You must be a pirate for the Pirate's Code to apply and you're not, and the code is more of what you call guidelines than actual rules.
-- The evil Captain Barbossa who stole the Black Pearl, in Pirates of the Caribbean
Buried on page 83 of the 89-page Report on Financial Regulatory Reform issued by the U.S. Administration on June 17 is a recommendation that the new Financial Stability Board "strengthen" and "institutionalize" its mandate to "promote global financial stability." Financial stability is a worthy goal, but the devil is in the details. Some see the new agency, which is based in the Bank for International Settlements in Switzerland, as the latest sinister development in a centuries-old consolidation of power by an international financial oligarchy.
When the G20 leaders met in London on April 2, 2009, they agreed to expand the powers of the old Financial Stability Forum (FSF) into this new Financial Stability Board (FSB). The FSF was chaired by the General Manager of the Bank for International Settlements and was set up in 1999 to serve in a merely advisory capacity for the G7 (a group of finance ministers formed from the seven major industrialized nations). The new FSB has been expanded to include all G20 members (19 nations plus the EU) and it has real teeth, imposing "obligations" and "commitments" on its members. What is the FSB's mandate, what are its expanded powers, and who is in charge?
The Shadowy Financial Stability Board
An article in The London Guardian gives these details:
The secretariat is based at the Bank for International Settlements' headquarters in Basel, Switzerland.
To the wary, this is not a comforting sign. The BIS has a dark and controversial history. Prof. Carroll Quigley, Bill Clinton's mentor at Georgetown University, said in Tragedy and Hope that the BIS was created to be the apex of "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." The goal was "[control] in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences."
The Financial Stability Forum is chaired by Mario Draghi, governor of the Bank of Italy.
Draghi was director general of the Italian treasury from 1991 to 2001, where he was responsible for widespread privatization (sell-off of government holdings to private investors). From January 2002 to January 2006, he was a partner at Goldman Sachs on Wall Street, another controversial player.
The regulator . . . will cooperate with the IMF, the Washington-based body that monitors countries' financial health, lending funds if needed.
The IMF is an international banking organization that is also controversial. Joseph Stiglitz, former chief economist for the World Bank, charges it with ensnaring Third World countries in a debt trap from which they cannot escape. Debtors unable to pay are bound by "conditionalities" that include a forced sell-off of national assets to private investors in order to service their loans.
What will the regulator oversee? All 'systemically important' financial institutions, instruments and markets.
The term "systemically important" is not defined. Will it include such systemically important institutions as national treasuries, and such systemically important markets as gold, oil and food?
The body will . . . act as a clearing house for information-sharing and contingency planning for the benefit of its members.
In some contexts, information-sharing is called illegal collusion. Would the information-sharing here include such things as secret agreements among central banks to buy or sell particular currencies, with the concomitant power to support or collapse targeted local economies? Consider the short-selling of the Mexican peso by collusive action in 1995, the short-selling of Southeast Asian currencies in 1998, and the collusion among central banks to support the U.S. dollar in July of last year -- good for the dollar and the big players with inside information perhaps, but not so good for the small investors who reasonably bet on "market forces," bought gold or foreign currencies, and lost their shirts.
To prevent another debt bubble, the new body will recommend financial companies maintain provisions against credit losses and may impose constraints on borrowing.
What sort of constraints? The Basel Accords imposed by the BIS have not generally worked out well. The first Basel Accord, issued in 1998, was blamed for inducing a depression in Japan from which that country has yet to recover; and the Second Basel Accord and its associated mark-to-market rule have been blamed for bringing on the current credit crisis, from which the U.S. and the world have yet to recover. These charges have been explored at length elsewhere.
The Amorphous 12 International Standards and Codes
Most troubling, perhaps, is this vague parenthetical reference in a press release issued by the BIS titled "Financial Stability Forum Re-established as the Financial Stability Board":
As obligations of membership, member countries and territories commit to . . . implement international financial standards (including the 12 key International Standards and Codes) . . .
This is not just friendly advice from an advisory board. It is a commitment to comply, so you would expect some detailed discussion concerning what those standards entail. However, a search of the major media reveals virtually nothing. The 12 key International Standards and Codes are left undefined and undiscussed. The FSB website lists them, but it is vague. The Standards and Codes cover broad areas that are apparently subject to modification as the overseeing committees see fit. They include:
Money and financial policy transparency
Fiscal policy transparency
Data dissemination
Insolvency
Corporate governance
Accounting
Auditing
Payment and settlement
Market integrity
Banking supervision
Securities regulation
Insurance supervision
Take "fiscal policy transparency" as an example. The "Code of Good Practices on Fiscal Transparency" was adopted by the IMF Interim Committee in 1998. The "synoptic description" says:
The code contains transparency requirements to provide assurances to the public and to capital markets that a sufficiently complete picture of the structure and finances of government is available so as to allow the soundness of fiscal policy to be reliably assessed.
