The Bank for International Settlements: Part III – Monetary Fascism Goes Global

"The world in a cage" by Oye Apitoño! is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

“We are going to go global.” – Andrew Crockett, BIS General Manager 1994 – 2003.

By 1996, the central banks of China, India, Russia, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Saudi Arabia had joined the Bank for International Settlements (BIS). BIS membership is made up of countries that control 80% of the world’s GDP. It is actively involved in rebuilding the world’s financial architecture, as well as coordinating regulatory supervisory policies. Its Financial Stability Board (FSB), of which the IMF, the World Bank and the ECB are members, coordinates national financial authorities.

The title of this piece uses the word ‘fascism’, and because I live in London, many readers might roll their eyes at the liberal use of the f-word, indicating that I seem to have caught the British bug of describing anything I don’t like as ‘fascist’. That lousy pizza I had last week? Made by fascists I tell you! However, as outlined in Part I and Part II, Adam Lebor’s Tower of Basel provides ample evidence of the BIS’s steadfast support for real fascists during, and in the aftermath of, World War II.

The global financial mafia comprises the BIS (the godfather), the IMF, The US Federal Reserve, the World Bank, the Bank of England, and the European Central Bank (ECB). Before we get up to date on the BIS, let’s briefly look at another pillar of the global banking mafia – the IMF.

The testimony of John Perkins, a self-confessed former Economic Hitman for the likes of the IMF and the World Bank, confirms that the formal process of decolonisation was replaced with a more effective financial colonisation, with the IMF and World Bank as the new colonising army. I recommend reading Confessions of an Economic Hitman by John Perkins for an insider’s account of how international finance replaced old-fashioned colonialism. This 2-minute video is an adequate overview for the purpose of this piece.

John Truman Wolfe was a senior US banker before he turned his skills to business management and investment advice. His book – The Coming Financial Crisis: A Look Behind the Wizard’s Curtain – is useful for understanding global international finance, the BIS being the head of that snake. In the course of following a major currency crisis in Mexico that involved an IMF bail-out loan, he managed to get hold of the loan agreement between the IMF and Mexico. Here’s what he found:

“Some of the provisions appeared to have been written by Orwell himself. They granted the IMF control over a wide range of social policies, many of which had no bearing on Mexico’s ability to repay the loan. ”[i] [emphasis added]

While not quoting the contract verbatim, Wolfe strongly intimated that social policies included in such contracts could relate to “educat[ing]…women on matters of family planning and contraception”.

In February 2024, the IMF committed to providing financial assistance to Egypt to facilitate the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. You may think this is not problematic and that the only criteria for consideration by a bank when advancing a loan is the creditworthiness of the borrower. If so, how do you judge the BIS and Wall Street banks that facilitated Nazi Germany’s brutal operations using slave labour in IG Farben’s manufacturing complex at Auschwitz?

If you think that printing money out of thin air is a recent banking innovation, then you might be surprised to learn, as I was, that the IMF pioneered this in 1965. With a lot of help from the CIA. As Wolfe explained:

“There were too many dollars in circulation and foreign governments that were holding dollars in reserve were considering turning theirs in for gold at the time. The CIA was trying to head off a run on Fort Knox by foreign governments.”[ii]

Whether there was actually any gold left to raid in Fort Knox is a whole other story [time stamp 2:40:00]. That question should be front and centre of the motivation for Nixon closing the gold window, and the mysterious death of the woman who leaked the story of the disappearance of the gold in Fort Knox.

A declassified CIA document dated 9 December 1965 reveals that the spy agency came up with the solution to countries ditching their dollars for gold – increasing liquidity by inventing a new asset. Quoting the incriminating sentence in the CIA memo:

“Our strategy is to supplement gold and dollars with a new international asset, Special Drawing Rights (SDR).”[iii]

The IMF didn’t create SDRs. The CIA did. And it’s essentially a currency created out of thin air. They claim it is ‘backed’ by the dollar and the Euro, but those are backed by thin air, ergo the SDR is backed by thin air.

