theHotstar

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In August 2019 BlackRock released a white paper proposing a new economic paradigm¹. A few months later, in that fated month of March 2020, their proposal became policy and the global economy entered into the endgame of the economic cycle of the past fifty years².

To understand the significance of this is to understand the nature of this cycle, and to understand that there was only ever one way out of it.

This essay is extremely long so here's the crux. A financial oligarchy made up of families emergent from high concentrations of capital required to stitch together the backbones of industrial society, have for the past fifty years consolidated their wealth into customary power, both social and financial, and used this to craft from behind the scene perpetual cycles of debt that have been used to finance mergers & acquisitions between corporations and financial institutions and to consolidate the control of assets within them. However, in doing so they have rendered these institutions insolvent and unable to ever pay off the debt amassed, and so this debt is being gradually inflated away through bold new economic policies designed to necessitate a currency reset onto Central Banking Digital Currency. Crucial to this process has been the rise to power of modern mutual funds, most notable among them BlackRock. These have come to play a central role in what has been, for the past fifty years, a conspiracy of the business cycle.

Economic cycles are as old as civilisation itself, having existed ever since agriculture and city-life constituted the very first civilisations of Mesopotamia. Back then, priesthoods of astrologers had figured out how to predict the flooding cycles in alluvial river valleys by studying the position of the Sun, and had used this specialised knowledge to elicit a portion of the crop yields from farmers. Such an exchange was an early form of taxation, making these priesthoods the first institutions of government(public authority). They controlled the agrarianism economy by crafting seasonal calendars that allowed societies to navigate natural weather patterns, and from this amassed a surplus of wealth which was used to finance public works such as roads and irrigation.

Since that time, institutions of surplus wealth, that is, those who control the distribution of incomes generated through mass productive activity; have generally been the most powerful. Whether an institution's power(ability to impose one's will on others) resided in religion(persuasion), military(force), or commerce(bribery); such means have generally been used to achieve economic ends. Which is to say politics is really economics.

But within our modern industrial societies, at least those making up western civilisation, public authority does not control domestic economies. This is because over the course of around 250 years, governments have gradually given up real control of two things:

1. Incorporating power. The ability to control the function and lifespan of corporations to prevent them usurping power from governments. This control had been maintained through a charter system, which like all things, eventually became corrupted.

2. Control of the supply of money and credit. Control of this was lost to a central banking system.

Because of these developments, modern governments for the most part are no longer sovereign. A fact readily observed in their inability to leverage even the most populist mandates into real power, such as the power to tax corporations.

These political developments have led to the institution of private control over the supply of money and credit. This control in turn been used to gain control of the modern economic cycle. This cycle is not a natural one like seasonal flooding, but one manufactured through the creation of what could be called synthetic financial instruments.

The modern economic cycle is no longer localised by climate or protectionist tariffs, as it has become planetary through the interdependency of globalisation. Though for most of the 20th century and for at least a little while longer in the 21st, its nexus has been and remains the American economy, whose dollar serves as the world's reserve currency. It is here, since at least the 1970s, that the economic landscape has been controlled almost entirely by the Rockefeller family and a legacy of financial institutions sourrounding them. For much of the latter half of the 20th century this was no secret, though since the 1990s it appears to have become one.

Over the last fifty years or so, the concentration of Rockefeller private control over the US economy has been used to manufacture a business cycle of crisis, for which there have already been two iterations, and a third in which we currently reside near ocnclusion. This cycle of crisis has been designed somewhat as a swan song to an industrial era set to crescendo into a new precarious social framework for 21st century. There are many names for this. The Fourth Industrial Revolution. The Great Reset. Etc. Call it what you will, but the overarching aim is to bring about a type of corporate feudal state, which a certain branch of western philosophy believes is the best chance of creating a utopia through civilisational totalitarianism.

This crisis cycle, as we have come to known it over the past 50 years as 'the business cycle', is the following in brief:

1. A boom period is initiated through the lowering of interest rates and increased availability of cheap credit through commercial banks.
2. This cheap credit is used to acquire assets like real estate and stock, creating bubbles in those markets, while corporations use it to finance leveraged mergers & acquisitions between themselves.
3. A bust period is initiated through hiking interest rates and restricting credit, which bursts the market bubbles that have been crated. The assets in these markets lose value and become non-performing liabilities. Loan repayments start to be defaulted on, and these assets are acquired by the commercial banks through foreclosure.
4. A crisis period is initiated through the banks acquiring all these nonperforming assets, which become liabilities on their own books. These commercial banks then become insolvent and can no longer account for the money in depositor accounts.
5. A bailout period is initiated through government acquisition of insolvent commercial banks or their assets. The government then liquidates these by first selling the performing assets to other bigger banks or private equity firms at heavily discounted prices, followed by dumping all the bad assets back onto the market through mortgage-backed securities and other financial derivatives used by mutual funds tranfer the burden to retail investors and/or pension funds.

The economic response to step 5 is then step 1, and the cycle repeats. Boom. Bust. Crisis. Bailout. Recession. . .Boom— And as it does , the following occurs:

1. The consolidation of financial institutions.
2. The consolidation of assets within those institutions.
3. An increase in government and corporate debt.
4. An increase in the prices for goods and services.
5. A decrease in the quality of goods and services.
6. A decrease in middle and lower class incomes and savings.
7. An increase in upper class incomes and savings.

The end goal is to consolidate all assets, including residential property, within a few financial institutions 'too big fail', so that the debt budrden amassed from doing this must be forgiven. What eventuates from this system, if followed to its logical end, is a two-tier economic landscape of renters and corporate landlords. And rents may not necessarily be paid from income.

A population of renters whose labour is gradually replaced by automation become superfluous, as they cease to generate incomes. What this would mean is many could only pay rents through good behaviour, which would manifest itself in a universal basic income pegged to a social credit score.

The culprits behind this cycle are not banks. As banks are corporations and corporations are not people, regardless of what lawyers would think. We are not talking about faceless institutions here. It is dishonest, or at best naïve, to anonymise this process through identifying the prime movers as institutional, or corporate entities. This only gives an identity to the villain, not a personality. Which is to say, it gives no substantive understanding as to where real power resides within modern society. Because behind the body corporate is a soul of very real vested interests. The vested interest of real people. They are not employees. Nor are they CEOs. They are only sometimes board members, and often times they are not even stockholders. But they are people with personalities and those personalities have names, and they make up what can be called a modern financial oligarchy.

This modern financial oligarchy is an internationalist fraternity of mutually vested interests, probably no more than a thousand people, being the limit of everyone knowing everyone else through at least reputation. That is segmented into factional divisions of kinship groups, or family dynasties, which maintain estates of intergenerational wealth, and who manage succession through a balance of ability and blood. In the past many preserved the legacy of their names and genetics through restricting marriages of their progeny to within the fraternal network of families, at times within their own. Though modern practise brings in outsiders of ability through marriage, generally as son-in-laws, married into the family to takeover business operations and avoid the estate collapsing under the stewardship of an incompetent heir, or becoming overrun by the managerial class built up beneath it. This can be seen as a sort of cross breeding between old money and new. Old money providing the pedigree of legacy and new money fresh talent. A balance between blood and ability to perpetuate the legacy of both bloodline and estate.

The interplay between new money and old is the basis of an age old dichotomy of power structures. In our modern era the stock market is the institution used by old money to control new money power, particularly that built up in modern technology corporations. Technology entrepreneurs, such as Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk can only access their wealth through giving up control of what they create in the form of publicly traded corporations. By the time they have cashed out their stock and shifted the proceeds into philanthropic foundations, this another area tightly controlled by old money institutions, they have handed control of their innovations to the financial institutions of old money, being custodian banks and mutual funds. Both these are explored later as thet are the main focus of this piece. It is for this reason new technology innovation begins with a promising implementation period, which provokes its mass adoption, followed by a swift curtailment of its potentiality. As an old saying goes, you cannot put new wine into old bottles. The old bottles break and the new wine spills out.

The economic crisis cycle was manufactured by the most prominent family of Anglo-American oligarchs, the Rockefeller family. They achieved this through controlling the appointments to key positions within the US Treasury and Federal Reserve. By doing this they were able to determine economic policy governing the supply of money and credit in US dollars. They also controlled the Resolutions Trust Corporation and the Federal Deposits Insurance Corporation, two government corporations tasked with liquidating the assets acquired from insolvent banks using government bailouts at the end of each crisis cycle.

Further more, nakedly corrupt practises such as political lobbying(bribery), and other more nefarious means(blackmail, think Jeffrey Epstein), were used to ensure that control within the legislative branches could be leveraged periodically to deregulate the lending practises of retail banks, abolish antitrust laws restricting mergers and acquisitions, and approve bailout packages for insolvent financial institutions.

So far there have been two of these crisis cycles, and we currently reside within the end of a third in 2022. They can be arbitrarily defined into the periods:

1. 1970-1990
2. 1990-2010
3. 2010-Present

Out of this cycle emerged two institutions to help facilitate the mass acquisition of private property. These were the private equity firm, The Blackstone Group, and its mutual fund progeny, BlackRock Inc. Both these, their origin and operations into the present, are the primary focus of this essay as both became institutional prime movers behind the crisis cycle.

What has transpired economically over the last fifty years is no doubt a conspiracy in the traditional sense of the word. However, the use of such a term has come to carry the connotation of a fantastical cabal with absolute control of absolutely everything, and that everything decided by this cabal is carried out by people 'in on it' at the tactical and operational level. Which sets up a strawman that can be easily debunked by pointing out how impossible it would be to keep such a thing of such grand scale secret with so many people involved.

It is true that a small community like this does exist at the strategic level, who are the aforementioned families of the financial oligarchy. But they are not absolutely united in interest or intention, which is to say there are many smoke filled anterooms surrounding what amounts to a smoke filled hall, probably operating like a de-facto sort of parliamentary system to determine consensus on a strategic agenda. Beyond this however, they rarely control what happens at the tactical or operational level. And people at the tactical and operational level needn't know what the aim at the strategic level is. Modern human organisations are highly compartmentalised operations. Operational roles, and even managerial ones, have come to be occupied by atomised individuals in ever more specialised areas of knowledge. Which means the modern working professional often has very little understanding for the context surrounding the area of their own narrow focus. Put simply, modern professions are often incapable of seeing the bigger picture of their industry because their education has become narrowly focused.

An easy way to conceptualise this conspiracy in a normalised manner is through a sporting analogy. There is an economic game being played by athletes at the operational level, and this is what spectators see. The athletes play within the rules of the game and their actions determine the results. But how they are playing is moderated by how the rules of the game are enforced by referees, at say the managerial level. Further more, the sporting league itself sets and adjusts the rules to determine the nature of the game itself at the strategic level. Control from the top down is indirect and not entirely rigid, but still exists. But of course, all the focus remains on the athletes. Or referees. Rarely ever the league itself. The more the league wants to influence how the game is played the more attention they will bring on themselves. Leveraging their power comes at the cost of their incognito status. So often they will not change the rules directly, but change the way in which referees enforce them.

Not everyone is in on it, and those who are do not control everything. Nor do they necessarily share the same motivations. But the game is set up in such a way as to ensue that at least a few critical outcomes serving a collective vested interest are met. And these outcomes can be reached in any number of ways through how things play out below in the managerial and operational tiers. The substance of the game remains the same even if the consistency of the form in which plays is flux.

The economic game being played here is a cyclical and often conceptualised as a wave. Investors trying to figure out, guess, or know when to start paddling onto it and when to get off before it crashes.

The way the business is moving now, you really have to learn to surf the wave

But this wave is generated by a wave-pool not the ocean. Because the modern business cycle isn't one governed by the moon, but by financial institutions more aligned with Saturn. With the Kaaba. The Blackstone.

The aim of the economic crisis cycle is to gradually create a society where human behaviour, as an aggregate defined by culture, becomes controlled through rental agreements which moderate access to the material goods and services required to fulfil human needs. A similar thing was attempted in the twentieth century using consumerism, which was the control of human desires, or things people think they need but don't. These rental agreements will allow corporations to control the social aspects of societies historically controlled by communities. They want to control this because communities govern a person's internal controls, or what are more commonly known as responsibilities. A responsibility is the self-enforcement of one's own behaviour so that they can be accepted by others. A person does this because it allows them to fulfil their social needs through the establishment and maintenance of interpersonal relationships.

The notion of a social contract has led to confusion over what the nature of responsibilities are. Responsibilities are nothing other than what people are compelled to exchange with others to meet their human needs. People form relationships to fulfil needs, and implicit in these relationships are responsibilities they must meet. This is what a therapist will charge thousands to explain to couples with relationship issues. They'll make the couple conscious of the nature of their relationship by helping them to openly recognise the exchange of responsibilities for needs between, so that these can be brought into an agreed upon balance that is mutually recognised by both as beneficial. The social contract purports people have a responsibility to society, but they don't. Because people only have responsibilities to their communities. One could argue that communities have responsibilities to their society, but not the individuals within those communities. The social contract is actually aimed at destroying communities as it's totalitarian in nature. Because an individual who fulfilled their social human needs at the societal level, would be living in one universal community governed by the State.

