209

became Strong’s alter ego. . . . "Strong’s easy money policies on the 

New York money market from 1925-28 were the fulfillment of his 

agreement with Norman to keep New York interest rates below those 

of London. For the sake of international cooperation, Strong withheld 

the steadying hand of high interest rates from New York until it was too 

late. Easy money in New

__________________________

87 Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope, Macmillan, New York, p. 326

* When people of this class are stricken by guilt feelings while plotting 

world wars and economic depressions which will bring misery, suffering 

and death to millions of the world’s inhabitants, they sometimes have 

qualms. These qualms are jeered at by their peers as "a failure of 

nerve". After a bout with their psychiatrists, they return to their work with 

renewed gusto, with no further digressions of pity for "the little people" 

who are to be their victims.

131

York had encouraged the surging American boom of the late 1920s, 

with its fantastic heights of speculation."88

Benjamin Strong died suddenly in 1928. The New York Times obituary, 

Oct. 17, 1928, describes the conference between the directors of the 

three great central banks in Europe in July, 1927, "Mr. Norman, Bank of 

England, Strong of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, and Dr. Hjalmar 

Schacht of the Reichsbank, their meeting referred to at the time as a 

meeting of ‘the world’s most exclusive club’. No public reports were 

ever made of the foreign conferences, which were wholly informal, but