Millions protest in Germany like here in Berlin 29/08/2020
By Ralph T. Niemeyer
2020 will bring us the greatest economic slump, the greatest concentration of power and the greatest threats to freedom and prosperity in living memory.
The corona measures – the shutdowns, the countless bankruptcies and people who have to fear for their existence – that is only a disadvantage for everyone.
As a result, the virus must be really dangerous, otherwise politics would never have acted against the interests of the economy … That’s how many argue and let the restrictions on their freedom endure defenselessly.
But it is by no means the case that nobody would benefit from the dramatic developments in 2020. And that doesn’t just mean the vaccine manufacturers, who are currently popping the champagne corks.
We are on the threshold of a world in which a triumvirate of a few digital and financial groups and the most important central banks will dominate the global monetary system and thus finally and irrevocably take over world power. In his lecture at the WEFF in Davos, Ernst Wolff sheds light on economic backgrounds that even critics of the measures are not necessarily known to.
We are currently not only living in a world of extremes and superlatives, we are in an exceptional historical situation that the world has never seen before.
Never before in the entire history of business and society has there been so many records as 2020. Never before have so many production sites closed and so many supply chains interrupted. Never before has there been such a slump in the demand for manufactured goods and raw materials.
The lockdown we have experienced is the greatest economic shock in history – and it is not the result of wars, political disputes or natural disasters, but the result of deliberate decisions by governments – against the following background:
We have the highest debt level in the world right now – $ 275 trillion. Household, corporate and national debts have thus doubled since 2006.
We have the lowest interest rates – and have been for 3,000 years. Never in the history of money have there been such low interest rates as today. We are currently dealing with the highest number of zombie companies – companies that are no longer viable on their own and are dependent on loans and bonds – mostly expensive junk bonds.
We are dealing with the highest number of bankruptcy delays and the highest number of bad loans. We have the highest number of unemployed and the highest number of jobs at risk in the world.
And finally, we have the highest number of countries in need: by April 2020 alone, 102 countries have applied for emergency aid from the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
In addition, we currently have the largest imbalance between the financial sector and the real economy. In March 2020, we experienced the worst and fastest stock market slump of all time in the financial sector – prices fell more sharply in a few days than in the great crash of 1929.
After that, in April we experienced the fastest upswing ever. Last week, Apple became the first company in the world to have a market value of over $ 2 trillion. Apple was founded in 1976 and it took 42 years to get a market value of 1 trillion, and the second trillion in two years.
All of this was brought about by the greatest money injection ever. The US central bank FED alone expanded its balance sheet by 3 trillion US dollars in April 2020.
And that against the background of the longest stock market upswing ever recorded from 2008 to 2020.
We are currently seeing the result: We have the biggest bubbles of all time – in stocks, bonds and real estate.
Turning to the social consequences: We are currently dealing with the greatest social inequality of all time. Never in all of human history has there been such a rift between rich and poor as in our day.
In addition, in the past four months we have seen the highest increase in social inequality from the greatest orgy of enrichment in the history of money.
The US billionaires alone increased their fortunes by 637 billion US dollars from the beginning of the Corona crisis to the beginning of August. In March and April 2020, Bill Gates’ net worth grew by $ 7.5 billion, Mark Zuckerberg’s net worth by $ 23 billion, Elon Musk by $ 50 billion, and Jeff Bezos by $ 75 billion. That is, four individuals have become more than $ 150 billion richer in two months – while 40 million Americans have lost their jobs and many of them their livelihoods.
This also means: of the $ 3 trillion the US government and the FED pumped into the system in April 2020, more than a fifth went to the top 0.00001 percent of the US population. By the way, these are the people whose taxes have been cut by 79 percent since 1980, with the last cut only being made 3 years ago by President Trump.
If that’s not enough to see how sick the current system is, take a look at July 20, 2020: On this day there was the highest daily wealth gain of an individual ever: Jeff Bezos (holds 11 percent of Amazon’s shares) grew its net worth $ 23.2 billion on July 20, 2020. That is twenty times what 600 million Africans earned that day.
