The Lords of Creation: The History of America's 1 Percent (Forbidden Bookshelf) by Louis Fredric Allen

Book Review - Five Stars

The Lords of Creation is true story of clever crafty unscrupulous money grabbers playing a financial shell game in a country with the very best politicians that money could buy.
For an understanding of what drove the financial markets into frenzies that put masses of working people out of their homes and onto the streets penniless and made the manipulators of finance even wealthier, read  The Lords of Creation. This is a true classic.

Excerpts:
The net income of the duPont powder concern (after amortization but before interest on bonds) had been only a little over 5 ½ millions in the dire year 1914. In 1915 it had jumped to 57 millions, in 1916 to 82 millions. The total cost of the war to the United States was over thirty-two billion dollars, a staggering sum. (As Noyes points out, it was more than ten times the cost of the Civil War to the Union!) How could such an incredible amount of money be raised?
One embarrassing result which conservatives discern in public-works campaigns in peace time: it did not “compete with private business” by producing useful goods which would remain to satisfy the population and limit their desire to buy. What it produced was conveniently useless except for purposes of destruction, and much was promptly blown sky-high. But inflation it did produce on a gigantic scale. Those who distrust governments which run into debt in order to feed the hungry should reflect that in less than two years the American government went over twenty billion dollars into debt and other governments went other billions into debt, with consequences which plague us to this day, not to feed the hungry, but to kill and maim and destroy.

There is no surer engine of inflation than war.

Many long-term debts, especially mortgages, were in default, but new ones had taken their places. The cold figures show what was happening: according to the computations of Dr. Simon Kuznets for the National Bureau of Economic Research, the amount of money paid out in interest in the year 1932 was only 3.3 per cent less than in 1929, though meanwhile salaries had dropped 40 per cent, dividends had dropped 56.6 per cent, and wages had dropped 60 per cent.