The reason for the creation of SDRs is the same reason the US closed the gold window in 1971 – foreign central banks converting their dollars to gold. Countries dumping dollars for gold was obviously not good for the dollar. Hence the end of the gold standard. To shore up the demand for dollars, a deal was done with the Saudis to sell oil in dollars – the Petro Dollar was born.[iv] That had the effect of forcing central banks around the world to keep dollars to buy oil. Countries short of dollars due to chronic trade deficits can always turn to the friendly IMF for loan assistance.

The IMF has been printing its SDRs ever since, and in 2009 alone, it printed $250 billion of SDRs in response to the global financial crisis.[v] In 2016, Wolfe predicted that:

“The SDR will fully replace the dollar as the global reserve currency. This…will continue at an increasingly rapid pace until the SDR is formally crowned.”[vi]

While SDR holdings of member countries have risen more than threefold since 2016 – from 204 billion to 661 billion at the end of 2024 – hindsight seems to indicate this may not be (or perhaps is no longer) part of a strategy to completely sideline the US dollar as the reserve currency. Its stellar status will almost certainly decline as multipolarity ramps up, but the dollar’s share of total currency reserves is still relatively high – 58% at the end of 2024 versus 64% at the end of 2016. Many commentators now believe that the Fed has plans to use the US dollar in a global drive for financial digitalisation, more of which later.

Global rule by stealth – the BIS’s ‘standards’

Wolfe’s research into the operations of global financial capital led him to conclude that the “organisation behind the IMF and the World Bank that is calling the shots” is the BIS.

Following the global financial crisis of 2008, the G-20 announced in April 2009 the creation of the Financial Stability Board (FSB) to operate out of the BIS. The FSB produces a raft of International Financial Standards and Codes that its member countries, represented by its central banks, are expected to implement. This amounts to financial policies disguised as ‘standards’ passed nationally by stealth. Tablets inscribed with the holy writ of ‘standards’ are passed down to central banks from the BIS’s mountaintop in Basel.

The G-20 is essentially an organisation of the central bankers and finance ministers of the 20 major industrialised nations. Wolfe provides the best description I have seen yet of the link between the BIS and the G-20:

“If the Earth has a Board of Directors, it is the G-20. But even the G-20 takes its orders from the BIS and its council in crime [the FSB].”

As part of its ‘standards’, the BIS demands accurate data from key ministries in all member countries. This allows it to engage in economic and monetary planning and forecasting. That might be a good thing if the BIS was transparent and working for you and me, but it’s not. It sucks up data to fortify the banking cartel’s architecture of global control. The BIS itself is under no obligation to disclose any of its own financial information or details of how and why it uses our national data, so this one-way flow of information tells you who is top dog in the relationship.

The standards are wide-ranging and even include an “FSB roadmap for addressing climate related financial risks”, proving, if proof were needed, that global financial control will be underpinned by counting and rationing all the carbon atoms in the world.

The digitalisation of finance – the final frontier

Crucially, there are standards for the global regulation of crypto and digital currencies. Unsurprisingly included in the BIS’s Basel Committee strategic priorities for 2025/26 is the digitalisation of finance, which includes central bank digital currencies, or some form of them. In an excellent short article, Catherine Austin Fitts has warned of the lightning speed at which the Trump administration is moving to build a digital gulag.

Key pillars of Trump administration digitalisation policy include:

• Getting all states compliant with the REAL ID programme;

• Building data centres under the Stargate programme to support a complete control grid and all-digital monetary system;

• Switching fiscal control to central bankers through the Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE) takeover of the Treasury payment systems;

• Pushing testing of digital transaction systems using private crypto currency and implementing a Federal regulatory framework governing the issuance and operation of digital assets, including stablecoins.

Sceptics like me see the private crypto drive as the backdoor for introducing programmable digital currency. Trump’s crypto Executive Order does indeed prohibit any federal agency from taking action to establish, issue or promote “central bank digital currencies” (CBDCs). However, I have always maintained that whoever appears to be fronting the ‘currency’ is largely irrelevant, since ‘digital currency’, in the eyes of central banks, is simply a payment system with greatly enhanced surveillance capability. It’s becoming apparent that in the US, the plan is to overcome resistance to CBDCs by using the Trojan horse of a ‘privately’ issued stablecoin. Remember: if the BIS wants digitalisation of finance, so does the Fed. Trump is a spectator and a distraction decoy.

