XRP and the Fed: What the 1910 Jekyll Island Meeting Still Decides

He told some of the most powerful bankers in the country, "Dear gentlemen, I want you to gather at the Hoboken train station, but I want you to come in secret. Come alone. Use only your [music] first names. Don't come in your top hat and your monle." They came dressed as duck hunters because even though he needs their expertise, it's not going to look good to have bankers designing a system to bail themselves out during future panics. They got in a southbound train in Aldrich's private rail car attached to the back.

The blinds were down and they start work immediately [music] on a plan for a new central bank while on their way to a private club on an island off the coast of Georgia, an island called Jackal Island. Six men, private rail car with the blinds pulled down and a cover story about shooting duck. That was November 1910. Within 3 years, the plan they sketched on the island had turned into the Federal Reserve. And more than a century later, it's still the system that decides how fast your money moves, when it's allowed to move, and who actually has to approve it on the way.

Now, here's the question almost no one asks, right? The men who designed the dollar's plumbing in 1910 never imagined money crossing the world in seconds. So, what fills the gap? That's where XRP comes in. Not as a replacement for the Fed, and I won't pretend otherwise, but as a rail built for the one job 1910 design never covered.

So, here's the route and what actually happened in Jackal Island and two famous claims about it that are wrong. What the system they built did to the dollar in your pocket, what the Fed itself switched on in July 2023, which most XRP videos actually leave out. And I'm going to be telling you where XRP genuinely fits in my opinion, with Ripple's own people showing you a payment move to pounds to pzos with no preunded account waiting at the other end. And right at the end, you'll actually get a one question I now ask about any coin or company that claims to be a building or new financial system. It takes 5 seconds.

It cuts through almost everything. All right, I learned tricks like this in the accelerator program. I'm going to speak about that in this video as well. There's a link down below. If you want to just sign up now without even hearing me, please do.

It could change your life. There are people in there right now that knew nothing about crypto. There are people there that knew everything about crypto. whichever one of them is you, you'll be in a room with hundreds of people who know exactly what's going on behind the scenes with nearly every single headline, teaching you how to research, teaching you so many different things that you can't just get from watching a YouTube video. So, we'll be talking about that as well, but let's roll the intro and then get deep into this. Let's run it. [music] So, welcome back bull runners.

My name is George Lee. I'm not a financial adviser. do this for education purpose only. Let's go back to 1907. To understand why a group of banker would sneak onto an island in disguise, you have to go back 3 years to the panic of 1907. Banks were failing.

All right? People were queuing outside to pull their savings out before the doors closed. And American had nothing in place to stop it. Let's watch this. And back in 1907, the US government had no institution to deal with this panic.

There's no way to even try and control it. So the job of saving the US economy falls to the most powerful banker in the world, one man, JP Morgan. At this point, Morgan [music] is basically running the world economy from his private library in a mansion on Madison Avenue.

Think about that for a second. The whole American banking system rescued by one private banker who got the heads of the other banks and wouldn't let the meeting end until they put up the money. It worked, but everyone could see the problem with relying on it. Let's watch this together. The panic of 1907 wasn't the first America had barely survived.

There was the panic of 1819, the panic of 1837, the panic of 1893, the panic of 1896. This was not a one-time [music] thing. It was bound to happen again. And Morgan was 70 years old, working [music] 2 hours a day. He was just not the guy who was going to keep saving the entire financial system.

The government needed a plan to help them manage future panics better. And one very powerful guy in particular decides he's going to get it done. The head of the Senate's finance committee, Senator Nelson Aldrich of Rhode Island. Aldrich looks at the US economy and he says, "We got to do something about these panics." And it comes to him that the US needs an organization that can loan money to banks. That way, people will know their banks won't run out of money.

It would stop bank runs. What we need is some sort of central bank.

A central bank, simple enough on paper. But old rich had a problem. In 1910, a lot of Americans didn't trust big banks, and they trusted Wall Street even less. A plan for a central bank written by Wall Street bankers would have been dead the moment that anyone actually found out who wrote it. So, nobody could find out.