That means: We do not only live in an exceptional situation, but with an unprecedented acceleration of these devastating processes and above all an unprecedented aggravation of the most dangerous social phenomenon: Plutarch already said 2,000 years ago that the inequality between rich and poor represents the oldest and most fatal suffering of all republics.
The fact that this inequality has reached astronomical values in the past six months means that we are on absolutely unexplored territory and are heading at a continuously increasing speed towards a millennium event that nobody knows what it will look like because there are no historical precedents gives.
And if you ask what caused this dramatic acceleration, there is a clear and unequivocal answer:
In 2020, for the first time in history, an illness was taken as an occasion to implement economic and financial measures with unimaginably far-reaching consequences.
I have to make something clear at this point: I have no tendency to conspiracy theories and I am not a corona denier. I’ve dealt extensively with the medical side. We are undoubtedly dealing with a pandemic, Covid-19 is a serious disease that is dangerous for certain groups of people, for some even very dangerous and fatal:
However, this does not include all people – 75 percent do not notice that they are sick, 20 percent remain completely symptom-free – but those with high blood pressure, obesity, vitamin D deficiency, serious previous illnesses, especially of the respiratory tract, weak immune system and age-related weaknesses in the immune system. You should definitely protect these people.
But one does not help these people by terrifying the entire world population, imposing scientifically unfounded regulations on it and at the same time paralyzing the world economy, sending millions into unemployment, inflating the amount of money in circulation further and paying billions and billions those who have the most anyway, and certainly not by sending hundreds of thousands and possibly millions in developing countries to certain starvation, as is currently happening.
The effects we have seen here in Europe are nothing compared to the gigantic catastrophe that is currently taking place in Africa, South America and Asia … How dramatic the situation is there, an excerpt from a declaration by the ILO (International Labor Organization, sub-organization of the UN) in Geneva from the end of April 2020:
“For almost every second person, the corona pandemic poses an existential threat to their livelihoods. Most affected are 1.6 of the two billion people who do irregular work, i.e. without employment contracts, and who often live from hand to mouth.
The income of these people has plummeted by 60 percent on average worldwide, in Africa and Latin America by more than 80 percent. They have no savings or access to credit. That means no income, no food, no future. “
In view of this situation, namely that irreparable worldwide damage has been caused deliberately and with full awareness of the consequences, which goes far beyond what the disease Covid-19 does itself, every critical person today has to ask himself one question above all: WHY ?
Why did you do something that you have never done before in the entire history of the world – not react prudently, prudently and with a sense of proportion in the face of an illness, but bring the world economy to a sudden crash?
Why have governments that have done everything in the past few years to cut their health systems suddenly changed so drastically and have been concerned about the health of the population in an unprecedented way since February of this year?
Why have governments since the beginning of the pandemic only listened to experts who have already reacted to previous pandemics with completely exaggerated forecasts and whose forecasts have long since been largely disproved by reality this time too?
Why do governments consistently ignore and block the opinions of professionals who disagree with them?
Why are the criteria for lifting the coercive measures changed over and over in favor of maintaining them?
Since all these questions have remained unanswered from the official side to this day, one inevitably has to ask the next question: Are there possibly completely different motives behind the protection of the population advocated by politics and business? Is it perhaps not about health, but something completely different? Is there possibly a second agenda?
Indeed, there is a lot of evidence and tons of data and facts to suggest that this second agenda exists. And, the most important information comes from the founder of the WEF, Klaus Schwab, who last winter was one of the first internationally known personalities to speak openly of the need for a “Great Reset”.
What does this Great Reset mean? Quite simply, it means that the system we live under no longer works and needs to be restarted. In itself, that wouldn’t even be a bad thing, only:
Klaus Schwab does not speak for anyone, but for his clientele, the international money nobility, and they want a new start that will enable him to save his fortune under the currently difficult conditions and also to maintain its political power.
If you take a closer look, you will see that the Great Reset is basically nothing more than a brutal acceleration and intensification of several processes that have been going on for years and are of use to precisely this clientele: namely the concentration of ever greater assets and more and more Power in fewer and fewer hands and the global tendency towards monopoly and cartel formation.
It is precisely these two trends that are currently standing in the way of obstacles that must be removed in the interests of the money nobility. What are these obstacles?
