JP Morgan Launches New High Frequency Trading Algorithm


Source: GizaDeathStar.com
Dr. Joseph P. Farrell Ph.D.
August 9, 2017

The disconnect between genuine human market activity and that created by machines proceeds apace, for JP Morgan has just launched a new algorithmic high frequency trading algorithm, as this article from Zero Hedge, spotted and shared by Mr. B.H., states:

JPM Develops A.I. Robot To Execute High Speed Trades, Put Humans Out Of Work

The motivation, as usual, is the “bottom line,” and maximizing profits while minimizing costly (human) labor overhead:

In the latest victory for robot kind over humans, LOXM’s job will be to execute client orders with maximum speed at the best price, “using lessons it has learnt from billions of past trades — both real and simulated — to tackle problems such as how best to offload big equity stakes without moving market prices.”

In other words, one giant “big data” aggregator, using historical precedent to guide future decisions, which coming in a time when “this time it’s certainly different” for the broader stock market, could be a big mistake.

“Such customisation was previously implemented by humans, but now the AI machine is able to do it on a much larger and more efficient scale,” said David Fellah, of JPMorgan’s European Equity Quant Research team. Mr Ciment said that, so far, the European trials showed that the pricing achieved by LOXM was “significantly better” than its benchmark.

The development guarantees another round of downsizing among bank front offices as increasingly inefficient human traders are removes from the equation… and payroll. As the FT notes, investment banks have been increasingly using AI, automation and robotics to help cut costs and eliminate time-consuming routine work. “For example, UBS’s recent deployment of AI to deal with client post-trade allocation requests, which saves as much as 45 minutes of human labour per task. UBS has also brought in AI to help clients trade volatility.” (Italicized emphasis added)

It’s precisely that italicized phrase (which I have emphasized) that caught my attention in this article, as the reader might well imagine, for “tackling problems such as how best to offload big equity stakes without moving market prices” has been, I submit, one of the major problems with high frequency trading algorithms, as exemplified by the various “flash crashes” that occur from time to time, beginning with the infamous May 2010 flash crash. The problem, of course, has been that these algorithms can, and have, “run amok”, and caused market value of certain equities or commodities either to dramatically rise, or fall, within mere seconds, forcing shut downs of markets and price “resets,” as I have blogged here before. The problem, as I saw it then, and still see it, is that these “resets” are costly, and will inevitably involve humans and human activity, and that, of course, adds to overhead costs.

But now, supposedly, JP Morgan has waved a magic wand of code, and one can now “offload big equity stakes without moving market prices.” Let that one sink in for a moment… “big equity stakes” can be “offloaded” without any effect on market prices!?!?  Since when?!? The sentence, I submit, is a stunning admission of just how artificial, and unreal, these markets have become under trading algorithms. If prices are not affected by “offloading big equity stakes,” then one of the key mechanisms by which humans determine their investment decisions – the price of an equity itself within market movement – no longer is reflective of anything humanly real. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to invest my paltry $100 in a share of Twisted Trading Algorithm Partners, Inc.  when the price itself is being determined in part by an algorithm that will allow JP Morgan to dump, or buy, vast blocks of Twisted Trading (NASQUACK symbol, TT) without “moving market prices.” Yes, that means I’d personally really rather have human traders on a floor waving papers and shouting hysterically at each other to conclude trades. And yes, I’ll take a physical copy of that 1 share of Twisted Trading’s stock, thank you very much.

Thank goodness sanity reigns somewhere, for Zero Hedge captures my own concerns with the vast expansion of “dark pools” and high frequency trading algorithms:

PM also said it had no risk management issues with the technology. “The machine is restricted in its trading behaviour, as it learns under, and operates within, our general electronic trading risk framework, which is overseen by internal control groups and validated by regulators,” Mr Fellah said.

Of course, with such rapid propagation of technology among both stock investing and trade processing, it is only a matter of time before a “black hat” hack takes place, and sends trading – and markets – haywire. Which, incidentally, may be among the reasons for the concerted push: after all what better way to avoid blame for what is coming than to blame it on, who else, Russian hackers.(Italicized emphasis added)

There you have the problem clearly stated. And I cannot improve on it.

See you on the flip side…

Read More At: GizaDeathStar.com
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About Dr. Joseph P. Farrell

Joseph P. Farrell has a doctorate in patristics from the University of Oxford, and pursues research in physics, alternative history and science, and “strange stuff”. His book The Giza DeathStar, for which the Giza Community is named, was published in the spring of 2002, and was his first venture into “alternative history and science”.

At The Eye Of A Looming Storm? Those Bankster Deaths & More Missing…

Source: GizaDeathStar.com
Dr. Joseph P. Farrell
January 28, 2017

It has been a while since we’ve talked about those mysterious bankster deaths, many of them having all the hallmarks of “bankercides (i.e., murder by suicide), and it’s been even longer since we’ve talked about all that “missing money” sloshing around in the system somewhere, an amount of money in the trillions. Well, Mr. W.D. sent the following article, and it has my high octane speculation running in high gear and overtime, but we’ll get back to that, because I want to paint in very broad strokes today. The article that he shared concerns a looming storm centered around Europe’s largest bank, Deutsche Bank, and some shenanigans that reach out to engulf Italy and, I suspect, pretty much everyone else. But as I said, we’ll get back to that. Here’s the lengthy article by Vernon Silver and Elissa Martinuzzi that appeared on Bloomberg Business Week:

How Deutsche Bank Made a $462 Million Loss Disappear

Of course, a mere $462,ooo,ooo looks like chump change to a bank as large and powerful as Deutsche Bank, but there are even vaster sums involved in this disappearing act. The story begins, according to the article, at a meeting held at Deutsche Bank’s London branch headed by Italian banker Michele Faissola:

On Dec. 1, 2008, most of the world’s banks were still panicking through the financial crisis. Lehman Brothers had collapsed. Merrill Lynch had been sold. Citigroup and others had required multibillion-dollar bailouts to survive. But not every institution appeared to be in free fall. That afternoon, at the London outpost of Deutsche Bank, the stolid-seeming, €2 trillion German powerhouse, a group of financiers met to consider a proposal from a team led by a trim, 40-year-old banker named Michele Faissola.

The scion of an Italian banking family, Faissola was the head of Deutsche’s global rates unit, a division that created and sold financial instruments tied to interest rates. He’d been studying the problems of one of Deutsche’s clients, Italy’s Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena, which, as the crisis raged, was down €367 million ($462 million at the time) on a single investment. Losing that much money was bad; having to include it in the bank’s yearend report to the public, as required by Italian law, was arguably much worse. Monte dei Paschi was the world’s oldest bank. It had been operating since 1472, not long after the invention of the printing press, when the Black Death was still a living memory. If investors were to find out the extent of its losses in the 2008 credit crisis, the consequences would be unpredictable and grave: a run on the bank, a government takeover, or worse. At the Deutsche meeting, Faissola’s team said it had come up with a miraculous solution: a new trade that would make Paschi’s loss disappear. (Emphasis added)

The crucial point to focus on here is not only Faissola’s connection to the Banca Monte dei Paschi di Sienna, the world’s oldest bank, in continual operation since the Renaissance, but also his position as head of Deutsche Bank’s global rates unit, which, the article also notes, “created and sold financial instruments tied to interest rates,” for later on in the article, we learn that Deutsche Bank is under investigation for its role in helping to rig the LIBOR (London Inter-Bank Offered Rate), which Wikipedia notes is ” the primary benchmark, along with the Euribor, for short-term interest rates around the world.” (See Wikipedia: Wikipedia LIBOR):

This month the bank agreed to pay $7.2 billion to resolve a U.S. probe into its subprime mortgage business, admitting it misled investors. Deutsche has paid more than $9 billion in further fines and settlements related to claims of tax evasion; violating sanctions against Iran, Libya, Syria, Myanmar, and Sudan; rigging the $300 trillion Libor market; and other alleged breaches of the law.
(Emphasis added)

Having a division that creates and sells financial instruments “tied to interest rates” such as the widely used LIBOR is a handy thing to have around, particularly if one is also engaged in rigging that very London Inter-Bank Offered Rate!

