The Great Wall Street Crash
At the beginning of the 21st century, the market in the western world was dominated by the American, British and German banks and corporations which have once financed and profited from the totalitarian regimes of Nazi Germany and Soviet Union. Some of these companies kept their business names whilst others merged with other companies often aiming to create monpolies and cartels. For example, major backers of Adolf Hitler, Krupp and Thyssen, merged in 1999 to form ThyssenKrupp AG, becoming world leader in the large area of steel production, ranking within the top 100 companies that engaged in arms sale. Bayer, BASF and others, which once formed IG Farben, the backbone of the Nazi-German military-industrial complex, became world leaders in chemical industry. Deutsche Bank, CommerzBank and Dresdner Bank, major banks that supported Nazi-Germany, were on the list of the leading financial institutions. So were the Swiss banking houses which laundered Nazi-looted gold: Credit Swiss and Union Bank of Switzerland (UBS) which came from a merger of Union Bank of Switzerland and Swiss Banking Corporation in 1998. Other companies that supported Nazi-Germany and profited from slave labour (mostly from German-occupied Poland), such as Daimler AG, Volkswagen AG, BMW AG, Opel, Porsche and Audi, were the leaders in the automobile industry. In 1998, Daimler merged with American automobile company Chrystler and became the third largest automaker in the world, after General Motors and Ford Company, which too supported Nazi-German military-industrial complex. Messerschmitt, the leading builder of warplanes for Nazi Germany, built cars and prefabricated houses after the war until it was allowed to resume aircraft production. In 1969, together with other companies it formed the MBB aerospace corporation, with Willy Messerschmitt as company chairman. In 1989 the company was bought by Daimler-Benz as part of Deutsche Aerospace, and in 2001 it was combined with Aerospatiale of France and CASA of Spain to form European Aerospace Defense and Space Company - EADS, the second largest aircraft manufacturer in the world. The corporation's most visible asset was Airbus, but its German division dealt mainly with military aircraft and traced its lineage to Messerschmitt.473 Virtually all the German companies that once profited from financing Nazi-German regime operated in the United States through their subsidiaries.474 In other words, in the beginning of the 21st century, vast majority of German-American trade rested upon the very same companies that profited from the genocidal policies of Nazi-Germany. Likewise, the biggest Japanese international companies such as Mitsui or Mitsubishi derived their wealth from the Second World War. All these companies engaged in further takeovers, mergers and acquisitions, building up dominant position on the market. Bayer, for example, which tested drugs in Nazi-German concentration camps, was in the course of merging with agricultural U.S. giant Monsanto, which produced genetically modified food (GMO). One of the farmers, concerned about the merger, said “They're locking in their profit and they're cornering the market by getting bigger, not by creating new products. They're just choking out the rest of the competition.”475 Many of these companies were still in the same partnerships which in the past engaged in war profiteering. Most illustrative example was the continued cooperation between ThyssenKrupp AG, Deutsche Bank and the Rothschilds, which built the power of the German Reich. 476 Although some of these companies contributed to the Fund that compensated Jewish victims of war, they have never paid compensation to its greatest victim - Poland - for murdering 6 million of the Polish citizens, crippling about 10 million and destroying 38% of that country's wealth during the Second World War.
The top ranking Jewish banking families, the Rothschilds, the Warburgs and Kuhn & Loeb, who co-operated with Nazi-Germany and Bolshevik regime in Russia, were still held in high esteem in the world of corporate finance although they were undergoing transformation. S.G. Warburg & Co. that was based in the City of London entered into a joint venture with Paris-based firm named Mercury Securities but after Siegmund Warburg's death in 1982, Paribas bought out Warburg's interest in the joint venture. The bank became the preeminent UK-based merger & acquisition advisor, equity underwriter, research house and (via its Mercury Asset Management subsidiary) asset manager by the early 1990s. Following another flawed and costly expansion into the United States, S.G. Warburg was purchased by Swiss Bank Corporation in 1995 and ultimately became part of UBS. Eric Warburg of the Warburg bank in Hamburg, which did business with many firms that financed Nazi-Germany, had been fighting for many years with Rudolf Brinckmann to recover the bank after its aryanization. After many years of internal fighting, the bank changed its name from Brinckmann, Wirtz & Co into M.M. Warburg-Brinckmann, Wirtz & Co. in 1969, and eventually assumed its original name M.M. Warburg & Co in 1991. The Warburgs established businesses in Luxembourg and Frankfurt and made acquisitions of various banking houses opening in 2007 Warburg Bank representative office in Berlin, the seat of the German Parliament. Kuhn, Loeb & Co, the banking house in New York of which Warburgs had been partners, faced capital crisis in the 1970s and merged in 1977 with Lehman Brothers to form Lehman Brothers Kuhn Loeb Inc., at the time the fourth‐largest investment bank - after Salomon Brothers, Goldman, Sachs & Company and the First Boston Corporation.477 Internationally, the merged firms were known as Kuhn Loeb Lehman Brothers Inc., in recognition of the fact that Kuhn Loeb's international reputation was superior to that of Lehman's. The merger did not, however, prove to be the panacea to Kuhn, Loeb & Co. After a period of internal strife, in 1984, Lehman Brothers Kuhn Loeb Inc., one of Wall Street's oldest and most powerful investment banking firms, was acquired by Shearson/American Express.478 In 1993, under newly appointed CEO, Harvey Golub, American Express began to divest itself of its banking and brokerage operations. Thus it sold its retail brokerage and asset management operations to Primerica and in 1994 it spun off Lehman Brothers Kuhn Loeb in an initial public offering as Lehman Brothers Holdings, Inc. Although name of Kuhn, Loeb was gone, former Kuhn, Loeb employees remained in senior positions throughout Wall Street and at Lehman Brothers.