Anyhow, control of social responsibilities are to be transferred from communities to corporations, through rental agreements, because the only alternative to controlling human behaviour through social responsibility, is through the use of external control. This is the use of force like police force or military force. But the use of external control is unsustainable as it creates political instability, in things such as revolution, a pattern human civilisation attests to, and one readily recognised by the think tank philosophers charged with crafting future models for stable governance in an ever more unstable industrial society.

Corporation control of individual social responsibilities is also being achieved through a dialectic on the ideological front. Both left and right now work together in different ways to destroy the only two things standing between them and complete corporate control, community and government. If the left successfully destroys communities, and the right successfully destroys government, what will remain are corporations and socially naked individuals.

The extent to which this process is already underway can be observed in modern phenomenons like cancel culture. Cancel culture is corporate governance of human behaviour controlled through careful curation of the corporate news cycle.

As confusing as the financial system has become, it is still remains easy to understand at a macro level. As its function is the hallmark of many civilisations that declined, most notably classical Roman. It is simply the process of supplementing quality for more quantity. That is, to achieve further growth, financial institutions have reduced the quality of loans given to increase the quantity of them made. Many complex mechanisms have been invented to achieve this, but there is no need to know the intricacies of these alien financial techniques, such as mortgages broken into bonds packaged into Mortgage-Backed Securities(MBS) arranged as Collateralised-Debt-Obligations(CDOs) hedged with Credit-Default-Swaps(CDSs), all placed as assets inside of Real-Estate-Investment-Trusts (REITs)making up the assets of Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs)floated onto the stock market. All this hookuspookus is just a means of hiding a reduction in the quality of loans given. So a simple mortgage becomes an MBS(CDO(CDS))-REIT-ETF. What this aims to achieve is a debt based stimulus of perpetual growth which equates to a cancer economy. Because that is what we have.

If or when your body dies of cancer, it will be because your cells have grown too big for your body's complex system of organs, nerves, and muscle to sustain growth of them any longer. Modern financial institutions are like these parasitic cancer cells growing within the body—the planet's body. And these cancer cells spread by increasing the quantity of loans they give to other cells, which they use to absorb them. As they keep getting bigger they extract more and more resources to grow, until they've grown so large that the entire system collapses and the body dies, taking with it the personality, spirit, soul - what have you. This is what is meant by, all things growing only grow towards their death.

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Consolidation of Financial Institutions

The first of the three aims of the modern economic cycle has been to consolidate the financial sector into an oligopoly of institutions 'too big to fail'. That this has happened over the past fifty yeats is a fact.

From 1934-1987, the total number of commercial banks in the United States remained steadily between 13,000-14,500. Since 1986 the total number of commercial banks have been reduced from 14,027 to 4,377 in 2020³.

Since 1984 the total number of savings and loans banks have been reduced from 3,550 to 627 in 2020⁴.

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Consolidation of Assets within Financial Institutions

The second aim has been to consolidate the legal control of assets within this oligopoly of financial institutions 'too big to fail'. That this has happened for the past fifty years is a fact.

As it currently stands in 2022, four New York based financial institutions legally control US$147.9 Trillion worth of assets through custodianship. That is not a typo – Trillion.

$147.9 Trillion

$147.9 Trillion

$147.9 Trillion

$147.9 Trillion

• BNY Mellon, US$45.3 trillion in assets under custody and/or administration as of September 30, 2021⁵

• State Street, US$43.3 trillion in assets under custody as of September 30, 2021⁶

• JPMorganChase, $31.3 trillion in assets under custody as of the September 30, 2021⁷

• Citibank, over $28 trillion in assets under custody as of 2021⁸

This fantastic sum is the upstream aggregate amount of assets managed by mutual funds such as Vanguard and BlackRock, which they themselves only account for a small portion of. BlackRock's assets under management(AUM) have risen from $2.7 billion in 1989 to over $10 Trillion in 2022⁹. While Vanguard's AUM has gone from $1.8 Billion in 1975 to $7.2 Trillion in 2021¹⁰. The relationship between these mutual funds and custodian banks will be made quite clear later on. The nature of this relationship has always been covered in another stand alone article from this site, The separation of control from ownership.

The capital used to acquire most of this came from corporate and government debt. Which is to say, it came from the future. One in which has become the present we are living in' in 2022.

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Expansion of the money supply

The following chart shows the expansion of the US money supply, also worlds' foreign exchange reserve currency, since 1975. The use of this chart had to be discontinued in May of 2020 because the US Federal Reserve stimulated the economy so much that charting the money supply became pornographic.

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Decline of Middle Class Wealth

In lockstep with these economic developments real wage growth began to decline during the 1970s.

Household savings as a % of income started to dip.

And the disparity in wealth talked about so much these days started to follow all these trends in the 1980s.

These macro trends are very clear. They are confluent from the 1970s onward, but these graphs only account for what has been happening quantitatively. They do not account for the qualitative decline in goods and services since then. Qualitative decline comes from the use of such things as GMO foods, microplastics, chemical fertilisers etc. and other much synthetic methods of achieving artificial growth through supplementing the quality of something for more quantities of it. In the case of foods, chemical farming has been used to increase crop yields at the cost of reducing the nutritional value of crops. The human need for food is found in its nutritional value. More food of less nutritional value does not necessarily equal more food. But as far as technocrats are concerned, it is more food on a bar graph, which means it can be considered growth. And growth is good. Even if this growth is cancer caused by Monsanto roundup.

Now, the reason growth by any means has become necessary is because growth is the only way to stabilise prices in an economy where the money supply is being perpetually expanded. By this is meant, an increase in the quantity of goods and services produced and sold to consumers who have more money to spend it on. This is why there is a growth rate and an inflation rate. In theory, the growth rate is meant to offset the inflation rate. And the inflation rate is meant to increase the growth rate.

The inflationary effects on prices from perpetual expansion of the money supply can only be contained through perpetual expansion of goods and services. This being growth. If growth stagnates, the prices of goods & services will start to inflate. So growth is forever trying to keep up with inflation of the money supply to keep the price inflation of goods and services stabilised. But these 'rates', the inflation rate and growth rate, they are juked. And the modern economy, what many have believed to be an American dream, is just creative bookkeeping everyone is slowly waking up from.
The inflationary effects on prices from perpetual expansion of the money supply can only be contained through perpetual expansion of goods and services. This being growth. If growth stagnates, the prices of goods & services will start to inflate. So growth is forever trying to keep up with inflation of the money supply to keep the price inflation of goods and services stabilised. But these 'rates', the inflation rate and growth rate, they are juked. And the modern economy, what many have believed to be an American dream, is just creative bookkeeping everyone is slowly waking up from. Because real growth is not perpetual, it eventually becomes synthetic growth. Synthetic growth is not perpetual either, as it comes at the cost of diluting quality and often wastage which pollutes the environment, things which in fact minimise the human needs growth is meant to serve. The shift from growth to synthetic growth is the extent to which the quality of a good or service can be supplemented for more quantities of it. For instance. You can make one hundred glasses of orange juice from one by simply watering it down, but at a certain point the substance you are creating becomes orange juice in name only. It will no longer contain the delicious vitamins we seek from it. Because the geniuses at the orange juice corporation supplemented a human need for vitamin for a human desire for sugar.

If pure quantitative growth is good, then cancer is good. Because that is what cancer is. Redundant growth inside your body taxing your organs. And this is what has been created, a cancer economy to soak up the expansion of the money supply with, literally in some cases, cancerous goods and services.

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Modern Real Estate Finance

The money supply began to be substantially expanded in the 1970s. Real middle class wealth started to decline since the 1970s. Financial institutions have been consolidated since the1970s. And legal control of private property, commercial and residential, has been consolidated within these since the 1970s.

This is a confluence of four phenomenons(Consolidation of financial institutions, Consolidation of assets within them, Expansion of money supply, Decline of middle class wealth) over the same period of time. They are easily observable through at least data and everyone can agree they are happening. If these four trends continue the logical endpoint is a corporate state governed by financial institutions. One could argue we are already there, but it truly arrives once it becomes openly acknowledged.

However there is rarely any meaningful explanation given by anyone being listened to as to why this is happening, let alone how it is happening. It isn't good enough to explain this process away as simply the capitalist system at work. This kind of shallow analysis, generally offered by those with an ideological axe to grind, falls flat and into an agenda more interested in offering up solutions to problems it demonstrates little understanding of. The intention of this essay is to do the opposite. Provide some understanding of the problem and offer no solutions. There is no gold or bitcoin position to sell you on, and whichever way you cast your vote won't resolve much of anything. Good solutions arise from understanding problems, not by knowing that there are problems. Which is precisely why most people are kept bamboozled when it comes to economic matters, and economic concepts in general. Financial punditry makes Up seem as if its Down, Down seem as if its Up. They shuffle the definitions of words around until financial categories lose all meaning, so that the assets within them can lose value and still be sold to pension funds.

Everything in finance in one way or another eventually takes on an ulterior motive. This is because money is the universal exchange commodity that has a relationship with all other commodities. Through it, everything can effect everything else. So everything done with money can be done in such a way as to provide those doing it plausible deniability. This is why financial institutions always manage to benefit from ostensibly always fucking up. But this would suggest they aren't fucking up. There is also a concerted effort to obfuscate the on-going operations within the financial sector through use of unnecessarily complex jargon, often changed decade to decade or even year to year. Basic concepts like a home loan, gets turned into a bond, which becomes twisted into mortgage-backed securities, that are then collateralised debt obligations, further more exchange traded funds of collateralised debt obligations, and all kinds of derivative acronyms. But all this can be divided into three categories.

Mortgage	This is a debtor to creditor relation between a property owner and a bank. Generally well understood.
Mortgage Bonds	When a bank divides a mortgage into lots of little mortgages, called bonds, it then sells on to investors who want to profit off little pieces of the interest rate. This is a 1-to-many debtor to creditor relation between a property owner and investors involving a middle man between the two to represent the bondholders.
Mortgage Backed Securities	When multiple mortgages are bundled together and then bonds of these bundles are sold.
Financial Derivatives	These are what confuse most people, and they are specifically designed to do this. The reason they are designed to do this is because if people understood what them, they wouldn't lose money trying to profit off them. To put it very simply, in most cases you can think of financial derivatives as pieces of a bad mortgage the creditor wants to sell to someone else before the debtor defaults on it.

The vital thing to observe between these three types of mortgage relations is the progressive detachment of the creditor from the real asset backing the mortgage.

A mortgage is directly backed by a piece of property, so if the debtor defaults the creditor gets the asset. Simple right.

But a bond isn't backed by the piece of property, it's backed by the mortgage on that piece of property. By this is meant, if a creditor has a bond and the debtor defaults, the creditor does not get the property because they are one of possibly thousands of creditors who all have bonds on the mortgage to that property, and the property cannot be cut up into thousands of tiny pieces and portioned out. What all these creditors have are beneficial ownership rights to the interest payments on the mortgage, or in some cases the profits from the sale of the property should the debtor default. But this means if the debtor defaults the creditors position will often times be negotiated by a middle man. Often times this middleman will not be operating in the bondholder's best interests.

It doesn't stop here though. These bonds can be packaged into all kinds of complex arrangements called mortgage-backed securities. From these are then created all kinds of financial derivatives. For example, there is the derivative called a Real Estate Investment Trust, or REITS, is a bunch of mortgage-backed securities making up the assets held by a company selling shares of itself on the stock market. Those shares can then pay dividends, which are based of the interest payments generated by the mortgages held by the company.

There is no need for it to be this confusing though, even if buying stock for dividends based on the speculative value of someone else's mortgage on a house owned by someone else is confusing. Really what is happening is the creditor is becoming one step further removed from the underlying asset purchased by the debtor using the initial mortgage. By doing this the quality of loans can be reduced and the quantity of them given can be increased because the creditors have been so far removed from the debtors they have no idea who they are lending money to.

Think of it like this. . .

Asset → Mortgage → Creditor (no middle-men)

Asset → Mortgage → Bond → Creditor (now 1 middle-men)

Asset → Mortagage → Bond → Mortgage-backed Security → Creditor (now 2 middle-men)

Asset → Mortagage → Bond → Mortgage-backed Security → REIT → Creditor (now 3 middle-men)

At each step there is a middle man sucking away value. Until some poor fuck called a retail investor, someone who doesn't have enough money to invest in real property, invests in 'real' estate stocks. In many cases these poor fucks don't even buy them, their pension fund does without their knowledge. Then, when something like 2008 comes along, their savings disappear.

A mortgage-backed security is kind of like a Non Fungible Token, or NFT, only not so far detached from reality. If you don't know what an NFT is, it is nothing. So imagine an NFT, only the value is backed by beneficial ownership rights to part of a mortgage on something. Which really just demonstrates what an NFT is, a nothing-backed security. Not even paper with beneficial ownership rights to vaguely something. Only the actual paper itself. Like a little gold star teachers stick on children to make them feel distinguished. And children grow out of this in kindergarten once they learn these stickers can be purchased in bulk from a dollar store. Hence the shift to report cards.

The rest of this essay covers the three crisis cycles as iterations in a broader economic conspiracy perpetrated by a coalition of Rockefeller associated financial institutions. And finally how these integrate into what has been happening since March of 2020, and the creation of new Environmental, Social, Governance institutes.