In any case, Faissola had approached Deutsche Bank with what can only be regarded as a “scheme” to help the troubled Banca Monte dei Paschi di Sienna, and this is where it gets interesting. As the article notes, Faissola proposed a “sure-thing, moneymaking bet with Deutsche Bank and use those winnings to extinguish its 2008 trading losses” by engineering a two-step trade, with one transaction bet which would make immediate gains, and the second transaction staged over time “that was sure to lose”, and of course, Deutsche Bank would profit from fees in both trades. But as the article also observes, as Faissola was pitching his plan – the details of which we’ll get to in a moment, doubts were being raised within the bank about the plan’s structure:

Outside the room, one of Faissola’s longtime colleagues was raising questions about the deal. William Broeksmit, a managing director who specialized in risk optimization, was concerned about the winner-loser construction. A Chicago-born son of a United Church of Christ minister, Broeksmit had decades earlier been a pioneer in interest rate swaps, the financial instruments that had rewritten the possibilities—and profitability—of investment banking. But Broeksmit, 53, was also against reckless derivative deals, which is how he viewed Faissola’s proposal, according to a person familiar with his thinking. Eleven minutes after the meeting began, Broeksmit e-mailed one of its attendees with a warning about the Paschi trade and its “reputational risks.”

If the name William Broeksmit sounds familiar, it should for he’s one of those “suicided” bankers, as the article also notes, for when the whole plan exploded into public view in Italy in 2013, it was accompanied by two more of those suspicious “banker deaths”, one of whom was William Broeksmit, and the other was David Rossi, of Banca Monte dei Paschi di Sienna:

Among the casualties was David Rossi, Paschi’s communications chief. At about 9 p.m. on March 6, a bank employee noticed that Rossi was missing from his fourth-floor office. A window had been left open. Authorities found Rossi’s body in a courtyard below. Rossi, 51, wasn’t himself the subject of any inquiries, but his home had been searched two weeks earlier by police. His death was at first ruled a suicide, but the inquest has been reopened based on evidence his wife presented, including security video that shows Rossi fell out backward.

Several months after Rossi’s death, in January 2014, Broeksmit was supposed to meet his wife of almost 30 years at a cafe near their home in the South Kensington neighborhood of London. He didn’t show. When she returned home, she found his body hanging from the leash attached to a door. In a dog bed, he’d left suicide notes, including one addressed to Jain, his longtime colleague. The New York Post reported last year that the note to Jain contained an apology. A summary of Deutsche Bank’s own review of the suicide, seen by Bloomberg Businessweek, doesn’t mention the note and says the review found no direct link between Broeksmit’s death and his work at Deutsche.

Why Broeksmit? Well, perhaps because he had been given broad authority within the big German bank on its “management approval committee, where Broeksmit had influence. Top management,” the article notes, “had just handed Broeksmit broad authority to police risk across the firm…”. And there’s more, for as news began to come out publicly about the details of the scheme, the German banking regulatory authority, BaFin began an audit in January 2014, and as Bloomberg Business Week states, even though the report “has never been make public,” Bloomberg managed to obtain a copy, just how, we’re not told, but we may be sure it involved big players, perhaps in the intelligence community. The audit began on Jan 27, 2014, the day after Mr. Broeksmit “was found at his London home, hanging from a dog leash.”

As the article also notes, when Deutsche Bank moved aggressively to enter the world of investment banking, it hired Edson Mitchell from Merrill Lynch. Mitchell brought in Broeksmit, and Anshu Jain, “a prodigy at selling such risky, fee-laden products to hedge funds.” Mitchell died in a plane accident three days before Christmas in 2000.

I don’t know about you, but three banker deaths, all tied to the same bank, seems a little more than just “coincidence.”

But whether…

Continue Reading At: GizaDeathStar.com
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About Joseph P. Farrell

Joseph P. Farrell has a doctorate in patristics from the University of Oxford, and pursues research in physics, alternative history and science, and “strange stuff”. His book The Giza DeathStar, for which the Giza Community is named, was published in the spring of 2002, and was his first venture into “alternative history and science”.

It’s Beginning to Smell a Lot Like Totalitarianism, and I Don’t Mean Russia

It’s Beginning to Smell a Lot Like Totalitarianism, and I Don’t Mean Russia
Source: WilliamEngdahl.com
F. William Engdahl
December 13, 2016

If we smell precisely the stench of the totality of steps taken in NATO countries in recent months, especially in the United States and the European Union, we can smell the stench of totalitarian rule or some would call it, fascism, being quietly imposed on our basic human freedoms. Some recent examples give pause for reflection as to where we are allowing our world to drift.

Let’s begin with a most ominous, bizarre, Jesuitical interview that the Roman Catholic Pope Francis gave to a Belgian paper December 7, comparing what he calls defamatory news to what he called the “sickness of coprophagia.” He stated:

QUESTION – A final question, Holy Father, regarding the media: a consideration regarding the means of communication…

POPE – The communications media have a very great responsibility…It is obvious that, given that we are all sinners, also the media can…become harmful… They can be tempted by calumny, and therefore used to slander, to sully people, especially in the world of politics. They can be used as a means of defamation: every person has the right to a good reputation, but perhaps in their previous life, or ten years ago, they had a problem with justice, or a problem in their family life, and bringing this to light is serious and harmful… This is a sin and it is harmful. A thing that can do great damage to the information media is disinformation: that is, faced with any situation, saying only a part of the truth, and not the rest. This is disinformation…Disinformation is probably the greatest damage that the media can do, as opinion is guided in one direction, neglecting the other part of the truth. I believe that the media should…not fall prey – without offence, please – to the sickness of coprophilia, which is always wanting to communicate scandal…And since people have a tendency towards the sickness of coprophagia, it can do great harm.

Coprophilia is defined in the Merriam-Webster dictionary as “marked interest in excrement, especially the use of feces or filth for sexual excitement.” And coprophagia is eating feces by humans, literally, eating shit.

What people precisely, Holy Father, have a “tendency to towards the sickness of coprophagia”? Is this the dominant sickness of the human race? And if not, why do you make such a disgusting likeness between eating shit and citizens who read about politicians and their misdeeds or media that report on same? And who is to judge if factually true dissemination of facts about political figures from their past is relevant or not to help voters judge their character? I would say the comments are a perfect example of what he pretends to condemn.

Were it only a single, off-the-cuff remark by a religious figure, we could dismiss it along with claims such as the papal infallibility declaration proclaimed by the Vatican I on 18 July 1870. However, precisely because of such dogma and of the influence of the Roman Catholic Church and its Pope, notably in the countries of Western Europe, the United States and Latin America, such vague and dangerous remarks ought to be taken seriously as a signal of what lies ahead for the public freedom of speech.

“Fake News”

The papal comments on coprophagia and journalism come amid an explosion of charges in the USA and EU that Russia is planting “fake news” as it is now being called, about Hillary Clinton in the US media by way of certain alternative media. Robby Mook, Hillary Clinton’s former campaign manager, said “fake news” was “huge problem” the campaign faced in the recent US election: “I still think we have to investigate what happened with Russia here. We cannot have foreign, and I would say foreign aggressors here, intervening in our elections. The Russian were propagating fake news through Facebook and other outlets, but look, we also had…Breitbart News, which was notorious for peddling stories like this.”

Online stories that claimed a Washington D.C. pizza restaurant, Comet Ping Pong, was used by candidate Hillary Clinton and her campaign manager John Podesta for child sex, the so-called “Pizzagate” Scandal, is now being used to drum up popular opinion for censorship of the Internet as well as Facebook and other social media. Senior New York Times reporter David Sanger wrote a vague, anonymous “according to senior Administration sources,” article on December 9 under the headline, “Russia Hacked Republican Committee but Kept Data, US Concludes.” What we are seeing is precisely the kind of fake news that Hillary Clinton and the Pope talk about. But it is mainstream establishment media doing the fakery.

The fakery is being orchestrated by the highest levels of the mainstream media in collusion with NATO circles and intelligence agencies such as the CIA, which has saturated the ranks of mainstream media with their disinformation agents according to former CIA head William Colby, who once allegedly said, ““The CIA owns everyone of any significance in the major media.” The campaign will continue, likely with some horrendous stories about some psychopath taking a gun and bursting into Comet Ping Pong pizza place shooting innocent customers, because it was said he read in alternative media fake news about the pedophile ring. That already took place, but the man fired no shots. The population is being manipulated to accept extreme censorship of internet and other alternative media, something unimaginable just months ago.

Like clockwork, the “fake news” campaign has spread to the European Union. After announcing she will run again in 2017 for Chancellor, Angela Merkel spoke ominous words suggesting government censorship of independent “populist” (sic) media might be necessary: “Today we have fake sites, bots, trolls — things that regenerate themselves, reinforcing opinions with certain algorithms and we have to learn to deal with them.” She declared, “we must confront this phenomenon and if necessary, regulate it…Populism and political extremes are growing in Western democracies..” Her remarks came after Google and Facebook cut off ad revenue to what they declared to be “fake” news sites.

In the EU, especially Germany, populist has an implicit negative or even fascist connotation as in “right-wing populist” parties who oppose Merkel’s open door to war refugees policies, or who these days oppose almost anything her heavy-handed government puts forward.

