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In FDR, My Exploited Father-in-Law, Col. Curtis B. Dall, who was a broker
on Wall Street at that time, writes of the Crash, "Actually it was the
calculated ‘shearing’ of the public by the World Money-Powers,
triggered by the planned sudden shortage of the supply of call money
in the New York money market."90 Overnight, the Federal Reserve
System had raised the call rate to twenty percent. Unable to meet this
rate, the speculators’ only alternative was to jump out of windows.
The New York Federal Reserve Bank rate, which dictated the national
interest rate, went to six percent on November 1, 1929. After the
investors had been bankrupted, it dropped to one and one-half
percent on May 8, 1931. Congressman Wright Patman in "A Primer On
Money", says that the money supply decreased by eight billion dollars
from 1929 to 1933, causing 11,630 banks of the total of 26,401 in the
United States to go bankrupt and close their doors.
The Federal Reserve Board had already warned the stockholders of
the Federal Reserve Banks to get out of the Market, on February 6,
1929, but it had not bothered to say anything to the rest of the people.
Nobody knew what was going on except the Wall Street bankers who
were running the show. Gold movements were completely unreliable.
The Quarterly Journal of Economics noted that:
"The question has been raised, not only in this country, but in several
European countries, as to whether customs statistics record with
accuracy the movements of
precious metals, and, when investigation
has been made, confidence in such figures has been weakened
rather than strengthened. Any movement between France and
England, for instance, should be recorded in each country, but such
comparison shows an average yearly discrepancy of fifty million francs