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The First Cycle: 1970-1990

Abolishment of the Gold Standard

In August 1971 a small contingent of advisors met secretly with Richard Nixon at Camp David and persuaded him to abruptly abolish the gold standard as it applied to US dollars on the foreign exchange market. This devaluation of the US dollar led to a decrease in the real income of OPEC oil producers.

''In 1970, slightly more than 10 barrels of oil would purchase an ounce of gold.8 By the next year, when the Bretton Woods agreement ended, with gold priced at $42 and oil fixed in terms of U.S. dollars at $3.56, oil sellers needed nearly 12 barrels of oil to buy an ounce of gold. This “real” oil price decline, and general worldwide inflattion did not go unnoticed in the oil-producing countries. In 1971, OPEC built in a 2.5 percent annual inflation factor by which to adjust the nominal (U.S. dollar) price of oil. Yet, by mid-1973, nearly 34 barrels of oil were required to buy an ounce of gold. In little more than two years, the gold price of oil had fallen by more than 70 percent, and the oil price of gold had risen by almost 200 percent.'' ¹¹

In response OPEC raised the dollar price of oil, which in turn caused a trickle down effect of rapid price inflation for goods and services across the broader American economy during the 1970s.

''On January 1, 1974, OPEC raised the U.S. dollar price of oil from $4.31 to $10.11, producing the first dramatic price shock. After this increase, the “gold price” of oil (at 12.8 barrels per ounce of gold) was back within its historical range. For the rest of the decade, including the second dramatic price rise in 1979, the gold price of oil stayed within its historical range. At the end of the decade, 14 barrels of oil exchanged for an ounce of gold, well within its historical range but with a “real” price approximately 25 percent lower than at the beginning of the decade.'' ¹²

An oil cartel price gauging operation orchestrated by the 'nefarious' Arabs of OPEC is generally blamed for the inflationary crisis of the 1970s in pop-history, but this is untrue. It was Nixon's decoupling of the US dollar from gold on foreign exchange markets that compelled OPEC to hike their oil prices in response.

Two of the primary advisers who attended that consequential meeting at Camp David were Peter G. Peterson, Presidential advisor on international economic affairs, and Paul Volcker, Undersecretary of the Treasury for international monetary affairs. Also in attendance was Secretary of the Treasury and former Texas governor John Connally. Connally was riding in the motorcade when JFK's head went back and to the left and was the same governor who got that 'magic bullet' lodged in him. In fact, if there is a clear cut genesis to all the economic developments to be outlined here, it could be argued it began with the end of the Kennedy administration. When LBJ took over all the new dealers were purged and replaced with the Henry Kissinger types, then people started to receive all kinds of new credit cards in the mail.

Connally is generally pointed to as a primary influence behind Nixon's decision. But the man was a career politician, and before that time he had been in the Navy. So it's hard to believe any economic policy position he held would've been his own, as opposed to that of say, his under secretary Volcker. Further more, there's evidence Connally was taking policy directions directly from Peter Peterson on how to go about abolishing the gold standard.

An October 26 1971 memo from Peter Peterson to Secretary Connally on administration strategy noted:

''The surcharge provides little leverage against France, and France does not abhor the trade wars and bloc formation which could develop. We can therefore achieve an effective French revaluation only by devaluing the dollar... . The United States should agree to devalue the dollar against gold by 5% to 8% if the following monetary conditions are met: 1. Simultaneous revaluations of at least 10% by Japan and 5% by Germany, leading to effective exchange rate changes of at least 15%-18% for Japan; 10%-13% for Germany; and 5%-8% for France, Italy, Britain (hopefully)'' ¹³

Connally merely ratified the decisions made by Volcker and Peterson, who acted as an information authority to him regarding the policy position to abolish the gold standard.

The reason behind for policy, at least ostensibly, was to devalue the US dollar to attract foreign investment to sure up domestic production, which meant more jobs. This was how it was sold to Nixon, a job creation vote winner.

''In addition, the administration focused on export promotion. Peter Peterson, an adviser on international economic policy in the White House, focused attention on U.S. competitiveness and the number of jobs created by additional exports. The notion that a lower foreign exchange value of the dollar could create jobs in traded goods industries, to the political benefit of the administration, was widely discussed within the administration.
With this trade policy backdrop, and with U.S. gold reserves at increasing risk due to the growing accumulation of dollars abroad, the Nixon administration began preparing for changes in the international monetary system. Paul Volcker, the Undersecretary of Treasury for Monetary Affairs, headed an interagency planning group to prepare for the possible closure of the gold window and other actions to persuade foreign countries to adjust their exchange rates. Although it would constitute a big change in policy, closing the gold window was relatively straightforward to implement and would immediately end concerns about the loss of U.S. gold reserves. '' ¹⁴

Paul Volcker was a Harvard grad who had spent time as a research assistant with the New York Fed in the 1940s. It appears he had initially taken up the Austrian school of economics in his senior thesis, but got a Rotary scholarship to study at the London School of Economics in 1951 after he graduated, probably to school him on a more Keynesian outlook. After that he returned to the New York Fed full time before going to work for the Rockefeller's Chase Manhattan in the 1960s. By the time Volcker had entered Nixon's treasury department in 1969 he had spent the better part of two decades inside of Rockefeller institutions. He would go on to become a member of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), Chairman of the Federal Reserve, and gain a bunch of other neo-peerages bestowed upon those made by and loyal to the Rockefeller family. For most of his career he would play the part of an inflation hawk, perched atop the Federal Reserve putting an end to business cycles by hiking interest rates. But back in 1971 he was behind the most inflationary economic policy of the 20th century.

''In 1971, Mr. Volcker played a key role in persuading Nixon to suspend the Bretton Woods agreement by closing the “gold window,” meaning the United States would no longer guarantee the value of the dollar.'' ¹⁵

''On Friday afternoon at Camp David, the president and his advisers met to discuss the proposed Treasury package. Federal Reserve chairman Burns strongly opposed closing the gold window, but this position received no support. Volcker recalled that “the only really active debate about the program was over the import surcharge. As I remember it, the discussion largely was a matter of the economists against the politicians, and the outcome wasn’t really close. I think the president had been convinced that it was both an essential negotiating tactic and a way to attract public support'' ¹⁶

Peter G. Peterson had graduated from the Chicago Graduate School of Business in 1951 where met George Schultz, the school's Dean at the time. After a few years in the private sector at the Bell&Howell corporation, Peterson was appointed chairman of the Commission on Foundations and Private Philanthropy in 1969. It was a private study group put together by John D. Rockefeller III to advise Congress on whether private philanthropic organisations should be taxed ¹⁷. The Peterson Commission as it came to be known, found that in fact oligarch owned philanthropic foundations should not be taxed, and who was Congress to argue with the experts? And who are we today? It was through Schultz that Peterson was pulled into the Rockefeller orbit. Schultz was apart of the Peterson commission while also serving within the Office of Management and Budget at the time. After Peterson's commission had secured the Rockefeller Foundation its tax exemptions, Schultz brought him into the Nixon administration as a Presidential economic advisor in 1971, and only months before that infamous Camp David meeting in August. During his brief tenure Peterson swiftly gained an apparent reputation as am “economic Kissenger” ¹⁸. Schultz had accompanied Peterson to the Camp David meeting, and both men moved into the Treasury Department together for a brief period in following year of '72 to oversee in the initial implementation of devaluing the US dollar.

Putting aside the justification of this policy given by Peterson and Volcker at the time, we know that the effects of it compelled OPEC nations to raise their oil prices, which then trickled down into hyper-inflationary prices for goods and services. So the interesting question becomes whether Peterson and Volcker knew what they were doing. And if they did know, why did they do it? It's hard to believe the effect on the price of oil hadn't been factored in given oil was, and still is, the kernel commodity of industrial society. At the very least it is reasonable to conclude that the way in which gold was decoupled from the US dollar was responsible for inducing 1970s hyper-inflation, and that these two men were most responsible.

And the response to this inflationary crisis became that of another. The Savings & Loans crisis of the 1980s.

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The Savings and Loan Crisis

In August of 1979 Paul Volcker was appointed Chairman of the US Federal Reserve and began to raise interest rates to suppress the price inflation of goods and services. The relationship between interest rates and prices is through the availability of cheap credit, or bank loans. If interest rates are low more people take out loans to buy things. These things raise in price because more people are buying them. This means higher prices. Inversely, raising interest rates mean less people take out loans to buy things. This means less things are being bought which means lower prices. This is a theory alot of people play around with though, and granted, there are more moving parts to the economy than the supply of credit.

Interest rate hikes happen at the central banking level through fund rates or discount windows. These determine the interest rates at which retail banks borrow money, which in turn should trickle down into the rates they give the general public. Though this is not always true. The central bank rates are the ones being discussed here, as they are centralised and easy to monitor for overall trends in the cost of credit. The trickle down effects of them vary however.

When Volcker became Chairman interest rates had already been hiked to 11%. For two years he incrementally raised interest rates to fluctuate between 10-20%, mostly on the high end of that spectrum. Then in 1982 he began to lower them.¹⁹. This had a deflationary effect on the prices of goods and services, as was the ostensible intention. However, in doing this Volcker had also caused savings and loans banks(S&Ls) to develop what is known as an asset-liability mismatch. This happened because the rate of interest banks were lending at became substantially lower than the rate of interest they had been borrowing at. On account of this S&Ls banks were haemorrhaging money.

What had been a jobs crisis in 1970 quickly became an inflationary crisis and eventually a banking liquidity(this means avaliable cash) crisis by 1980.

To remedy the liquidity crisis Congress were advised to deregulate the S&L industry to help generate more money for themselves. This was achieved through two pieces of legislation::

• The Depository Institutions Deregulation and Monetary Control Act of 1980
• The Garn–St. Germain Depository Institutions Act of 1982

What happened next was the Savings & Loans Crisis of the 1980s. But calling it this is misleading because it was really a commercial real estate scam. An independent journalist(this is back when they existed) called Rob Widdowson provided a very thorough and easy to understand explanation of the S&L crisis on the community cable network show Alternative views in 1990, not long prior to him becoming a fugitive for manufacturing a slightly altered version of MDMA called Heaven. Here are the audio files of those episodes.

AV Ep 410 Savings and Loans Stolen Looted
AV Ep 422 Savings and Loans Update
AV Ep 423 Savings and Loans Update 2

What this deregulation did was increase the amount of commercial loans banks could make and increased the proportion of assets that banks could hold in residential and commercial real estate. Then in March of '82 Volcker at Fed began to lower interest rates incrementally from 15% down to around 8%, where they hovered throughout most of the mid-80s ²⁰.

What deregulation of S&L industry did was increase the amount of commercial loans these banks could make and increase the portion of assets they could hold as residential and commercial real estate. Then in March of 1982 Volcker at the Fed started to lower interest rate, down incrementally from 15% to around 8%. This confluence of low rates of interest and deregulated lending practises led to an outflow of cheap credit to property developers, such as Donald Trump, who used it to buy up large swathes of commercial real estate. This created lots of commercial property mortgages along with a commercial real estate bubble between the years of 1982 until and 1985.

During these three years there was no actual increase in the demand for commercial property. Demand had been manufactured entirely on the supply side. And at some point these properties needed to be leased to a tenant or purchased by an owner occupier. But since there was no actual demand, they couldn't be sold or leased once they had been developed, and due to this started to become liabilities through their carrying costs of maintenance and management fees plus property taxes.

Because of this property developers, such as Donald Trump, started to default on the loans used to purchase commercial property around about 1985, and the S&L banks which held the mortgages on these began to acquire them through foreclosure. However, the banks couldn't sell these properties either because there was still no REAL demand for them. So the banks had really just acquired the burden of having to pay for the upkeep and taxes on all these empty buildings.

It wasn't long before the FSCIC, the insurance fund banks pay into for rainy days like this, had been completely drained and the S&L banks were becoming insolvent. Which meant they would no longer be able to account for the money in their depositor accounts. It simply wasn't there.

In response, the government started to liquidate these insolvent banks by paying off their depositors using taxpayer funds in exchange for acquiring their assets, which of course were largely made up of foreclosed commercial properties.

Some S&L banks managed to avoid or postpone insolvency by getting the commercial properties off their books through selling the mortgages on them to wall street banks, who had then been bundling them into mortgage-backed security packages, which had then been sold on to private or retail investors. Now, why would private buyers agree to bulk purchase the interest bearing mortgage bonds on defaulting commercial properties? Because the government started to guarantee the payment of interest on them through the publicly owned corporations of Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae and Ginnie Mae. Which is to say, private businessmen were used to funnelled these terrible commercial property mortgages from wall street banks back onto government books by making these defaulting commercial mortgage-backed security bonds into what were effectively US Treasury bonds.

