“Until you change the money, you change nothing.”
Michael Ruppert (RIP my friend)
“To not know is bad. To not want to know is worse.”
David Rogers Webb’s father
This essay unpacks economics; in particular, both money and asset “ownership”. These concepts are key to what is being stolen from us, even if we think we have our eyes on the prize. I hope this prompts lots of questions that you then explore on your own; trust but verify. I knew much of this already; but some pieces fell into place as I read “The Great Taking” by David Rogers Webb, released earlier this year[1]. He knows what he is talking about, having been as deep in the belly of the golden bull as one can be and still get out alive (for now anyway, praise be). TLDR? Skip to the SUMMARY at the bottom….Otherwise, let’s get right to it….
When outsourcing became King, a few decades ago, productivity (calculated as sales / man hours) skyrocketed, and lower wages overseas increased profits enormously. In the world of capital, the price of materials is not set by the corporation that buys them, nor is the cost of facilities and factories for the manufacturing. What can be controlled to generate profit are prices (to some degree) and wages. You know as well as I do that prices are set with the consumer in mind, so the only real opportunity for increasing profit comes through lowering what workers earn for their labor. Hence the main attraction to developing, not developed, work forces[3]. But the outsourcing, by laying off workers in America, led directly to increased debt taken on by individuals and families, and increased burdens on governments of all levels to care for the unemployed. This meant increased government borrowing as well; while tax revenues fell unless modifications could be made to the tax rates / systems. We could have set a windfall profits tax to shift the burden of increasing services to the entities, the corporations, which caused the need; instead we lowered capital gains rates, so the powerful kept far more than their fair share. It was this kind of thinking that now has Warren Buffet paying a lower average tax rate than his secretary.
But the better question, the better statement, is this: at the end of the day, who owns the money? This essay is to point out that it is not you or I; we don’t “own” much of anything, and certainly not the money. Money is created from debt; but we take on the debts that create the money, and don’t keep the money itself. Any money you think you have, if it is in a bank, belongs to the bank, alongside your promise to pay back the loan for your car, home, medical procedures, student loans, and that party last Halloween that you charged to your credit card. If your bank begins to fail, maybe because they tied up “your” money in long term government bonds paying a tiny interest rate (5 – 10 years at .5% for example, like Silicon Valley Bank in 2022) thinking that was ‘prudent’, and then suddenly interest rates jump to 5% on newly issued paper and your bonds are virtually unsellable, then where do you get the cash you need if word gets out you have no assets and the bank run starts? Short answer is, you don’t get it. And you get absorbed by a bigger bank (Chase) who can afford to hold those long bonds until maturity ‘cause Chase has more room to maneuver. See, here’s something you may not realize: we have a ‘fractional reserve’ system of banking; fancy words that mean banks only have to have assets worth 2 – 9% of the loan(s) they make. That means if 10% of the deposits get taken out, the last person in line gets nothing, not to say anything about the other 90% of depositors. Oh, you say, there’s FDIC insurance (of up to $250,000 per person)…except two things. 1) the banks pay a tiny amount into the FDIC account which currently holds only as much as a rounding error should all banks fail at once. IOW, no savior there. 2) you can be forgiven if you don’t know that in the case of Silicon Valley Bank in March 2023, a bank which had high tech company accounts holding literally billions, not $250K; all accounts were made whole by the government ‘in order to restore trust in the system’.
We’ll come back to this shortly.[4]
More history: banking, and finance more broadly, historically was a small percentage of the national economy. You may not remember this, but US Post Offices used to cash checks and other simple banking services for people, especially those who still had a fear of banks left over from the Great Depression. But in the 1990s, the industry transformed and began to develop ‘financial products’; funny things like derivatives (a bet on the price or rate of something, not the thing itself), or Collateral Debt Obligations (CDOs), Mortgage-Backed Securities (MBS), and even Credit Default Swaps (CDS), another term for passing the risk of default to others for a price, just like insurance. These tricks-of-the-trade were questioned, but Mr. Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, famously demurred: “The risk will be borne by those best able to handle the risk.” Except, as you might imagine, those able to handle the risk don’t want to handle the risk. That leaves government holding the bag so to speak. When losses inevitably threaten to overturn the moneychangers’ tables in the Wall Street Temple, bailouts save the Too Big To Fail Jail bankers. They who keep the profits (capitalism) pass the losses onto the public (socialism). The investors in these products use valuation models that assure everyone there is no chance of default, thus even with due diligence, this crap can be purchased by pension funds, within IRAs and 401(k)s, and by anyone who takes what the salesman says at face value.[5]
The products like CDOs MBS, and CDS all were packaged in such a way, called ‘tranches’, that contained small bits of hundreds or thousands of loans, so that the risk could be passed off as immaterial. It’s not at all as if you hold one mortgage; that mortgage goes into default, and you lose out. Instead, it’s like you own half a percent of a mortgage that defaults, and the borrower can’t locate you to negotiate a discount so the bank is forced to foreclose. Clearing all of this trash from these products, which literally had been sold globally, very quietly took nearly $20 trillion[6] in 2009 USD; far more than the headlines in your newspaper, I’m sure. Those trillions were (once more) printed out of thin air because…we had no choice. Print or fail, print or jail. In addition to the ‘robosigning’ scandal that quietly disappeared, replaced by some other scandalous horror in the news cycle, these issues have not been dealt with to prevent them from happening again. One more bit that remains pertinent today: the Lehman bankruptcy, followed a few years later by the MF Global scandal (which also disappeared without anyone going to jail, cough, John Corzine, cough), solidified the ability to take stocks owned outright by the shareholder and transferring them to the bankruptcy court without compensation. Understand that: even when in your name, your property belongs to the bank or broker, not you. Forewarned is forearmed they say, pay attention.
