Everyone thinks WWI started with a single gunshot in Sarajevo.
That's wrong.
The real trigger was hidden in bank vaults across London and New York.
Here's how a handful of bankers turned a regional conflict into the first World war in history: 🧵
1914: Archduke Franz Ferdinand gets assassinated.
Alliances activate. Millions die in trenches.
But peel back the history books and you'll find something darker.
A financial arms race that had been building for decades.
By the early 1900s, European empires were drowning in debt.
Britain, France, Germany, Russia all borrowed massive sums to fund colonial expansion.
Their factories needed cheap resources. Colonies provided them.
But building empires wasn't cheap...
Who funded these colonial adventures?
Private banks in London's financial district:
- The Rothschilds
- Barings
- J.P. Morgan
They lent billions in bonds, collateralized by future colonial taxes.
Empires became ATMs for lenders.
Britain owed billions by 1900.
France's North African expansion left Paris bankers sweating over Ottoman-style debt.
Germany, unified only in 1871, was playing catch-up with 20 billion marks in external debt.
Russia borrowed 6 billion francs from French banks.
Then there was the gold standard.
Every currency was pegged to gold. Fixed exchange rates. Stable trade.
Until it wasn't.
Gold was finite. Wars and trade disruptions meant gold outflows.
And when gold fled, currencies crashed.
Britain hoarded 40% of the world's gold by 1914.
Germany's vaults were half empty after naval buildups.
When tensions flared, gold started fleeing.
Banks raised rates to lure it back, strangling credit for regular people.
Unemployment spiked. Bread riots followed.
The fix?
More colonies for more gold mines.
But colonies were zero-sum.
Germany wanted Morocco. France wanted Morocco.
Each power borrowed more to arm up.
More tension meant more loans, higher interest rates.
The banks loved it.
Secret treaties made it worse.
These weren't diplomatic handshakes they were IOUs wrapped in classified envelopes.
Britain, France, and Russia bribed Italy with $50 million plus war spoils to switch sides.
The Sykes-Picot Agreement carved up Ottoman oil fields in secret.
Then war broke out.
And here's where it gets really twisted.
Enter J.P. Morgan Jr., who turned American neutrality into a punchline:
Morgan's firm became the Allies' exclusive purchasing agent.
$3 billion in munitions, food, and steel funneled through J.P. Morgan & Co.
That's over $80 billion in today's money.
A single 1915 loan: $500 million to Britain and France.
The biggest foreign bond issue ever.
Why risk American neutrality?
Simple: A German victory meant defaulted debts.
By 1916, Britain was bankrolling everyone.
Italy's full tab. Two-thirds of France's budget. Russia's gold reserves were drained.
Private credit maxed out.
Germany tried fighting back financially.
Secret pacts with the Ottomans. Gold shipments. Credits to Austria-Hungary.
But it backfired.
Reichsbank notes tripled. Inflation loomed.
Central banks suspended gold convertibility and started printing money like confetti.
The war cost $280 billion total.
Taxes covered almost nothing. Bonds sold on patriotism, bought by ordinary citizens.
But who profited?
Morgan and Rothschild, raking in commissions while trenches filled with the poor.
Today, we see echoes everywhere:
- Sanctions as economic weapons
- IMF bailouts with strings attached
- Wars funded by debt that regular people repay
The playbook hasn't changed. Just the players.
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That's it. Thanks for reading.
Follow me @LogWeaver, for more stories like this.
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