War on Cash

Now if we begin to see stealth propaganda preparing us to accept severe clampdown on the one remaining free media, the Internet and related social media, we can also see an equally ominous, indeed, totalitarian move to create acceptance for the idea we give up the right to hold paper money, giving private, often corrupt, banks total control over our money, and in turn giving government agencies total control over where we spend for what.

This is the so-called cashless society. Arguments put forward are that elimination of cash will be more convenient to consumers or that it will eliminate or greatly reduce organized crime and shadow economy that evades taxation. In the EU, Sweden has already virtually eliminated cash. Sweden cash purchases today are down to just three per cent of the national economy compared to nine per cent in the Eurozone and seven per cent in the US. Public buses don’t accept cash. Three of Sweden’s four largest banks are phasing out the manual handling of cash in bank branches. Norway is following the same path.

In France today, it’s now illegal to do cash transactions over €1,000 without documenting it properly. France’s finance minister Michel Sapin, in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo attacks, blamed the attacks on the ability of the attackers to “buy dangerous things with cash.” Shortly after the Hebdo attacks he announced capital controls that included the €1,000 cap on cash payments, down from €3,000, to “fight against the use of cash and anonymity in the French economy.” In high-inflation Eurozone €1,000 is not a huge sum.

Even in conservative Germany, a leading member of the Merkel coalition proposed to eliminate the €500 note and capping all cash transactions at €5,000. Some weeks later the European Central Bank, where negative interest rates are the order of the day, announced it would end issue of €500 notes by December 2018 arguing it made it too easy for criminals and terrorists to act.

And in the United States, as the campaign to sell skeptical citizens on cashless digital bank payments increases, JP Morgan Chase, the largest and one of the most criminal banks in the US, has a policy restricting the use of cash in selected markets. The bank bans cash payments for credit cards, mortgages, and auto loans; and it prohibits storage of “any cash or coins” in safe deposit boxes. So if you have a rare cold coin collection, you better stuff it in the mattress…

Negative Rates and Cashless Citizens

As long as cash–bills and coins of a national currency–are the basis of the economy, the central banks of the USA and EU as well as Japan, are unable to impose a severe negative interest rate policy much beyond the flirtation today by the ECB and Bank of Japan. If central bank rates were to go very negative, banks would be charging customers the absurd charge to make them pay to keep their cash on deposit or in savings at those banks. Naturally, people would revolt and withdraw in cash to invest in gold or other hard, tangible valuables.

Harvard economist and member of the Economic Advisory Panel of the Federal Reserve, Kenneth Rogoff, an advocate of the “war on cash,” noted that the existence of cash “creates the artifact of the zero bound on the nominal interest rate.” In his 2016 book, The Curse of Cash, Rogoff urged the Federal Reserve to phase out the 100-dollar bill, then the 50-dollar bill, then the 20-dollar bill, leaving only smaller denominations in circulation, much like what the mad Modi has just done in India.

Any serious observer of the world economy, especially of NATO nations in Europe and North America since the financial crisis of September 2008, would have to realize the current status quo of zero or negative central bank interest rates to prop up banks and financial markets is not sustainable. Unless cash is eliminated that is.

On April 5, 1933 President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 6102, “forbidding the Hoarding of gold coin, gold bullion, and gold certificates within the continental United States.” That was rightly denounced by many as outright theft, confiscation of privately held gold, by the Government.

Radical solutions such as done by President Roosevelt in 1933, yet in a monetary order where gold no longer dominates, is clearly becoming more attractive to the major bankers of Wall Street and the City of London. Rather than confiscate citizens’ gold, today the Gods of Money would have to find a way to steal the cash of citizens. Moving to their “cashless” banking, limiting how much cash can be withdrawn and then eliminating cash entirely as Swedish banks are doing would enable tax authorities to have perfect totalitarian control on every citizen’s use of money. Moreover, governments could decree, as did FDR, that cash above certain levels must be taxed under some or another national declaration of emergency.

As such bold, radical moves advance, they would of course be vociferously attacked not on CNN or The New York Times or Financial Times or other mainstream media tied to those criminal financial institutions, but in alternative media. Keep in mind it was the uncritical New York Times and Washington Post that uncritically retailed the fake news that led to declaration of war on Iraq in 2003, namely that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction aimed at Washington. That war has spread death and destruction of a scale unimaginable. No one complained at the time about that fake news.

The protest over moves to confiscate citizens’ bank holdings would come through alternate, independent media such as Zero Hedge or countless others. Recently, US media uncritically republished a purported list of “fake news” blogs and websites prepared by Assistant Professor of Communications at Merrimack College, Melissa Zimdars. Zero Hedge was on it.

This is not about endorsing or not endorsing any alternative blog or website. It is about the essential freedom of us all to be able to read and decide any and all opinions or analyses and not to have government decide what I am or am not allowed to read. It’s about the freedom to keep privacy about what I choose to buy and not leave a digital trail that my bank could release to the tax authorities or to Homeland Security or the FBI, or sell to profiling consumer operations. Controlling public communication and controlling private money would go a long way to creation of the perfect totalitarian state. Not a good idea, I would say.

Read More At: WilliamEngdahl.com
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F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and geopolitics, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”

Vatican, Bilderberg and a ‘Migration’ Crisis

Vatican, Bilderberg and a ‘Migration’ Crisis
Source:WilliamEngdahl.com
F. William Engdahl
December 17, 2016

The annual meeting of the secretive Bilderberg Group took place this year in Dresden, Germany from June 9-12. Notable is their terminology in an official press release announcing topics for discussion. Point three (not necessarily in terms of importance) is curiously titled “Europe: migration, growth, reform, vision, unity.” Curious is the choice of the word “migration” for the EU refugee crisis that began in Spring 2015 as Turkey opened the detention centers and refugee camps from Syrian war refugees and pointed them to the EU. More about that later on. Here I want to concentrate on the little-known historical ties or links between the Bilderberg Meetings, founded in 1954, and the Vatican, and the role of both in heating up the current EU refugee instability.

In May, 1954 in Oosterbeek, near to the German border, a highly secret meeting was held at the Hotel de Bilderberg. The meeting was hosted by Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, husband of Queen Juliana. It was called simply, “Bilderberg Conference,” from the name of the hotel where the first talks were held. Out of three days of private discussion, a new Trans-Atlantic think-tank was created. It was to become one of the most effective organizations for influencing world events after 1954 up to the present, and one of the most damaging and secretive.

German-born Prince Bernhard was a controversial figure, a notorious philanderer, who had been a member of the German NSDAP and Reiter SS. In 1976 Bernhard was accused of accepting a $1 million bribe from the US fighter aircraft maker, Lockheed, to influence jet purchases by the Dutch Air Force. When Bernhard was forced to resign because of the scandals, he was succeeded as Bilderberg Chairman by then German Bundespräsident, Walter Scheel, and then afterwards by Britain’s Lord Carrington, a confidante and later business partner of Henry Kissinger. From the beginning it was clear Bilderberg was not the Little League of world politics.

In 2014 the Bilderberg Group’s official website, with sparse information, stated its purpose as simply to, “foster dialogue between Europe and North America.” It adds that it meets once a year with around 120 select attendees from finance, politics, industry, media and academia. Its rules mandate that two-thirds come from Europe and the remainder from the USA and Canada, with one third of the total always from the world of politics. Bilderberg participants from the US are always members of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).

Shadowy origins

The Bilderberg Group, in the words of the first Bilderberg Secretary General, a shadowy and enormously influential Polish exile, Joseph Retinger, came from an initiative Retinger made in 1952 to counter, “growing distrust of America which was making itself manifest in Western Europe and which was paralleled by a similar distrust of Western Europe in America.” In brief, its aim was to make certain that the strategic policy orientation of Western Europe and of the United States was in harmony. The decisive question to be asked was harmony in pursuit of which and whose geopolitical goals?

Joseph Retinger

Joseph Retinger was one of the most influential political figures shaping the pro-Atlanticist architecture of post-World War II Western Europe. He founded the Strasbourg-based Council of Europe, to lobby for the Washington-backed plan for creation of a United States of Europe, today called the European Union. He created the CIA-funded European Movement, as well as the CIA-funded European Youth Campaign. By far his most influential project was bringing the Bilderberg Group into being, and serving as its key European director and Secretary General, all far away from the public eye, as he preferred.

At the time his Bilderberg project took form the Korean War was ending and US Marshall Plan aid to Europe as well. Józef Hieronim Retinger had spent the war years in London as adviser to the exile government of Prime Minister General Wladyslaw Sikorski. While Retinger’s name was virtually unknown to the world at large, he was one of the most influential string-pullers of the postwar period in Europe and the United States. He was able to get private audiences with the Pope as well as the American President at will. It was he who selected Prince Bernhard to act as figurehead host and who selected which Americans and which Europeans would be invited to Bilderberg.

