Rothschild had his first real opportunity in the early seventies when the English bankers and Parliamentarians decided to send troops to kick butt in the 13 Colonies. Convinced that the English voters wouldn’t appreciate Englishmen killing Englishmen, the bankers decided to hire German soldiers to do the dirty work for them.
The English paid Prince William of Hesse more than three million pounds for the rental of his troops. Since Rothschild was the Prince’s official banker in Frankfurt, he was asked to broker the deal. If he received a ten percent commission, then that means he made three hundred thousand pounds in that one deal. And if we want to have some idea of how much money that represented, suffice it to say that in those days a highly skilled English craftsman enjoying a good standard of living earned around fifty pounds a year. If we base the figure on today’s salaries, and if we use a one pound to two thousand dollar conversion rate, we can infer that Rothschild earned around six hundred million of today’s dollars in gold, for in those days international payments were made in gold. Some of that gold had to have been delivered to Haym Salomon, his agent, who was waiting in New York, for 1775 was the year Salomon suddenly became a very rich man. Salomon, a Jew with no apparent connections who had come to America with just the shirt on his back, couldn’t have made that kind of money as a broker in New York City, a city with barely 14,000 inhabitants. Europe was where the action was and that’s where the gold came from.
Because it had been negotiated that the Hessians were to fight as a unit, the English needed someone like Haym Salomon to do the interpreting and to look after the German troops’ logistics support. Haym, who spoke eight languages including German, was most certainly the only man in New York qualified for the job, and we know for a fact that he did work for the English at that time. So with some of the gold from Rothschild’s commission and that from the English for the logistics support of the Hessian troops, he had all he needed to open a posh bills of exchange office in New York, which he did. He was an expert in that field and he paid for everything with commercial paper while keeping the gold stashed in the vault. From day one, buying up all the gold he could and paying with paper has been Rothschild’s modus operandi. Not surprisingly, today, most of the gold ever produced lies quietly in his vaults.
History of finance 