Central banks, including the Fed, are private banking cartels, so whether crypto is administered by the central bank or its cartel member is neither here nor there from a user perspective. As long the central bank controls the currency that flows through the payment system, whether it is a stablecoin or a CBDC, it will remain in charge. The bottom line is that central banks would not accept competition for control over the money supply, so if the US Fed is playing along with the Trump administration proposal, that’s because it’s their proposal, not his.

The BIS and its member central banks are obviously gung-ho on CBDCs and, in this December 2024 paper, the BIS proposes a “division of labour between the central bank and private intermediaries.” Isn’t that cute! The paper also confirms that a CBDC is a “digital payment instrument” (in other words, a payment system), and talks about the desired “interoperability between CBDC systems and other payment systems”.

Right off the bat, the BIS’s technical design approach lists “introducing additional functionalities such as programmability” as a public policy objective, [emphasis added]. For those new to the concept of CBDCs, ‘programmability’ refers to the ability of the issuer (the central bank or its proxy) to attach conditions to how the money in a CBDC wallet is spent. Used up your quota of 5 grams of steak this week? Sorry, you’ll have to switch to toasted spiders freshly imported from the Amazon rain forests. Don’t complain; they’re organic!

What happened in Cyprus won’t stay in Cyprus – bail-ins

Soon after its establishment, the FSB masterminded the bank-friendly concept of the bail-in. When Greece defaulted on its bonds in 2012, two major banks in Cyprus holding these bonds suffered massive losses. The banks stayed afloat by recouping their losses directly from depositors’ accounts through a ‘bail-in’. Wolfe explains in plain English why money in the bank is not as secure as you think it is:

“Legally, once you give your money to the bank, they own your funds. The deposit is a bank liability… and you have become a creditor. Your deposit isn’t secured by anything so you are…an unsecured creditor.”[vii] [emphasis added]

The Cyprus banks’ losses were effectively recovered by exchanging a portion of depositors’ balances for stock or shares in the bank. Thus, a depositor may have gone to bed in the evening thinking they had a savings account worth €100,000, only to wake up the next morning to see it replaced by stock with a nominal value of the same amount, but practically worthless. Which would you rather have – your savings account with money in it, or worthless stock in a bank that has just gone bust?

The UK government has approved this exciting banking innovation, describing it very helpfully as “a bail-in tool … to improve the toolkit for dealing with the failure of large, globally systemic banks.” The Bank of England is equally excited about this “key innovation”. They deceitfully describe this swap of depositors’ funds for junk shares as a way of ensuring that “costs [are] borne by the failed bank’s owners and investors rather than by depositors or taxpayers.” When “failed bank’s owners” hand you stock in their failed bank and take your savings, do you think that’s a fair swap? Do you really think the costs are being borne by the failed bank’s owners and not the depositors?

Bail-ins are part of a plan by the BIS to protect the major players in the banking cartel from collapse during the next global financial crisis – and to do so at the expense of depositors.[viii]

If you doubted the central banking explainer provided by Wolfe (see Part I under heading: Central Banking 101), I think the bail-in ruse confirms that money in circulation is private money. It’s not yours; the banks are letting you have it provided that all is well in their world. But they’ll take it when they need it.

The section below on derivatives is just one way in which a banking crisis could lead to the use of bail-ins. Putting aside the insanity of the debt Ponzi scheme, I wanted to include a short section on derivatives to emphasise just how insane the banksters are.

Financial Weapons of Mass Destruction

Investopedia defines derivatives as:

“binding contracts between parties that are bought or sold as bets on (or hedges against) the future price moves of whatever securities they're based on—hence, the name "derivative." So derivatives' prices are dependent on the prices of their underlying assets.”

The size of the derivatives market is estimated to be more than 10 times that of the total world gross domestic product (GDP). For the second half of 2021, the BIS’s own estimate of the total notional amounts outstanding for contracts in the derivatives market was $600 trillion.

