The Coming Economic Collapse And The Next Great Depression

The Coming Economic Collapse And The Next Great Depression
The forgotten man painting by McNaughton (click image for video) I believe this image best exemplifies where we stand today, pun intended.

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Wednesday, May 27, 2015

Towards a Militarized Police State in America? Explosive New Revelations over “Jade Helm 15 Exercise” and Potential False Flags




A growing segment of the American population is waking up to the implications of the Jade Helm 15 military operation to be conducted by Special Forces in conjunction with local law enforcement, the FBI, DHS, the DEA and Border Patrol across the entire Southwest. This massive unprecedented exercise will also commence in June sooner than first announced and last for 10 weeks through the summer till September 15.

The risk of it triggering civil unrest or that it may coincide with a potential false flag scenario followed by another possibly timed crisis situation is both feasible and real, despite mainstream media’s ridicule dismissing any such possibilities as pure paranoid conspiracy theory. What we do know for sure is this nation has turned into a militarized police state and that both the military and the government lie all the time.

We also are aware of the globalists’ long planned agenda of a national crisis that would induce Obama to quash civil unrest by declaring martial law. A recent poll of Americans found that near half (45%) see Jade Helm as imposing more control over the states. If martial law doesn’t actually come to pass this time around, it certainly sets the stage for next time in this incrementally increasing militarization of America.

We also know that a specific Department of Defense manual FM 3-39.40 has existed since 2010 delineating how the federal government in cooperation with the UN will respond to civil disturbance that includes FEMA camp roundups to fill waiting empty Haliburton-refurbished prison camps after a $385 million no bid contract during the former CEO Cheney’s vice presidency. We also know that each prison camp includes a tribunal section and a mortuary section along with psychological officers responsible for reprogramming US detainees. Despite this layout presented so matter-of-fact and by-the-book, Americans will be killed. During the upheaval of a national crisis, a lethal outcome is also most probable. Meanwhile, countdown to global war appears to be ticking away as troops from virtually every nation are busily training in preparation for a likely West versus East endgame scenario of World War III.

President Kennedy spoke of subversive forces operating inside the shadow government several months prior to those same forces killing him. And those demonic forces posing as our international crime syndicate government boldly went on unconsequenced by the JFK assassination to stage the worst false flag in history on 9/11 giving birth to the neocons’ war on terror. And it’s been all downhill ever since with nonstop wars, a runaway deficit (over $18 trillion), a fragile and broken global economy, and within a few years after 9/11 a militarized totalitarian police state. Long gone is America’s once democratic republic, replaced by a fascist oligarchy controlled by a military-security-prison complex. As Obama’s personal army, Homeland Security has grown gluttonously evil bringing tyranny and oppression to the United States of America as never before.

But to those of us aware enough to study and learn from history, there are no accidents and no surprises here. Armed with the latest technology, the global elitists in control have done their homework, long in advance manipulating everything in its Orwellian place for these shuttering events and developments to unfold. From the overreaching CIA grooming their Manchurian Candidate president to his unqualified meteoric rise to puppet power, Obama was the perfect made man for the job. Obscured by a shadowy, made over past that includes a fake birth certificate, he was steeped in Communist ideology and socialist collectivism by his deep connection with ex-terrorist Bill Ayers (who also was the Common Core architect responsible largely for dumbing down public education) and fellow mentor Saul Alinsky. Obama displayed dazzle as an early orator on the big stage of big politics, wore the right skin color to prey on people’s hope for change and progress, appearing as a different kind of leader who many thought would represent the common people, a unifier and uplifter for the downtrodden. Boy were they dead wrong!

Once elected, Obama became the Manchurian Trojan Horse presidential imposter occupying the White House. This is the same man as presidential candidate who bragged and promised as a former constitutional law professor for over 10 years that he’d be the most open and transparent president in US history after the criminal Bush regime. Then once Obama became president, he only demonstrated that he is the most secretive and closed off president in history. Even worse, in the same speech he denounced Bush and Cheney for violating America’s rule of law, he proposed to develop “an appropriate legal regime for indefinite prolonged detention of American citizens” prior to ever breaking the law based purely on the government’s suspicion that they may become a future threat to national security. This statement uttered early in his first term ominously spelled out his sinister agenda to lock up and throw away the key to any citizen that he and his minions believe might become a future threat.