The American Steering Committee for the first Bilderberg Meeting in 1954 consisted of USA chairman Joseph E. Johnson, president of the Rockefeller-tied Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Others included George Ball, who during the Second World War was in London serving as director of the Strategic Bombing Survey, to analyze the impact of British and American bombing of German cities and civilian populations.

The American Bilderberg Steering Committee also included H. J. Heinz II, of the food group and father-in-law of John Kerry’s current wife; George Nebolsine, a State Department consultant on the Marshall Plan; and Dean Rusk, then President of the Rockefeller Foundation, later Secretary of State.

The real guiding hand behind the American side of the Bilderberg Group, however, was the first head of the newly-established Central Intelligence Agency, General Walter Bedell Smith. In 1950 Smith became Director of the CIA. The CIA helped organize, and sponsored the formation, and operation of the Bilderberg Conferences.

In late 1952, Retinger went to America to test his Bilderberg idea on his American contacts, where he met with Averell Harriman, David Rockefeller, and Bedell Smith, then director of the CIA. After Retinger explained his proposal, Smith reportedly said, “Why the hell didn’t you come to me in the first place?” The CIA chief then told Retinger to go to C. D. Jackson, who was about to become President Eisenhower’s Special Assistant for Psychological Warfare, and Eisenhower’s liaison between the Pentagon and CIA. viii.

The attendees at the 1954 initial Bilderberg Meeting included David Rockefeller, who today is the only Bilderberg “Advisory Group” Member. It included State Department official, Paul Nitze. As well, Gardner Cowles, US media baron and founder of Look magazine, who had been the US Government deputy director of the Office of War Information, the US propaganda ministry that created the Voice of America (VOA). It included J.P. Morgan Bank director Nelson D. Jay, a close Rockefeller associate.

The first Bilderberg attendees also included C.D. Jackson, by then Eisenhower’s architect of the Cold War; Alcide de Gasperi, Italian Prime Minister; and Antoine Pinay, a former French Prime Minister. Pinay was to become, the decisive personality shaping the long-term agenda of Bilderberg.

In Retinger’s words he founded Bilderberg Group simply to, “foster dialogue between Europe and North America.” That was for public consumption. In reality he built a very dark agenda that drew in the most reactionary circles in postwar Europe and tied them to the most powerful of postwar American oligarch families, that of Rockefeller, Harriman and their emerging “American Century.” The Bilderberg Group was to insure that that Century would be heavily influenced by postwar Vatican geopolitics. Its first meeting in 1954 was funded by Walter Bedell Smith’s CIA, with subsequent meetings financed by the CIA’s close ally during the Cold War, the Ford Foundation.

Le Cercle—The Vatican-Rockefeller Alliance

The key to the extraordinary power and influence of the annual Bilderberg Meetings from 1954 laid in the unpublished role of the secretive pan-Europeanist organization then known as Le Cercle, sometimes referred to as Cercle Pinay, a reference to the pivotal role in shaping Bilderberg played by the network of French Prime Minister Antoine Pinay, an intimate friend of Bilderberg founder Retinger.

Pinay’s Le Cercle (The Group) was the link that covertly tied most European intelligence services including the German BND and BfV, MI-6 in Britain, France’s SDECE, Holland’s BVD, Belgium’s Surete de l’Etat and Swiss and later even Saudi intelligence and apartheid South Africa’s secret service, BOSS. Prominent politicians associated with Pinay and Le Cercle included Franz Josef Strauss, Otto von Habsburg, Konrad Adenauer, Julio Andreotti of Italy, General Antonio de Spinola of Portugal, a conservative who went on later to become President; Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan.

Antoine Pinay’s group, Le Cercle, in turn was tied as well to the powerful and very right-wing Roman Catholic lay organization, Opus Dei, which had just been given final Catholic Church official approval in 1950, two years before plans for Bilderberg began, by Pope Pius XII. The organization was made well known, to its discomfort, as a subject of the 2003 Dan Brown historical novel, Da Vinci Code.

Among the later achievements of Le Cercle was the manipulation of the 1979 British elections that successfully brought in anti-labor right-wing Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. It was done with Le Cercle leading members, Sir Brian Crozier, MI-6 head Sir Arthur Franks, and MI-6 division head, Nicholas Elliott.

The late Bavarian political czar, Franz Josef Strauss, “The Lion of Bavaria,” noted in his memoirs that he had held a friendship with Le Cercle’s Antoine Pinay since the two first met in 1953. Le Cercle networks in Germany promoted Strauss’s candidacy, unsuccessfully, to become German Chancellor. In 1955 Strauss also became a regular member of the Bilderberg Meetings.

Bilderberg founder, Josef Retinger, a Polish-born Roman Catholic, organized his European network of the Bilderberg through the mediation of an Italian CIA asset, Prof. Luigi Gedda, head of Azione Cattolica. Gedda was also medical adviser to Pope Pius XII, a very strong right-wing anti-communist pontiff, who before the Second World War, as Cardinal Eugenio Giovanni Pacelli, had been architect of the 1933 Reichskonkordat with Hitler’s Nazi Party. Already in 1932 Pacelli as Vatican Secretary of State had played a key role in convincing Roman Catholic German Chancellor Franz von Papen to steer his Catholic Center Party into an anti-left alliance and join with the NSDAP of Hitler.

Clerical fascism and Pius XII

As Pope, Pius XII had a clear political bias and it was towards support of clerical or nominally Roman Catholic fascist or extremely repressive right-wing regimes, a form of what some termed clerical fascism, the fusion of the Church with fascist or dictatorial political regimes, such as in Franco’s Spain or Spinola’s Portugal.

During the Second World War Pius XII refused to condemn the clerical fascist pro-Hitler regime of Roman Catholic Ante Pavelić, the leader of the newly proclaimed Croatian state. Informed by Catholic clergy of the genocidal murders of Orthodox Serbs who had refused to embrace the Catholic faith, Pius XII, even though he possessed a list of Croatian clergy members who had “joined in the slaughter,” did not condemn the Pavelić regime or take action against the clergy involved. Instead he elevated Aloysius Stepinac—a Croatian archbishop convicted of collaborating with the Ustaše—to Cardinal.

In effect, Retinger’s European Bilderberg networks linked the extreme right-wing European anti-communist networks—including the Vatican of Pius XII, of Opus Dei, of the Franco government in Spain, of Portugal’s General Spinola and numerous other right-wing European anti-communist networks—to the triumphant American elites around the powerful Rockefeller group, through the networks and person of David Rockefeller. It was a power marriage that was to have a profound effect on the development of postwar European society and politics.

Francis and the ‘Migrants’-Words are all I have…

Now against this background of Bilderberg true history, the question to be asked is whether the first Jesuit Pope in history, Francis, is following in the heavy footsteps of Pius XII? Is he deliberately trying to stir things up in Europe through his support of the huge influx of war refugees from Syria and North Africa in the past year?

Words are an essential form of human communication, quite complex in the energy they convey to others. Depending on the word and its context, it can convey negative energy, hate energy; it can convey neutral energy, neither here nor there; it can also convey love, harmony, peace energy. If there is any organized group on the face of this Earth that is master of such word use precision it is the Society of Jesus, Pope Francis’ mother organization. This is relevant in reading his numerous missives on the population disruptions of the Middle East and Africa and the EU in the past three years.

There are three words being loosely thrown about today in regard to the EU crisis, and crisis it is. There is the word, “refugee,” legally defined as “a person who has been forced to leave their country in order to escape war, persecution, or natural disaster.” Then there is the related term, “asylum-seeker” defined as “a person who has left their home country as a political refugee and is seeking asylum in another.” Third there is the entirely different concept behind the word used both by Pope Francis and by the 2016 Bilderberg Meeting in Dresden, namely the word “migrant.” Migrant is precisely defined as “a person who moves from one place to another in order to find work or better living conditions.” Here there is no mention of war, political persecution or life-endangering calamity.

By calling it what it clearly is not, a migration into the EU from the south, the word completely blunts the causes behind that migration, namely a US-UK-France-instigated series of wars, wars for control of oil and now gas, wars in Libya, Egypt, Tunisia, Syria, initially called by Hillary Clinton the Arab Spring. The million-plus human beings streaming into the EU from Turkey over the past fifteen months are no migrants. They are refugees from wars.

In calling them migrants it implicitly makes either racist or bigot anyone questioning the legal procedures employed by the Merkel government and the German Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF). According to reliable investigative reports conveyed to this author, the German Bundesamt für Migration und Flüchtlinge (BAMF) since November 2014 has abandoned the rules and legal directives for refugees (not asylum seekers) for no public reason and without any notice to the public. Interesting.

“Structural Reality?”

