The CFR

Wall Street, Banks, and American Foreign Policy

Tags: Cronyism and Corporatism, Media and Culture, U.S. History

09/03/2026 Murray N. Rothbard

The 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.

The Mises Institute is a non-profit organization that exists to promote teaching and research in the Austrian School of economics, individual freedom, honest history, and international peace, in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard.

Non-political, non-partisan, and non-PC, we advocate a radical shift in the intellectual climate, away from statism and toward a private property order. We believe that our foundational ideas are of permanent value, and oppose all efforts at compromise, sellout, and amalgamation of these ideas with fashionable political, cultural, and social doctrines inimical to their spirit.