We learn that members are required to provide a "picture of the structure and finances of government" that is complete enough for an assessment of its "soundness" -- but an assessment by whom, and what if a government fails the test? Is an unelected private committee based in the BIS allowed to evaluate the "structure and function" of particular national governments and, if they are determined to have fiscal policies that are not "sound," to impose "conditionalities" and "austerity measures" of the sort that the IMF is notorious for imposing on Third World countries?
For three centuries, private international banking interests have brought governments in line by blocking them from issuing their own currencies and requiring them to borrow banker-issued "banknotes" instead. "Allow me to issue and control a nation's currency," Mayer Amschel Bauer Rothschild famously said in 1791, "and I care not who makes its laws." The real rebellion of the American colonists in 1776, according to Benjamin Franklin, was against a foreign master who forbade the colonists from issuing their own money and required that taxes be paid in gold. The colonists, not having gold, had to borrow gold-backed banknotes from the British bankers instead. The catch was that the notes were created on the "fractional reserve" system, allowing the bankers to issue up to ten times as many notes as they actually had gold, essentially creating them out of thin air just as the colonists were doing. The result was not only to lock the colonists into debt to foreign bankers but to propel the nation into a crippling depression. The colonists finally rebelled and reverted to issuing their own currency. Funding a revolution against a major world power with money they printed themselves, they succeeded in defeating their oppressors and winning their independence.
Political colonialism is now a thing of the past, but under the new FSB guidelines, nations can still be held in feudalistic subservience to foreign masters. Consider this scenario: Like in the American colonies, the new FSB rules precipitate a global depression the likes of which have never before been seen. XYZ country wakes up to the fact that all of this is unnecessary -- that it could be creating its own money, freeing itself from the debt trap, rather than borrowing from bankers who create money on computer screens and charge interest for the privilege of borrowing it. But this realization comes too late. The FSB has ruled that for a government to issue money is an impermissible "merging of the public and private sectors" and an "unsound banking practice" forbidden under the "12 Key International Standards and Codes." XYZ is forced into line. National sovereignty has been abdicated to a private committee, with no say by the voters.
A Bloodless Coup?
Suspicious observers might say that this is how you pull off a private global dictatorship: (1) create a global crisis; (2) appoint an "advisory body" to retain and maintain "stability"; and then (3) "formalize" the advisory body as global regulator. By the time the people wake up to what has happened, it's too late. Marilyn Barnewall, who was dubbed by Forbes Magazine the "dean of American private banking," wrote in an April 2009 article titled "What Happened to American Sovereignty at G-20?":
It seems the world's bankers have executed a bloodless coup and now represent all of the people in the world. . . . President Obama agreed at the G20 meeting in London to create an international board with authority to intervene in U.S. corporations by dictating executive compensation and approving or disapproving business management decisions. Under the new Financial Stability Board, the United States has only one vote. In other words, the group will be largely controlled by European central bankers. My guess is, they will represent themselves, not you and not me and certainly not America.
Adoption of the FSB was never voted on by the public, either individually or through their legislators. The G20 Summit has been called "a New Bretton Woods," referring to agreements entered into in 1944 establishing new rules for international trade. But Bretton Woods was put in place by Congressional Executive Agreement, requiring a majority vote of the legislature; and it more properly should have been done by treaty, requiring a two-thirds vote of the Senate, since it was an international agreement binding on the nation. The same should be mandated before imposing the will of the BIS-based Financial Stability Board on the U.S., its banks and its businesses.
Even with a two-thirds Senate vote, before Congress gives its approval it should draft legislation ensuring that the checks and balances imposed by our Constitution are built into the agreement. The legislatures of the member nations could be required to elect a representative body to provide oversight and take corrective measures as needed, with that body's representatives answerable to their national electorates. If we are to avoid abdicating our national sovereignty to a private foreign banking elite, we need to insist on compliance with the constitutional and legal mandates on which our country was founded.
Follow Ellen Brown on Twitter: www.twitter.com/ellenhbrown
While many Reserves are nationalised they are all badly in debt to the Merchant Bankers - who pull the strings anyway, eg via fronts like IMF, BIS, WB.