In a Papal Message of January 17, 2016, the Pope declared, “In our time, migration is growing worldwide…Migration movements are now a structural reality, and our primary issue must be to deal with the present emergency phase by providing programmes which address the causes of migration and the changes it entails, including its effect on the makeup of societies and peoples.” He goes on, “Biblical revelation urges us to welcome the stranger; it tells us that in so doing, we open our doors to God, and that in the faces of others we see the face of Christ himself.” What if that stranger wants to kill you and to rape your daughters?

Nice words these are indeed. It ignores entirely the actual disruptive reality of the flood of war refugees into Germany and the rest of the EU. Rather than to focus his immense influence on bringing about peace and reconciliation of all domestic parties in Syria and condemning the terrorism of ISIS, Al Qaeda/Al-Nusra Front and the others destroying one of the oldest cultures in the world, a poly-religious one, Francis chooses to tell Europeans to open their hearts and even homes to the “migrants.” In this context, as I noted at the start, it is highly significant that this year’s Dresden Bilderberg Meeting referred in their discussion to “Migration” not Refugee Crisis. It appears both the Pope and Bilderberg planners are singing from the same sheet of music on this at least.

On January 6, in his message on the feast of Epiphany, the same Pope released a Papal video in which he called for creating a one world religion in effect: “Many think differently, feel differently, seeking God or meeting God in different ways. In this crowd, in this range of religions, there is only one certainty that we have for all: we are all children of God.”

Some days later, January 11, 2016 in an address to the Vatican diplomatic corps, Francis insisted that Europe has the means to absorb migrants without sacrificing its security or culture. He criticized the distinction made by the international community between refugees fleeing persecution and those fleeing poverty, referring to “the grave crisis of migration which we are facing.” He condemned various EU national attempts to find their own national solutions to this crisis of migration: “…there is no place for autonomous solutions pursued by individual states, since the consequences of the decisions made by each inevitably have repercussions on the entire international community. Indeed, migrations, more than ever before, will play a pivotal role in the future of our world.”

Unlike Francis, I firmly believe that borders DO matter, that national autonomy, like individual autonomy, does matter, is in fact, an essential component of our existence, our individual sovereignty our national sovereignty. We human beings are unique individuals every one. We are not some amorphous blob with no individuality. These differences are sacred in my view. Not according to the words of the Jesuit Pope. Our world with all its wars and deep disturbances is not at the state of nirvana which Pope Francis would like us to believe where peace and Christian charity overcome every obstacle. It well may be in the future but to pretend it already is belies in my view a hidden agenda.

David Rockefeller is an open partisan of a one world order where he and his ilk would sit atop all mankind, a disgusting idea. For such a one economic world, we must dissolve national borders. This, the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership is designed to do in large part, if, that is, EU leaders are suicidal enough to agree. Then to control an entire world, it needs a synthetic new religion. The forced refugee crisis is designed to blur national borders and historical ethnic or national culture. There is far more behind all the nice speeches of the Pope and the talks of Bilderberg than we are being told. It’s not without reason that the word “Jesuitical” in ordinary usage means “one using subtle or oversubtle reasoning; crafty; sly; intriguing.”

_______________________________________________________________

F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and geopolitics, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”

Read More At: WillaimEngdahl.com

FINALLY! First Senior Bankers On The Planet Responsible For 2008 Collapse Jailed

Source:TheFreeThoughtProject.com
Matt Agorist
August 5, 2016

In April, Wells Fargo & Co admitted to defrauding the United States government for nearly an entire decade, which subsequently led to the housing market collapse — and the United States punished no one.

Bank of America Corp (BAC.N), Citigroup Inc (C.N), Deutsche Bank AG (DBKGn.DE) and JPMorgan Chase & Co (JPM.N), have all previously made the same admission and settled similar federal lawsuits — again, with no one being held criminally responsible.

While low-level bankers have been thrown in jail as apparent scapegoats in places like Iceland, not a single high-level CEO or officer has faced punitive criminal action — until now.

On Friday, three senior Irish bankers were jailed for up to three-and-a-half years for their conspiracy to defraud investors, subsequently causing the economic collapse of 2008.

According to a report in Reuters, the trio will be among the first senior bankers globally to be jailed for their role in the collapse of a bank during the crisis.

Watching these criminal bankers use the governments of the world to fleece the taxpayers in a series of bailouts and scams to defraud the people has been infuriating.

As Reuters reports,

The lack of convictions until now has angered Irish taxpayers, who had to stump up 64 billion euros – almost 40 percent of annual economic output – after a property collapse forced the biggest state bank rescue in the euro zone.

The crash thrust Ireland into a three-year sovereign bailout in 2010 and the finance ministry said last month that it could take another 15 years to recover the funds pumped into the banks still operating.

Former Irish Life and Permanent Chief Executive Denis Casey was sentenced to two years and nine months following the 74-day criminal trial, Ireland’s longest ever.

Willie McAteer, former finance director at the failed Anglo Irish Bank, and John Bowe, its ex-head of capital markets, were given sentences of 42 months and 24 months respectively.

Unlike the bankers who remain protected in America’s legal system, the Irish have decided to lay down the law.

“By means that could be termed dishonest, deceitful and corrupt they manufactured 7.2 billion euros in deposits by obvious sham transactions,” Judge Martin Nolan told the court, describing the conspiracy as a “very serious crime”.

“The public is entitled to rely on the probity of blue chip firms. If we can’t rely on the probity of these banks we lose all hope or trust in institutions,” said Nolan.

In the United States, the people have been forced to file their own legal action against the criminal bankers as the government does absolutely nothing to stop their crimes.

Despite the bankers’ best attempts at foiling the private actions against them, the people have pushed through.

A newly revived antitrust lawsuit, according to the appeals court, could be devastating to these 16 banks, including Deutsche Bank AG, Royal Bank of Canada, Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc, UBS AG, HSBC Holdings Plc, Barclays Plc, Credit Suisse Group AG, Bank of America Corp, Citigroup Inc., and JPMorgan Chase & Co.

“Requiring the banks to pay treble damages to every plaintiff who ended up on the wrong side of an independent Libor‐denominated derivative swap would, if appellants’ allegations were proved at trial, not only bankrupt 16 of the world’s most important financial institutions, but also vastly extend the potential scope of antitrust liability in myriad markets where derivative instruments have proliferated,” the U.S. Court of Appeals in New York said in the ruling.

Until the people wake up to the atrocities being carried out against them by criminal bankers who control the government, this fleecing of the citizenry will continue. To all those who bank with any of these huge banks — pull your money out today, move it to a local bank, or find another alternative.

Failing to do so only sustains their criminal behavior. Please share this story with your friends and family as it will most assuredly be a mere blip on their televisions and deliberately easy to miss.

Read More At TheFreeThoughtProject.com
________________________________________________________________

Matt Agorist is an honorably discharged veteran of the USMC and former intelligence operator directly tasked by the NSA. This prior experience gives him unique insight into the world of government corruption and the American police state. Agorist has been an independent journalist for over a decade and has been featured on mainstream networks around the world.

Fed On JP Morgan: Your Bank’s “Wind Down Plan” Is…

 FED ON JP MORGAN: YOUR BANK’S “WIND DOWN PLAN” IS ...

Source: GizaDeathStar.com
Dr. Joseph P. Farrell
April 25, 2016

Mr V.K. sent this article along, and when you read it, I think you’ll see why he did. But the problem is, where to “file’ it, because its contents are so stunning. Here’s the article:

The Fed Sends a Frightening Letter to JPMorgan and Corporate Media Yawns

The crux of the problem, I suggest, is outlined by the following paragraphs:

  1. All the “big banks” are overexposed to each other as a result of trading “bad derivatives” paper

A rational observer of Wall Street’s serial hubris might have expected some key segments of this letter to make it into the business press. A mere eight years ago the United States experienced a complete meltdown of its financial system, leading to the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression. President Obama and regulators have been assuring us over these intervening eight years that things are under control as a result of the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation. But according to the letter the Fed and FDIC issued on April 12 to JPMorgan Chase, the country’s largest bank with over $2 trillion in assets and $51 trillion in notional amounts of derivatives, things are decidedly not under control.

At the top of page 11, the Federal regulators reveal that they have “identified a deficiency” in JPMorgan’s wind-down plan which if not properly addressed could “pose serious adverse effects to the financial stability of the United States.” Why didn’t JPMorgan’s Board of Directors or its legions of lawyers catch this?

Then, a little farther down the page:

How could one bank, even one as big and global as JPMorgan Chase, bring down the whole financial stability of the United States? Because, as the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Financial Research (OFR) has explained in detail and plotted in pictures (see below), five big banks in the U.S. have high contagion risk to each other. Which bank poses the highest contagion risk? JPMorgan Chase.

