Date: ca. 1800–Present
Location: Worldwide
The Conspirators: The Rothschild family
The Victims: Everyone anywhere who hopes to save money
Long the subjects of conspiracy theory, the infamous Rothschild family is said to have been making international loans to finance wars in Europe since the 1700s. Believers claim that each time the family financed a war, the debts they held effectively gave them control over the governments on both sides—giving them nearly unlimited influence on every major nation in the world by the late 1800s. The Jewish Rothschild family is claimed to have financed both Nazi Germany and the creation of the state of Israel, profiting massively each time. Today they are described by some to be the single most powerful entity on the planet.
Prior to the World Wars, Rothschild family banks were indeed quite large and powerful, but the family has since diversified and slid into relative insignificance.
Mayer Amschel Rothschild was born in 1744 in a Jewish slum of Frankfurt. As a teen he began working in the coin trade, assisting clients with buying and selling rare coins. He wisely sought out the wealthiest clients he could, and diversified the investment opportunities he offered them as much as he was able. Rothschild’s big break came at about the age of forty when his best client, Landgrave Wilhelm I, Elector of Hesse, inherited his father’s vast wealth and began looking to make some large international transactions.
By then, Rothschild had five sons, all of whom he brought into the family business. He sent his five sons out to be his agents in the five biggest financial centers of Europe: Frankfurt, Vienna, London, Naples, and Paris. When four of these sons had sons of their own, Mayer ordered that the trend continue, and most of his grandsons joined the business and opened offices of their own. Mayer even encouraged the intermarriage of first cousins to keep the family locked down tight against outsiders.
The Rothschild family business hit its height around the turn of the twentieth century. With agents in every major financial center, Rothschild banks did, indeed, as the conspiracy theorists say, finance both sides of European wars. They won no matter what. But most important, the Rothschilds filled a crucial role in international finance, one held today by the International Monetary Fund. Their investments greatly stabilized various currencies by facilitating international trade and credit. When a nation faced a crisis, the Rothschilds were always there to help—for a price. However, very soon the needs of nations exceeded what any one institution could provide.
The First and Second World Wars spelled the beginning of the end for the Rothschild dynasty. World War I was so great in scope that nearly every financial institution in the world had to pitch in to finance the massive buildups on all sides, which greatly leveled the playing field on which the Rothschilds competed. And as bad as World War I was for their dominant position, World War II was even worse. The Rothschilds were European Jews, with deep roots in the countries held by Nazi Germany. The family members escaped to the United States but it cost many of them nearly everything to do so: their fortunes were seized and their dozens of fantastic mansions were destroyed or given away.
Although the Rothschilds did have a formidable start in the world of finance, the exaggerated stories today are more the result of bigotry than a reflection of true history. The spread of malicious stories about the Rothschilds is a manifestation of anti-Semitism in the conspiracy theory community. Throughout much of the past millennia, institutionalized anti-Semitism throughout Europe had consequences such as prohibitions against Jewish people owning property. Such policies often forced people of Jewish heritage to seek expertise in business or finance, where assets could be kept liquid and easily transferred or hidden; at any rate, this was the reputation they were eventually given. Thus, conspiracy theories involving Jewish wealth are nothing new.
Today, wealth held in public funds is intermixed, at some level, with every other fund in the world. So saying that a Rothschild family member owns some of every company in the world is true, but only true in the sense that you do too if you have any kind of interest-bearing account. The money in your checking account is invested by your bank in various securities (such as stocks, bonds, and mutual funds), each of which invests their own holdings in the same way. With some creativity, it’s possible to trace a line of ownership between any person in the world with a bank account and any publicly held company in the world, and vice versa.
Claims that the Rothschild family has $500 trillion in assets are even more problematic. Prior to World War I, the Rothschild family did indeed control a disproportionate amount of wealth. But in the century since, the family has diversified and diluted substantially. Many family members work in unrelated industries. Many have divested whatever they inherited. There is no longer a single, central “House of Rothschild.” The closest thing is a Swiss company called Rothschilds Continuation Holdings AG, which manages interests in many Rothschild-founded companies, as well as other businesses. There are no Rothschild family members on its board, and only eight Rothschilds are known to hold any shares in the company; most of it is owned by non-Rothschild financial institutions. Its annual revenues are about $500 million (compare this to the world’s largest company, Walmart, with revenues of $500 billion). Rothschilds Continuation Holdings AG has billions in assets, but this is small potatoes compared to the many banks with trillions in assets, such as Deutsche Bank, Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, HSBC Holdings, and others.
The idea of a single family owning a controlling portion of the world’s wealth, while romantic, is simply absurd. The rest of the world caught up with and surpassed them generations ago.