Based on Obama and his administration’s subsequent actions, their definition of “future threat to national security” is simply anyone who disagrees with his treasonous policies, DHS declaring them a greater threat than even ISIS, which is really quite telling. Those citizens honest and brave enough to expose the criminal truth about his evil agenda betraying our Constitution, nation and people have been singled out and targeted on dissident watch lists.

Americans believing in our Constitution who object to the feds’ criminality of constantly violating the nation’s rule of law that used to protect citizens with privacy rights over unlawfully invasive surveillance and search and seizure, the right to peaceful assembly to public protest, the right to own a gun, the right to freedom of speech and religion, the right to due process, the right to habeas corpus dating back to the 1066 Magna Carta, all these previously guaranteed civil liberties under Bush-Obama were usurped and denied Americans. The 2012 National Defense Authorization Act was a traitorous package deal depriving us of all these rights, as well as violating and repealing the 1878 Posse Comitatus law prohibiting US military from involvement in civil matters that fall under state National Guard and law enforcement jurisdiction.

This president and his DHS in one fell swoop have equated US patriots who are returning veterans from warfronts(regardless of war) as potential home grown terrorists. So after placing their life on the line for their nation in combat, risking and often incurring serious life threatening injuries while experiencing the trauma of witnessing their comrades die sacrificing their lives for their nation, upon return home from US Empire’s blood for oil wars, their nation turns on them in betrayal, calling them terrorist threats and developing a criminally subversive plan to remove not only their private weapons violating their Second Amendment right, but physically removing them from society by locking them away in prison or worse killing them under false suspicion they might become homegrown terrorists. This is how our diabolically treasonous and insane government led by our current commander-in-chief repays our veterans. It’s unbelievably despicable that America’s come to this.

On to another targeted population, Obama has harassed, threatened, accused and locked up more journalists and whistleblowers than any previous administration ever. Moreover, he has charged more whistleblowers with violating an antiquated 1917 espionage act for treason than all past presidencies combined, sentencing them to jail time 25 more times than all previous combined. The least transparent president in history also denied more Freedom of Information Act requests in 2014 than all previous administrations, only proving himself to be the most vindictive, revengeful, secretive despot president in history.

When Obama came to power everything was in place for the globalist war machine to continue uninterrupted, unleashing the same imperialistic US Empire aggression launched by the war criminal invaders and occupiers Bush and Cheney. Following his globalist marching orders, Obama seamlessly maintained the Empire’s role as world policeman and murderous bully around the globe. He prolonged the war in Iraq for another three years in time to claim credit for ending the Iraq War during his reelection campaign. In the other decade-long war he ensured the fighting in Afghanistan would continue unabated for another half dozen years. Then with the help of Israel and Saudi Arabia, he created ISIS, which conveniently provided the fine print disclaimer ensuring the US-NATO military presence in both war ravaged nations would be on an as needed, permanent basis.

In the meantime hidden from public view, Obama guaranteed the proliferation of new, sneakier kind of lower intensity, out of sight, out of mind wars around the world fought by none other than the killer elite Special Forces. Now Americans cannot even tell you who the US is at war with because it’s all a deep state secret. Did I mention Obama’s the most secretive prez in history? Investigative reporter and author Nick Turse has determined the exponential growth of US Special Operations at last count over a year ago is deployed in more than 134 nationsaround the globe with the highest concentration throughout most of Africa and much of Central and East Asia. That’s most nations on earth along with a thousand US military posts around the world.

Expanding the presence of US proxy wars, Obama refined a new and improved formula for churning out the most barbaric, savage, seemingly unstoppable monster enemy of them all – the Islamic State (IS). Pretending IS jihadists are the most evil enemy since Russian Communists, complicit in showcasing their staged youtube beheadings to horrify the world for effect, Obama secretly engineered their expanding global dominance in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Somalia and possibly just eight miles from the US border near El Paso in Mexico where reports from Judicial Watch recently claimed a high ranking Mexican police and a military officer stated ISIS is currently undergoing joint training operations with the drug cartel ostensibly to potentially terrorize Americans on US soil during Jade Helm. Of course the US government vehemently denies the presence of Islamic State in Mexico yet speculation still lingers based on US FBI and DHS meetings with Mexican authorities. In any event, the bottom line if the US really wanted to destroy ISIS, as the most lethal killing force on earth, it could eliminate Islamic State forces within a month.