In other words, folks, the big banks were busily pumping up each other’s ledger sheets by trading the credit defaul swaps/derivative bundles (and bundles of bundles), one key component of which were mortgages (many of them fraudulent), and when the housing bubble burst…well, you know the story.

But now comes a second point in the article, and it’s a stunner”

Continue Reading At: GizaDeathStar.com

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Joseph P. Farrell has a doctorate in patristics from the University of Oxford, and pursues research in physics, alternative history and science, and “strange stuff”. His book The Giza DeathStar, for which the Giza Community is named, was published in the spring of 2002, and was his first venture into “alternative history and science”.

 

Criminal Bankers and Icelandic Justice – F. William Engdahl

iceland_president

Source: TheNewsDoctors.com
F. William Engdhal
April 17, 2016

TND Editor’s Note:  If you want to know how bankers got away with no prosecution in the United States, John Titus’ latest documentary is truly a “must-watch” tour-de-force.  Titus details the exact language and associated strategy that was executed to protect bankers following the 2008 financial crash.  Click here to access it.

TND Guest Contributor: F. William Engdahl

On September 15, 2008, a former Goldman Sachs chairman, US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulsen, deliberately triggered a predictable global financial meltdown when he decided to break precedent and let Lehman Bros, the fourth-largest Wall Street investment bank, go bankrupt. The reasons for his decision are for another time. The fallout from that traumatic financial crisis remains very much with the world financial system to this day, more than seven years later. One of the little-noticed casualties of that Lehman Bros. debacle was the worst banking crisis in the history of one of the world’s smallest countries, Iceland. How that country of 323,000 citizens chose to deal with the crisis is a model for the rest of the world. Instead of beatifying the criminal bankers responsible for worst world financial crisis in history, the people of Iceland did something quite different.

Iceland, a beautiful Nordic island in the far North Atlantic between Greenland and Norway, with active volcanoes, streams with some of the most delicious non-industrial and non-GMO wild salmon, self-sufficient in energy from thermal springs and hydroelectric power, got lured into the mad, greed-driven frenzy of the US sub-prime real estate crisis in a big way. In October 2008, amid the global financial Tsunami triggered by Paulsen’s Lehman act, the Iceland government nationalized the three largest private banks, Glitnir, Landsbanki and Kaupthing, following depositor panic withdrawals. The three banks, in a few short years after they were privatized had managed to amass debts ten times Iceland’s annual DGP.

When a group of sensible US economists proposed Paulsen nationalize the top Wall Street banks behind the crisis–JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs– to restore order and keep credit flowing to the real economy, he replied that would be “socialism. We don’t do that in America.” Instead, Paulsen’s US Treasury used hundreds of billions of US taxpayer dollars to buy non-voting shares of the Wall Street banks, meaning the Government didn’t demand any say in the banks’ policies in return. That might be called bankers’ socialism–privatize the profits and socialize the losses.

By November 2008 the UK and Dutch investors in a now-defunct savings scheme of Landsbanki, Icesave, found their hundreds of millions of Pounds of investments were, indeed, frozen like ice—their savings were frozen ice. When the British government demanded of the Iceland government the repayment of the deposits in the UK branches of the formerly private Landsbanki bank, an international dispute, known as the Icesave dispute, erupted. The British government invoked anti-terrorism legislation against Iceland in order to freeze the UK-based assets of Kaupthing, Iceland’s biggest bank, bankrupting the bank. Iceland’s government turned to the IMF for a $5 billion bailout, the first European country since Italy in 1976 to do so.

Citizen revolt

The Governor of the Iceland Central Bank, David Oddsson went against the government of Geir Haarde, who had been complicit in facilitating the private bankers’s criminal Ponzi schemes, and stated on national TV, “Icelanders will not pay the debts of profligate financiers.”  In January 2009 Haarde’s coalition was forced to resign following massive protests as unemployment soared from 1% before the crisis to over 9% in months. The IMF, as always, was demanding severe Greek-like austerity from the government as condition for its bailout. In September 2010, Haarde became the first Icelandic minister to be indicted for misconduct in office, and the only politician in the world to be charged with responsibility for the financial crisis. He stood trial before a special court for official offenses, the Landsdómur. He was convicted on one count.

The Haarde government had twice negotiated terms under which Iceland would repay the UK and the Netherlands governments, with interest, for the cost of bailing out Icesave savers. The IMF demanded it as condition for its money. And Parliament bowed. But Iceland’s staunchly independent voters twice passed popular referenda rejecting the UK, Dutch and IMF demands.

Continue Reading At: TheNewsDoctors.com

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F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and geopolitics, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.  This work was published at the New Eastern Outlook and is reprinted with permission.

SKU Podcast #15: Bankers Finally Admit Manipulating Gold and Silver Prices

Source: SmartKnowlegeU
JS Kim
April 15, 2016

Today we discuss the recent admission of Deutsche Bank bankers in manipulating gold and silver prices after years of many prominent figures in the gold and silver blogosphere denying this obvious fact that had been supported by mountains of evidence, and we pose the question, “What ulterior motives drove prominent voices to deny that gold and silver prices were manipulated by bankers?”

The above includes a clip from the film “Take Shelter” that is used for educational purposes to illustrate a point as it relates to gold and silver “conspiracy theories” that is entirely different than the point illustrated in the film. I do not own any rights to this clip and Hydraulx Entertainment, REI Capital, Grove Hill Productions, and Strange Matter Films own all rights to this clip.

Deutsche Bank Confirms Silver Market Manipulation In Legal Settlement, Agrees To Expose Other Banks
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-04…

Deutsche Bank Admits it Rigs Gold Prices
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-04…

SmartKnowledgeU Challenges the Legitimacy of the Paper GLD and SLV Investment Vehicles, 15 July, 2009
https://smartknowledgeu.com/blog/2009…

JS Kim Challenges CFTC Commissioner Bart Chilton to Stop Fraudulent Manipulation of Gold Prices, 16 October 2008
https://smartknowledgeu.com/blog/2008…

The Federal Reserve Cartel: Part I: The Eight Families

Source: HendersonLeftHook.wordpress.com
Dean Henderson
January 9, 2016

(Excerpted from Chapter 19: The Eight Families: Big Oil & Their Bankers…)

The Four Horsemen of Banking (Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup and Wells Fargo) own the Four Horsemen of Oil (Exxon Mobil, Royal Dutch/Shell, BP Amoco and Chevron Texaco); in tandem with Deutsche Bank, BNP, Barclays and other European old money behemoths.  But their monopoly over the global economy does not end at the edge of the oil patch. 

According to company 10K filings to the SEC, the Four Horsemen of Banking are among the top ten stock holders of virtually every Fortune 500 corporation. [1]

So who then are the stockholders in these money center banks?

This information is guarded much more closely. My queries to bank regulatory agencies regarding stock ownership in the top 25 US bank holding companies were given Freedom of Information Act status, before being denied on “national security” grounds.  This is rather ironic, since many of the bank’s stockholders reside in Europe.

One important repository for the wealth of the global oligarchy that owns these bank holding companies is US Trust Corporation – founded in 1853 and now owned by Bank of America.  A recent US Trust Corporate Director and Honorary Trustee was Walter Rothschild.  Other directors included Daniel Davison of JP Morgan Chase, Richard Tucker of Exxon Mobil, Daniel Roberts of Citigroup and Marshall Schwartz of Morgan Stanley. [2]

J. W. McCallister, an oil industry insider with House of Saud connections, wrote in The Grim Reaper that information he acquired from Saudi bankers cited 80% ownership of the New York Federal Reserve Bank- by far the most powerful Fed branch- by just eight families, four of which reside in the US.  They are the Goldman Sachs, Rockefellers, Lehmans and Kuhn Loebs of New York; the Rothschilds of Paris and London; the Warburgs of Hamburg; the Lazards of Paris; and the Israel Moses Seifs of Rome.

CPA Thomas D. Schauf corroborates McCallister’s claims, adding that ten banks control all twelve Federal Reserve Bank branches.  He names N.M. Rothschild of London, Rothschild Bank of Berlin, Warburg Bank of Hamburg, Warburg Bank of Amsterdam, Lehman Brothers of New York, Lazard Brothers of Paris, Kuhn Loeb Bank of New York, Israel Moses Seif Bank of Italy, Goldman Sachs of New York and JP Morgan Chase Bank of New York.  Schauf lists William Rockefeller, Paul Warburg, Jacob Schiff and James Stillman as individuals who own large shares of the Fed. [3]  The Schiffs are insiders at Kuhn Loeb. The Stillmans are Citigroup insiders, who married into the Rockefeller clan at the turn of the century.