To summerise this process thus far.:

• 1980-1982 Legislation deregulated S&L banks and the Federal Reserve lowered interest rates. This allowed S&L banks to make lots of commercial property loans
• 1982-1985 Property developers took advantage of this by taking out lots of loans to buy and develop commercial property. This created a commercial property bubble.
• 1985 Because there was no demand for these properties, the developers could not sell or rent them after they had been developed, and began to default on the mortgages used to acquire and develop them.
• 1985 The S&L banks who owned these mortgages started to foreclose on them, which in turn rendered them insolvent because they couldn't sell or rent these properties either.
• 1985-1988 The US government started to liquidate these insolvant banks to pay off their depositors, and in the process acquired all the commercial real estate that had been foreclosed on.

If this story sounds familiar it's because the same thing happened again in 2008, only with residential property. More recently a similar same scam has been going on in China since 2008, only with entire cities. Which is why China's largest property developer, Evergrande, is in the process of going bust ²¹.

By 1989 the US government had become the largest commercial real estate holder in the United States, and the government agency charged with managing it all was called the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, FDIC. And it was here, in the wake of the S&L crisis, the Blackstone Group and its progeny BlackRock Inc. began to emerge as the new dominant financial institutions of the 21st century.

The Blackstone Group

After advising Nixon to abolish the gold standard back in 1971, Peter G. Peterson had left the administration for the private sector in 1973 where he joined Lehman Brothers. There he became both Chairman and CEO and met Stephen A. Schwarzman, another executive at the firm. Both men left together to found the Blackstone Group in 1985.

It was during Blackstone's founding year of 1985 Peter Peterson had also been handpicked by David Rockefeller to succeed him as Chairman of The Council on Foreign Relations, a position Rockefeller had held for the preceding fifteen years. ²². And Peterson's connections to the Rockefeller family don't stop there. He was trustee of the Rockefeller Japan Society, sat on the board of the Rockefeller family's Museum of Modern Art, and would eventually end up as Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The point being made here is crucial. . .Rockefeller, Rockefeller, Rockefeller, Rockefeller. . .Peter Peterson was a Rockefeller agent. The Blackstone private equity group he founded was a Rockefeller institution. Now, if one were insist on an unrealistic burden of proof for such a contention, such as substantive evidence found in the paperwork of controlling rights, then of course I would be shit out of luck. This statement could be normalised somewhat, by saying the Blackstone Group is rather an emergent institution of the Rockefeller family legacy, a legacy since disbursed into a fractured power array of confused estate holding between innocuous heirs. But this wouldn't be precise, as it sows doubt as to whether the Blackstone group was a Rockefeller institution. And historical evidence combined with reasonable intuition would suggest that the Blackstone Group was a Rockefeller financial institution.

The groups co-founder Stephen Schwarzman has less extensive ties to the Rockefeller faimly. Though he does live in David Rockefeller Jr's former NY residence.²³, The groups co-founder Stephen Schwarzman has less extensive ties to the Rockefeller faimly. Though he does live in David Rockefeller Jr's former NY residence, and is a man with an interesting history of his own.

Schwarzman graduated from Yale class of 1969 as a member of quasi-secretive Skull & Bones soceity. He would've been initiated into that society as a neophyte by the fifteen or so members of the graduating class above him, that of 1968 which included none other than George W. Bush ²⁴. After Yale he attended Harvard business school and graduated in 1972. He joined Lehman Brothers the exact same year as Peterson in 1973, where he remained until he joined Peterson, who was his boss at Lehman's, in founding his Blackstone venture.

The Blackstone Group had been initially founded as a mergers and acquisitions consultancy firm, but it had quickly pivoted into private equity through a suspiciously well timed fundraiser of capital in the lead up to the 1987 stock market crash²⁵. Blackstone had timed these fundraising activities so perfectly they had concluded them the very day before the black monday crash occured on October 19th.

''After a carpet-bombing campaign of 488 solicitation letters, Peterson and Schwarzman eventually raised $635 million, closing the initial fundraising the day before the stock market crashed in October 1987. As Milken's money machine proceeded to break down, hundreds of junk-bond-laden thrifts were put into receivership. When the government's Trust Corp. started auctioning off billions in troubled assets, Schwarzman & Co. was flush and ready to buy. It began snapping up dozens of apartment buildings in places like Arkansas and Texas. Blackstone's real estate business was born out of the S&L crisis.''

To help with Blackstone's pivot into private equity Peterson and Schwartzman had brought over another former Lehman Brothers executive, Roger Altman, in 1987.

Altman had worked worked with Peterson in the 1970s but left Lehman Brother's in 1978 for a role as Assistant Secretary for Domestic Finance within the US Treasury under Jimmy Carter. While there the two major pieces of legislation deregulating the banks had been formulated, though there is no evidence of a direct connection between him and this. However, Altman did go back into the Treasury under the Clinton after his time at Blackstone to take control of the Resolution Trust Corporation(RTC). To understand the significance of this more must be said about the fallout of the S&L crisis.

By the end of the 1980s the US government had become the largest holder of commercial property in the United States, and this had placed them, or the American taxpayer if you will, in quite a precarious position. On one hand the government needed to get rid of these assets because their carrying costs, that is, the on-going costs of maintaining them, made holding onto them a liability. But on the other hand, if they got rid of these properties by dumping them back onto the open market, the market would collapse even more than it already had from an excess of supply, which would likely drag the US economy into a depression. This because the price of property had all kinds of externality effects due to the amount of financial mechanisms pegged to them though creative bookkeeping practises.

The part of the government in charge of managing these commercial properties was the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, or FDIC. What it had started to do with these properties was auction them off in bulk packages at extremely discounted prices to private equity firms, such as Blackstone, which in turn would agree not to dump them back onto the market for a certain period. However, these private equity firms were actually selectively purchasing only the good assets the FDIC had acquired from insolvent banks at these discount prices. Which meant all the bad commercial property, which was actually what the government should've been trying to get rid of, was left on government books to burn a hole in taxpayer pockets. Which is where Larry Fink and BlackRock Inc. enter the picture.

Larry Fink

Fink begun his career at First Boston in 1976 as a bond trader, but swiftly shifted over into the emerging market of mortgage-backed securities, where he became a pioneer of the kinds of debt-securitisation that has plagued the economic landscape ever since. He joined Blackstone in 1988 as the head of a new department called Blackstone Financial Management (BFM). His department was injected with $5 million in seed capital by Peterson and Schwartzman and its personnel was made up of Fink's former asset management team at First Boston which he had brought over with him.

In 1989 'The Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery, and Enforcement Act' was signed into law by George H. W. Bush, who had served alongside Peterson within Nixon Administration back in 1971, and whose son, George W. Bush, had initiated Schwarzman into the Skull&Bones society in 1968.

The act was ostensibly a regulatory response to what had occurred in the S&L industry during the 1980s, but it was also a poison pill which tacitly privatised FDIC operations. While at the same time it created new government agency called the Resolution Trust Corporation, or RTC.

That year Larry Fink's Blackstone Financial Management won a contract to become an asset manager of the FDIC holdings. This meant Fink and his department took control of the commercial properties acquired by the government from the bank bailouts. BFM started to auction these assets off on behalf of the government, in some instances to Blackstone which it worked for, which was then acquiring them auction.

''Fink started the advisory business in 1988, almost literally in the ashes of First Boston. His first client was a savings-and- loan institution, an industry he knew well. With help from the major Wall Street firms, including First Boston, the S&L industry had expanded too rapidly and made poor investments. By the late 80s, the industry was on the verge of failure, and one of Fink’s next clients was the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. Until the Resolution Trust Corporation was established, the F.D.I.C. hired him to manage the assets of S&Ls that had been taken over by the government. ''

The Resolution Trust Corporation had been created as a parallel agency to the FDIC to assist in the disposal of government owned commercial property holdings. It fell beneath the control of the FDIC until 1992, so it can be treated synonymously for its first three years of life.²⁸.

''At the beginning of 1989, the FDIC held $9.3 billion in failed bank assets. By the end of 1989, the FDIC was managing the disposition of $25.9 billion in assets from failed institutions, a substantial increase over 1988.''

''On August 9, 1989, the RTC assumed control of 262 insolvent thrift associations with total assets of $115.3 billion and which had been in conservatorship. During the months that remained in 1989, 56 additional thrifts with total assets of $26.4 billion were placed into the RTC's conservatorship program for a total of 318 thrifts. The RTC resolved 37 institutions with total assets at the time of resolution of $10.8 billion during that period. A total of 281 thrifts remained in conservatorship at the end of the year. Those 281 thrifts had a total asset book value of $104.9 billion as of December 31, 1989.''

What the RTC and FDIC were doing was slowly disposing of all the good assets at highly discounted prices. Instead of say, auctioning off individual assets at prices individual buyers would pay, they bundled multiple assets into asset packages, which they then sold at a bulk discount price, though this price would still be high enough to restrict prospective buyers to institutional investment funds like Blackstone. Eventually, after this had been done, they would then, and only then, start disposing of all the bad stuff, which of course would increase the value of all the good stuff already sold. More on this later.

''Democrats and Republicans in Congress say Patriot was offered exceptionally generous terms, such as a seven-year no-interest loan, that could come at the expense of taxpayers who already have paid $80 billion for the bailout. Private real estate brokers charge that other buyers were willing to pay more for individual properties than Patriot.
Details of the package sale agreement, announced in August, still are being worked out. Its fate takes on added importance because RTC, the federal agency created to manage the S&L bailout, wants to package other bundles of property worth hundreds of millions of dollars to expedite the sale of property from failed S&Ls. The agency said generous terms were necessary to move large numbers of properties, which include hard-to-sell assets.''

Stock Market Crash of 1987

In the 1980s automated computer trading was just starting to take off. The financial firms using these trading algorithms effectively started to indirectly synchronise their trading strategies, like a cartel of sorts. Since they were all using the same software, certain market events triggering this software would initiate massive buyups or selloffs. As a result on November 19 1987 these algorithms for some reason triggered a massive and unexpected stock selloff, which instigated the black monday crash on November 19th. After the crash occurred the stock exchanges responded by taking these automated trading system offline ³². These days BlackRock's proprietary trading software Aladdin is used ubiquitously across the financial sector and controls the ETF market.

The crash was also apart of a broader pattern. The stock market had plateaued after a long 1970s bullrun around 1980. It then began to inflate back up in 1982 due to the lowering of interest rates and the deregulatory acts allowing banks to increase the availability of commercial credit, much of which ended up in stocks. So a crash was looming on the horizon from the gradual retraction of this cheap credit.

The following chart shows corporate debt levels during in the 1980s. The amount of corporate debt ticks up in Q4 of 1983 and continues on this trajectory until Q3 and Q4 of 1986, when it starts to flatten out a little. This amounted to roughly a $300 Billion increase.

Major corporations don't go bankrupt anymore, yet many are insolvent. These are called zombie corporations. Because instead of bankruptcy, what we have these days is called a leveraged buyout. When a corporation becomes insolvent, instead of going bankrupt, it is acquired by another corporation using a bank loan, which is called leverage. The acquiring corporation acquires the old debt from the insolvent corporation and uses this new 'leverage' to pay off or service the old debt it has taken on.

Thus, the old debt which couldn't be paid, is paid off using a loan created from new debt which can't be paid, but with a new due date further in the future. Which means the debt is really just being transferred to the acquiring company, but with an extended due date. However, as this process continues, all the debt being acquired from these insolvent corporations begins to amass within the fewer and fewer big enough to acquire them, which in turn are becoming too big to fail. The endgame here, should it be reached, would be that all corporate debts accumulate within monolithic corporate conglomerates that have acquired all other insolvent corporations in their industry, along with their debts, yet these can never be allowed to go bankrupt, as an entire industry would collapse if they did. Thus other options would be explored.

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Second Cycle: 1990-2010

In 1992 Blackstone Financial Management separated from the Blackstone Group and became its own corporate entity called BlackRock Inc. with Larry Fink as CEO and around $17B assets under management. ³³.

That year the Resolution Trust Corporation, which had been apart of the FDIC till that point, was moved into the purview of the Treasury.

'' Various changes mandated by the enactment of the RTC Refinancing, Restructuring, and Improvement Act (RTCRRIA) of 1991 on November 27, 1991, were implemented in 1992. The changes included funding through April 1, 1992; extension of the time frame to accept appointment as conservator or receiver; establishment of the Thrift Depositor Protection Oversight Board; removal of the FDIC as exclusive manager of the RTC; and creation of the office of chief executive officer of the RTC. Pursuant to RTCRRIA, Albert V. Casey was named chief executive officer''

During the three years the RTC had been managed by FDIC contractors like Larry Fink, it had been rapidly drained of all its performing assets.

''To be sure, all is not neat and clean. Even the best estimate of RTC Chairman Albert V. Casey is that his agency will leave up to $60 billion in bad S&L assets for the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. to handle. RTC also leaves behind bitter criticism that it was too quick to sell off assets at fire sale prices to big investor groups and too harsh in liquidating troubled S&Ls.''

Roger Altman left Blackstone in 1992 to become Deputy Secretary of Treasury within the Clinton Administration, where he took control of the RTC, which had just been tranferred over from the FDIC to the Treasury.³⁶. While managing RTC assets Altman became embroiled in the infamous 'Whitewater scandal', that eventually led to his resignation in 1994. After this he founded his own private equity fund called Evercore in 1995.