Warren Buffett, no amateur in the field of financial investing, has called derivatives Financial Weapons of Mass Destruction. I remember when financial derivatives started really taking off at the end of the last century. For my sins in a former life, I had to wade through new and complex accounting standards that would supposedly keep track of what the geniuses in the banks were doing. They were far more complicated than anything that had come before, and I still find much of it unfathomable. That may just be because I am stupid. But I also recall the Enron scandal in 2001 that brought down Enron Corporation and its accounting firm, Arthur Anderson, one of the top five global accounting firms.

Most experts and analysts pretended to understand Enron’s explanations for its stellar financial performance…until it collapsed. A tiny minority of analysts did not fall for the scam, and I committed to memory one analyst’s answer in response to why he never recommended Enron stock to anyone. It was the point at which I stopped feeling stupid. He didn’t understand Enron’s products or its financial statements, and he didn’t think it was wise to put his faith in something he didn’t understand.

Financial experts also pretended to understand the ins and outs of mortgage backed securities…until the global financial crisis of 2008 exposed the gaping holes in their understanding. There is never a shortage of professionals claiming to know how complex financial products work...until they stop working. I understand enough about Bitcoin to know I don’t understand it. If I ever write about Bitcoin, the title of the piece will be: “What I don’t understand about Bitcoin.” But I digress.

Wolfe points out that in the US, banking reforms have made derivatives counterparties senior to unsecured lenders. ‘Unsecured lenders’ is us, the plebs. So, “the derivatives counterparties [banks and financial institutions]…get to grab the assets first and leave everyone else [the plebs] to scramble for crumbs.”[ix] The multi-trillion dollar derivatives casino is just one of numerous possible triggers for the next financial collapse, the debt Ponzi scheme itself being the main one.

This is what bankers do for a living. They think of obscure and intangible concepts to formulate bets on. Next, they think of a very large number and multiply it many times over. Finally, they place a bet on that number. All you need to know about that bet is that if the bankers lose, and the loss is too big for them to bear, you, the depositor, will pick up the tab. A bet that you can’t lose is not a bet, but that’s what the banking psychopaths call it. Even psychopaths have a sense of humour.

Operation Dark Fed

While the BIS is the coordinating brain of the world’s central banks, the US Federal Reserve is the titan of central banks. In May 2024, the Biden administration issued a memo that has implications for the direction of intended central bank influence, not just in the US, but globally. It essentially presages the final stage of the central bank coup.

John Titus describes it as “a major push to replace rule by democratic governments with rule by privately owned central banks.” That would be the coming to fruition of the project that Carroll Quigley described in 1966, and which I referenced in Part I – namely, global capital’s ambition 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.”

The title of the Biden administration memo is intended to leave its target audience in no doubt as to the endgame – The Importance of Central Bank Independence. The memo confirms the point made in this series of articles – “nearly all advanced economies and many developing countries are now governed by independent central banks whose governing bodies decide monetary policy without political input, approval, or fear of reprisal.”

Let that sink in. Advanced economies are not governed by elected representatives of the people. They are governed by central banks. Without the inconvenience of having to account to the people, in any way.

Jerome Powell, Chair of the Federal Reserve, was asked at a press conference the day after Trump took office if he would vacate his office if asked to do so by Trump. Without pause, the one-word answer was, “No.” Why? “Not permitted under the law.”

So, if the Fed is untouchable, what was the purpose of the memo? Well, John Titus asserts that, under the US Constitution, “credit issuance and money-coining are expressly identified sovereign powers belonging to Congress”. In practical terms, this has not prevented the US Fed from operating pretty much like other independent central banks. The US Fed is certainly powerful, but unlike, say, the European Central Bank, the power the Fed enjoys has been delegated to it under the Federal Reserve Act.

In essence, the US Fed has been given independence, via the Federal Reserve Act, from the Executive Branch, but not from Congress itself. That’s why Trump can’t fire the Fed Chairman. But ultimate authority still rests with Congress through the Constitution. The Federal Reserve Act is therefore like a lease. From the Fed’s perspective, there is a risk that one day it might not be renewed. If by some miracle Congress ever came to its senses, it could repeal the Act.