They want global control via a world money and trade system with corporate players that would overide any national identity and sovereignty ( and therefore any rebellion ). Hence the econo/state mergers, and a world organisation for everything you can think of.
The play for world control was largely through the main Private Reserves ( via industrialisation, colonisation, warfare etc ) like Bank of England and USA Fed.....which led the way from 1944 on by debasing the Dollar while the world was/is hitched to it. Now that will change.
The Fed was/is private and above Congress. Formed in 1913 with 7 banks - 6 Jewish, plus Rockefeller - taking all profit on US money. From 1947 that changed to 6%, in theory, but there's more to it, and facts and bank identity are secret. The 12 regional reserves are more transparent. But the big winners now - JP Morgan/Chase and Goldmans are both Fed banks.
The Bank of England was also 'nationalised' in 1947 but it seems that is only half true ( all secret ).
Both Britain and USA were still paying the huge WW2 war debt to the private Reserve owners into the sixties.
If you mean it is time to get rid of the US central bank and replace it with a system where politicians directly control the money supply, it would destroy the United States in a way from which there is little chance that the United States would ever recover, the United States would instead become a poverty stricken nation trapped in a funny money regime with a currency nobody on earth will accept, and a market returned to direct barter, and a make of the United States little more than a historical footnote to prove that paranoia will destroy you.
It's only we ignorant paranoids that believe it's time to abolish the federal reserve, the private bancorporation that creates and controls the nation's money system.
You may call it "unique complexity" if you like, but US Courts have found repeatedly that the Federal Reserve Banks are independent private corporations not under the control of the United States Government.
The Fed's publications from the 60s, 70s and some 80s, describe itself as a private banking corporation, only later becoming "quasi-governmental" and part-private with some public purposes.
Why would any country become poverty stricken when it is capable of creating it's money, in a proper quantity, in a fashion that was supported by most American economists, progressive and conservative alike, back in the 30s and 40s?
Henry Simons, Milton Friedman, Jacob Viner, Frank Knight, Lloyd Mints.
All supported a debt-free, government-issue of the nation's money supply, and the elimination of fractional-reserve banking as a sound means toward economic stability and full employment.
So, why can we not do what all these economists advocated, and why threaten us with a poverty-induced Dostoevskian future if we take the advice of Nobel-prize winning monetary economist Milton Friedman?
The money system has two functions – one is governmental – creating the money needed for exchange of goods and services, without debt.
One is private, that is the deposit/lending function that should properly be the bailiwick of private banks. Not rocket science here.
Thanks for your work. Regards, Dave
The Fed is not a private bank.
Gold backed currencies guarantee inflation and deflation, as the growth in the size of the supply of gold is not related to the growth of the economy and cannot be made to match.
If economies grow faster than the money supply expands, you get deflation, which is an incentive for hoarding and devastates any rational for investing.
Anytime anybody says the Fed is outside of the control of congress, when really the Fed is a creature of congress, occam's razor allows one to discount that argument in its entirety.
But, uuhhmmmmm.....
"The Fed is not a private bank."
The Federal Reserve Banks are private corporations controlled by their stockholding members. So, to me, the Fed system is a private banking system. And the Courts have repeatedly found as such.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=8518
For the record, the Fed is not outside the control of Congress and this is why we want the Congress to amend the Fed Act and to restore the money-creation powers back to the people of the US, to whom that power was conveyed as a result of our victorious War of Independence from the private banking cartel at the Bank of England, and their nobles and aristocrats.
The Fed is indeed a creature of the Congress but we've all read and understand that this creature was really created by the private banking Morgan clan down at Jekyll Island.
This article is really about letting the money power slip even further from Congressional control, where we CAN amend the Act, and on down the road to the BIS, where we will have no say at all.
I know you say you're not the bankers' scrivener here, but I find little evidence to the contrary.
Keeping it civil.
The International Bankster Syndicate's primary weapon against society is theft by way of fiat money creation. With the wealth that they siphon from our currency through their inflationary counterfeiting, they can buy the politicians, media outlets, etc. necessary to establish their dynasties. The first salvo against the self-proclaimed globalist "royalty" must be to strip them of the power to create money.
As Thomas Jefferson so wisely wrote:
"I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around [the banks] will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs."
In the U.S., we must write our so-called representatives and otherwise get fully behind Ron Paul's HR 1207 to audit the Fed. Once we bring tranparency to their criminal dealings, we can take the next step to abolish the Fed.