The key player in the City of London, N M Rothschild and Sons, was, since the late 1970s, under control of Evelyn de Rothschild, chairman of The Economist and head of numerous businesses including the world's leading diamond company, De Beers Consolidated Mines, British Merchant Banking & Securities House Association and IBM United Kingdom Holdings Limited, among many others. Victor's son, Jacob Rothschild, who worked at NM Rothschild and Sons, sold his stake in the bank and took independent control of Rothschild Investment Trust (later RIT Capital Partners plc), one of the largest investment trusts quoted on the London Stock Exchange. In the 1980s, N M Rothschild and Sons advised the Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher in her privatization program and in the 1990s engaged through intermediaries in privatization of Russia's state assets, expressing special interest in gas and oil, given the increased demand for these commodities in Europe. In 1989, the London and Paris branch of Rothschilds announced the opening of a Frankfurt subsidiary, marking the return of a Rothschild bank to the city from where the family business had originated. It was part of a series of worldwide operations which began with the establishment of Rothschild Intercontinental Bank (later Rothschild Inc.), in the United States. In 2003, the Rothschild branches in London and Paris merged under leadership of Baron David de Rothschild, the head of the French branch of the bank. He claimed “that these measures to consolidate the various Rothschild shareholder and business interests will create a stronger, more unified group."479 After the merger, Evelyn Rothschild retired from day-to-day management of N M Rothschild & Sons giving the company over to Baron Rothschild in Paris. David de Rothschild shocked the world of finance when in 2004 he decided to withdraw from gold trading and fixing of the price of gold that took place traditionally at the London offices of N M Rothschild & Sons in St Swithin's Lane, in the City of London. David de Rothschild stated at the time: “Our income from commodities trading in London, including gold has fallen as a percentage of our total income in each of the past five years. Following a strategic review of our activities we have concluded that this is no longer a core area of activity and have therefore decided to withdraw from the market. We remain committed to growing further our activities in specialist commercial banking, private banking and trust services, and objective relationship-based investment-banking advice.”480
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473 Anshel Pfeffer, “Arkia's purchase of Airliners Should Force Airbus to confront its Nazi roots”, Haaretz, 12 July 2012 https://www.haaretz.com/airbus-should-confront-nazi-roots-1.5266269 »
474 Jan Vater & Nicola Michels, Top 50 Ranking of German Firms in the U.S. http://www.gaccny.com/fileadmin/ahk_usa/publikationen/Top50/Top_50_Ranking_2014.pdf »
475 Dana Varinsky, “The $66 billion Bayer-Monsanto merger just got a major green light – but farmers are terrified”, Business Insider, 29 May 2019 https://www.businessinsider.com/bayer-monsanto-merger-has-farmers-worried-2018-4?r=US&IR=T »
476 “Further step implemented in the strategic development of ThyssenKrupp: Management Team of Stainless Global appointed, banks mandated”, ThyssenGroup.com/Company News, 19 July 2011 https://www.thyssenkrupp.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/press-release-47458.html »
477 Leonard Sloane, “Lehman & Kuhn Loeb to merge”, New York Times, 29 November 1977 »
478 Robert J. Cole, SHEARSON TO PAY $360 MILLION TO ACQUIRE LEHMAN BROTHERS, 11 April 1984 »
479 Katherine Griffiths, “Rothschild family realigns London and Paris bank operations”, The Independent, 9 July 2003 https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/rothschild-family-realigns-london-and-paris-bank-operations-95332.html »
480 William Kay, “Rothschild, the bank built on gold quits the market”, The Independent, 15 April 2004 »