background image

 

233

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