Eustace Mullins came to the same conclusions in his book The Secrets of the Federal Reserve, in which he displays charts connecting the Fed and its member banks to the families of Rothschild, Warburg, Rockefeller and the others. [4]

The control that these banking families exert over the global economy cannot be overstated and is quite intentionally shrouded in secrecy.  Their corporate media arm is quick to discredit any information exposing this private central banking cartel as “conspiracy theory”.  Yet the facts remain.

The House of Morgan

The Federal Reserve Bank was born in 1913, the same year US banking scion J. Pierpont Morgan died and the Rockefeller Foundation was formed.  The House of Morgan presided over American finance from the corner of Wall Street and Broad, acting as quasi-US central bank since 1838, when George Peabody founded it in London.

Peabody was a business associate of the Rothschilds.  In 1952 Fed researcher Eustace Mullins put forth the supposition that the Morgans were nothing more than Rothschild agents.  Mullins wrote that the Rothschilds, “…preferred to operate anonymously in the US behind the facade of J.P. Morgan & Company”. [5]

Author Gabriel Kolko stated, “Morgan’s activities in 1895-1896 in selling US gold bonds in Europe were based on an alliance with the House of Rothschild.” [6]

The Morgan financial octopus wrapped its tentacles quickly around the globe. Morgan Grenfell operated in London. Morgan et Ce ruled Paris. The Rothschild’s Lambert cousins set up Drexel & Company in Philadelphia.

The House of Morgan catered to the Astors, DuPonts, Guggenheims, Vanderbilts and Rockefellers.  It financed the launch of AT&T, General Motors, General Electric and DuPont.  Like the London-based Rothschild and Barings banks, Morgan became part of the power structure in many countries.

By 1890 the House of Morgan was lending to Egypt’s central bank, financing Russian railroads, floating Brazilian provincial government bonds and funding Argentine public works projects.  A recession in 1893 enhanced Morgan’s power.  That year Morgan saved the US government from a bank panic, forming a syndicate to prop up government reserves with a shipment of $62 million worth of Rothschild gold. [7]

Morgan was the driving force behind Western expansion in the US, financing and controlling West-bound railroads through voting trusts.  In 1879 Cornelius Vanderbilt’s Morgan-financed New York Central Railroad gave preferential shipping rates to John D. Rockefeller’s budding Standard Oil monopoly, cementing the Rockefeller/Morgan relationship.

The House of Morgan now fell under Rothschild and Rockefeller family control.  A New York Herald headline read, “Railroad Kings Form Gigantic Trust”.  J. Pierpont Morgan, who once stated, “Competition is a sin”, now opined gleefully, “Think of it.  All competing railroad traffic west of St. Louis placed in the control of about thirty men.”[8]

Morgan and Edward Harriman’s banker Kuhn Loeb held a monopoly over the railroads, while banking dynasties Lehman, Goldman Sachs and Lazard joined the Rockefellers in controlling the US industrial base. [9]

In 1903 Banker’s Trust was set up by the Eight Families.  Benjamin Strong of Banker’s Trust was the first Governor of the New York Federal Reserve Bank.  The 1913 creation of the Fed fused the power of the Eight Families to the military and diplomatic might of the US government.  If their overseas loans went unpaid, the oligarchs could now deploy US Marines to collect the debts.  Morgan, Chase and Citibank formed an international lending syndicate.

The House of Morgan was cozy with the British House of Windsor and the Italian House of Savoy.  The Kuhn Loebs, Warburgs, Lehmans, Lazards, Israel Moses Seifs and Goldman Sachs also had close ties to European royalty.  By 1895 Morgan controlled the flow of gold in and out of the US.  The first American wave of mergers was in its infancy and was being promoted by the bankers.  In 1897 there were sixty-nine industrial mergers.  By 1899 there were twelve-hundred. In 1904 John Moody – founder of Moody’s Investor Services – said it was impossible to talk of Rockefeller and Morgan interests as separate. [10]

Public distrust of the combine spread.  Many considered them traitors working for European old money.  Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, Andrew Carnegie’s US Steel and Edward Harriman’s railroads were all financed by banker Jacob Schiff at Kuhn Loeb, who worked closely with the European Rothschilds.

Several Western states banned the bankers. Populist preacher William Jennings Bryan was thrice the Democratic nominee for President from 1896 -1908.  The central theme of his anti-imperialist campaign was that America was falling into a trap of “financial servitude to British capital”.  Teddy Roosevelt defeated Bryan in 1908, but was forced by this spreading populist wildfire to enact the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. He then went after the Standard Oil Trust.

In 1912 the Pujo hearings were held, addressing concentration of power on Wall Street.  That same year Mrs. Edward Harriman sold her substantial shares in New York’s Guaranty Trust Bank to J.P. Morgan, creating Morgan Guaranty Trust.  Judge Louis Brandeis convinced President Woodrow Wilson to call for an end to interlocking board directorates.  In 1914 the Clayton Anti-Trust Act was passed.

Jack Morgan – J. Pierpont’s son and successor – responded by calling on Morgan clients Remington and Winchester to increase arms production. He argued that the US needed to enter WWI.  Goaded by the Carnegie Foundation and other oligarchy fronts, Wilson accommodated.  As Charles Tansill wrote in America Goes to War, “Even before the clash of arms, the French firm of Rothschild Freres cabled to Morgan & Company in New York suggesting the flotation of a loan of $100 million, a substantial part of which was to be left in the US to pay for French purchases of American goods.”

The House of Morgan financed half the US war effort, while receiving commissions for lining up contractors like GE, Du Pont, US Steel, Kennecott and ASARCO.  All were Morgan clients.  Morgan also financed the British Boer War in South Africa and the Franco-Prussian War.  The 1919 Paris Peace Conference was presided over by Morgan, which led both German and Allied reconstruction efforts. [11]

In the 1930’s populism resurfaced in America after Goldman Sachs, Lehman Bank and others profited from the Crash of 1929. [12]  House Banking Committee Chairman Louis McFadden (D-NY) said of the Great Depression, “It was no accident.  It was a carefully contrived occurrence…The international bankers sought to bring about a condition of despair here so they might emerge as rulers of us all”.

Sen. Gerald Nye (D-ND) chaired a munitions investigation in 1936.  Nye concluded that the House of Morgan had plunged the US into WWI to protect loans and create a booming arms industry.  Nye later produced a document titled The Next War, which cynically referred to “the old goddess of democracy trick”, through which Japan could be used to lure the US into WWII.

In 1937 Interior Secretary Harold Ickes warned of the influence of “America’s 60 Families”.  Historian Ferdinand Lundberg later penned a book of the exact same title. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas decried, “Morgan influence…the most pernicious one in industry and finance today.”

Jack Morgan responded by nudging the US towards WWII.  Morgan had close relations with the Iwasaki and Dan families – Japan’s two wealthiest clans – who have owned Mitsubishi and Mitsui, respectively, since the companies emerged from 17th Century shogunates.  When Japan invaded Manchuria, slaughtering Chinese peasants at Nanking, Morgan downplayed the incident.  Morgan also had close relations with Italian fascist Benito Mussolini, while German Nazi Dr. Hjalmer Schacht was a Morgan Bank liaison during WWII.  After the war Morgan representatives met with Schacht at the Bank of International Settlements (BIS) in Basel, Switzerland. [13]

The House of Rockefeller

BIS is the most powerful bank in the world, a global central bank for the Eight Families who control the private central banks of almost all Western and developing nations. The first President of BIS was Rockefeller banker Gates McGarrah- an official at Chase Manhattan and the Federal Reserve.  McGarrah was the grandfather of former CIA director Richard Helms.  The Rockefellers- like the Morgans- had close ties to London. David Icke writes in Children of the Matrix, that the Rockefellers and Morgans were just “gofers” for the European Rothschilds. [14]

BIS is owned by the Federal Reserve, Bank of England, Bank of Italy, Bank of Canada, Swiss National Bank, Nederlandsche Bank, Bundesbank and Bank of France.

Historian Carroll Quigley wrote in his epic book Tragedy and Hope that BIS was part of a plan, “to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole…to be controlled in a feudalistic fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert by secret agreements.”

The US government had a historical distrust of BIS, lobbying unsuccessfully for its demise at the 1944 post-WWII Bretton Woods Conference.  Instead the Eight Families’ power was exacerbated, with the Bretton Woods creation of the IMF and the World Bank.  The US Federal Reserve only took shares in BIS in September 1994. [15]

BIS holds at least 10% of monetary reserves for at least 80 of the world’s central banks, the IMF and other multilateral institutions.  It serves as financial agent for international agreements, collects information on the global economy and serves as lender of last resort to prevent global financial collapse.

