Ernst Wolff: Digital Financial Complex

...and a side note on Pfizer shareholders.

This story is a quick and focused one, again (or so it was until I got into it). An interesting talk by Ernst Wolff came up, and I want to share it and add some context while I am at it. I am sharing it as food for thought. I certainly hope that no matter what kind of financial reform might be coming at us, we stick with each other and win by love.

Photo by Konstantin Evdokimov via Unsplash

The talk is by Ernst Wolff, a German journalist who specializes in world finance, hedge funds, and the IMF. The vision that Wolff proposes is similar to the vision of Catherine Austin-Fitts. I find it plausible because—well, for one, this vision has been voiced directly out of the horse’s mouth on multiple occasions, albeit without the dark overtones—but also it explains the seemingly arbitrary, unusual, and blatantly anti-democratic policies of the past year and a half in a more structured manner than traditional greed, corruption, fear, confusion, politics, and general chaos alone. Which is not to say that there has been any lack of traditional greed, corruption, fear, confusion, politics, and general chaos. After all, any conspiracy works against the backdrop of human nature—and in a way, a conspiracy is a trivial thing that can be described in terms of human relationships and shared strategies. Human beings form clubs—it’s just that some clubs are more influential than other. In that sense, if we just look at it as a possible business plan, it kind of makes sense.

THE GIST

Wolff points out that currently, entities like BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street Corporation hold more financial power than many governments—and hence, they have the ability to dictate their will to governments convincingly.

[A side note: CHD recently posted two stories on BlackRock and Vanguard (here and here). Adding these stories for the curious minds who like to assess different points of view and decide what they like.]

Back to Wolff. According to him, the destruction of the traditional Western social fabric and small businesses is intentional, and the purpose of the destruction is to create enough momentum in the form of desperation and impoverishment that when the central banks roll out the new financial system, the citizens will see it as a solution to horrible problems—as opposed to a new system that somebody wanted to roll out to begin with, at the expense of the prior Western expectations for freedom, standards of living, and so on.

And why do they (they = the wealthiest human beings of the world whose social club has historically played a bigger role in shaping historical events than your average citizen) want to roll out a new financial system and why do they go to such great lengths to make it happen? Wolff believes—and I believe it’s plausible—that it is out of their own desperation, i.e. the desperation of the rich, who are very scared of losing control. The backdrop for their desire is that the planet has gotten small, the old expansion-based model has hit a wall, the U.S. pension funds have been stolen-ish, the people of the world are breeding like rabbits, emerging markets are growing fast—and so they need to make the world AI- and digitally manageable as quickly as possible. In other words, the proposition is that instead of letting the Western economy combust or evolve in an unpredictable manner, the richest people of the world have taken the matters in their own hands and are handling this “transition” like driving a race car carefully through rough terrain—while obviously still competing with each other and while also not missing any opportunity to make themselves even richer as the average Joe is dazed, confused, and maybe also angry at cis white males, or antivaxxers, or immigrants, or Muslims, or all of the above.)

Per Wolff, the desired end result of the financial reform looks like this:

Cash is out. Banks are we know them are out. All money is digital and transparent. Central banks generate digital money at will, as much as they want. Every citizen has one and only bank account, which is an account with a central bank. Money is programmable, and our spending is not free-form, i.e. certain chunks of our money can be assigned for specific purposes, or we can only spend it in certain places, or we may be allowed to only buy certain types of food, etc. etc. Taxation’s easy. Censorship is easy. Fining people for bad behavior is easy. The citizenry is entirely transparent and monitored, and the algorithm is a blackbox. [The last sentence in my commentary, based on my observations of Big Tech and how they usually go about things.]

I am not going into broader elements of the system for the sake of keeping the story focused. Please check out the links at the end if you like.

UPDATE: The original video was taken down, here is a later talk (below) that addresses the same issues.

SIDE THOUGHTS

As a tangent, here is a list of corporate donors and partners of the CDC Foundation. Also this is interesting.

We already know that the UN signed an agreement with the World Economic Forum in 2019 (see the interview with Mary Otto-Chang), and the cooperation on the Fourth Industrial Revolution is a part of that otherwise short and vague agreement.

This from Australia caught my eye. Abolition of Certificates of Title. Presumably, this is about moving all land titles to the digital format and abolishing the paper documents completely. And it could be but I want to accompany this with a story.

[A few years ago, I had many conversations with a friend who is an expert on the relationship between Big Tech companies and book publishers. What was happening at the time was that Google was going after book publishers rather aggressively, investing a lot of effort into bribing impoverished libraries and digitizing as many books as possible, often against the legal rights of publishers. Book publishers rebelled, there was a convoluted lawsuit, and Google won. Google did everything it could to weaken the position of physical books and traditional publishers in favor of “digital content,” controlled by, well, Google and friends. At the time, it could have been perceived as benevolent by a pair of eyes not familiar with the deep dynamic. Even I was only partially concerned. (I was concerned and mad about Google’s bullying but I was not necessarily concerned about the digitization of books per se, digital books are convenient, and I didn’t mind it, as long as the publishers were paid.) But my friend kept telling me that the long-range plan on the part of Google and friends was to control the flow of information at large—and once most information moved online—they would be able to alter or censor information in real time as much as they wished. At the time, I thought that such a development was, though theoretically possible, not very likely to happen in America during my lifetime. So I mostly brushed my friend’s predictions off as unnecessary worry. Well, what do you know… today, we have robust censorship in America, book bans are in vogue, and my friend’s words no longer sound paranoid. So maybe this whole digitization of property titles in Australia is completely innocent but time will tell…]

As another tangent, here is the list of top Pfizer shareholders from Yahoo Finance.

The Great Reset for Dummies
The Next Bubble (riming markets for tomorrow’s big crash) (Harper’s Magazine)
Prioritizing the poorest and most vulnerable in West Africa: Togo’s Novissi platform for social protection uses machine learning, geospatial analytics, and mobile phone metadata for the pandemic response. (World Bank)
Why Totalitarianism
V-Word: The Multi-Billion Dollar Sacred Cow
A War on (Free) Natural Immunity
The Great Self-Betrayal and the Great Reset
Hello, New Normal. Hello, Behavioral Modification
The Last Squeeze: Digital Colonization as Manifest Destiny 2.0
Former UN Employee's Brave Mission
A War on Touch
2 Giant Investment Firms Control Almost Everything You Buy — Here’s Why You Should Care (CHD)
Who Owns Big Pharma + Big Media? You’ll Never Guess. (CHD)|
Co-Develop: Digital Public Infrastructure for an Equitable Recovery (Rockefeller Foundation)
On Massive Love