Tower of Basel

Tower of Basel: The Shadowy History of the Secret Bank that Runs the World
By Adam LeBor
Published in June 2014
360 Pages
Thibault’s Score: 4/5

Tower of Basel is a short history of the Bank for International Settlements. I had always heard of the bank, and had some vague idea that it was important, but was otherwise ignorant of it. This book has been eye opening.

The Bank for International Settlements was founded in the aftermath of WW1 allied and German bankers to help Germany pay back its war debt. The bank marked itself as “neutral” and “apolitical.” However, the repayment of Germany’s debt was inherently political - and would lead to the rise of the third reich.

Later, during the 1930s, the bank was taken over by Nazis and Nazi sympathizers. Allied industrialists used it to semi-legally channel money into the Germany military industrial complex. The bank is credited with having allowed American and British investors in making lucrative investments into the arms factories that would produce weapons to kill their compatriots a decade later.

After WW2, BIS was seen as useless. That is when bankers rebranded it to go from a semi-fascistic bank used to fund nazism into a bank that handled currency transactions in between central banks. BIS has maintained this role since the end of WW2.

The bankers at BIS have always had an extreme globalist ideology. Whether they were nazis who supported unifying Europe’s currency for Hitler, or leftists creating the Euro thirty years later the fundamental ideas remain unchanged. Now, BIS is talking about creating a one world currency.

As a side note I also enjoyed it because I live in Switzerland. Many of the events in the book - like those in Lausanne - take place in areas that I regularly visit. I’ve even been in one of the hotels mentioned.

This is an absolutely fantastic book. It sheds light into the global central banking system like no others do. I strongly recommend it to anyone trying to grasp how central banking works.

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