In November 10, the man boarded Oldri's private rail car in New Jersey and headed south. By Thanksgiving, the 24th of November, they were actually having dinner at the Jackal Island Club, a private club whose members included JP Morgan, Marshall Field, and William Vanderbilt. All right. Now, who was in the room? Senator Aldrich, Pia Andrew, and assist secretary of the Treasury, Henry Davidson, a partner at JP Morgan, Frank Vanderlet, president of National City Bank, the bank that actually grew into City Bank.

All right. Paul Wahberg of the investment bank Lobe, and Aldrich's private secretary, Arthur Shelton. The secrecy was almost comic, right? On the train, they used the first names only so the staff wouldn't know who they were. The cover story was a duck hunt.

According to the Richmond Fed, Paul Warberg actually turned up with all the trappings of a duck hunter when he'd never actually shot a duck in his life. That is, and Pier Andrew actually didn't even tell his own boss. The Secretary of the Treasury where he was going, right? Some version of the story added a seventh man, Benjamin Strong, who went on to run the New York Fed. The Fed's own historians say that's unlikely, so I'm going to leave him out.

And for 20 years, the man involved denied the meeting ever happened. It was only in 1930 when three of them told the story to Aldrich's biographer that it properly came out. Now, what did they do for all time on the island? Well, NPR puts it well. Check this out.

They hole up in this beautiful empty resort for about a week over Thanksgiving, arguing, debating, going through one plan after another. After a week, the Jackal Island gang leaves Georgia with a plan now officially known as the Aldrich Plan. And on December 1913, President Woodro Wilson signs the Federal Reserve Act. The clip jumps a step, and it's the same step a lot of posts skip. The first claim you'll see is that the plan written on the island became law.

Well, it didn't. After the 1912 elections, with Woodro Wilson in the White House and his party running both houses of Congress, the Aldrich plan was shelved. Now, what passed instead was a new bill, the Federal Reserve Act. But here's the twist. The Fed's own history site says the new act's technical details closely resembled the plan drafted on Jackal Island.

So, the island didn't write the law. It wrote the blueprint. The second one you'll see, all over X. Wilson signed the act two days before Christmas while Congress had gone home. The date's right.

The rest isn't. The House passed the final version on the 22nd of December 1913. The Senate passed it on the 23rd by 43 votes to 25 and Wilson signed it at 6:00 the same evening. Congress was there and it voted. So, why am I bothering you with that?

Because if you want people to take the real story seriously, you can't hand them a version that falls apart the first time somebody checks it. the real ones. Dramatic enough on its own. And in fairness to the Fed's defenders, here's what it was actually built to do. Check this out.

And the USA finally has a central bank. Now, whenever a bank starts to run low on money, the Fed can step in and loan them some. It stops the whole cycle of bank runs. That's the case for it. And it is nothing, right?

It's not nothing because it came with a cost. And you've been paying for it your whole life. So, let me be honest about myself for a moment. For years, I watched the price of XRP without really understanding the plumbing it's meant to fix. What changed that for me wasn't a chart.

It was finally learning how money actually goes from one country to another. And that's the kind of thing we go for on the call. It's not predictions. It's how the system really works, where your holding sits inside it, and what you're really backing when you buy. To get there, go to the description.

The top link starts with a free training. Start there. Press the button under it. Fill out the brief form. Roughly a minute's work, and book a chat with our team.

If you're on the phone, the description stays hidden till you tap the word more. The link sits first in the list. Guys, get that done with the video still playing because next I'm going to show you exactly what that cost has been and in cents on the dollar that is now by the government's own consumer price index. Something that cost $1 in 1913 costs more than $30 now. Turn that around and a dollar from 1913 buys about 3 cents worth of goods today.

Roughly 97% of its buying power is completely gone. Now, the Fed's defenders will tell you this partly by design. Since 2012, the Fed has openly aimed for inflation of around 2% a year, and wages have risen a long way over that century, too. A little inflation, they argue, keeps an economy moving. But if you've ever kept saving in cash for years, you know how it feels from the other side.

