http://mises.org/podcasts/wall-street-banks-and-american-foreign-policyRothbard’s 1984 essay traces US foreign policy from Jay Cooke’s Civil War bond monopoly to the Trilateral Commission, arguing that the decisive divisions ran between rival banking blocs—the House of Morgan and the Rockefeller interests—rather than between political parties. Told through cabinet appointments, law firms, and interlocking directorates, it covers the founding of the Federal Reserve, entry into both world wars, and the CIA operations in Iran, Guatemala, and Chile. This Mises Institute edition adds introductions by Anthony Gregory and Justin Raimondo.enMurray N. RothbardSerialnohttps://cdn.mises.org/images/2026-09/Wall-Street-Banks-and-American-Foreign-Policy_Rothbard_2400.jpghttp://mises.orgMises Institutemisesmedia@gmail.comhttp://mises.org/podcasts/wall-street-banks-and-american-foreign-policy/introduction-2011-editionAnthony GregoryThu, 03 Sep 2026 09:47:57 -0500145922Writing after the 2008 collapse and the bailouts, Anthony Gregory argues that left and right each see half of the corporate-state picture and refuse the rest—one blaming Wall Street while excusing its president, the other detecting elitism but declining to question the warfare state. He makes the case for Rothbard’s power-elite history as the tool partisan analysis cannot supply.

]]>noCronyism and Corporatism, Media and Culture, War and Foreign Policy1http://mises.org/podcasts/wall-street-banks-and-american-foreign-policy/introduction-1995-editionJustin RaimondoThu, 03 Sep 2026 09:53:51 -0500145923Justin Raimondo places the essay in Rothbard’s career, showing how methodological individualism and the Austrian analysis of banking combine into a history of the American elite. He draws out the Nock, Flynn, and Chodorov insight at its center: the biggest capitalists have been the deadliest enemies of capitalism.

]]>noHistory of the Austrian School of Economics, Philosophy and Methodology, Political Theory2http://mises.org/podcasts/wall-street-banks-and-american-foreign-policy/wall-street-banks-and-american-foreign-policyMurray N. RothbardThu, 03 Sep 2026 10:09:47 -0500145924Rothbard’s opening thesis: commercial bankers, engaged in fractional reserve credit, always teeter toward bankruptcy and reach for bailout, while investment bankers underwrite government bonds and profit from deficits. He traces the first great American investment bank—Jay Cooke’s—to a monopoly on the federal debt secured by lobbying and a $100,000 payment to Salmon P. Chase.

]]>noCronyism and Corporatism, Money and Banks, U.S. History3http://mises.org/podcasts/wall-street-banks-and-american-foreign-policy/j-p-morganMurray N. RothbardThu, 03 Sep 2026 10:15:53 -0500145925After 1873 the House of Morgan became the leading investment firm in the country and, through Cleveland’s Democratic administrations, a decisive voice in foreign policy. Rothbard follows the Morgan and Rothschild men through the State, War, and Navy departments and into the gunboat diplomacy stretching from Nicaragua and Santo Domingo to the road to war with Spain.

]]>noCronyism and Corporatism, U.S. History, War and Foreign Policy4http://mises.org/podcasts/wall-street-banks-and-american-foreign-policy/aggressive-asian-policyMurray N. RothbardThu, 03 Sep 2026 10:19:06 -0500145926Blocked in China by Russia and a Belgian syndicate, an American banking consortium pressed Washington toward a harder Asian line. Rothbard follows the American China Development Company through the Boxer Rebellion to Theodore Roosevelt egging Japan on to attack Russia—and to the Morgan bargain backing McKinley in exchange for the gold standard.

]]>noGlobal Economy, U.S. History, War and Foreign Policy5http://mises.org/podcasts/wall-street-banks-and-american-foreign-policy/teddy-roosevelt-and-lone-nutMurray N. RothbardThu, 03 Sep 2026 10:31:21 -0500145927McKinley’s assassination made a Morgan man president. Rothbard details the syndicate headed by J. P. Morgan and Company that bought the old French canal company’s shares before Roosevelt’s engineered Panamanian revolution doubled their price, and reads the antitrust assault on Standard Oil as a move in the Morgan–Rockefeller war.

]]>noCronyism and Corporatism, Interventionism, U.S. History6http://mises.org/podcasts/wall-street-banks-and-american-foreign-policy/morgan-wilson-and-warMurray N. RothbardThu, 03 Sep 2026 10:42:44 -0500145928Rothbard shows the Progressive Party ploy that delivered Wilson the presidency, the Morgan men who surrounded him, and the influence of Colonel House. With the Morgan empire financially precarious by 1914, the firm became fiscal agent for Britain and France; Rothbard argues American entry, which foreclosed a negotiated peace, was the most fateful act of the century.