Have a nice weekend folks!
There are many, many clues.
For example, Jefferson would not have referred to inflation, a word not coined until fifty years after he was dead, nor deflation, coined even later, for the same reason.
At least I know you yourself did not fake the quote, the quote was first faked in 1937, in front of the US Senate, Committee on Agriculture and Forestry.
Besides which, the quote has nothing to do with central banking or the Fed. During Jefferson's time, it was quite common for banks and bakeries and other businesses to issue their own currencies in addition to literally dozens of sovereign currencies in circulation in the US. Here's another quote:
"I'm getting tired of seeing these same ridiculously out of context quotes passing for lack of argument" http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ann-pettifor/bernanke-dodges-the-bulle_b_176753.html?show_comment_id=22179655#comment_22179655
As the old head shop poster said: "Just because you know you're not paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you."
It was a link on HuffPo last year that sent me to the video "Money as Debt", then to your book "The Web of Debt" , Bill Still’s "The Money Masters" video and Stephen Zarlenga's "The Lost Science of Money". What an eye-opening exposure to the idea that not only is our money and banking system unfair (true, unfairness may be inevitable - as JFK said, "life is unfair") it is also unsustainable, doomed to collapse in a credit crunch like we are now seeing. Now THERE is a criticism of the current money system that cannot be ignored.
Or so I thought. For nine months I have been searching in vain for a refutation of that thesis. Academic economists and TV talking heads alike all tacitly assume that the underlying system is stable and sustainable, meaning that they think either that debt can keep increasing without limit forever, or that our present system doesn't require that it do so. They never say which, so buried are their assumptions.
I would love to see what I call the Fiat Money/Full Reserve thesis set forth in HuffPo. I’m sure it would crack some bones, especially the idea that we can pay down the national debt in one year with no inflation.
How about it, Arianna?
Debt is money, but money is not debt.
The idea that you can pay down the national debt in one year with no inflation is not a thesis, it is an absurd misunderstanding of money.
Have you ever read Fisher's "100-Percent Money"?
Or Frederick Soddy's "The Role of Money"?
Or Friedman's "Financial and Monetary Framework for Economic Stability"?
Or, the "Chicago Plan for Monetary Reform"?
A couple of Nobel-prize winners and the majority of American economists supported full-reserve banking. Are they all just plain ignorant on money matters?
All full-reserve banking does is to limit the amount of loans that can be made to the sum of the deposits in the banks, which are bonded via the central bank to legitimate the transactions. If you have a Billion in the bank, and you bond that Billion to the Federal Monetary Auhority, then you can lend out a Billion.
By the way, that's what most people think banks do now.
Full-reserve banking would eliminate the need for the FDIC and any deposit insurance scheme, and it was touted as such when these banking reforms made their way into proposed legislation in 1933.
Anybody who tells anybody that full-reserve banking does anything except EXACTLY what I just wrote needs to show some economic references that DO NOT come from wikipedia, which is totally misinformed on the subject.
Do you really expect us to believe that Milton Friedman was proposing a banking reform that would paralyze the economy as you have indicated? Somebody is lacking credibility on this subject.
"Debt is money, but money is not debt" This is correct. Though all bank debt is money, about 3% of our money is not bank debt.
Please expand your put-down of Fiat Money/Full Reserve Banking. Begin by explaining which you believe: that debt (as a percentage of GDP) can increase forever without limit, or that fractional reserve banking does not require it to do so.
I've been following Ellen Brown for a few months and I'm pleased to see her here. She has a talent for dissecting the most complicated economic theories and laying them out for the layperson to see clearly.
Speculations on global manipulations by capitalists entities operating under the veil of government sponsored agencies is not a stretch when you take into account the unprecedented changes in the global markets we have witnessed in the last few months. The idea that the crisis was created by an international group of bankers seeking greater control of the political arena is not without merit. Consider the Bay of Pigs fiasco that Kennedy walked into.
Obama needs to tread carefully.
The unnamed financial oligarchy was discovered in a famous conspiracy theory from 1921, not quite one century old. In 1921 a pamphlet was published, Bismarck on Jews, Bankers and the American Civil War, setting out the bones of the conspiracy, and naming the Rothschilds as the conspirators.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/10163218/Bismarck-on-Jews-Bankers-and-the-American-Civil-War
Ellen Brown also wrote, “For three centuries, private international banking interests have brought governments in line by blocking them from issuing their own currencies and requiring them to borrow banker-issued "banknotes" instead. "Allow me to issue and control a nation's currency," Mayer Amschel Bauer Rothschild famously said in 1791, "and I care not who makes its laws."”
