The Creature from Jekyll Island: A Second Look at the Federal Reserve by G. Edward Griffin was originally published in 1994. It has been reprinted multiple times, reaching a fifth edition in 2010. The book focuses on the historical origins of the Federal Reserve Bank and the social and political justifications for its creation. Griffin is a non-fiction writer and documentary filmmaker who pursued a financial education in preparation for writing this book. The book is controversial and has been debunked for its factual inaccuracies and antisemitic and racist conspiracy theories. It garnered additional notice following the 2008 financial crisis and Ron Paul’s presidential campaign, which focused on abolishing the Federal Reserve.

This guide references the 2010 fifth edition e-book edition available on archive.org, in which the pagination differs from the print edition.

Content Warning: The source text and this guide contain discussions of antisemitic and racist conspiracy theories about the Napoleonic Wars, the Civil War, the enslavement of African-Americans, the World Wars, and the history of central banking.

Summary

On Jekyll Island in Georgia in 1910, six men who represented the banking elite of the US and Europe met in secret to craft a plan to protect banking interests. Nelson Aldrich and his guests emerged from this secret meeting with the structure of the Federal Reserve System drafted. The public argument in favor of the Fed is that the system would have a stabilizing influence on the American economy, but Griffin argues throughout the book that the Fed has destabilized the economy in disastrous ways. The System mirrors European Central Banking, which Griffin argues is intentional and is part of a larger conspiracy to create a world government with a world economy that benefits the banks rather than individuals. He calls this the New World Order.

Part of the function of the Fed is to provide protection to banks in the event of a run on the bank or a potential failure. If a bank is about to fail, the Fed will give it a low-interest loan to temporarily cover losses. Griffin argues that the direct result of this protection is that banks make risky loans and are more likely to need bailouts, thereby incentivizing reliance on the Fed by US banks.

A major argument throughout the book is that abandoning the gold standard has massively reduced the health of the American and global economy. In service of this argument, Griffin offers a history of currency and a definition of money to demystify the function of precious metals as currency or currency backing.

Griffin argues that nations continue to go to war because it produces financial gains for central banks and governments. He uses extensive discussions of the Napoleonic Wars, the Bolshevik Revolution, the American Civil War, and World War I to support and illustrate the connections between financiers and war profiteering. The histories of these wars also serve to underscore Griffin’s claim that politics and finance are far more connected than they may appear.

The connection between politics and finance comes to fruition in the political background Griffin describes directly preceding the establishment of the Fed. The level of influence held by a few powerhouse financial firms led to the meeting on Jekyll Island, which led to the Federal Reserve Act establishing the Fed. The major players in passing that legislation were all either beholden to financiers like J.P. Morgan and the Rockefellers or were their direct agents.

Tracing the events that led up to the stock market crash in 1929 and the subsequent Great Depression, Griffin argues that the Fed’s choices directly caused the Depression. He claims that without a central bank, there may have been a crash and a subsequent economic panic, but a free market would have encouraged a faster recovery rather than a decade-long depression.

The primary conspiracy theory elements of the book are concentrated in the last section of the book, where Griffin explains how the Fed’s policies could play out in the future. Initially, he argues that the Council on Foreign Relations is using a potentially satirical work as a master plan to create the New World Order, which according to Griffin essentially enslaves the middle and lower classes, especially in the United States. He presents a dystopian future in which the Fed’s inflationary practices lead to a massive bank failure requiring bailouts. After the housing market crashes, he speculates, the government would expand and use little-known powers to seize property, relocate citizens, and create a world government in which American citizens are disenfranchised while the financial elite rule the world.

He closes with a plan to avoid his dystopian vision. The plan primarily consists of abolishing the Fed, re-establishing the gold standard, shrinking the federal government drastically, and reducing foreign aid to essentially nothing. His last thoughts are a call-to-arms against the forces behind the Fed, which he argues are collectivist. Ultimately, his argument is that central banking leads to a collectivist dystopia which is totalitarian in nature.