''Mr. Altman's Treasury job forced on him a similar juggling of roles, but under harsher scrutiny. Early in his tenure, he took on an additional task: acting head of the Resolution Trust Corporation, which administers insolvent savings and loan associations.''

During Altman's brief two year stint he had managed to auction off 39% of the RTC's $102B assets held at the beginning of 1993.³⁸. By 1995 the RTC had been drained of almost everything except junk bonds and commercial mortgage-backed securities.

After the RTC had been transferred over to the Treausry and into the hands of Altman, it had begun to issue Commercial Mortgage Backed Securities(CMBS) using the junk bonds and subprime mortgages it had acquired from the insolvent S&L banks aswell.

''During the first two months of 1992, the RTC consummated its first manufactured housing and commercial mortgage securitizations, RTC 1992-MH1 and RTC 1992-C1, respectively. The RTC issued an internal circular requiring securitization to be the primary and priority method for selling all performing loans secured by one-to-four family homes, multi-family properties, commercial real estate, and manufactured housing contracts.''

''In 1992, the RTC used Multiple Investor Funds and N Series securitization transactions to dispose of nonperforming and subperforming loans, as well as real estate owned to a lesser extent. The benefits of those programs were access to a broader investment base than was available through other disposition strategies, a potential upside economic interest for the RTC, and a structure to ensure that asset managers' interests were parallel to those of the RTC. The RTC also developed a securitization program for nonconforming single-family mortgages, multi-family loans, and commercial real estate loans.''

In this way Altman and Fink, both former Blackstone men who had ostencibly cut ties with the group the same the RTC started to issue CMBS, began to bundle these leftover RTC assets into complex arrays of investment vehicles like Collateralised Debt Obligations, or CDOs. Doing this confused the underlying value of the individual mortgages mixed within them so that they could be sold on to passive investors paying little attention to what they buy. In conjuction with this, what are called Real Estate Investment Trusts, or REITs started to be used to get commercial real estate off the government books and back onto the market. REITs were companies created for the sole purpose of purchasing these commercial real estate holdings from the RTC and FDIC. These companies made up entirey of these property holdings were then floated onto the stock market to cover the costs of acquiring these undesirable assets.

The secondary effect of this was the commercial property market started to heat back up. Which meant the assets previously auctioned to private equity firms between the years 1988-1992 began to appreciate in value. ^40.

Put simply. The performing assets acquired by the FDIC and RTC were auctioned off to private equity groups early on. After which the non-performing assets were dumped onto the market through publicly traded real estate corporations. Buy low. Sell high. Or. . .crash markets so you can buy low, then afterwards inflate them back up so you can sell high. And this can be done if you gain control of the Federal Reserve and Treasury.

From its role in all this BlackRock had amassed $165bn AUM by 1999. Much of this was made up funds that used pension fund capital to buy the stock of the REITs being used to buy all the non-performing commercial property from the government. That year Larry Fink also launched BlackRock's IPO through Merrill Lynch in another well-timed fundraiser, reminiscent of Blackstone's in 1987, in preparation for the looming dot com crash that occurred the following year. What caused the dot com crash is fairly apparent, but what fuelled the irrational speculation was once again the expansion of easy credit made avaliable through retail banks, just as was the case in the 1980s.

In the wake of the crash Blackstone, by then under the solitary command of Schwarzman, started to buy up large chunks of corporate stock in pretty standard vulture capital activities. Peterson had left the group in the 1990s for various behind the scenes positions within policy groups surrounding the Clinton administration. Then in 2000 he was more notably appointed Chairman of the NY Fed.

In response to the market crach interest rates were incrementally cut from 6.5% down to 1% between the years 2000 and 2003. This stimulus of cheap credit into the economy combined with three legislative acts would eventually culminate in what transpired in 2007 and what followed it in 2008 as the Golbal Financial Crisis(GFC).

The first of these acts was the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999. What this did was remove a prior law that had prevented mergers and acquisitions between large financial firms. Granted, such a law had been largely ignored by the Rockefeller institutions, which granted themselves dispensation via the Federal Reserve. This was done in a 1996 merger between Chemical Bank and Chase Manhattan Bank, then again in 1998 with a merger between Citicorp and Travellers Insurance.

The second was the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000. That deregulated credit-default swaps and other financial derivatives used to pass financial liabilities onto unwitting investors. It was spearheaded by Laarry Summers who at the time was at the Treasury and was signed into law Bill Clinton. It is interesting to note both men had close ties to Jeffrey Epstein around this period.

In the 1990s financial institutions began to appoint academics rather than their own employees to positions within the Federal Reserve and Treasury to obfuscate the revolving door between these two 'government' institutions and their own. Larry Summers was a Harvard economist who later became its President after his time in the Treasury. Between 1998-2005 he was listed in the flight logs of Epstein's private plane four times, and while President of Harvard he had approved Epstein's endowment of the 'evolutionary dynamics program' which is what had placed Epstein within the orbit of other high profile academics and scientists.⁴¹.

''Indeed, Epstein shares a special connection with one of the most prominent figures at Harvard—University President Lawrence H. Summers.
Summers and Epstein serve together on the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations, two elite international relations organizations. Their friendship began a number of years ago—before Summers became Harvard’s president and even before he was the Secretary of the Treasury—and those close to Epstein say he holds the University president in very high regard. “He likes Larry Summers a lot,” Epstein’s friend and Frankfurter Professor of Law Alan M. Dershowitz says. “He speaks well of Larry, and I think he admires Larry’s economic thinking.''

Since academics like Summers didn't work in the private sector the financial institutions couldn't compensate them through direct salary. What started to happen was money began to be laundered to them through paid speeches, from which they earnt millions. This was done for Summers in 2008 as a payoff for his time in the Treasury back in 1999. The banks that paid Summers these fees were the same ones involved with MBSs and credit default swaps: Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Citigroup, and Morgan Stanley ⁴³.

Finally, the third piece of legislation was the Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001. This cut the capital gains tax on stocks and property. It also created new types of pension funds to seduce middle class savings into aggregated capital funds which could be used to buy up mortgage-backed securities and stock. Pension funds like these eventually took a trillion $ hit in 2008⁴⁴.

All this was cultivation for the ripe unregulated market mortgage-brokers would come to operate in, and which eventually culminated in the GFC. There's no need to get into the specifics of the financial directives which caused it. These were all sleight of hand. A nonsense used to shift the losses accumulated by bad lending practises, from those who made them over to middle class savings. This was realised in a number of ways, either through pension funds being wiped out, government bailouts using taxpayers money. . .or by slightly higher prices for poorer quality goods and services due to expansion of the money supply used in the bailout packages(for those MMT zealots who would deny the former contention).

Credit ratings agencies played a primary role in this too. The ratings industry had been, and still is, a private duopoly dominated by the two firm Standard & Poor's and Moody's. A much smaller firm called Finch operated as well, but had less than 10% of the market share. These privately controlled firms are extremely influential as they effectively control the rate at which governments borrow money at. And they were responsible for fraudulently rating 98% of the subprime mortgages packaged into CDOs. These ratings are the metric that allow mutual funds like BlackRock to seduce pension fund clients into investment funds made up of junk bonds.

Standard & Poor’s was controlled by the private equity firm Apollo Global Management. Apollo's founder and CEO was Leon Black who resigned this position in 2021 after business ties to Jeffrey Epstein, going back twenty five years, were made public⁴⁵. Moody's had launched an IPO of its credit ratings division in 1999 that had handed control of its credit ratings over to a number of investment funds like Berkshire Hathaway. While the smaller agency Finch was controlled directly by the Hearst family through their holding company.

To put this all together:

1. Financial directives were deregulated. Capital gains taxes were cut. Middle class savings were seduced into new kinds of pensions. Interest rates were lowered from 6.5% down to 1%.
2. Banks made credit available to people who purchased lots of homes they couldn't afford, creating lots of mortgages which would never be repaid.
3. The mortgages were packaged into mortgage-backed securities. These were then given fraudulent ratings by the credit rating agencies.
4. These mortgage-backed securities were then placed into real-estate investment funds managed by the likes of BlackRock, which then sold them on to pension funds in the form of bonds, or even stock.
5. Homeowners eventually begun to default on their mortgages. The banks foreclosed on the homes purchased with them. Then the banks became insolvent because they couldn't liquidate these and the bailouts began.

When this large scale residential property scam finally collapse in 2007, the US Treasury was under the control of two Goldman-Sachs bankers and one Harvard academic. These were Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson, former Goldman-Sachs CEO. Ass Sec of Tres Neel Kashkari, also Goldman-Sachs. And Ass Sec of Tres Phillip Swagel, a Harvard economist. Together they drafted the Emergency Economic Stabilisation Act, signed into law by George W. Bush in 2008. This act did the following things

1. Created the Troubled Asset Relief Program, TARP, an initial $800B government bailout fund.
2. Gave control of this fund to the Treasury and the NY Fed.
3. Created a new position within the Treasury called, the Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Financial Stability. Appointed to this position was Herbert M. Allison, a Vice-Chairman from Merrill Lynch.
4. Transferred control of the quasi-government loan corporations Freddie Mac(FMAC) & Fannie Mae(FMAE) over to the Treasury, specifically under the administration of this newly created position Allison from Merrill Lynch had been appointed to.

The President of the NY Fed at that time was Timothy Geithner. He had worked at Henry Kissinger's private consultancy firm in the late 1980s before becoming a US trade envoy to Japan during the early to mid 1990s. After that he was appointed an under secretary at Treasury, where he served alongside Larry Summers between the years 1998 and 2001. He then took a dedicated position within the Council on Foreign Relations and International Monetary Fund drafting think tank policies for the government to ratify. After which he became President of the NY Fed in 2003.

In the early months of 2008 both Timothy Geithner at the NY Fed, and Henry Paulson at the Treasury, began to 'consult' Larry Fink on what to do with the government's TARP bailout fund. Not long after BlackRock was made the primary, and in some ways exclusive, asset manager for the US Treasury and NY Fed.

“Indeed, it is hard to argue that anyone, or any firm on Wall Street, gained as much stature from the economic crisis as did Fink and BlackRock. At the height of the disaster, when the American economy was on the brink, it was to Fink that Wall Street’s C.E.O.’s—including J. P. Morgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon, Morgan Stanley’s John Mack, and A.I.G.’s Robert Willumstad—turned for help and counsel. As did the U.S. Treasury and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, whose top officials turned to Fink for advice on the financial markets and assistance on the $30 billion financing of the sale of Bear Stearns to J. P. Morgan, the $180 billion bailout of A.I.G., the $45 billion rescue of Citigroup, and those of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac at $112 billion and growing.”

First the bailout fund was used to finance a number of merger acquisitions between the big banks. These transferred the assets of Bear Sterns and Merrill Lynch over to JPMorganChase and Bank of America. A third big bank liquidated, Lehman Brothers, was spread across a wider number of financial institutions. Geithner and Fink had both worked with Jamie Dimon at JPMorganChase on his banks acquisition of Bear Sterns for $2 a share⁴⁶

''During the next 10 weeks, he would be on the phone to government officials several times a day—logging at least 21 calls with Geithner alone. He also spoke frequently to Paulson, at Treasury, helping to advise on the structuring of tarp ''

After JPMorganChase acquired Bear Sterns, Fink helped Bank Of America acquire Merrill Lynch⁴⁷. Then the NY Fed contracted BlackRock to manage the bailout of insurance giant AIG⁸².

All this did was consolidate the number of insolvent banks in a smaller number of more insolvent banks that had been made 'too big to fail'. All the bad assets were still on the books.

So the bailout fund was then used to buy these bad assets acquired by the likes of JPMorganChase, Bank of America, and others; thus transferring them to the government, where they were put into the custody of FMAC & FMAE, which had been put under the control of Herbert Allison in his newly minted position within US Treasury for precisely this purpose.²⁷.

Allison then contracted the liquidation of these bad assets to BlackRock, most which were single family homes. This is of course exactly what happened back in 1989 when the RTC and FDIC hired BlackRock to manage the liquidation of commercial real estate amassed by the government in the wake of the S&L 'crisis'. Only this time it was residential property amassed by the FMAC & FMAE.

However, the problem this time was a little different. Technically there was demand for single family homes, as people had been kicked out of them through foreclosure, it was more no one could afford to buy them because middle class wealth had been so drastically reduced by GFC. And with the mortgage industry under heavy scrutiny due to what had just transpired, making these homes available to people with little income through home loans wasn't an option.

But Stephen Schwarzman and the Blackstone group had a solution to this. Found in the creation of a new financial instrument called a Rent-backed Security. And this is where the second cycle ends and the third begins.

---

Third Cycle: 2010-2022*

By the time BlackRock took control of the TARP bailout fund they had become the largest mutual fund in the world. They had done this by acquiring the mutual fund departments of other large financial institutions. In 2004 it had acquired a department from State Street. Then in 2006 it had acquired the entire mutual department of Merrill Lynch. In 2007 they had acquired Quellos Capital Management. And in 2009 BlackRock acquired a mutual fund department of Barclay's and with it the iShares Exchange Traded Funds(ETFs). By then BlackRock's assets under management has grown from the $165 billion AUM it was at in 1999 to $3.3 Trillion a decade latter in 2009.