The United States issues its own currency, and prohibits banks from issuing currencies.
And Mayer Amschel Bauer Rothschild said no such thing. This quote was invented in 1935 by Gertrude M. Coogan in her book promoting the same conspiracy theory, “Money Creators”.
It is a corruption of an old saying, “Let me make the songs of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws” which was coined by Andrew_Fletcher of Saltoun and is sometimes misattributed to Plato.
* The privately owned Federal Reserve issues US currency in exchange for US Treasuries.
* All but a tiny fraction (mostly coins) of all US money is created by banks when loans are made for any purpose.
* All US money but coin is debt money (or credit money, the flip side of debt).
* All of Ellen's statements are essentially and substantially correct. I cannot say the same for yours, "GrahamCanada.
What would be the point?
Occam's razor, don't they even teach it anymore?
p.s. And I've got to add that to the list, I've been called many things in my life, from graham crackers on up, but really, I'm a banker's boyz rep?
Just look at my posts, I don't think the bankers would agree that I represent them...
From where do you get the license to translate Ellen's international oligopoly charge into the 1921 Bismark pamphlet, the result of which is to raise the anti-semitism flag yet again against any and all monetary reformers.
Shame !
There is no need for any reader interested in monetary reform to follow Graham's lead into the Graham-induced world of anti-semitism.
The American Revolutionaries fought their battles against the Bank of England and their aristocratic parliamentary lackeys for the rights of the Colonies to issue THEIR OWN debt-free money.
There was no anti-semitism there, and there is none here.
"The United States issues its own currency, and prohibits banks from issuing currencies."
WOW !
Define banks.
Define currencies.
Are FRNs currencies?
The Fed system is a cartel of private bankers, all of whom issue their own currency, be it FRNs or computer-derived bank credits.
I'm almost at a loss for words on this one.
Shame, from where do you get the licence to question my right of expression because I disagree with you?
I raised the 1921 Bismark pamphlet because it first proposed the theory that The American Revolutionaries fought their battles against the Bank of England and their aristocratic parliamentary lackeys for the rights of the Colonies to issue THEIR OWN debt-free money, which is a false conspiracy theory.
In the statement ""The United States issues its own currency, and prohibits banks from issuing currencies." I will rely on the legal definitions of currency, and banks.
FRNs are currency, distributed by the Federal Reserve Bank, produced by the BEP, an arm of Treasury. If the FRNs are to replace worn out FRNs, the BEP provides them in exchange for the worn versions and 4 cents and destroys the worn versions. For new FRNs, the BEP requires the Federal Reserve to deposit collatoral against the loan.
The Fed System is a creature of congress, not a cartel of private bankers. Banks do not issue currency, the Congress issue currency, through the BEP and the Mint.
Just look closer to home. - At the IMF and the World Bank. These two icons of Friedmaniac free market subjugated more nations than Hitler in his "best" years. They blackmailed poor nations just out of dictatorship to pay the debts the torturers made to pay for the very implements and installations with wich they tortured their people under CIA-training.
South Africe, Bolivia, Nigeria, Argentina, Brasil, Peru, ............................ the list of nations is endless. And they all were made to bow to the "natural laws" of economy we just learned were the biggest load of crap ever to escape the greedy brains of economists and businessmen.
It may wekk be that all those tax haven banks have something to do with it all. They have the money the parasites drained out of the world economy. But the root is where it was all invented. And that is the sole most prfligate provider of personnell for IMF and World Bank - among others. - Friedmans autitoriums in Chicago and its "subsidiaries".
Yes, the swiss are helping the criminals. But even shutting down switzerland will be like closing Guantanamo and going on torturing everywhere else. - It solves nothing. It only draws a blind in front of our eyes.
You guys are taking this so calmly. Is MainStream Press part of the charade?
Is this a Joke ?
I cannot understand iwhy the US would give up its power and influence..
In other words, to attempt to narrow the responsibility of this international banking scam to our current president is counterproductive and foolish. The president has a very limited field of those he can choose for the head of the Fed, Treasury, and other key money posts. These things are controlled by the banksters. The threat is real. If we lose sight of its true origins we will never defeat it.
I've been writing warnings about this financial globalization threat for decades, although not nearly as effectively as Ellen, who deserves the highest praise for sounding the alarm is ways people are beginning to understand. Web of Debt should be read by everyone who wants to save our world for our children, and future generations.