]]>noCronyism and Corporatism, U.S. History, War and Foreign Policy7http://mises.org/podcasts/wall-street-banks-and-american-foreign-policy/fortuitous-fedMurray N. RothbardThu, 03 Sep 2026 10:44:26 -0500145929Established at the end of 1913, the Federal Reserve made Allied loans and wartime deficits possible by centralizing reserves and backstopping the banks. Rothbard traces the five-year campaign by Morgan, Rockefeller, and Kuhn, Loeb interests, then follows Benjamin Strong’s Morgan ties and the inflation undertaken to prop up the pound—setting the stage for the collapse of 1929 to 1931.

]]>noGold Standard, Money and Banks, The Fed8http://mises.org/podcasts/wall-street-banks-and-american-foreign-policy/round-tableMurray N. RothbardThu, 03 Sep 2026 10:53:30 -0500145930Rothbard traces the Milner Group from Rhodes’s 1891 society through its command of British postwar planning and the expert delegation at Versailles, to the founding of the Institute of International Affairs in Paris in 1919. Its first American member had come to notice by attacking the American Revolution and praising the eighteenth-century British Empire.

]]>noPolitical Theory, War and Foreign Policy, World History9http://mises.org/podcasts/wall-street-banks-and-american-foreign-policy/cfrMurray N. RothbardThu, 03 Sep 2026 10:59:33 -0500145931The Council on Foreign Relations emerged from a 1921 merger, Morgan-dominated from top to bottom, with Elihu Root as honorary president and Morgan’s chief counsel as president. Rothbard recounts the founding of its journal Foreign Affairs, and how after World War II the Rockefellers displaced the Morgans as the senior partners of the Eastern Establishment.

]]>noCronyism and Corporatism, Media and Culture, U.S. History10http://mises.org/podcasts/wall-street-banks-and-american-foreign-policy/rockefeller-morgan-and-warMurray N. RothbardThu, 03 Sep 2026 11:06:38 -0500145932Rothbard reads the Second World War through rival interests: Rockefeller pressure for war with Japan over oil and rubber, Morgan commitment to Britain and France. He then follows the postwar Eastern Establishment, its “Cowboy” Sun Belt challengers, and the CIA operation in Iran that cut five American oil companies in for 40 percent of the new consortium.

]]>noGlobal Economy, U.S. History, War and Foreign Policy11http://mises.org/podcasts/wall-street-banks-and-american-foreign-policy/guatemalan-coupMurray N. RothbardThu, 03 Sep 2026 11:12:41 -0500145933After Arbenz nationalized uncultivated United Fruit holdings, Eisenhower assigned the CIA a counter-revolution. Rothbard maps the interlocking boards behind it—Sullivan and Cromwell, the Schroder bank, International Railways of Central America—and the Council on Foreign Relations study group whose report hinted that drastic action would be necessary.

]]>noCronyism and Corporatism, Interventionism, War and Foreign Policy12http://mises.org/podcasts/wall-street-banks-and-american-foreign-policy/jfk-and-establishmentMurray N. RothbardThu, 03 Sep 2026 11:18:44 -0500145934Rothbard traces Kennedy’s foreign policy appointments back to Lovett, the Rockefeller Foundation, and Lehman Brothers, then to the Bay of Pigs and the sugar company interests entangled with it. The chapter closes on Kennedy’s last foreign policy act: the green light to oust and murder South Vietnamese President Ngô Đình Diệm.

]]>noCronyism and Corporatism, Interventionism, War and Foreign Policy13http://mises.org/podcasts/wall-street-banks-and-american-foreign-policy/lbj-and-power-eliteMurray N. RothbardThu, 03 Sep 2026 11:22:36 -0500145936Johnson kept the hawks and replaced doves as they were ousted. Rothbard details the July 1965 meeting at which escalation was decided and the committee of power-elite figures formed to back it, along with Ellsworth Bunker’s role in the invasion of the Dominican Republic and the sugar interests it protected.

]]>noBig Government, U.S. History, War and Foreign Policy14http://mises.org/podcasts/wall-street-banks-and-american-foreign-policy/henry-kissingerMurray N. RothbardThu, 03 Sep 2026 11:30:33 -0500145937Kissinger rose through a Council on Foreign Relations study group and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, receiving $50,000 from Nelson Rockefeller three days before taking office under Nixon. Rothbard covers the secret bombing and invasion of Cambodia and the $8 million the CIA funneled into Chile to bring down Allende, with copper and ITT interests at stake.

]]>noCronyism and Corporatism, Global Economy, War and Foreign Policy15http://mises.org/podcasts/wall-street-banks-and-american-foreign-policy/trilateral-commissionMurray N. RothbardThu, 03 Sep 2026 11:32:44 -0500145938David Rockefeller founded the Trilateral Commission in 1973 as a body more elite than the CFR, and it placed its people in office. Rothbard runs through the Carter appointments post by post, from Brzezinski and Vance to Volcker at the Fed, closing on a 1984 field in which every front-runner was a Trilateralist.

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