2% a year sounds like nothing over a 40-year working life, it quietly takes more than half. Now, that's the feeling behind a phrase you've probably seen on X. All right. End the Fed. The former Congressman Ron Paul wrote a whole book with that title back in 2009.

So, really, there are three camps. Fix the Fed with tighter rules and more oversight. End the Fed, which is what Ron Paul side, and a third camp that grown up alongside crypto. Leave the Fed where it is and build the rails to cover the gaps it was never designed for. I want to know where you stand, right?

Fix it, end it, or build around it. Just drop one of those in the comment and let me know. If you're in the fix it camp, you'll like the next part because the Fed has been quietly fixing one thing in particular. By 1915, not long after it opened its doors, the Fed was already moving money between its regional banks by telegraph in Morse code. The system still runs.

It's called Fedwire and it's how big dollar payments settle in America. For most of the century after that, the Fed's rails kept bankers ours, right? Payment bunched into batches, weekdays dead, bank holidays dead. 10 of the 20th of July 2023, the Fed switched on something new. Now, let's watch this clip together.

The Fed Now service is now live. This new infrastructure provides financial institutions of all sizes the ability to provide safe and efficient instant payment [music] services. The Fed Now service is the latest development [music] in a 100year history of Federal Reserve payment innovation. From the Fed wire fund services to Fed a services and check [music] 21 enabled services, the Federal Reserve has partnered with the industry to evolve [music] payment platforms, eliminate friction in transactions, and create new opportunities for financial institutions, businesses, and consumers. [music] When the Federal Reserve first introduced Fed Now, we knew from the get-go that this was something that we wanted to be part of.

The instant settlement nature of it, the 24/7, [music] 365 operating hours, all those ultimately look like a huge benefit for our customers and our customers customers. [music]

Instant settlement 24/7 365. And that's the Federal Reserve talking, not a crypto company. I think anyone holding XLP should know this exists because it kills a lazy argument. The Fed isn't stuck in 1913 for dollar payments inside America. It is now instant rails on its own.

35 banks and credit unions were on it from day one. But listen closely to how the Fed describes where it's going. Watch this.

The launch of the Fed Now service is the first step in a multi-year journey to build an instant payment network that is accessible to all Americans.

Accessible to all Americans. Now that's the scope. Dollars moving between American banks. What Fed now doesn't do is turn dollars into pesos or pounds into yen. It was never meant to.

And that's the same gap the 1910 design left open. Jackal Island was about one country's banks and one country's currency. Nobody on that island was designing how money crosses a border. So how does money cross a border now? Mostly the way it has for decades through correspondent banks holding accounts with each other's in each other's currencies.

They're called nostro accounts. It's a firm in London wants to pay someone in Manila quickly. Somebody has to have pesos already sitting in the account in the Philippines and it has to be paid for in advance doing nothing until they need it. Now, multiply that by every currency in every country, and you've got an enormous amount of money parked around, let's say, the world, just so payments can happen on time. Now, here's Ripple's Kevin Mole explaining the fix they built for exactly that back when the product was first rolled out.

Let's check this out.

What is on demand liquidity?

On demand liquidity is a way for customers to send fast, [music] lowcost payments without having to preund the destination account. Today's correspondent banking network is so slow that in order to deliver a fast experience, you have to preund [music] accounts in the destinations in which you're sending money to. You're storing capital like cash really in those accounts for days at a time. And that's highly inefficient. It's a poor use of money.

And so on demand liquidity puts XRP in the kind of in the middle of that payment from one country to another country to allow for the ability to send payments instantaneously or near instantaneously without having to have funds already available in the destination account.

Fund the accounts in advance, park the cash, wait days. That's the old model in one breath. And here's why the speed matters so much.

I think there's really two main reasons. Speed and low cost. And we've talked about both of those. But speed element is because XRP settles every 3 to 5 seconds. The ability to do crossber settlement instead [music] of 2 or 3 days in 2 or 3 minutes end to end is a huge value proposition for not just our customers but for their customers actually sending money who want that speed and expect that speed.

