G. Edward Griffin (born November 7, 1931) is an American film producer, author, and political lecturer.[1] Starting as a child actor, he became a radio station manager before age 20. He then began a career of producing documentaries and books on often-debated topics like cancer, Noah's ark, and the Federal Reserve, as well as on right-libertarian views of the U.S. Supreme Court, terrorism, subversion, and foreign policy. Since the 1970s, Griffin has promoted Laetrile as a killer of cancer cells, a view not accepted by a majority of scientists.[2][3] He has also promoted the Durupınar site as hosting the original Noah's ark, against skeptics as well as near-Ararat Creationists. He has opposed the Federal Reserve since the 1960s, saying it constitutes a banking cartel and an instrument of war and totalitarianism.[4] In 2002, Griffin founded the individualist network Freedom Force International.
Griffin enrolled in the College for Financial Planning in Denver, Colorado,[23] became a Certified Financial Planner in 1989, and described the U.S. money system in his 1993 movie and 1994 book on the Federal Reserve System, The Creature from Jekyll Island.[1] This popular book[24][25] has been a business bestseller;[26][27] it has been reprinted in Japanese, 2005, and German, 2006. The book also influenced Ron Paul during the writing of a chapter on money and the Federal Reserve in Paul's New York Times number-one bestseller, The Revolution: A Manifesto, which recommended Griffin's book on its "Reading List for a Free and Prosperous America".[28]
The title refers to the November 1910 meeting at Jekyll Island, Georgia, of seven bankers and economic policymakers, who represented the financial elite of the Western world.[29][30] The meeting was recounted by Forbes founder B. C. Forbes in 1916,[31] and recalled by participant Frank Vanderlip as "the actual conception of what eventually became the Federal Reserve System".[32] Griffin states that participant Paul Warburg describes the Jekyll Island meeting as "this most interesting conference concerning which Senator Aldrich pledged all participants to secrecy".[33]
Griffin's work stresses[34] the point which Federal Reserve chair Marriner Eccles made in Congressional testimony in 1941: "If there were no debts in our money system, there wouldn't be any money."[29] Griffin advocates against the debt-based fiat money system on several grounds, stating that it devours individual prosperity through inflation and it is used to perpetuate war. He also described a framework of central bankers underwriting both sides of an ongoing war or revolution.[35] Griffin says that the United Nations, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the World Bank are working to destroy American sovereignty through a system of world military and financial control, and he advocates for United States withdrawal from the United Nations.[10]
Edward Flaherty, an academic economist,[36] characterized Griffin's description of the secret meeting on Jekyll Island as "conspiratorial", "amateurish", and "suspect".[37] Griffin's response was that Flaherty had miscategorized the book with other publications and had labeled all criticisms of the Federal Reserve as the results of conspiracy theory.[38]
Griffin's dreams of a free-market, private-money system superior to the Fed caused economist Bernard von NotHaus to deploy such a system in 1998. Griffin states that von NotHaus's private silver certificates, known as Liberty Dollars, are "real money".[39]
[edit] The "Mandrake mechanism"
The Mandrake mechanism is a term coined by Griffin in this book. Mandrake the Magician was a comic strip character from the 1940s. He had the ability to magically create things and, when appropriate, make them disappear[40]. Griffin's view is similar to many other gold-standard supporters' critique of the fractional reserve banking system and the Federal Reserve in particular: that it makes money "magically" appear from nothing.
In Griffin's view, the "magical" quality of this mechanism is really just a simple mathematical limit (mathematics). When banks loan money, they don't actually loan existing money. Rather, they allocate money to loan, but they are limited by how much money they can create. The law basically says that, for each dollar a bank has on hand in one of its savings accounts, it is allowed to create another 90 cents to give out as a loan. (The dollar from the savings account is still there, and can still be spent by the person who owns the savings account.) This loan is then spent, and the recipient puts it into another bank, and that bank can now loan 90 cents times 0.9 = 81 cents. This can be repeated many times (depending on the demand for loans) until it approaches its mathematical limit of 10 dollars.
For example, when the Federal Reserve holds on deposit 1 billion in marketable United States Treasury security then the banks in the banking system, public and private, and bound by US financial law, are able to generate 10 billion in new debt over time. In September, 2008 the US Public Debt was 5.8 trillion and from that debt there was a potential to create approximately 53 trillion ((5.8x10)-5.8=52.2) dollars of money (as debt).
(Source Wikipedia)