Another way the money supply and its ability to support the modern lifestyle has been overtly manipulated is also a quiet secret. The Federal Reserve (not a federal government agency, a private banking cartel) adds digits to its account on the computer then lets big banks (Chase for example) use it to buy actual stocks in the markets. It started out as the Plunge Protection Team (PPT) in the 1980s (Reagan); now, in addition, we have Quantitative Easing which is code for printing money and giving it those who will not buy goods and services that lead to jobs, but buy assets like homes, stocks, real estate, and/or private jets to keep asset prices high so those of us who also ‘own’ a home ‘feel’ rich. That in turn makes for happy voters.
We humans don’t do cause & effect well, we usually fail to connect the dots, even when the dots we know are true and not propaganda. It is healthy to be angry or distressed at being unable to stop genocide(s) in real time; because wars aren’t won by those who are scared or uncaring.
What is different in this debt cycle, because for sure there is always a cycle of increasing debt followed by destruction of the money when interest eats up even the seed corn, is this time it’s global. It is the reserve currency, USD, which is about to be eaten up. Never before have we seen an Empire that not only is the global currency but also the global military force; until it isn’t. The currency side is eroding, as sanctions teach even U.S. allies that our capricious demands may bite them soon, too. And the war in Ukraine, specifically intended to weaken and erode Russia’s military capabilities, has done the opposite: it has exposed the West as a mirage. America and NATO no longer have a manufacturing infrastructure (see outsourcing above) and have instead spent the previous few decades designing high tech, remote controlled weapons (to save our men and women in uniform) that are very expensive per unit and thus in short supply. Whose capabilities have been degraded in Ukraine? Empire’s. Whose money is being shunned in trade? Empire’s. See a trend?
Which is why I mentioned that the Great Reset, with its slogan, “You will own nothing and be happy”, is quite true. Anything you own that is a tangible asset can be confiscated even if it is not encumbered as collateral for debt. It began with stocks being rehypothecated (that means used as collateral many times over per unit) and progressed to being claimed during bankruptcy despite not being a company asset. It continues as “bail-in” laws are strengthened, meaning it is the depositors on the hook to salvage the financial system, not a government bailout, the next time there’s a run on the system itself. This is the ultimate wealth transfer: everything is to be owned by the top tenth of one percent. Don’t misunderstand: that is a perk, not a bug. Those at the top; and they are invisible (not in the news), they are not John Corzine, Bernie Madoff, or Sam Bankman-Fried, but they are confident they are too big to jail. We have three levels of justice in America: one for those who can’t afford a lawyer, one for those who can afford one, and one for those who never end up in the justice system and thus never need a lawyer. They know we will cave, accept our fate because we are not in charge, and move on to the next distraction. We will accept whatever it takes, whatever the system demands. From conspicuous consumption to feeding your child (or not), money is everything in this system and we have none, only an illusion of it.
The use of assets as collateral has expanded to include those assets once owned by others but ‘mine’ now. Think of it this way: the auto dealer that sold you your car, once counted that vehicle as inventory. That inventory may have been used as collateral for a loan made to the dealer. You paid cash and drove the car home, but as far as the lender is concerned, that car is still collateral for the loan. When the dealer defaults, the lender can confiscate ‘your’ car. As freaky as this sounds, it has been codified into Commercial Codes in every state over the last two decades; quietly of course, because if we only knew…. The same concept is active regarding homes, stocks, and as make clear (I hope) in this essay, ‘our’ money. You can even lose it all when stocks are held by the broker in a ‘segregated’ account; that is a fiction meant to keep your relationship with the broker alive. Nothing is segregated, nothing is safe from confiscation. Sidebar -> even people carrying cash obtained legally: restaurant owners for example, taking today’s receipts to the bank; have had their money taken by police who merely have to say they ‘suspect it came from illegal activities’ in order to keep it without recourse. Blatant yet unremarked, because the police are our friends, right?
