"You'll own nothing."
~ World Economic Forum prediction

By Catherine Austin Fitts

Upon surviving a mass atrocity, you come to understand the criminal nature of the financial syndicates roaming the planet. Human rights are everywhere threatened. So are property rights.

Private property is important. It is family wealth that creates community wealth and stands between us and the abyss in emergencies or challenging times. Remove our assets and our access to wealth-building, and we lose our independence and the reserves that make the difference. We lose the entrepreneurial seed corn that creates an enlightened and productive society. If we own nothing in a world with central transaction control, we are no more than slaves.

For several decades, we have watched growing bubbles in the fixed-income markets. It became more than clear during the financial crisis of 2008–2012 that our collateral system was marked by high levels of fraud. Ultimately, the bailouts—supposedly necessitated by a collapse in the mortgage and housing markets—were more than 300% of the amount needed to retire all the single-family mortgages in the United States. In the process, we have experienced events that create serious questions about the ability of banking creditors and investors to compromise investor and depositor assets and the willingness of regulators and courts to allow them to do so. Such events include:

The collapse of the Madoff fraud controlled by JPMorgan Chase

The resolutions of Lehman, Bear Stearns, and MF Global

The HSBC settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice

The U.S. Treasury and New York Fed role in the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank

The acquisition of Credit Suisse by UBS

The result has been increased concerns about the dangers of bail-ins of our bank deposits in an engineered consolidation of the banking system. This is compounded by increased concerns regarding the potential destruction or confiscation of our real estate through regulation and taxation inspired by "climate change." It also includes questions regarding the ownership and custody of securities described in a new book titled The Great Taking by retired hedge fund manager David Webb.

Originally from Cleveland, Ohio, David has studied the financial and human harm caused to several generations of his family by engineered pumps and dumps of the U.S. economy. Committed to protecting himself and his family, David had a successful career in the hedge fund business. Concerned by the corruption in the U.S. financial system (made clear during the financial crisis), David moved to Sweden, convinced that his assets would be safer in the Swedish securities, banking, and custodian systems. Then, as the Swedish and European systems aligned with U.S. practices, he continued to research the byzantine developments taking place in the legal and financial nuts and bolts being engineered in the backrooms of the global financial systems.

Persuaded that Mr. Global has now created a global mechanism to assert creditor rights over all securities, David lays out his case in The Great Taking. David bases his analysis on statements made by regulators as to what they can do. Carolyn and I still cannot document the legal pathway behind these statements. I believe that much of what David describes were mechanisms created to keep the collateral bubble going. David points to changes in the Uniform Commercial Code that we do not understand—more research here would be invaluable.

We do not agree with David's analysis of money velocity. Centralization and criminality remove trust from the system, bringing on a drop in money velocity. Growth without inflation is more than possible, but it will require a change in the governance and central banking systems. Where we do agree is that the central bankers intend to strip us of our assets and property rights. If the central bankers achieve financial transaction control, they will indeed be able to engineer a "great taking." The pandemic destruction of small businesses and family income was simply a small taste of what will then be possible.

This coming week, David joins Carolyn Betts and me to describe his journey from money manager to author, help us understand the documents and evidence supporting his conclusions (yes, this gets into lots of technical issues regarding securities) and the general assault on our property rights, and share his thoughts on what we do about it all. We are deeply grateful for David's research and his willingness to share it broadly. His work proves once again that the deterioration in the integrity of our legal and financial systems creates unacceptable risks – including for the very wealthy.

I will review a list of "takings" covering all asset classes with Dr. Farrell in the Annual Wrap Up – News, Trends & Stories Part I in January, so stay tuned for that as well.

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The next Money & Markets will publish on January 4. Post questions at the Money & Markets commentary here.

Related Solari Reports and Videos:

All the Plenary's Men

JP Madoff with Helen Chaitman

Stopping the Steal with John Titus

Book Review: Bailout by Neil Barofsky