The global financial system. It is on its last legs and therefore needs to be redesigned in the interests of big money.
The consequences of the digital revolution. They lead to an unprecedented reduction in jobs that threatens to break up the global social fabric very soon.
The role of the central banks. It is no longer enough to sustain a world in which the ultra-rich and their vassals are in charge.
All three problems together have so far represented an almost insurmountable hurdle, for the following reason: They can no longer be removed through reforms within the framework of parliamentary democracy.
And if we look around the world with open eyes, then everything points to the fact that for this very reason we are currently experiencing a scenario in which a huge global chaos is deliberately and deliberately created in order to enable changes that occur under normal Circumstances could not be undertaken – and all under the leadership of the current world power No. 1, namely the digital-financial complex.
The American President Eisenhower warned against the “military-industrial complex” in his farewell speech in 1960. Based on the expression he used, I would describe the current world power, for which Klaus Schwab, among others, speaks and which he gathers around him every January here in the Swiss mountains, as the “digital-financial complex”.
At the top of this digital-financial complex are the large corporations Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook and, in the financial sector, the giant BlackRock. To understand how this new world power was able to gain so much influence, I would like to briefly discuss the three processes that made this possible.
Development No. 1: The global financial system
Let me start with the development of the financial system under which we live. It is fundamentally undemocratic and contradicts any principles of justice or equality.
It goes back to the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944. At that time, the USA was the most powerful state on earth, had the strongest economy, the strongest military and was the only country in the world to have the atomic bomb.
The United States did something that had never been done before: it made its US dollar the world’s reserve currency, pegged it to gold and pegged all other currencies in the world to the dollar at fixed exchange rates. That means: This system is nothing more than the dictatorship of one currency over all others.
With this system, the US has usurped not only military and economic but also financial world domination. And it paid off for them, as the post-war boom from 1948 to 1973 showed.
The biggest beneficiary of this boom was the banking industry, which was able to record a huge increase in wealth and power due to the high demand for credit. When this demand subsided in the mid-1970s, bankers took advantage of the power they had gained in the 1950s and 1960s and urged politics to provide them with other ways to make money besides their main source of income, lending.
Indeed, politicians around the world were making ever greater concessions to banks by abolishing numerous rules and laws that had previously narrowed the financial sector. This trend quickly gained momentum of its own and led to more and more deregulation in the 1980s and 1990s, giving banks more and more leeway.
The most important development milestones were the constant introduction of new financial products, the approval of share buybacks, the increasingly lax legal requirements for hedge funds and the abolition of the separate banking system in the Anglo-Saxon countries.
The totality of the measures led to a steadily progressing restructuring of the world economy in favor of the financial sector, which gradually became many times larger than the real economy.
A crucial consequence of this development has been the increasing concentration of financial power, first in the hands of investment banks and then later of hedge funds.
With the crisis of 2007/08 the heyday of asset management began, the largest of which combined the most lucrative hedge funds, and whose most important representatives – above all BlackRock, Vanguard, Fidelity and State Street – now control large parts of the financial sector. These four companies alone manage about 19 trillion US dollars, which is roughly the same as the US GDP.
BlackRock alone has $ 7.4 trillion in assets under management, making it the largest asset manager in the world. In addition to the money from private investors, BlackRock manages the assets of sovereign wealth funds, pension funds, insurance companies and companies.
To show the power of BlackRock in the state sector: California is the fifth strongest economy in the world after the USA, China, Japan and Germany. BlackRock manages one of the largest in the world with Calpers, the California pension fund.
BlackRock also advises the FED and the ECB and, together with both central banks, allocated funds in the crises of 2007/08 and 2020 – to a large extent to those companies in which BlackRock is involved.
BlackRock’s main tool is Aladdin, a computerized risk analysis system that has been in operation for 34 years and can perform 200 million calculations per week.
This system can calculate how the value of stocks or funds changes under influences such as currency and oil price fluctuations. The company sells the knowledge and analyzes gained through Aladdin – and thus influences the global financial market by selling insider knowledge.