Apparently it was two homegrown ISIS fighters from Arizona that showed up in Dallas bent on a shooting spree at a cartoon contest lampooning Islam earlier this month in what seemed a staged event, the same state deemed “hostile” by the Jade Helm game plan. Then came the bizarre mass biker gang shootout killing 9 in Waco, Texas a week ago. Evidence is coming to light that hidden ISIS recruiters are presently embedded in US, UK and Canada college campuses around those Western nations attempting to entice non-Muslims to join their cause. Based on a recent UN report almost two months ago, more than 25,000 new recruits did join from most countries in the world just since June last year. Whether ISIS is really here in North America amongst us or not, Washington’s been hyping the eminent dangers posed by right wing domestic terrorists lurking to kill government authorities like police, almost as if to prep us for an upcoming false flag that could occur during Jade Helm.

As the US-created hired gun, after training, arming and financing Obama’s secret ally that holds a calling card reading “Terrorism-R-Us-Will-Travel,” Obama and his globalist puppet masters have been increasingly outed with incontrovertible evidence of newly declassified documents that the so called ISIS enemy is actually a mere extension and creation of the US, its Western allies and their oligarch masters. It was just released that the Pentagon had devised a plan back in August 2012 for the rise of ISIS (that we never even knew existed then) to later take over two key Iraqi cities Mosul and Ramadi. Is it any wonder that Iraqi security forces simply cut and ran without a fight from both cities?

The latest disturbing revelations surfacing are disclosures from whistleblowers inside the military high command and a recently retired Homeland Security officer. One recently purged lieutenant general among the 270 high ranking military officers Obama has forced out of the service has just revealed in an email that this summer’s Jade Helm will in fact bring not only dissident extraction but the start of “a ground war, city by city, street by street” to America. The anonymous retired three star general went on to write:

Additionally what is coming will be unlike any civil war in history, it will be very personal, the government will call the Patriots forces terrorists and traitors, they will arrest, intern, torture and murder suspected terrorists families, this will result in bloody reprisals which will start a vicious cycle lasting for years.

Lending credibility to his dire prediction was the general’s assignment in 2012 to be part of a Pentagon study assessing the rank and file personnel in all the US armed forces on whether they would be willing or not to fire upon and kill US citizens in a civil war scenario. He revealed that 80% of the National Guard would side with the American people, 90% of the Marines also, 60% of the Army would, the Navy would remain on active patrol in defense to interdict any possible foreign intervention and only the Air Force will side with Obama’s government at 75%. So from his email he believes the majority of US military would fight right alongside Americans against the government oppressors. It was alluded that a number of veterans up and down the ranks would also be armed as patriots actively resisting the government attack on its own citizens, which would far outnumber the treasonous government forces. But the bottom line according to this high ranking flag officer, an all-out civil war is fast approaching where many US citizens are likely to die and be imprisoned.

Another anonymous career insider from Homeland Security just admitted:

Preparations have been finalized to respond to a crisis of unprecedented magnitude within the United States. The response will include the use of lethal force against US citizens under the instructions of Barack Obama.

The whistleblower described the atmosphere inside the DHS mega-bureaucracy as forebodingly paranoid where no one trusts anyone and workers are leaving in droves. Afraid of information leaks, conditions have become so oppressive to create an ultra-hostile, toxic work environment. The DHS retiree maintains that the upcoming crisis will be “rooted in an economic collapse.” He said a key precursor just before the crash to look for will be falling gold and silver prices. The orchestrators behind it are the Wall Street bankers who of course like with every fixed crash in the past will be busily buying up all the precious metals for untold illegal profiteering. The insider maintains that America’s already sliding into crash mode though most people don’t realize it yet, adding:

The ‘big bang’ comes at the end, when people wake up one morning and can’t log in to their bank accounts, can’t use their ATM cards, and find out that their private pension funds and other assets have been confiscated.