The term ‘ownership’ has become a much weaker ‘entitlement’ in legalese, placing the account provider in a superior position to the account holder. Note the language once more: you don’t own the asset, you hold it….for now. And so-called ‘safe harbor’ rules give ‘secured creditors’ a superior position over the account providers. It is hardly obscured, we just aren’t told. The legal term ‘self-help’ empowers account providers (here remember Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX) to ‘borrow’ the property of others with neither consent nor restriction. A European Commission in 2012 wrote, “[The fiction of ownership] works well until a bankruptcy occurs.” Gee Sherlock, what was your first clue?
Remember, he (or she) who shapes the battlefield is in the superior position and will usually win. The only way to be sure of winning is not to play. I can’t say this enough: language is important. All of these rules, definitions, and changes in meaning are shaping the financial battlefield, and seek to provide (in their words) ‘global financial harmony’. I beg to differ; these changes provide us instead, with the true goal: ‘global financial harm’.
All banks were closed by Executive Order of the President on 6 March 1933. Only some were allowed to re-open a week later, chosen by…the Federal Reserve. If mine remained closed, my money was gone…there was no such thing as FDIC insurance then. My debts however, remained, gobbled up by one of the banks that did begin ‘business’ once more. Being broke yet still deep in debt means it is foreclosure time, when banks and lenders steal assets under cover of authority; exactly what this essay warns about. Eerie note; when the banks did reopen, people stood in line to open new accounts, using cash they had squirreled away ‘for a rainy day’. How can you be so blind? In the end, there was no recovery that allowed people to keep what they had ‘owned’ before…because there wasn’t enough money to go around. Which, since money comes from debt, is like saying, “even though we have wood and carpenters, we don’t have enough inches to build another house.”
As artificial intelligence (AI) performs more of the robot control and finding signals amongst noise in financial markets, there is less need for worker bees. You and I are worker bees. We will be carried by the system, but not part of it….at least in the short term. This is the exploitation of humanity beyond nation-states; as I try to show, even the money you claim is yours, is not.
The first iterations of ‘police’ were gangs tasked with returning runaway slaves to ‘their owner’. Justice has always been about protecting Master’s property, not protecting citizens. We have been warned, sometimes in subtle ways, sometimes not. The game ‘Monopoly’ for instance, the movies “It’s a Wonderful Life” and “Wizard of Oz” were allegories of the financial system either propagandizing us or trying to pull back the curtain and expose the wizard at the controls. Even “A Christmas Carol” tries to show us it is not impossible to wake up and make real changes; as long as we realize real wealth is not digits in an account or paper money. Real wealth is healthy relationships, communities, and Nature. We have real wealth all around us, right now, if we just have eyes to see and hearts that care.
There’s an important predictor of the SHTF moment incoming soon: the ‘velocity of money’. The calculation is simple, velocity = GDP/money supply. If the supply is small and it is used often because goods and services are being purchased, paying workers so they can make purchases also, then the velocity is high. It means that adding to the supply will also generate more GDP; this is what we call economic growth. Because debt creates money, but doesn’t create the money needed to pay back the debt with interest, the money supply must grow. Ponder this a moment; it shouldn’t take that long to recognize a Ponzi Scheme in play. Sidebar -> If a bank only has to have a small fraction of the loaned amount to create money through debt, why must we pay it back with interest? A system with lending at no interest, only fees to facilitate the loan at the outset, does not require growth in the supply of money like the system we have today.
Back to velocity; if money is created but goes through big banks and into stocks or real estate, then it does nothing to add to GDP and thus adds nothing to the velocity of money. In fact, we see historically that this kind of increase in money supply generates less and less GDP until in the end, all it does is transfer assets to the few at the top. Once more, wealth is always being transferred, the only questions are from whom and to whom?
If something doesn’t make sense, I am missing info, using bad info, or using incorrect assumptions. A crisis is not an accident, an accident creates an excuse to consolidate power by calling it a crisis. This opens the path to changes that benefit the Masters at the expense of we the peasants. Yet we are approaching a crisis that WILL be used in this way: the clear signal is seen in the last three years, as the money supply increased 40%, while GDP increased 2%. This signal is the worst in the last 125 years; the only other times velocity of money hit ‘all-time lows’ occurred in 1929 and 1946. The so-called ‘Great Reset’; claiming to be due to climate change or the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR; driven by AI) is due to neither; it is the end of money as we know it.