But behind the scenes, and in the growing shadow cast by the BlackRock behemoth it had given birth to, Blackstone had been making some more nefarious acquisitions. In October 2000 the group had acquired, for some reason, the mortgage on World Trade Center building number 7(WTC 7) from Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association⁴⁸. They had then financed property developer Larry Silverstein's bid to acquire the WTC7's lease from the New York port authority in April 2001^{49 50}.

Floors 9,10,11, and 12 of the building housed the offices for the US Secret Service and the Securities and Exchange Commission, agencies responsible for investigations into financial crime and fraud. These along with everything else in the building were destroyed on September 11 when WTC7 spontaneously free fall collapsed after not being struck by a plane⁵¹.

This was right around the time Enron's creative bookkeeping practises were starting to unfold. The SEC didn't publicly announce an investigation into Enron until November 1st 2001, but investigators had been probing the company's books for the better part of 2001. Then on November 8th Enron reissued all pf its SEC filings for the periods between 1997 and September 2001^{52 53}.

As Enron began to collapse under further audit scrutiny, Blackstone took over the company's administrative duties, which is to say, their energy assets that were to be auctioned off over the coming years as part of the largest ever corporate bankruptcy suit.⁵⁴

Then in 2007 Blackstone launched another clairvoyantly timed fundraiser through an IPO in the months preceding the GFC. This made it 2/2 in fundraisers right before market crashes. One with private equity in 1987. Another with public equity in 2007.

In the aftermath of GFC vulture real estate firms had been created to purchase bulk packages of single family homes acquired by FMAC & FMAE. In 2012 Blackstone had consolidated a number of these into a residential real estate subsidiary called Invitation Homes, which swiftly became the largest corporate residential landlord in the United States. The rent being generated from these properties were then used by Blackstone to create a new type of security, called the Rent-Backed Security, or RBS.⁵⁵

Blackstone started to sell the rents generated from residential property as bonds to investors in the same way interest payments on a mortgage had been sold as mortgage-backed securities. It was quickly discovered by these corporate landlord groups that these RBSs could actually be used to back the payments on mortgages sued to purchase new properties. Which meant they could buy up even more single family homes if they could find people to rent them.

This is what evolved into a 'rent to own model', which effectively turned rent-backed securities into mortgage-backed securities. A corporate landlord would enter into an agreement to purchase a property for a prospective renter, who may be interested in buying it off the company at a later date, say in 5 years. A rental agreement would then be drawn up between the two and the landlord would acquire the property for the renter to live in by taking out a mortgage on it. The renter would then move into the property and start paying rent, which the landlord would use to pay the mortgage. This process effectively created a rent-backed-mortgage-backed-security. ⁵⁶

After this had been going on for around five years, Blackstone washed its hands of Invitation Homes in 2017 by floating it onto the stock market as a REIT. This is what a REIT, a publicly traded corporation made up of real estate assets. By that time Invitation Homes had acquired almost 50,000 of these single family homes⁵⁷<. Now, the reason Blackstone made Invitation Homes into a REIT is because it did not want to hold onto the rent-backed-mortgage-backed securities that it had created. So it sold its stake to the general public. But it didn't stop there, because this Blackstone REIT, and many others, where then used to make up the assets of what are called Exchange Traded Funds(ETFs). The largest of these being BlackRock's iShare funds.

To clarify this process. Rent was being used to pay the mortgages on single family homes acquired by publicly traded corporations whose stock has been bought by mutual funds that had packaged it into real estate investment funds marketed to pension funds to invest in. And if the rent stopped being paid, or vacancy rates went up, then all of this would collapse. Just as it did in 2007.

Exchange-Traded Funds(ETF) are what mutual funds like BlackRock and Vanguard are made up of. They buy the stock of other companies and make industry specific funds out of them which they then sell to passive investors. In the case of BlackRock the iShares Residential and Multisector Real Estate ETF is the one made up of these residential landlord corporations. Invitation Homes is 5% of its holdings ⁵⁸.

When it is said that BlackRock has $10 Trillion assets under management, what is meant is they have $10 trillion of other people's money invested in these funds. Alot of this pensions. But the actual management of these ETF funds is mostly automated using a proprietary trading algorithm called Aladdin. And it isn't just BlackRock funds using this algorithm. Since Aladdin was first licensed in 1999 it has come to inform the trading patterns of $18 trillion invested in the stock market⁵⁹. For reference, The s&p 500 index had about $40 trillion invested in it as of 2021.

This means a large segment of the stock market has become synchronised through the trading pattern of an algorithm sending what are meant to be independent investors the same buy and sell signals. If BlackRock's Aladdin manipulates the market to this degree, inside knowledge of the algorithm's behaviour is akin to insider trading and it becomes a de fact automated cartel system coordinating activities between firms using universal buy and sell signals. It was a similar trading algorithm used this ubiquitously across investment firms which had caused the black monday crash in 1987. There is somewhat of a tangent here involving PROMIS software which was being circulated around the time of Aladdin's intial development. .⁶⁰.

Aladdin was first developed in the late 80s by a former First Boston employee who had followed Larry Fink over to Blackstone. The software had then been modified in 1994 by a team headed by Jody Kochansky, who had joined the company in 1992, the year it detached from Blackstone^{61 62}.

Anyhow, it was supposedly during the early 90s that adaptations of the infamous PROMIS software started to infiltrate electronic financial systems in the United States by way of Jackson Stephen's computer software firm, Systematics. Systematics had provided a large chunk of the technology used by automated trading systems at the time. And in 1990 the company was put into obfuscating merger and acquisitions blender so who knows where its software went off to.

By 2021 BlackRock and a handful of other mutual funds gained significant institutional stock ownership within almost every publicly traded multinational corporation of significance. In turn these corporations have come to dominate more and more aspects of modern industrial society. This is well understood by everyone since everyone has to live within such an economic system, yet hardly anyone seems to understand how this economic system actually functions, let alone who functions it(to the greatest degree). Most think it is autonomous, with a life of its own beyond the control of any vested interest group. That thing called capitalism. The labour v. capital dialectic. Everything viewed through a Marxian lens. The corporations themselves came to be known as the villain, which is to say blame was attributed to no one, and because of this accountability could not exist. The system was blamed instead of those responsible for creating it. And so it has become that a corporation like Pfizer can accumulate the largest criminal wrap sheet in history with one hand, while using its other to mandate the use of experimental medicines.

Corporations have two primary relationships. To the market, being a corporation-to-corporation relation. And to society, being a corporation-to-people relation. These distinct functions are governed by two distinct corporate policies, that is operational policy and cultural policy.

Operational policy controls goods and services. Cultural policy controls people.

A technocracy of specialised experts, or corporate managers, are in full control of the operational policies of hteir corporations, and they must be left this autonomy for them to effectively achieve their corporations sole function within the market, which is not profit, but rather growth. The nature of modern technology necessitates this due to a need for advanced planning and specialised expertise. If an external power such as a corporation's board of directors were to impede on the operational autonomy of the technocrats running things, growth would be stunted and growth is a mutual objective for both parties. For this reason, even though corporate boards have the power to infringe upon the operational decisions of corporate managers, they very rarely do. Which leaves the operational control of corporations largely to the corporations themselves. Which is to say that when it comes to how corporations are run in relation to markets, there isn't much of a conspiracy.

However it is not operational control, but cultural control that is of interest here. And while a technocracy of specialised experts control the day to day operations of a corporation, corporate cultural policy controls their social behavior.

The corporate chain of command is this:

A publicly traded corporation is controlled by its CEO.

The CEO is controlled by a board of directors who elect its CEO.

The board of directors are elected by the shareholders.

The largest shareholders are institutional mutual funds, such as BlackRock, and this is where things get interesting.

As had been pointed out, BlackRock technically doesn't own the stock in any of the corporations it is invested in. Remember, it operates a series of ETFs which it markets to pension funds and other retail investors. So technically it is the pension fund or retail investors who own the stock. But the pension funds themselves only buy the stock on behalf of everyday workers who pay a portion of their salary into it. Which means the stock is technically owned by everyday working people.

What this means is that since corporations are the means of production, and since everyday working people own these corporations, the modern economic system is technically very similar to communism, as it was initially defined by Marx in the political pamphlet. However, just because people own something, doesn't mean they control it.

Traditionally corporate stock bought the holder three things:

1. Rights to corporate profits through dividends
2. Beneficial ownership rights to the future sale of that stock
3. Voting rights to elect the board of directors.

When a pension fund invests in a BlackRock ETF, BlackRock purchases corporate stock but returns only the beneficial ownership rights to the pension fund. If the corporation still pays a dividend, which many no longer do, then the rights to profit off that are included too. But, what BlackRock keeps is the right to vote the stock through what are called proxy voting rights.

What this does is separate the ownership of corporations from the control of them by creating two distinct things from corporate stock holdings:

1. Stocks, which are beneficial ownership rights to profit off a speculative stake in the company's growth.
2. Voting blocks, used to control the board of directors.

These voting blocks that are used to control corporate boards have become concentrated within a handful of mutual funds. The two biggest being Vanguard and BlackRock, both of which respectively control about $7.2 trillion and $8.6 trillion assets under management as of January 2021. The amount of this made up of the value of corporate stock is the amount of corporate voting blocks that they control.

However, these mutual funds then hand control of these voting blocks of corporate stock over to what are called Custodian Banks. And they are required to do this by law.

The Investment Company Act of 1940 requires asset managers, such as mutual funds, to transfer the custody of their managed assets, including stock, over to a third-party custodian licensed by the SEC.

'' (b) Except as provided in paragraph (c) of this section, all such securities and similar investments shall be deposited in the safekeeping of, or in a vault or other depository maintained by, a bank or other company whose functions and physical facilities are supervised by Federal or State authority. Investments so deposited shall be physically segregated at all times from those of any other person and shall be withdrawn only in connection with transactions of the character described in paragraph (c) of this section. ''

In this way the corporate voting blocks gathered up by the mutual funds are consolidated within a small number of mutual funds of 'special' banks. The biggest of these'special' custodian banks are BNY Mellon , State Street, JPMorganChase, and Citibank. Together these have legal custody over the corporate voting blocks contained within US$147.9 Trillion assets under custody.

• BNY Mellon, US$45.3 trillion in assets under custody and/or administration as of September 30, 20214
• State Street, US$43.3 trillion in assets under custody as of September 30, 20215
• JPMorganChase, $31.3 trillion in assets under custody as of the September 30, 20216
• Citibank, over $28 trillion in assets under custody as of 20217

This gives these four custodian banks, all based in New York, de-facto control over the boards of almost every publicly traded multi-national corporation you can think. Now, for them to leverage this control is not that simple, but if they have the will to do so it can be done. But when one has power one rarely has to demonstrate it.

The legal document that grants custodian banks this universal control over corporations is called a global custody agreement, or master custody agreement. These legal agreements include clauses giving custodian banks the legal right to vote the proxy on stock they hold within their custody.

BlackRock's primary custodian bank since 1988 had been State Street. But in 2017 it transferred a large portion of its assets, over a trillion, into the custody of JPMOrganChase ⁶⁴

The following is the proxy voting clause from the Master Custody Agreement BlackRock has with State Street ⁶⁵.

'' SECTION 5.7 SHAREHOLDER OR BONDHOLDER RIGHTS. The Custodian shall use reasonable commercial efforts to facilitate the exercise of voting and other shareholder and bondholder rights, including delivery to the Fund of any proxies, proxy soliciting materials and all applicable notices, with respect to foreign securities and other financial assets held outside the United States, subject always to the laws, regulations and practical constraints that may exist in the country where the securities or other financial assets are issued. The Custodian may utilize Broadridge Financial Solutions, Inc. or another proxy service firm of recognized standing as its delegate to provide proxy services for the exercise of shareholder and bondholder rights. Local conditions, including lack of regulation, onerous procedural obligations, lack of notice and other factors may have the effect of severely limiting the ability of a Fund to exercise shareholder and bondholder rights. ''

And this is the one BlackRock has with JPMorganChase⁶⁶

'' The Customer acknowledges that the provision of the Proxy Voting Service may be precluded or restricted under a variety of circumstances. These circumstances include, but are not limited to:

  (i) the Financial Assets being on loan or out for registration; 

(ii) the pendency of conversion or another corporate action; 

(iii) the Financial Assets being held in a margin or collateral account at J.P. Morgan or another bank or broker, or otherwise in a manner which affects voting; 

(iv) local market regulations or practices, or restrictions by the issuer; and 

(v) J.P. Morgan being required to vote all shares held for a particular issue for all of J.P. Morgan’s customers on a net basis (i.e., a net yes or no vote based on voting instructions received from all its customers). Where this is the case, J.P. Morgan will notify the Customer. ''

This JPMorganChase custody agreement gives the custodian bank much more control over proxy votes to its voting blocks of stock held in custody than the State Street agreement. It explicitly grants JPMorganChase legal power to proxy vote the entirety of the stock of a corporation held in its custody across all the various different mutual funds it is a custodian of, as if they were all a single aggregated voting block of stock.