He states that the above scenario of a cyberattack on the US banking system is but one possible plan he was privy to. Though the whistleblower admitted that DHS, the NSA and IRS are all militant, totalitarian arms of the White House, he doubly emphasized that it’s not Obama pulling all the strings:

[Obama] is a creation of the globalists who have no allegiance to any political party. He is the product of decades of planning, made for this very time in our history. He was selected to oversee the events I just disclosed. Who has that ability? He’s a product of our own intelligence agencies working with the globalists. He should be exhibit ‘A’ to illustrate the need to enforce the Logan Act.

Unlike the whistleblowing general, the former Homeland Security employee said he did not know the exact timing of when he foresees the plan being executed with high probability of two near simultaneous false flags triggering martial law and the violence directed against US citizens. But the general did, feeling certain that Jade Helm would go live in response to government induced crises. Because we live in an interconnected global economy, the disaster that will soon afflict the US will reverberate with ripple effects around the globe. And though many Americans will refuse to believe any such malevolent harm can possibly come to the United States that relative to most of the world has had it so good for so long, the globalists responsible are heartless evildoers who have no compassion or guilt for the atrocities and suffering they directly inflict on humankind. Bringing down America puts them one huge step closer to one world government. It will be up to us patriots like the revolutionaries of our War of Independence to fight for our liberty and life for a rebirth of a new nation fashioned after what originally was our Founding Fathers’ lasting legacy.

Joachim Hagopian is a West Point graduate and former US Army officer. He has written a manuscript based on his unique military experience entitled “Don’t Let The Bastards Getcha Down.” It examines and focuses on US international relations, leadership and national security issues. After the military, Joachim earned a master’s degree in Clinical Psychology and worked as a licensed therapist in the mental health field for more than a quarter century. He now concentrates on his writing and has a blog site at http://empireexposed. blogspot. com/. He is also a regular contributor to Global Research and a syndicated columnist at Veterans Today.


Friday, May 1, 2015

The Tower of Basel: Secretive Plans for the Issuing of a Global Currency




Tower of Basel (Bank for International Settlements BIS)


Tower of Babylon

Do we really want the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) issuing our global currency

By Ellen Brown
Theme: Global Economy

The Tower of Basel: Secretive Plans for the Issuing of a Global Currency
This carefully research article by Ellen Brown was first published in April 2009. It sheds light on the current crisis of the World monetary system. (GR ed. M. Ch.)

In an April 7 [2009] article in The London Telegraph titled “The G20 Moves the World a Step Closer to

a Global Currency,” Ambrose Evans-Pritchard wrote:

“A single clause in Point 19 of the communiqué issued by the G20 leaders amounts to revolution in the global financial order.

“‘We have agreed to support a general SDR allocation which will inject $250bn (£170bn) into the world economy and increase global liquidity,’ it said. SDRs are Special Drawing Rights, a synthetic paper currency issued by the International Monetary Fund that has lain dormant for half a century.

“In effect, the G20 leaders have activated the IMF’s power to create money and begin global ‘quantitative easing’. In doing so, they are putting a de facto world currency into play. It is outside the control of any sovereign body. Conspiracy theorists will love it.”

Indeed they will. The article is subtitled, “The world is a step closer to a global currency, backed by a global central bank, running monetary policy for all humanity.” Which naturally raises the question, who or what will serve as this global central bank, cloaked with the power to issue the global currency and police monetary policy for all humanity? When the world’s central bankers met in Washington last September, they discussed what body might be in a position to serve in that awesome and fearful role. A former governor of the Bank of England stated:

“[T]he answer might already be staring us in the face, in the form of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS). . . . The IMF tends to couch its warnings about economic problems in very diplomatic language, but the BIS is more independent and much better placed to deal with this if it is given the power to do so.”1

And if the vision of a global currency outside government control does not set off conspiracy theorists, putting the BIS in charge of it surely will. The BIS has been scandal-ridden ever since it was branded with pro-Nazi leanings in the 1930s. Founded in Basel, Switzerland, in 1930, the BIS has been called “the most exclusive, secretive, and powerful supranational club in the world.” Charles Higham wrote in his book Trading with the Enemy that by the late 1930s, the BIS had assumed an openly pro-Nazi bias, a theme that was expanded on in a BBC Timewatch film titled “Banking with Hitler” broadcast in 1998.2 In 1944, the American government backed a resolution at the Bretton-Woods Conference calling for the liquidation of the BIS, following Czech accusations that it was laundering gold stolen by the Nazis from occupied Europe; but the central bankers succeeded in quietly snuffing out the American resolution.3


