The WWI $3 Billion Loan That Ended an Empire

Описание: The guns did not decide World War I. The ledgers did.

History books tell you WWI ended in the trenches. They tell you about generals, machine guns, and American soldiers storming across France in 1918. They never tell you the war was already decided three years earlier in a wood-paneled office on Wall Street.

In October 1915, J.P. Morgan organized a $500 million loan to Britain and France. Over the next two years, that number grew to $3 billion. This was not charity. This was financial architecture that predetermined which side would win and which would collapse.

Germany made a fatal choice in August 1914. The Kaiser funded his war through domestic bonds sold to German citizens. Britain made the opposite choice and mortgaged its entire empire to American bankers. One strategy created a pyramid scheme requiring victory to avoid collapse. The other built a pipeline of American industrial production flowing directly to Allied armies.

By 1916, Germany was financially dead. The military kept fighting for two more years because surrender meant immediate economic disintegration. The impossible mathematics found their resolution in the hyperinflation of 1923 that wiped out the German middle class and planted seeds for an even greater catastrophe.

This video reveals the financial war behind the military war. The decisions made in 1914 and 1915 that still shape your world today. The same financial architecture that strangled Germany now powers modern sanctions against Russia, Iran, and others. The transfer of financial power from London to New York during these four years created the dollar-dominated system you live inside right now.

You were never taught this in school. The men who built these systems preferred to operate without monuments.

Now you know where to look.

Chapters

0:00 The War Nobody Understood
4:12 The House of Morgan Goes to War
8:13 Neutrality Dies in a Board Room
11:25 Germany's Fatal Miscalculation
15:45 The Collapse Within
20:03 The Architecture Endures

Sources and Archives Referenced

J.P. Morgan and Co. Archives at The Morgan Library and Museum in New York
British Treasury Papers T 172 and T 170 Series at The National Archives in Kew
German Reichsbank Records and War Bond Documentation at Bundesarchiv in Berlin
John Maynard Keynes Treasury Memoranda and The Economic Consequences of the Peace 1919
Federal Reserve Board Minutes and Correspondence 1914 to 1919

Related Search Topics

WWI financing Allied loans
J.P. Morgan World War I purchasing agent
German war bonds Kriegsanleihen inflation
British gold shipments United States 1915 to 1917
Interwar debt reparations Keynes

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