Tellingly, the Federal Reserve Act doesn’t even define the US Fed as a central bank. The term ‘central bank’ is used in the Act, but it is defined as “any foreign bank or banker authorized to perform any one or more of the functions of a central bank”. [emphasis added]

The US Constitution is therefore theoretically in the way of untrammelled independence for the US Fed from all national oversight. Hence the Biden administration’s commitment to its “unwavering support for CBI [Central Bank Independence]” – the kind enjoyed by “nearly all advanced economies”. If you believe that the Trump administration will gallop in on a large white steed and give the Fed a bloody nose, then scepticism is probably not a word that has much pride of place in your lexicon.

Why does this matter to the rest of the world? Well, the US dollar is still the global reserve currency and the US Fed is the most significant central bank on the world stage. Whatever theoretical transparency we have into the US Fed also provides a sliver of transparency into the wider global central banking system. If the Fed transacts with other foreign central banks, some transparency into those foreign central banks is, in theory, available to us by Congress exercising its power to demand information from the Fed.

The bottom line from Titus is:

“if Congress can pass an act tomorrow erasing the Fed from the face of the earth, and take possession of the money house – which it can do – it can inspect that house as well… Permanent, enforceable transparency is a feature of the U.S. Federal Reserve that separates it from central banks generally and from the European Central Bank in particular.”

The Biden memo, as Titus points out, is in fact a propaganda campaign “aimed at convincing Congress and really the American public that the best course of action for the U.S. is to treat the Fed just like the European Central Bank”.

Were this to happen, it would signify a major victory for the US Fed, and by extension all central bankers who would love to operate with as little transparency as possible. Dimming the light on the US Fed will have the effect of making other central bank operations even darker than they already are.

I plan to follow John Titus’s series of central bank exposés. Here are the links:

https://beta.solari.com/the-war-for-bankocracy/

Episode 1 - The War for Bankocracy

This series of articles will hopefully lay the foundation for an analysis of what multipolarity means in a world ruled by the Owners and Controllers of Global Financial Capital. And, if I’m feeling foolish enough, I might include a framework for hazarding a guess on whether the demonic state of Israel will be allowed to go through with its genocide and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. If you haven’t yet guessed by now, that framework will start with the question: what do the Owners and Controllers of Global Financial Capital want?

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[i] John Truman Wolfe, The Coming Financial Crisis: A Look Behind the Wizard’s Curtain, Lisa Hagan Books, 2016, Introduction, pg. 8

[ii] John Truman Wolfe, The Coming Financial Crisis: A Look Behind the Wizard’s Curtain, Lisa Hagan Books, 2016, Ch 6, pg. 121

[iii] John Truman Wolfe, The Coming Financial Crisis: A Look Behind the Wizard’s Curtain, Lisa Hagan Books, 2016, Ch 6, pg. 120

[iv] John Truman Wolfe, The Coming Financial Crisis: A Look Behind the Wizard’s Curtain, Lisa Hagan Books, 2016, Ch 8, pg. 173

[v] John Truman Wolfe, The Coming Financial Crisis: A Look Behind the Wizard’s Curtain, Lisa Hagan Books, 2016, Ch 6, pg. 125

[vi] John Truman Wolfe, The Coming Financial Crisis: A Look Behind the Wizard’s Curtain, Lisa Hagan Books, 2016, Ch 8, pg. 175

[vii] John Truman Wolfe, The Coming Financial Crisis: A Look Behind the Wizard’s Curtain, Lisa Hagan Books, 2016, Ch 7, pg. 159

[viii] John Truman Wolfe, The Coming Financial Crisis: A Look Behind the Wizard’s Curtain, Lisa Hagan Books, 2016, Ch 8, pg. 176

[ix] John Truman Wolfe, The Coming Financial Crisis: A Look Behind the Wizard’s Curtain, Lisa Hagan Books, 2016, Ch 7, pg. 167