By David A. Graham
If you're inclined to see a conspiracy behind every news event, it doesn't take much to get you worried. But even by those standards, the new Basel III accords were a doozy. The agreements, approved in September, set requirements for how much capital banks around the world must hold. Skeptics promptly denounced the agreements as just the latest machinations of wide-ranging global conspiracy to introduce a single world government known as the "New World Order." But Basel III is only a small player in the paranoid world of conspiracy theories. Here are a few of the major players--and the wacky beliefs attached to them that make theorists positively apoplectic.
Above, George Washington as a freemason, one of the groups conspiracy theorists link to the New World Order.