Egypt and Syria invaded Israel, igniting the Yom Kippur War.
The events surrounding the outbreak of the October War were secretly orchestrated by Washington and London, using the powerful secret diplomatic channels developed by Nixon’s national security adviser, Henry Kissinger. US intelligence reports, including intercepted communications from Arab officials confirming the build-up for war, were suppressed by Kissinger.
Washington didn’t permit Germany to remain neutral in the Middle East conflict, but hypocritical Britain clearly stated its neutrality, so avoided the Arab oil embargo.

On October 16, the Arab OPEC declared an embargo on all oil sales to the US and the Netherlands for its support for Israel and raised the oil price from $3.01 to $5.11 per barrel (+70%). Following a meeting in Teheran on 1 January 1974, a second price increase of more than 100% brought OPEC benchmark oil prices to $11.65. Henry Kissinger secretly put up to the Shah of Iran to arrange this.
President Nixon was kept busy with the “Watergate affair”, leaving Henry Kissinger as de facto president. When in 1974 the Nixon White House sent a senior official to the US Treasury in order to devise a strategy to force OPEC into lowering the oil price, he was bluntly turned away.
In August 1971, Nixon had established a secret accord with the Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency (SAMA) that was finalised in February 1975. Under the terms of the agreement, a sizeable part of the huge rise in Saudi oil revenue would be invested in financing the US government deficits.
In 1974, 70% of the additional OPEC oil revenue, $57 billion, at least 60% went directly to financial institutions in the US and Britain.

The most severe impact of the oil crisis in the US was felt in New York City. New York was forced to slash spending for roadways, bridges, hospitals and schools in order to service their bank debt, and to lay off tens of thousands of city workers.
Bankruptcies and unemployment across Europe rose to alarming levels. As Germany’s imported oil costs increased by 17 billion Deutschmarks in 1974. By June 1974 the oil crisis had resulted in the collapse of Germany’s Herstatt-Bank and a crisis in the Deutschmark as a result. It resulted in a million unemployed Germans.
In May 1974, Willy Brandt offered his resignation to Federal President Heinemann, who then appointed Helmut Schmidt as chancellor.

In 1973, India had a positive balance of trade. But in 1974, India had total foreign exchange reserves of $629 million which couldn’t pay for the annual oil import bill of 1,241 million.
In 1974, Sudan, Pakistan, the Philippines, Thailand and most countries in Africa and Latin America faced gaping deficits in their balance of payments.
In 1974, developing countries had a total trade deficit of $35 billion, 4 times as large as in 1973 (precisely in proportion to the oil price increase). In the early 1970s, the account deficit of all developing countries was (only) some $6 billion per year.

The major New York and London banks, and the Seven Sisters oil multinationals benefitted. In 1974, Exxon overtook General Motors as the largest US corporation in gross revenues. Her “sisters”, including Mobil, Texaco, Chevron and Gulf, were not far behind.
Chase Manhattan, Citibank, Manufacturers Hanover, Bank of America, Barclays, Lloyds, Midland Bank all enjoyed the windfall profits of the oil crisis.
In a strange twist, the American David Mulford became director and principal investment adviser of the SAMA, the largest OPEC oil producer.
Basically the post-war Bretton Woods gold exchange system was replaced by the highly unstable petroleum-based dollar exchange system, the “petrodollar standard”.

The year 1975 witnessed the first major decline in world trade since the end of the war in 1945, a drop of 6%.
While industrial countries had experienced a slow recovery from the initial oil shock, the developing economies deteriorated even further in 1975. In 1976, the account deficit of all developing countries rose to $42 billion. Private US and European banks were glad to lend to these countries.
Foreign debts of the developing countries expanded some five-fold, from $130 billion in 1973, before the first oil shock, to some $550 billion by 1981, and to over $612 billion by 1982, according to the IMF.

In August 1976, the 85 non-aligned “developing” states countries tried after the Colombo meeting to fight for “A fair and just economic development”. The UN was chosen as the arena where the “developing” countries explained their demands.
Share prices for US banks began to fall, especially those most involved in Eurodollar lending to the developing countries: Citicorp, Morgan Guaranty, Bankers Trust and Chase Manhattan. The Federal Reserve Bank was forced to intervene to support the falling dollar.
One by one, the advocates of Third World development were removed from the seats of domestic power. In February 1977, PM Indira Gandhi of India was forced into elections and was ousted by March. Sri Lanka paralyzed by a wave of strikes in early January 1977. By May 1977, Bandaranaike’s ruling Freedom Party was gone from power. In 1977, Bhutto was overthrown in a military coup led by General Zia ul-Haq. Before his death by hanging, Bhutto accused US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger of being behind his overthrow. On 14 February 1978, in Guyana, Frederick Willswas forced to resign.


William Engdahl – A Century of War; Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order (first published in 1992, but updated since): http://www.takeoverworld.info/pdf/Engdah...r_book.pdf
(http://web.archive.org/web/2019061512093...r_book.pdf)

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