Modest beginnings, BIS Office, Hotel Savoy-Univers, Basel


First Annual General Meeting, 1931

In Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time (1966), Dr. Carroll Quigley revealed the key role played in global finance by the BIS behind the scenes. Dr. Quigley was Professor of History at Georgetown University, where he was President Bill Clinton’s mentor. He was also an insider, groomed by the powerful clique he called “the international bankers.” His credibility is heightened by the fact that he actually espoused their goals. He wrote:

“I know of the operations of this network because I have studied it for twenty years and was permitted for two years, in the early 1960′s, to examine its papers and secret records. I have no aversion to it or to most of its aims and have, for much of my life, been close to it and to many of its instruments. . . . [I]n general my chief difference of opinion is that it wishes to remain unknown, and I believe its role in history is significant enough to be known.”

Quigley wrote of this international banking network:

“[T]he powers of financial capitalism had another far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences. The apex of the system was to be the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland, a private bank owned and controlled by the world’s central banks which were themselves private corporations.”

The key to their success, said Quigley, was that the international bankers would control and manipulate the money system of a nation while letting it appear to be controlled by the government. The statement echoed one made in the eighteenth century by the patriarch of what would become the most powerful banking dynasty in the world. Mayer Amschel Bauer Rothschild famously said in 1791:

“Allow me to issue and control a nation’s currency, and I care not who makes its laws.”

Mayer’s five sons were sent to the major capitals of Europe – London, Paris, Vienna, Berlin and Naples – with the mission of establishing a banking system that would be outside government control. The economic and political systems of nations would be controlled not by citizens but by bankers, for the benefit of bankers. Eventually, a privately-owned “central bank” was established in nearly every country; and this central banking system has now gained control over the economies of the world. Central banks have the authority to print money in their respective countries, and it is from these banks that governments must borrow money to pay their debts and fund their operations. The result is a global economy in which not only industry but government itself runs on “credit” (or debt) created by a banking monopoly headed by a network of private central banks; and at the top of this network is the BIS, the “central bank of central banks” in Basel.

Behind the Curtain

For many years the BIS kept a very low profile, operating behind the scenes in an abandoned hotel. It was here that decisions were reached to devalue or defend currencies, fix the price of gold, regulate offshore banking, and raise or lower short-term interest rates. In 1977, however, the BIS gave up its anonymity in exchange for more efficient headquarters. The new building has been described as “an eighteen story-high circular skyscraper that rises above the medieval city like some misplaced nuclear reactor.” It quickly became known as the “Tower of Basel.” Today the BIS has governmental immunity, pays no taxes, and has its own private police force.4 It is, as Mayer Rothschild envisioned, above the law.

The BIS is now composed of 55 member nations, but the club that meets regularly in Basel is a much smaller group; and even within it, there is a hierarchy. In a 1983 article in Harper’s Magazine called “Ruling the World of Money,” Edward Jay Epstein wrote that where the real business gets done is in “a sort of inner club made up of the half dozen or so powerful central bankers who find themselves more or less in the same monetary boat” – those from Germany, the United States, Switzerland, Italy, Japan and England. Epstein said:

“The prime value, which also seems to demarcate the inner club from the rest of the BIS members, is the firm belief that central banks should act independently of their home governments. . . . A second and closely related belief of the inner club is that politicians should not be trusted to decide the fate of the international monetary system.”

In 1974, the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision was created by the central bank Governors of the Group of Ten nations (now expanded to twenty). The BIS provides the twelve-member Secretariat for the Committee. The Committee, in turn, sets the rules for banking globally, including capital requirements and reserve controls. In a 2003 article titled “The Bank for International Settlements Calls for Global Currency,” Joan Veon wrote:

“The BIS is where all of the world’s central banks meet to analyze the global economy and determine what course of action they will take next to put more money in their pockets, since they control the amount of money in circulation and how much interest they are going to charge governments and banks for borrowing from them. . . .