There is a message from April 2020 that should make everyone sit up and take notice: “BlackRock and Microsoft Corp. have entered into a strategic partnership to host BlackRock’s Aladdin infrastructure on the Microsoft Azure cloud platform and to provide enhanced capabilities to BlackRock and its Aladdin customers, which include many of the world’s most discerning institutional investors and asset managers. “
So we are dealing here with a direct cooperation between the absolutely largest players in the financial and digital sectors, which brings us to the next topic: digitization.
Development No. 2: digitization
The development of digitization began in the USA in the 1970s. At that time, some young technology freaks founded companies that specialized in the still young computer technology. Initially ridiculed by many, several of these companies such as Apple and Microsoft exploded and founded a trend that was to influence global economic activity more than the industrial revolution 250 years ago.
One of the most important features of the development is the great influence that these corporations can exert on other companies, as they organize a large part of their business processes and thus have access to the most important good in our modern society besides money: data.
Some major corporations that were added later, such as Google (founded in 1998, now Alphabet) and Facebook (founded in 2004) base their power almost exclusively on the acquisition and distribution of information.
Since their sheer financial power enables them to keep competitors at bay by buying them up at an early stage in their development, they have become almost inviolable monopolies in their fields.
The position of the large group Amazon, which was founded in 1994 as a bookselling platform, is also unique. It has now completely mastered Internet trade in the western world and has become what is probably the largest monopoly in economic history.
With these companies at the top, an industry has been established that has pervaded the entire economic system in a historically unprecedented manner and which, due to its economic power, has also become a decisive factor in finance.
Not only have digital companies laid the foundation for cryptocurrencies and the groundbreaking blockchain technology, they have also become the undisputed heavyweights in the stock markets.
The technology exchange Nasdaq, for example, owes its historic increase almost exclusively to the price gains of the five companies Microsoft, Apple, Alphabet, Amazon and Facebook.
Above all, the interaction with BlackRock gives this cartel-like structure even more power than it has already usurped. BlackRock is not only involved in all five corporations, but can also move any market in the world in any desired direction due to its unimaginable financial strength.
Nevertheless, this absolute superiority faces a huge, historically unique problem that has a similar effect to the low interest rate policy in the banking industry: While ever lower interest rates are destroying the basic business of banks, lending, digitization is gradually destroying the most important foundation of our society, namely the human work.
Due to the development of artificial intelligence and the resulting increasing robotization of work, digitization has now reached a stage that no one would have thought possible even five years ago. We are in a phase of job cuts that is progressing faster than anything we have ever seen. According to insiders, up to 80 percent of current jobs will disappear in the next ten years due to digitization.
This has created a new, historically unprecedented problem that raises the following questions: 1. How do you keep societies together that are heading towards a state in which there is only space for 20 percent of the workforce? 2. How should an economy and a monetary system work when 80 percent of the workforce must be kept alive through social benefits? 3. How should an economy and a monetary system work if only 20 percent of people consume it?
The digital-financial complex already has an answer to this problem, but it cannot give it itself – at least not yet – because it needs a third member of the league – and that is the central banks.
Development No. 3: The Central Banks
In the crisis of 2007/08, as well as in the Corona crash in March 2020, the central banks saved the system from collapse by mobilizing huge sums of money. Without their intervention, the global financial system would have collapsed.
In both cases – 2007/08 and 2020 – both the US Federal Reserve (FED) and the European Central Bank (ECB) reached out to BlackRock immediately as part of their attempts to stabilize the system. It’s no wonder to insiders, for three reasons:
BlackRock has more information on Aladdin than all central banks put together.
The power of the central banks always only relates to their own currency area. BlackRock, on the other hand, is present in all markets around the world.
Acting against BlackRock would get even the central banks in great trouble.
It is therefore only logical that the largest central banks take BlackRock on board to distribute newly created money in crisis situations. However, this means that we are dealing with a concentration of power that has never been seen in the entire history of finance.
But now these partners face the problem of the greatest unemployment in human history. What’s your answer? The answer is: helicopter money. The answer is justified with the Modern Monetary Theory.
In the simplest terms, it goes as follows: To keep consumption going when unemployment rises, the central banks only have to print enough money and make it available to those who are out of work in the form of a regular payment, which is euphemistic Called “unconditional basic income”.