SUMMARY
A key point in The Great Taking: ‘they’ don’t want your home, car or furniture; they want total control and to break all resistance to that control. It is quite literally, Matrix-cocoon slavery. The Federal Reserve Act of 1913, enacted into law on Christmas Eve (could one pick a slower news day?) allowed for the confiscation of gold. That wasn’t put into practice until…1933. Gold backed the US dollar, there needed to be 40% of a dollar in gold reserves to support the paper money. Remember the fractional reserve system mentioned earlier. There wasn’t enough gold to issue tons of paper, at least until citizen gold was taken. Gold has been the escape hatch of the people; it had to be closed to keep control of money out of our hands. Gold is not, as some think, something used to buy food when the money goes bad. Gold is how powerful families pass their wealth to their descendants, meaning you hold the gold through the bad times, and then sell it into the new currency that replaces the old one. This way you have funds for buying assets during the fire sale that happens when no one is flush with cash; once prices get back to ‘normal’, you use your wealth to buy gold for the next round.
The Executive order made it extremely problematic to keep gold in secret; it could not be transported or sold without risking prison. In other words, gold was not only confiscated, its use was stolen. When ‘crisis’ threatened again in 1971, President Nixon struck that clause requiring the dollar to be backed by gold from the law by Executive order. That freed the government from any restriction, and began the tsunami of debt we see today. Now instead of gold to issue money, we need new debt, in theory. In order to pay interest on the debt, we need more debt. In reality, a few strokes on the keyboard, and there you have it…money. Hockey stick come to mind, anyone?
Let me be blunt: any securities or stocks you think you own, you don’t. Any asset you think you own that is collateral for a loan: house or car for example, you don’t own it. Because we have no control over the chemicals and electromagnetic fields (EMF) that our environment is flooded with today, we don’t even ‘own’ our bodies. This was made abundantly clear when vaccine mandates were (swallowed whole) by much of humanity. I am hard-pressed to identify anything you own free and clear; except your heart, mind and soul. Our hearts, minds and souls cannot be taken from us. From the late 1920s to the early 1950s, America saw little price recovery to pre-Depression values when adjusted for monetary inflation. During that same period, much changed in the economy, with apparently no effect: electrification, interstate highway construction, air travel, telephone and TV. All of these new economic factors required more workers with new skills; yet adding skilled workers to the labor force did not result in increasing real wealth. Today we are ‘sold’ on the ‘progress’ to be wrought through AI and Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs)[7]; but neither offers real wealth and thus will similarly stagnate or deflate the global economy. The gains since 2010 were the result of the zero interest rate policy (and in Europe, negative rate policies), whereby ‘free money’ could be invested and the debt traded with little cost. Now that interest rates have returned just to their historical median, the required interest sucks liquidity out of the system and hurts everyone’s discretionary spending ability. This is the leading edge of the fewer jobs - means less consumption - means fewer jobs – death spiral. This is engineered to steal assets; it is not an accident or coincidence. There will be no DEBT JUBILEE…because there is no crisis, only a coincidence to be managed.
We chase comfort, and give up resilience in return. My grandparents, just two generations past, threw away nothing, not even the bones of the animals they slaughtered on their farm. Today we chase distraction and give up wisdom like it is no longer needed. This money we crave above all else funds wars that rape people and planet. No one goes to jail. They seduce us into compliance with lies and illusions; soon we will all be ‘deplorables’, unnecessary eaters. The inhumanity is global and getting worse with every unnatural death. Money and narrative have been Empire’s foundation; both are in deep, deep trouble. That is our key to transformation: stop using their money, stop listening to their lies. If they succeed, if they own it all; they face a suffering humanity. Their censoring us is desperate, their killing us is too. The money is losing any power to end suffering; therefore suffering is increasing. Who will break first? If we see nothing else from what is transpiring in Gaza let it be this: people will only suffer domination for some period of time; eventually they get out the pitchforks and torches no matter how strong the dominator appears to be. I cannot survive alone, nor can you. Our world is made by man, but a fever dream can be broken, the body returned to health, with love, and care, and real wealth.
Once more: healthy relationships, communities, Nature. The time is now.
[1] While I paraphrase key points, he does a masterful job of providing proof in a short read.
[3] With the additional cost savings of making the pollution in someone else’s country and subject to their regulations that eat up profit if Made in America.
[4] I sense I’m getting quite sarcastic, sorry. The facts remain, forgive my tone please
[5] I am NOT licensed to give financial advice, I am merely pointing out common sense
[6] Count seconds: after 11.8 days you have counted a million. Do that 1,000 times and you count a billion; or 31.4 years. Do that 1,000 times and you count your first trillion; or six times recorded history (31,400 years). You get a sense of a trillion now? It’s not ‘just’ three more zeroes….
[7] CBDCs are a whole ‘nother rant; if you don’t understand the threat they pose, do some research