16. April 2026 16. April 2026 04/16/2026 Entire blog as a free PDF eBook. No, it’s not the owner of the bank branch around the corner who’s to blame for wars—it’s the big banks. The banks you don’t go to for a mortgage. Napoleon once said: To wage war, you need three things: money, money, and more money. The claim that there would be no wars without banks naturally refers to times when banks already existed. How did Genghis Khan finance his army? Read about it here. In the past, wars were financed by the promise of plunder. Julius Caesar’s method of war financing was based on funding his campaigns with the profits from those very campaigns. In 1602, the Dutch East India Company became the first in history to issue shares that could be purchased. Joseph Penso de la Vega, a Sephardic Jew who traded diamonds on the new stock exchange in Amsterdam, published a report in 1688 on contemporary trading instruments, which included a discussion of the possibilities of buying and selling as …