This basic income is of course by no means unconditional and certainly not a gift to the unemployed. Its sole purpose is to stimulate demand in order to keep an economic system going that is actually no longer working.
This helicopter money, however, only temporarily eliminates the basic problem and at the same time creates a new one: Since money does not end up in the financial sector, as in the past, but in the real economy, it leads to a rapidly progressing devaluation of money in everyday life.
In order to counteract this devaluation, the basic income has to be constantly increased – and that leads straight into inflation, which quickly turns into hyperinflation and thus must lead to the complete collapse of the existing monetary system.
Now what is the plan of the digital financial complex? There is a lot of speculation about this right now, but we know that both central banks and digital corporations are working on new currencies. And since we live in a time in which this complex has long since overcome national borders, they will all be world currencies.
We may already see a flood of such currencies in the near future, but they will all have one thing in common: They will not only be issued by the central banks, but also in cooperation with digital corporations or perhaps the other way round by digital corporations in cooperation with the central banks – that is : It will be semi-private currencies.
We are on the threshold of a world in which a triumvirate of a few digital and financial groups and the most important central banks will dominate the global monetary system and thus finally and irrevocably take over world power.
We can see how quickly this is done by the push back, or rather: the abolition of cash, which has been accelerated by the Corona crisis.
A year ago I warned that cash could one day be abolished through the IMF’s proposed cash tax. This is exactly what has now begun in the wake of the Corona crisis in Germany: VAT has been reduced there and the first companies are now passing this reduction on to their customers – on the condition that they pay digitally. Put more simply: Customers pay less for goods when they pay for them digitally.
It will certainly not be long before this principle takes hold internationally and accelerates the cash disposal process rapidly.
If you look only at the expansion of power that the digital-financial complex has brought about in the past six months, you have to say that a force has formed here, which the military-industrial complex, US President Eisenhower in his farewell speech Described 1960 as “the potential for the catastrophic rise of misguided power” by far.
The power of this digital financial complex is infinitely greater than that of any government. If this power wants something, then – as we are currently experiencing – it enforces it, globally.
These are all very bleak prospects, but there is no point in spreading artificial optimism in times like this. Nevertheless, especially in such situations, one should remember that mankind’s most ingenious ideas and problem solutions in the past seldom arose in simple and problem-free times, but mostly under very difficult circumstances.
It may also help to remember that the Chinese word for crisis is made up of two words – danger and opportunity. And the most important philosophers in our latitudes, especially the fathers of dialectics, have always insisted that every thing, to put it simply, has its two sides.
But what is this chance?
For me it consists in the logical development of the current situation, which will lead to the bankruptcy of tens of thousands of companies and the laying off of hundreds of thousands and millions into unemployment in the foreseeable future. That we will see further, even worse collapses in the financial markets and, as a result, uprisings and social unrest and possibly also the kindling of new wars.
All of this means nothing else than that people who have largely refused to deal with political and economic questions are confronted with huge problems and hit upon precisely these questions with their noses.
But that in turn means nothing else than that we have a time ahead of us in which the Enlightenment is likely to find seldom fertile ground. And in my opinion, education is by far the most important task of our time.
So let us use every day and every hour to open people’s eyes and in this way, without violence and by virtue of our conviction, prevent the digital-financial complex from succeeding in realizing Benito Mussolini’s dream of authoritarian corporatism and humanity in to run a digital prison and to include future generations in it.
Let’s stand up for a really democratic system and that means first and foremost in a world dominated by money and characterized by huge inequality: a really democratic monetary system.
One that does not give preference to one currency and one that does not lead to individual people amassing greater fortunes than entire states and being able to rise above others because of their power.
One that does not allow the real economy to wither while the financial casino takes on ever more grotesque forms, where those who earn the most bear the least tax burden and those who are most cunning and speculate can evade payments.
Let us stand up for a world in which everyone, regardless of the circumstances under which they were born, has the same opportunities and for a world in which one does not have to scare people when it comes to diseases, but in the It is a matter of course to protect the old, the weak and the sick.
And let’s remind ourselves every day: If we don’t, who else?