“When you understand that the BIS pulls the strings of the world’s monetary system, you then understand that they have the ability to create a financial boom or bust in a country. If that country is not doing what the money lenders want, then all they have to do is sell its currency.”5

The Controversial Basel Accords

The power of the BIS to make or break economies was demonstrated in 1988, when it issued a Basel Accord raising bank capital requirements from 6% to 8%. By then, Japan had emerged as the world’s largest creditor; but Japan’s banks were less well capitalized than other major international banks. Raising the capital requirement forced them to cut back on lending, creating a recession in Japan like that suffered in the U.S. today. Property prices fell and loans went into default as the security for them shriveled up. A downward spiral followed, ending with the total bankruptcy of the banks. The banks had to be nationalized, although that word was not used in order to avoid criticism.6

Among other collateral damage produced by the Basel Accords was a spate of suicides among Indian farmers unable to get loans. The BIS capital adequacy standards required loans to private borrowers to be “risk-weighted,” with the degree of risk determined by private rating agencies; and farmers and small business owners could not afford the agencies’ fees. Banks therefore assigned 100 percent risk to the loans, and then resisted extending credit to these “high-risk” borrowers because more capital was required to cover the loans. When the conscience of the nation was aroused by the Indian suicides, the government, lamenting the neglect of farmers by commercial banks, established a policy of ending the “financial exclusion” of the weak; but this step had little real effect on lending practices, due largely to the strictures imposed by the BIS from abroad.7

Similar complaints have come from Korea. An article in the December 12, 2008 Korea Times titled “BIS Calls Trigger Vicious Cycle” described how Korean entrepreneurs with good collateral cannot get operational loans from Korean banks, at a time when the economic downturn requires increased investment and easier credit:

“‘The Bank of Korea has provided more than 35 trillion won to banks since September when the global financial crisis went full throttle,’ said a Seoul analyst, who declined to be named. ‘But the effect is not seen at all with the banks keeping the liquidity in their safes. They simply don’t lend and one of the biggest reasons is to keep the BIS ratio high enough to survive,’ he said. . . .

“Chang Ha-joon, an economics professor at Cambridge University, concurs with the analyst. ‘What banks do for their own interests, or to improve the BIS ratio, is against the interests of the whole society. This is a bad idea,’ Chang said in a recent telephone interview with Korea Times.”

In a May 2002 article in The Asia Times titled “Global Economy: The BIS vs. National Banks,” economist Henry C K Liu observed that the Basel Accords have forced national banking systems “to march to the same tune, designed to serve the needs of highly sophisticated global financial markets, regardless of the developmental needs of their national economies.” He wrote:

“[N]ational banking systems are suddenly thrown into the rigid arms of the Basel Capital Accord sponsored by the Bank of International Settlement (BIS), or to face the penalty of usurious risk premium in securing international interbank loans. . . . National policies suddenly are subjected to profit incentives of private financial institutions, all members of a hierarchical system controlled and directed from the money center banks in New York. The result is to force national banking systems to privatize . . . .

“BIS regulations serve only the single purpose of strengthening the international private banking system, even at the peril of national economies. . . . The IMF and the international banks regulated by the BIS are a team: the international banks lend recklessly to borrowers in emerging economies to create a foreign currency debt crisis, the IMF arrives as a carrier of monetary virus in the name of sound monetary policy, then the international banks come as vulture investors in the name of financial rescue to acquire national banks deemed capital inadequate and insolvent by the BIS.”

Ironically, noted Liu, developing countries with their own natural resources did not actually need the foreign investment that trapped them in debt to outsiders:

“Applying the State Theory of Money [which assumes that a sovereign nation has the power to issue its own money], any government can fund with its own currency all its domestic developmental needs to maintain full employment without inflation.”

When governments fall into the trap of accepting loans in foreign currencies, however, they become “debtor nations” subject to IMF and BIS regulation. They are forced to divert their production to exports, just to earn the foreign currency necessary to pay the interest on their loans. National banks deemed “capital inadequate” have to deal with strictures comparable to the “conditionalities” imposed by the IMF on debtor nations: “escalating capital requirement, loan writeoffs and liquidation, and restructuring through selloffs, layoffs, downsizing, cost-cutting and freeze on capital spending.” Liu wrote:

“Reversing the logic that a sound banking system should lead to full employment and developmental growth, BIS regulations demand high unemployment and developmental degradation in national economies as the fair price for a sound global private banking system.”