The second thing is low cost. So the ability to not have to preund all these accounts around the world means you can use that capital which you would otherwise have had in various [music] bank accounts to put to good use marketing your product lowering the cost of your product to the end user. It's about growing your business as a result of having uh essentially more access to capital rather than keeping it trapped in in bank accounts.

Trapped in bank accounts. Hold on to that phrase, right? because in a minute you're actually going to hear Ripple put a number on it and that's Ripple selling its own product. Weigh it like a sales pitch, right? But the problem is describing is real and the banks have grumbled about the cost of preunding for years. Seeing it is easier than describing it.

This is from one of Ripple's conference demos. It's an older one and some of the product names have actually changed since, which I'll come back to, but the mechanics are what matters here. A UK money transfer firm called Fastremit is paying out to Sprout Bank in the Philippines and there's no prefunded Pisu accounts between them. Pounds in XRP across the ledger. pesos out and no pesos sitting in Manila in advance. 10 trillion dollars of trapped capital.

That's Ripple's own estimate. It's not an independent figure. So treat it as their number. And two honest updates since that demo, right? First, Ripple has since folded these products into what it now calls Ripple payments.

Second, and this one it matters, right? Brad Garlinghouse has said publicly that some of the Ripple's payments now run through stable coins rather than XRP depending on the corridor. So XRP is not automatically in the middle of every payment network. It's one route among several. Used where it works best.

Which brings us back to that line doing the rounds. You don't need fix the Fed. You opt out. And here's my honest read. XRP does not replace the Federal Reserve.

And it isn't going to. The Fed sets interest rates, lends to banks in a crisis, and runs the dollar's plumbing at home. Nothing in this video changes that. And look at what Ripple itself did. Back in July 2025, Ripple put in an application for the Federal Reserve master account, which would let it settle dollars directly within the Fed.

Now, that isn't a company trying to escape the system. Jackal Island Build. It's actually a company asking to plug into it. So where's the opt out? It's narrower than the slogan and honestly more useful.

In 1910, design gave America a central bank for its own. Now, it never designed the bridge between currencies, right? That space between central banks where payments wait for days and trillions sit preunded in foreign accounts isn't run by any one central bank. That's the gap the XRP ledger was built for. A neutral rail between currencies that runs every second of every day, including the Sunday you just heard about.

And on a personal level, guys, opting out doesn't mean ending anything. It means understanding which rails your money sits and what they quietly cost you. Deciding for yourself whether you want some exposure to the ones being built for what comes next. Now, that's a decision. It's not a prophecy, and it's yours to make.

If you like knowing where the system you're betting on actually came from, then simply subscribe. All right, we'll keep digging into this and showing you all the receipts. Now the question I promised you at the beginning whenever someone tells you a coin or a company or a stable coin is a new financial system. Ask this question. Who has to say yes for the money to move?

With Fed Wire and Fed now it's your bank and the Fed with a correspondent payment is a chain of banks in different countries each on its own hours. On the XRP ledger itself a valid transaction settles in seconds and the ledger doesn't close for the weekend. Though if you're going from pounds to pesos, you still need exchanges and liquidity at both ends. And that's where the real world comes back in. The shorter the list of people who have to say yes, the closer you are to genuinely new rail.

The longer the list, the more it's old system with a new logo on it. So, let's land it, right? In November 1910, six men, one private rail car, and a fake duck hunt. Their plan never made it through Congress. But its blueprint became the Federal Reserve Act, signed on the 23rd of December 1913 by a Congress that was very much in the room.

A dollar that year now buys about 3 cents worth of goods. The Fed has modernized and Fed now is real, but it's built for dollars inside America. The space between currencies is the part nobody on the island designed. That's where XRP makes a case, not as the end of the Fed, as a bridge the Fed was never built to be. If you'd like to work out what all of this means for your own holdings with someone who will explain the plumbing rather than just see sell you a prediction, then that's exactly what our team runs these calls for.

You'll find it up in the description, okay? If you're on your phone, just hit the more and you'll see it there. It's going to pop up. Hit that link and start getting involved. Crypto carriers risk and past results are no guarantee of the future, guys.

Like I said at the beginning, this is purely educational in my opinion. It's not financial advice. As always, stay bullish.