To clarify this, if JPMorganChase was the custodian bank of four different mutual funds, each holding 15%, 14%, 13%, and 12% of the same corporations stock, for instance Pfizer's, JPMorganChase would have custody of 54% of Pfizer's stock and could vote this 54% as an aggregate on specific issues, such as electing Pfizer's board of directors.

In this same way custodian banks also control the boards of mutual funds, which are themselves corporations acting as a conduit between custodian banks and other corporations.

So, if society is controlled by governments, and governments are controlled by corporations, and corporations are controlled by mutual funds, and mutual funds are controlled by custodian banks. Then who controls custodian banks? This has already been touched on at the beginning of the essay. An financial fraternity of dynastic families. The collection of families that consolidated the power of their financial institutions over the course of more than century, now discretely preside over the resulting power structure they openly created. What a twist. . .

And Yet most would push back against this notion and instead offer up some Marxian theory on the capitalist greed of corporations. They aren't wrong, they never get to the underlying truth of what is at play here.

Perhaps this is because such a thing cannot be known, only understood, or at best reasonably believed to be true. Which precludes people who can only fathom reality in substantive fact from ever really understanding why the world doesn't work in practise as they are taught it does in theory. The types of people prone to distress when presented with any kind of theory that uses intuition to deviate into an area where the facts have been made intentionally hazy. As a result such people often have little understanding of the world they have to function in. Which is to say they have little ability to operate outside of the systems it had designed for them. And so they are compelled to appeal to authority, take authoritative facts on faith, as it provides them with the security of something being collectively known, even if that something is at odd with reality. Because these people aren't so much looking for truth, so much as they are the security found in a consensus knowledge, a thing which simplifies the process of having to function within a world that in reality, is beyond knowing. Because of this they are willing to believe whatever explanation is given for alternative facts, such as JFK's head going back and to the left in the zapruder film. Or WTC7 spontaneously free fall collapsing without having been struck by a plane. They are willing to deny their senses to live in a reality that exists inside their collective heads. But this realityis only real if everyone agrees on it. So when someone starts questioning the authoritative reality, they start to become distressed as their world is quite ltierally being torn apart. It is not enough for them to believe. Because these people don't believe in things, they think they know things. The point is that these types cannot deal with the kinds of questions that concern real power above and beyond the political offices they are presented with. They must remain in a stable world where the most powerful person is the leader of the most powerful nation, even if he is senile and to think such a thing makes no sense. And so they sort of unconsciously go along with these theatrics until it becomes apparent not enough are buying into the charade any longer and their worlds starts to no longer make sense. Because to them, the real power situation makes no sense, and feels to them like a dream. And so they call it this, among other things, conspiracy theory.

For this reason most people cannot know who controls BlackRock. As the theory of ownership cannot be used to make sense of a world in which ownership no longer means control. For example. . .

BlackRock's CEO is Larry Fink. He is elected by a corporate board, who in turn are elected by the stockholders. BlackRock's top three stockholders as of Sep 29 2021 are:

1. Vanguard Group: 8%
2. BlackRock: 6.66% (they like to trigger the paranoids with this kind of stuff)
3. Capital World Investors : 5.1%

This is called cross stock holding, which is when publicly traded corporations all own each other like a daisy chain. Trying to make sense of it is like playing a carnival shell game with matryoshka dolls. An exception to this is The Vanguard group, which unlike BlackRock is a private company with a complex ownership structure eventually leading off shore.

But none of this matters, because rememeber, the voting rights to all this stock Vanguard and BlackRock hold is stripped from the beneficial ownership rights of the stock itself and placed into the custody of the custodian banks, who can vote it all via proxy.

These days it isn't about following the money, it's about following the career trajectory to try and determine who is controlling what.

As mentioned, State Street had been BlackRock's primary custodian since 1988 but in 2017 BlackRock had shifted a large portion of its assets, around about a trillion, over into the custody of JPMorganChase⁶⁴ Then in 2021 even more of BlackRock's assets that had been in State Street custody were further diversify between Citibank, BNY Mellon, and JPMorganChase. (https://www.reuters.com/markets/funds/blackrock-spreads-ishares-custody-work-across-wall-street-2021-12-07/)

So the question isn't who controls BlackRock, or who controls Vanguard, but who controls these Custodian Banks? Though the problem in answering this is the same, because these banks are also publicly traded corporations as well, whose largest institutional stockholders are Vanguard and BlackRock, which just transfer the banks own stock back into their own custody. Because of this there is a need to think historically about these banking institutions that are now custodian banks.

BNY Mellon is the result of a 2006 merger between the Mellon family bank and The Bank of New York. BNY Mellon is the largest custodian bank in the world and in 2008 it became the custodian of assets acquired by the Treasury using the TARP bailout fund⁶⁷.

JPMorganChase is made up of a merger between JPMorgan and Chase Manhattan. The latter of these two had been made up of a merger between Chemical Bank and Chase Bank. All these had been Rockefeller family banks. The Morgan family firm existed in name only from around about the 1950 onwards. J.P Morgan had been an early conduit for the City of London, mostly Rothschild capital, but by that time the British Empire had become the Anglo-American one, and the City of London had a new ally in the Rockefeller family. Since that time the Rockefeller institutions gobbled up the J.P Morgan ones.

Citigroup is the result of a merger between Citibank and Traveller's Insurance. Both these were also Rockefeller financial institutions.

And the historical ownership of State Street is a little more unclear.

We can either believe that families like the Mellons and Rockefellers gave up control of everything they had built inter-generationally over the course of more than 150 years. Or we can believe that they have somehow maintained control of them through a complex system of anonymous control, facilitated by an offshore banking system that miraculously showed up right around the period these families supposedly gave up control of their institutions.

There is a third possibility though. That these mutual fund institutions the custodian banks created to help facilitate their system of private control through public ownership quickly usurped power from them. Historically this often happens with establishment power structures. It happened to the Roman Senate when the Roman military crossed the rubicon. It then happened to the Roman military when their Caesars became subservient to the Praetorian guard. Though this seems unlikely since mutual funds are only once such institution within a complex system involving supranational power structures like the central banking network and its Bank for International Settlements.

One interesting thing to note about BlackRock's stock ownership is that up until around 2011 Merrill Lynch directly owned 49% of it. The mutual fund department of Merrill Lynch had been merged into BlackRock in a 2006 deal which had granted it a 50% stare in BlackRock stock. This was about a year before Merrill Lynch collapsed under exposure to subprime mortgages and was acquired by Bank of America using the TARP bailouts in 2008. After Bank of America had acquired this BlackRock stock along with Merrill Lynch it had gradually sold it off until it was entirely dissolved of it in 2011⁶⁸.

The Rockefeller family currently operate a private equity firm called Rockefeller Capital Management. Out of a total 44 managerial positions at their firm, 25 had worked at Merrill Lynch or Morgan Stanley and of these seven had worked first at Merrill Lynch and then Morgan Stanley before joining RCM ⁶⁹.

Twenty of them had worked at Merrill Lynch during the period preceding the GFC, including RCM's President & CEO, Gregory J. Fleming. Fleming also sits on RCM's board and is close friends with Larry Fink, dating back to his Merrill Lynch days⁷⁰.

Other board members on the RCM board include Shelly Lazarus, who is also on the board Blackstone. John Brennan, who was the handpicked successor as CEO and Chairman of the Vanguard Group by its founder John Bogle. And of course, David Rockefeller Jr., assumedly the family's contemporary patriarch.

A pattern emerges in the career trajectories here. Many go from Merrill Lynch, to Morgan Stanley, and finally end up at Rockefeller Capital Management. This pattern carries over into other institutions aswell. The current chair of the New York Federal Reserve is James Gorman, who prior to this appointment worked, first at Merrill Lynch and then Morgan Stanley.

The connections between the Rockefellers and modern financial institutions like BlackRock are tenuous on paper. But they are only tenuous because these institutions were created in large part as insolation between them and public scrutiny. While at the same banking secrecy jurisdictions have been created the world round, to prevent these ties from ever becoming factually known. These are the things which can be known. And because they are known, what has happened since can be understood by those who are willing to think historically.

All while most people who think they are interested in this kind of stuff are stuck bamboozled in a perpetual dialectic over capitalism vs socialism. Such a discussion is encouraged because it overlooks the fact that a socialist or capitalist system, is an industrialist system either way. The real underlying issue of perpetual growth, which is at the heart of the population-energy-pollution conundrum is never questioned. But all things growing only grow towards their death, which does not perclude the industrial system.

Rent-Backed Securities

After the GFC the US Treasury and Federal Reserve began to rapidly expand the US money supply under the guise of a new economic theory called quantitative easing. Interest rates were cut to effectively 0% until 2015, when Janet Yellen replaced Ben Bernanke as the Fed chair and they were slowly raised again to a height of 2.5% in 2018. Doing this started to crash the stock market so rate were swiftly lowered again. Both Bernanke and Yellen were Harvard economists who were subsequently rewarded for their time at the Fed through wall street's paid speech circuit^{71 72}. Yellen was replaced at the Fed by Jerome Powell in 2018, after which she was appointed Secretary of the Treasury within the Biden administration later in 2021. In this position she assisted Powell in undertaking the most gratuitous money printing operation in US history. This is why the stock market inflated in response to a pandemic which deflated the productive capacities of the industries being speculated on.

When Blackstone created the rent-backed security in 2012 the US residential property market stopped its decline and started to boom again.

As mentioned, Blackstone had used subsidiary real estate corporations to buy bulk packages of foreclosed single family homes acquired at government auctions. Then the future rent generated from these as rental properties were packaged as rent-backed security bonds that were rated by the underlying speculative value of rent generated. Then these 'rent to own models' were created which used rent-backed securities to actually acquire new single family homes, creating a rent-backed-mortgage-backed security. The corporate landlord would take out a mortgage which would be backed by the rental agreement of a tenant.

It's interesting to note that since march 2020 there have been rent moratoriums put in place all over the world. Which means for almost two years tenants have had the option not to pay rent. What this would've achieved, along with providing economic relief to those who desperately needed it, was probably two other things aswell:

1. a reduction in the number of small to medium landlords who could no longer rely on their quasi-parasitic incomes.
2. a massive reduction in the underlying value of rental backed securities.

The thing is, these rent-backed securities would only appear bad only if the vacancy rate or rent price dropped. But the assumption an occupied property is generating rent at a market price becomes completely thrown off by these rent moratoriums.

Now, all these homes that have been acquired and rented out by REITs are the same ones that were foreclosed on back in 2007, which means they are concentrated in specific geographic areas through the United States.

'' More than $30 billion in capital is chasing the surging US rental housing market as bond yields remain at historic lows and inflation rises.
John Burns Real Estate Consulting identified 43 announcements targeting US rental housing, but notes that the real number is likely “much higher” since those figures are only the equity investment and excludes the debt, and does not include announcements that are not yet public.
Single-family rents have increased 6% over the last year, according to the Burns Single-Family Rent Index, the highest growth in the 35 years that John Burns Real Estate Consulting has collected and analyzed such data. The index is a weighted average of rents across 63 major single-family rental markets.
JBREC’s Danielle Nguyen notes that multiple factors can account for the surge in investment activity. Investors typically view SFRs as an inflation hedge, and the aforementioned record-high rent growth is also supported by high occupancy.''

Notice how the rent increases for 2021 are highest in areas with the highest foreclosure rates in 2007. This is because those are the properties bought up by the REITs which have been used to create these rent-backed securities. Since rent-backed securities are rated by the underlying value of the rent paid, plus the vacancy rate, these corporate landlords have kept tenants in their rental properties and used a rental support program provided by the US Treasury to pay the rent for them.

What this means is that once the Treasury stops paying peoples rent to these corporate landlords through the rental relief package, rental prices will go down and vacancy rates will go up. When this happens the value of Rent-Backed Securities will be exposed as trash, and everything else which is pegged, including mortgages, will collapse.

And it just so happens that the Deputy Secretary of the Treasury who is currently managing the Emergency Rental Assistance program⁷⁵ is former BlackRock employee, in fact he was Larry Fink's chief of staff, yes he has a chief of staff, Wally Adeyemo⁷⁶

Adeyemo is BlackRock's man in the Treasury running the day to day operations under Yellen, who is likely just a trusted figurehead these days ratifying whatever requests are made of her by the Fed.

Another BlackRock appointment within the Biden administration is Brian Deese, former head of BlackRock's sustainable investment division. Deese is an economic advisor, or information authority, on all things that shape the economic policy ratified by elected lawmakers. Imagine a group of politicians meeting in Plato's cave, and all they see is Deese's shadow puppetry projected on the wall.

Even Kamala Harris has her own BlackRock handler, Michael Pyle, who was the company's former global chief investment strategist before he became her chief economic advisor.

BlackRock has effectively become, has nakedly become, the first real institution of the corporate state. Its entire operation, since inception back in 1988, has been publicly funded and privately controlled. Yes, this public/private blurring of lines emerged before BlackRock's time, but it has never been unashamedly paraded to the public in this way manner.