BIS promotes an agenda of monopoly capitalist fascism.  It gave a bridge loan to Hungary in the 1990’s to ensure privatization of that country’s economy.  It served as conduit for Eight Families funding of Adolf Hitler- led by the Warburg’s J. Henry Schroeder and Mendelsohn Bank of Amsterdam.  Many researchers assert that BIS is at the nadir of global drug money laundering. [16]

It is no coincidence that BIS is headquartered in Switzerland, favorite hiding place for the wealth of the global aristocracy and headquarters for the P-2 Italian Freemason’s Alpina Lodge and Nazi International.  Other institutions which the Eight Families control include the World Economic Forum, the International Monetary Conference and the World Trade Organization.

Bretton Woods was a boon to the Eight Families.  The IMF and World Bank were central to this “new world order”.  In 1944 the first World Bank bonds were floated by Morgan Stanley and First Boston.  The French Lazard family became more involved in House of Morgan interests.  Lazard Freres- France’s biggest investment bank- is owned by the Lazard and David-Weill families- old Genoese banking scions represented by Michelle Davive.  A recent Chairman and CEO of Citigroup was Sanford Weill.

In 1968 Morgan Guaranty launched Euro-Clear, a Brussels-based bank clearing system for Eurodollar securities. It was the first such automated endeavor.  Some took to calling Euro-Clear “The Beast”.  Brussels serves as headquarters for the new European Central Bank and for NATO.  In 1973 Morgan officials met secretly in Bermuda to illegally resurrect the old House of Morgan, twenty years before Glass Steagal Act was repealed.  Morgan and the Rockefellers provided the financial backing for Merrill Lynch, boosting it into the Big 5 of US investment banking. Merrill is now part of Bank of America.

John D. Rockefeller used his oil wealth to acquire Equitable Trust, which had gobbled up several large banks and corporations by the 1920’s.  The Great Depression helped consolidate Rockefeller’s power.  His Chase Bank merged with Kuhn Loeb’s Manhattan Bank to form Chase Manhattan, cementing a long-time family relationship.  The Kuhn-Loeb’s had financed – along with Rothschilds – Rockefeller’s quest to become king of the oil patch.  National City Bank of Cleveland provided John D. with the money needed to embark upon his monopolization of the US oil industry.  The bank was identified in Congressional hearings as being one of three Rothschild-owned banks in the US during the 1870’s, when Rockefeller first incorporated as Standard Oil of Ohio. [17]

One Rockefeller Standard Oil partner was Edward Harkness, whose family came to control Chemical Bank.  Another was James Stillman, whose family controlled Manufacturers Hanover Trust.  Both banks have merged under the JP Morgan Chase umbrella.  Two of James Stillman’s daughters married two of William Rockefeller’s sons. The two families control a big chunk of Citigroup as well. [18]

In the insurance business, the Rockefellers control Metropolitan Life, Equitable Life, Prudential and New York Life.  Rockefeller banks control 25% of all assets of the 50 largest US commercial banks and 30% of all assets of the 50 largest insurance companies. [19]  Insurance companies- the first in the US was launched by Freemasons through their Woodman’s of America- play a key role in the Bermuda drug money shuffle.

Companies under Rockefeller control include Exxon Mobil, Chevron Texaco, BP Amoco, Marathon Oil, Freeport McMoran, Quaker Oats, ASARCO, United, Delta, Northwest, ITT, International Harvester, Xerox, Boeing, Westinghouse, Hewlett-Packard, Honeywell, International Paper, Pfizer, Motorola, Monsanto, Union Carbide and General Foods.

The Rockefeller Foundation has close financial ties to both Ford and Carnegie Foundations.  Other family philanthropic endeavors include Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, General Education Board, Rockefeller University and the University of Chicago- which churns out a steady stream of far right economists as apologists for international capital, including Milton Friedman.

The family owns 30 Rockefeller Plaza, where the national Christmas tree is lighted every year, and Rockefeller Center.  David Rockefeller was instrumental in the construction of the World Trade Center towers.  The main Rockefeller family home is a hulking complex in upstate New York known as Pocantico Hills.  They also own a 32-room 5th Avenue duplex in Manhattan, a mansion in Washington, DC, Monte Sacro Ranch in Venezuela, coffee plantations in Ecuador, several farms in Brazil, an estate at Seal Harbor, Maine and resorts in the Caribbean, Hawaii and Puerto Rico. [20]

The Dulles and Rockefeller families are cousins.  Allen Dulles created the CIA, assisted the Nazis, covered up the Kennedy hit from his Warren Commission perch and struck a deal with the Muslim Brotherhood to create mind-controlled assassins. [21]

Brother John Foster Dulles presided over the phony Goldman Sachs trusts before the 1929 stock market crash and helped his brother overthrow governments in Iran and Guatemala.  Both were Skull & Bones, Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) insiders and 33rd Degree Masons. [22]

The Rockefellers were instrumental in forming the depopulation-oriented Club of Rome at their family estate in Bellagio, Italy.  Their Pocantico Hills estate gave birth to the Trilateral Commission.  The family is a major funder of the eugenics movement which spawned Hitler, human cloning and the current DNA obsession in US scientific circles.

John Rockefeller Jr. headed the Population Council until his death. [23]  His namesake son is a Senator from West Virginia.  Brother Winthrop Rockefeller was Lieutenant Governor of Arkansas and remains the most powerful man in that state.  In an October 1975 interview with Playboy magazine, Vice-President Nelson Rockefeller- who was also Governor of New York- articulated his family’s patronizing worldview, “I am a great believer in planning- economic, social, political, military, total world planning.”

But of all the Rockefeller brothers, it is Trilateral Commission (TC) founder and Chase Manhattan Chairman David who has spearheaded the family’s fascist agenda on a global scale.  He defended the Shah of Iran, the South African apartheid regime and the Chilean Pinochet junta.  He was the biggest financier of the CFR, the TC and (during the Vietnam War) the Committee for an Effective and Durable Peace in Asia- a contract bonanza for those who made their living off the conflict.

Nixon asked him to be Secretary of Treasury, but Rockefeller declined the job, knowing his power was much greater at the helm of the Chase.  Author Gary Allen writes in The Rockefeller File that in 1973, “David Rockefeller met with twenty-seven heads of state, including the rulers of Russia and Red China.”

Following the 1975 Nugan Hand Bank/CIA coup against Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, his British Crown-appointed successor Malcolm Fraser sped to the US, where he met with President Gerald Ford after conferring with David Rockefeller. [24]

Next Week: Part II: Freemasons & The Bank of the United States

[1] 10K Filings of Fortune 500 Corporations to SEC. 3-91

[2] 10K Filing of US Trust Corporation to SEC. 6-28-95

[3] “The Federal Reserve ‘Fed Up’. Thomas Schauf. http://www.davidicke.com 1-02

[4] The Secrets of the Federal Reserve. Eustace Mullins. Bankers Research Institute. Staunton, VA. 1983. p.179

[5] Ibid. p.53

[6] The Triumph of Conservatism. Gabriel Kolko. MacMillan and Company New York. 1963. p.142

[7] Rule by Secrecy: The Hidden History that Connects the Trilateral Commission, the Freemasons and the Great Pyramids. Jim Marrs. HarperCollins Publishers. New York. 2000. p.57

[8] The House of Morgan. Ron Chernow. Atlantic Monthly Press NewYork 1990

[9] Marrs. p.57

[10] Democracy for the Few. Michael Parenti. St. Martin’s Press. New York. 1977. p.178

[11] Chernow

[12] The Great Crash of 1929. John Kenneth Galbraith. Houghton, Mifflin Company. Boston. 1979. p.148

[13] Chernow

[14] Children of the Matrix. David Icke. Bridge of Love. Scottsdale, AZ. 2000

[15] The Confidence Game: How Un-Elected Central Bankers are Governing the Changed World Economy. Steven Solomon. Simon & Schuster. New York. 1995. p.112

[16] Marrs. p.180

[17] Ibid. p.45

[18] The Money Lenders: The People and Politics of the World Banking Crisis. Anthony Sampson. Penguin Books. New York. 1981

[19] The Rockefeller File. Gary Allen. ’76 Press. Seal Beach, CA. 1977

[20] Ibid

[21] Dope Inc.: The Book That Drove Kissinger Crazy. Editors of Executive Intelligence Review. Washington, DC. 1992

[22] Marrs.

[23] The Rockefeller Syndrome. Ferdinand Lundberg. Lyle Stuart Inc. Secaucus, NJ. 1975. p.296

[24] Marrs. p.53

Dean Henderson is the author of five books: Big Oil & Their Bankers in the Persian Gulf: Four Horsemen, Eight Families & Their Global Intelligence, Narcotics & Terror NetworkThe Grateful Unrich: Revolution in 50 Countries,Das Kartell der Federal Reserve, Stickin’ it to the Matrix & The Federal Reserve Cartel.

To Read More, Please To Dean Henderson’s free weekly Left Hook column @www.hendersonlefthook.wordpress.com