The Last Domino to Fall

While banks in developing nations were being penalized for falling short of the BIS capital requirements, large international banks managed to escape the rules, although they actually carried enormous risk because of their derivative exposure. The mega-banks succeeded in avoiding the Basel rules by separating the “risk” of default out from the loans and selling it off to investors, using a form of derivative known as “credit default swaps.”

However, it was not in the game plan that U.S. banks should escape the BIS net. When they managed to sidestep the first Basel Accord, a second set of rules was imposed known as Basel II. The new rules were established in 2004, but they were not levied on U.S. banks until November 2007, the month after the Dow passed 14,000 to reach its all-time high. It has been all downhill from there. Basel II had the same effect on U.S. banks that Basel I had on Japanese banks: they have been struggling ever since to survive.8

Basel II requires banks to adjust the value of their marketable securities to the “market price” of the security, a rule called “mark to market.”9 The rule has theoretical merit, but the problem is timing: it was imposed ex post facto, after the banks already had the hard-to-market assets on their books. Lenders that had been considered sufficiently well capitalized to make new loans suddenly found they were insolvent. At least, they would have been insolvent if they had tried to sell their assets, an assumption required by the new rule. Financial analyst John Berlau complained:

“The crisis is often called a ‘market failure,’ and the term ‘mark-to-market’ seems to reinforce that. But the mark-to-market rules are profoundly anti-market and hinder the free-market function of price discovery. . . . In this case, the accounting rules fail to allow the market players to hold on to an asset if they don’t like what the market is currently fetching, an important market action that affects price discovery in areas from agriculture to antiques.”10

Imposing the mark-to-market rule on U.S. banks caused an instant credit freeze, which proceeded to take down the economies not only of the U.S. but of countries worldwide. In early April 2009, the mark-to-market rule was finally softened by the U.S. Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB); but critics said the modification did not go far enough, and it was done in response to pressure from politicians and bankers, not out of any fundamental change of heart or policies by the BIS.

And that is where the conspiracy theorists come in. Why did the BIS not retract or at least modify Basel II after seeing the devastation it had caused? Why did it sit idly by as the global economy came crashing down? Was the goal to create so much economic havoc that the world would rush with relief into the waiting arms of the BIS with its privately-created global currency? The plot thickens . . . .

Ellen Brown developed her research skills as an attorney practicing civil litigation in Los Angeles. In Web of Debt, her latest book, she turns those skills to an analysis of the Federal Reserve and “the money trust.” She shows how this private cartel has usurped the power to create money from the people themselves, and how we the people can get it back. Her earlier books focused on the pharmaceutical cartel that gets its power from “the money trust.” Her eleven books include Forbidden Medicine, Nature’s Pharmacy (co-authored with Dr. Lynne Walker), and The Key to Ultimate Health (co-authored with Dr. Richard Hansen). Her websites are www.webofdebt.com and www.ellenbrown.com.

NOTES

1. Andrew Marshall, “The Financial New World Order: Towards a Global Currency and World Government,” Global Research (April 6, 2009).
2 Alfred Mendez, “The Network,” The World Central Bank: The Bank for International Settlements, http://copy_bilderberg.tripod.com/bis.htm.
3 “BIS – Bank of International Settlement: The Mother of All Central Banks,” hubpages.com (2009).
4 Ibid.
5 Joan Veon, “The Bank for International Settlements Calls for Global Currency,” News with Views (August 26, 2003).
6 Peter Myers, “The 1988 Basle Accord – Destroyer of Japan’s Finance System,” http://www.mailstar.net/basle.html (updated September 9, 2008).
7 Nirmal Chandra, “Is Inclusive Growth Feasible in Neoliberal India?”, www.networkideas.org (September 2008).
8 Bruce Wiseman, “The Financial Crisis: A look Behind the Wizard’s Curtain,” Canada Free Press (March 19, 2009).
9 See Ellen Brown, “Credit Where Credit Is Due,” www.webofdebt.com/articles/creditcrunch.php (January 11, 2009).
10 John Berlau, “The International Mark-to-market Contagion,” OpenMarket.org (October 10, 2008).