BlackRock is attempting to legitimise the transition into corporate feudalism. As people lose faith in the pageantry of a puppet show they start to accept the power of the puppeteer. Eventually the puppeteer is on stage pulling the strings in plainsight, and then finally the puppet is thrown away and everyone suddenly comes to terms with what the real power situation is. And the legitimacy of this real power relationship between corporations and communitites, the people within them, is being forged through Environmental, Social Governance NGOs, or ESG institutes.

---

Enviromental, Social, Governance: Inclusive Capitalism

The institution of ESG is to the corporate State what the Church was to Monarchy. That is, the coronation of human power with a divinity which cannot be questioned. In both instances this divine power is nature. The conceptualisation of what nature is, does differ, but that is only theological. What ESG is attempting to do, is gain control of the divine legitimacy of nature by becoming guardian of the 'environment', so that it can determine what constitutes the common good. If they gain control of the constitution of common good they effectively gain control of ideology. Ideology is the justification for actions. If ones can control this they will be able to justify everything they do regardless of how awful it appears to the common senses.

They want ESG to become a secular technocratic Catholic Church, but for the enviroment instead of God, what the Greeks called Gaia. This mythological figure, modernised through cybernetics theory into a kind of organic computer system, is probably the most accurate description of a somewhat vague spiritual belief underpinning secular technocratic belief. It basically conceptualises nature as a network of integrated ecosystems, with sensors constantly feeding data back to some kind of divine hivemind cpu – mother earth, or Gaia. There is an element of intelligent design here, even though it makes no sense to call it artificial as its nature. This is called the Gaia theory, and they haven't quite worked out the specifics yet.

But as it currently stands the most prominent of these ESG institutes is called the Council of Inclusive Capitalism, which operates in partnership with the Catholic Church. The founder of this institution is Lynn Forester de Rothschild, who was so intimately involved with Jeffrey Epstein's hard candy blackmail operation that it's reasonable to believe Epstein was in fact working for her. Evidence for this is provided in another investigative article found on this website. Who did Jeffrey Epstein Work for?

In recent years corporate CEOs have become less concerned with the market operations of their corporations and more concerned with environmental and social issues. The exception to this are technology entrepreneurs, such as Bezos, Musk, Gates etc. But after these types have built up their corporations, they then hand control of these over to the custodian banks. After which the entire operation is taken over by a technocracy of middle managers. When this happens the role of the CEO changes from an entrepreneurial one to that of bringing corporate control to bear upon the cultural aspects of society. It is the role of ESG institutions to act as an information authority guiding CEOs as to what these controls should be. In recent years even Larry Fink, a CEO still intimately involved in the day to day operations of creating a population of renters, has been slowly seguing into the role of an ESG priest.

Now, there is an important distinction between the need for something to be done and the way in which something is done. This is not tirade against environmental protection, quite the opposite. It is merely pointing out that the power structure offering up the only solution to the problems faced by industrial society, are those who are responsible for creating them. That the solutions they offer only cause more problems for them to solve. It could be said that change, in whatever form, can only come from those with the power to effect change. To a certain point this is true. The reality of power necessitates that those with it will always use it in such a way that serves their vested interests. And accepting this as the price paid for achieving something that, while done in a way which isn't ideal, still serves the collective good, can be considered more desirable than doing nothing.

But this is not the case here. Because the people behind the institution of ESG quite literally want to destroy nature. By this is meant, they want to attain complete control over the natural environment by perpetually converting it into synthetic adaptations of itself. This desire comes from an underpinning philosophical belief that all of nature should become subservient to human civilisation. That nature is evil, and since humans are emergent from nature that means human nature is evil. This outlook is most commonly known as social darwinism. Because of this belief, which those who believe it would call a fact, it is human destiny to transcend this evil and adapt it into good. The process for achieving this is gaining control of the environment and our own nature through synthetically adapting it through the use of technology and specialised knowledge into a form which is under our complete control.

This is what the The Judge embodies in Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, and what is meant when he preaches:

'' Only nature can enslave man and only when the existence of each last entity is routed out and made to stand naked before him will he be properly suzerain of the earth.''

This philosophy is ripe throughout industrial civilisation. The idea of transcending nature so human civilisation can become the collective body of a God. And it goes hand in hand with the ancient social outlook that human societies should be totalitarian. This what Nietzsche meant by Ubermensch. That the ideal future society would be apart of one collective body. And by God is dead, what Nietzsche meant was nature. The same think is found in the Anglo philosophy of liberal democracy as well. John Locke's Leviathan is the same totalitarian society as Nietzsche's Ubermensch. What this is, is the view of human society as an organism. That individuals are the cells making up a supreme hierarchy of self regulating organs governed by a centralised nervous system feeding information into and out of a single brain. This brain is what Plato called the class of philosopher kings.

The idea of the social contract, another John Locke invention, is based on the demonstrably false belief, adopted by both the Greeks and Romans, that there is no difference between the State and society. Thus, the social contract implies that if you live in a society then you have a 'responsibility' to accept whatever rules the State makes. The trick of the social contract was it convinced people they have rights. That at birth they were given freedom by the State through a contract they implicitly signed by exiting their mother's womb. And from that day their freedom is defined by these rights granted them by the State. But since they have accepted that the State has given them freedom, they must inversely accept when the State revokes it. Such a belief is in contradiction to idea of liberty. Where someone with liberty is born free and can use it to do whatever is in their ability to, and if the State wants to restrict this liberty, it must justify itself. The justification for restricting liberty is called justice and is a process handled by a justice system which sits between society and the State governing it. Within this system judges determine what is a just or unjust restrictions of liberty based on reasonable belief in reality. The social contract does not believe in this system because it believes the State and society are the same thing.

The social contract is nothing more than a blueprint for authoritarian regimes to unjustly restrict liberty in the name of common good. But it is also based on a demonstrably incorrect understanding of human nature and the social structure of human culture. It quite literally posits that if the State were to be removed from human society, humans would instantly revert back to a state of nature. To believe this is to believe that there is no such thing as community beyond the political level. This is so obviously untrue that anyone who would use the social contract to justify their actions is either stupid, nefarious, or never read the actual theory itself. Because human communities existed long before the State of public authority. Societies existed long before the State as well. Human civilisations were eventually created from the emergence of the State as a public authority on top of prexisting societies made up of communities made up of individual people. The social contract completely contradicts evolution theory and posits that human culture did not exist until the astrologer priests created it in Mesopotamia. But, it also implies that human communities don't exist. Only the State and socially naked individuals within it. And this, this is what totalitarianism is. Totalitarianism is the absence of communities so that all individuals in a society identify with the State above all else, every their family. Now, if that were to be achieved somehow then the social contract would become valid.

If corporations are to become the self regulating organs in such an organisitic, or mechanistic system, then ESG institutes are primed to become the central nervous system. And this is what the modern fraternity of financial oligarchs want control of. They want to control the flows of information throughout the body.

The ESG institution targets three things:

1. People
2. Environment
3. Communities

The goal is to control these three areas by defining them with guidelines set by universally adopted corporate governance frameworks. These frameworks are developed and passed on as policy mandates to CEOs who then implement them. This process is enforced through the custodian banks control of corporate boards, who elect the CEOs. If a CEO refuses to sign on, then the board will replace them. If the board refuses to replace them, then the custodian banks leverage their master custody agreements of mutual fund stock to replace the board. But this doesn't happen, because everyone who has climbed the corporate ladder knows what is expected of them. But there is also the rigorous propaganda of the corporate media convincing many to do this in earnest volition also.

When a corporation signs on to an ESG it provides its internal data to the institute in an audit like manner. Most corporations have dedicated ESG departments that act as an interface for this process. Evidence for all of this is readily available on the Council for Inclusive Capitalism's(CIC) website. This isn't a conspiracy, it is an attempt to legitimise a conspiracy by making its operation open source. H.G Wells wrote about such a ploy in his book, The Open Conspiracy, published in 1928. The aim is to gain operational security through obscurity as opposed to secrecy. Rather than hide what they are doing, which is too grand a scale to hide, they operate in broad daylight and call what they are doing something else. This is a pretty standard operational procedure these days. Bribery and corruption in politics became too essential to the system to cover up any longer, so instead these things were just called political lobbying or paid speeches. Beware of linguists, especially those of Harvard. They will rape you like pavlov's dog then tell you it was an act of love. The modern term 'gaslighting' is just a turn of phrase for semantics.

The largest ESG framework is the Embankment Project for Inclusive Capitalism(EPIC)⁷⁷. It has been adopted by mutual funds such as BlackRock, Vanguard, Fidelity, State Street, and a long list of other corporations is too vast to account for⁷⁸.

The smoking gun is that the founder of Inclusive Capitalism is Lynn Forester de Rothschild. She constitutes a direct connection between the institution of ESG and the financial fraternity of oligarch families which developed the system of controlling corporate boards through the master custody agreements they have with mutual funds. But even more damning is Lynn Forester de Rothschild's connection to Jeffrey Epstein. Is it mere coincidence his hard candy blackmail operation targeted Harvard academics, hedge fund managers, technology entrepreneurs, and American Presidents.

---

March 2020: Third Cycle Endgame

After fifty years of increasing the money supply through debt issuances in corporate and government bonds, the ability to continue servicing this accumulating mountain of debt through issuing new debt was waning. This was because demand for new debt had fallen to historic lows because the profit to be made off corporate and government bonds had fallen to historic lows. There were no more creditors willing to take on the new debts corporations needed to remain solvent, at least on paper.

The yield on a bond is essentially the interest generated from the debt purchased with the bond. For corporate debt this peaked in the 1980s and gradually declined ever since. But what also effects the value of bonds is the REAL price inflation of assets. In an inflationary economy, that is, one in which asset prices are gradually increasing, it is advantageous to be a debtor and bad to be a creditor, because the value of money declines while the value of assets purchased with it rise.

As you can see, the yield on government bonds followed the same trend as corporate ones.

For fifty years these bonds had been paid off through the sale of new bonds. And then those bonds had been paid off by the sale of newer bonds. But as this progressed the value of bonds dropped, which meant demand for them dropped and the ability to sell them to investors dropped.

What this meant was that all the major corporations, including banks, which had used this mass accumulation of debt to fiance themselves into 'too big to fail' institutions were finally about to become exposed as insolvent. It was in the midst of this culminating crisis that BlackRock proposed its solution¹.

''Policy responses that put money more directly in the hands of citizens might be more attractive. The rise of central bank-issued electronic money (not cryptocurrencies) might achieve these objectives in ways that were not previously possible. ”
. . . Quasi-fiscal credit easing, such as central bank purchases of private assets, could be operated by the SEFF rather than the central bank alone to separate monetary and fiscal decisions. ''

The solution was for the Federal Reserve to print lots of money, give this money to BlackRock, who would then use it to buy corporate and govt bonds through its Exchange Traded Funds.

''As the Federal Reserve began its historic purchases of corporate bonds exchange-traded funds, almost half of the Fed’s purchases went into BlackRock funds, according to ETFGI, an ETF research and consulting firm.''

Then in March 2020, as part of a bamboozling number of economic responses to covid-19, the US Fed adopted this BlackRock proposal and went into a debt purchasing agreement with them, called going direct ⁸⁰.

But possibly the most significant policy measure taken by the US Fed in response to this economic emergency, conveniently confluent with a global health emergency, was to completely abolish what are known as reserve ratio requirements⁸¹. Reserve ratio requirements effectively act as a measure limiting the amount of debt a bank can issue. This is achieved by only allowing a bank to issue a certain amount of debt in portion to the amount of assets it has on its books. If this is removed, then theoretically a bank could issue an unlimited amount of debt.

Well, this became theoretically possible for banks to do in March 2020, and then this happened:

Put in laymen terms, American banks became the most deregulated they had ever been. Now there are a number of 'complex' modern economic theories used to refute this statement. However, these are the same ones which contended that doing this would not be inflationary. Some of these modern theories even contested that such a policy would be deflationary. By this is meant, the increased amount of money released into the economy would be magically converted into productive activities which would increase the amount of goods and services produced beyond the demand for them, the result of which would be lower prices. This is obviously bullshit as anyone buying anything in 2022 will attest to. What is actually happening is a currency reset. This is what German industrialists did in the 1920s. They hyper-inflated the Reichsmark and took advantage of this through going into massive amounts of debt used to acquire and merge companies into massive conglomerates like IG Farben(pharmaceuticals) and Vereinigte Stahlwerke(metals)⁸². In doing this they hyper-inflated the Reichmark to literal worthlessness then reset the German currency by issuing a new Rentenmark with an exhcnage rate pegged at one Rentenmark to one trillion Reichsmarks.

When money becomes worthless the outstanding debts in that money become worthless also. The debts are still technically owed, but nobody is going to collect them because the cost of a piece of paper used for issuing a collection notice costs more than collecting the debt itself.

So all the debts these German industrialists had accrued were wiped out, or could be easily paid off in the old currency through a loan in the new currency. After this these industrialists backed Hitler to consolidate their industrial monopolies around a fascist regime, but eventually turn against him around 1942 when it became apparent that that the war had been lost.

It would appear that in our own era Central Banking Digital Currency is being primed for a reset of the US dollar, and along with it a reset on the corporate and government debts. Because a currency reset is the only way out of what they are doing. This is what is meant by,

Written by Simon Dovey and published on the hotstar February 11th 2022.

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