BY THE GREAT TAKING ON YOUTUBE and DAVID ROGERS WEBB

A film about the scheme of central bankers to subjugate humanity by taking all securities, bank deposits, and property financed with debt.

COMMENTARY

INTERNAL DESTRUCTION: FIRST COVID, NOW COMES “THE GREAT TAKING”

BY MATTHEW SMITH FOR INTERNATIONAL MAN

The Great Depression was a well-executed plan to seize assets, impoverish the population, and remake society. What comes next is worse..

A recent book by David Webb sheds new light on exactly what happened during the Great Depression. In Webb’s view, it was a setup.

Webb is a successful former investment banker and hedge fund manager with experience at the highest levels of the financial system. He published The Great Taking a few months ago and recently supplemented it with a video documentary. Thorough, concise, comprehensible, and FREE. Why? Because he wants everyone to understand what’s being done.

The Great Taking describes the roadmap to collapse the system, suppress the people, and seize all your assets. And it includes the receipts.

You Already Own Nothing

Webb’s book illustrates, among other things, how changes in the Uniform Commercial Code converted asset ownership into a security entitlement. The “entitlement” designation made personal property a mere contractual claim. The “entitled” person is a “beneficial” owner, but not the legal one.

In the event a financial institution is insolvent, the legal owner is the “entity that controls the security with a security interest.” In essence, client assets belong to the banks. But it’s much worse than that. This isn’t simply a matter of losing your cash to a bank bail-in. The entire financial system has been wired for a controlled demolition.

Webb describes in detail how the trap was set, and how the Great Depression provides a precedent. In 1933, FDR declared a “Bank Holiday.” By executive order, banks were closed. Later, only those approved by the Fed were allowed to reopen.

Thousands of banks were left to die. People with money in those disfavored institutions lost all of it, as well as anything they’d financed (houses, cars, businesses) that they now couldn’t pay for. Then, a few “chosen” banks consolidated all the assets in the system.

Centralization and Systemic Risk

As Webb shows, the  cake has been baked for years. But this week came a sign it’s coming out of the oven.

Last Monday, Bloomberg admitted that measures taken to ostensibly “protect the system” actually amplify risk.

In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, G20 ‘leaders’ mandated all standardized Over The Counter (OTC) derivatives be cleared through central counterparties (CCPs), ostensibly to reduce counter party risk and increase market transparency. The best-known CCP in the US is the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation (DTCC), which processes trillions of dollars of securities transactions each day.

Before 2012, OTC derivative trades were bi-lateral and counterparty risk was managed by parties to a transaction. When doing business directly with other firms, each had to make sure it was dealing with reliable parties. If they had a bad reputation or were not creditworthy, counterparties could consider them toxic and shut them out of trades. This, according to the wise G20 leadership, was too risky.

With the introduction of central clearing mandates, counterparty risk was shifted via CCPs away from the firms doing the deal to the system itself. Creditworthiness and reputation were replaced with collateral and complex models.

Brokers, banks, asset managers, hedge funds, corporations, insurance companies and other so-called “clearing parties” participate in the market by first posting collateral in the form of Initial Margin (IM) with the CCP. It’s through this IM and a separate and much smaller Default Fund (DF) held at the CCP that counterparty risk is managed.

To ‘Mutualise’ Losses

Shifting risk from individual parties to the collective is a recipe for trouble. But, as explained in a recent report from the BIS, it’s worse than that. The structure of CCPs themselves can cause “Margin Spirals” and “wrong-way risk” in the event of market turbulence.

In flight-to-safety episodes, CCPs hike margin requirements.  According to the BIS,

“Sudden and large IM hikes force deleveraging by derivative counterparties and can precipitate fire sales that lead to higher volatility and additional IM hikes in so-called margin spirals.”

We’ve already gotten a taste of what this can look like.  Similar margin spirals “occurred in early 2020 (Covid-19) and 2022 (invasion of Ukraine), reflecting the risk-sensitive nature of IM models.”

Government Bonds as a source of trouble

The second area of systemic risk is the dual use of government bonds as both collateral and as underlying assets in derivatives contracts. Volatility in the government bond market can lead to a demand for more collateral underlying the derivatives markets precisely when government bond prices are declining. Falling bond prices erode the value of the existing IM.  Collateral demands skyrocket just as the value of current and would-be collateral is evaporating.

Again, the BIS:

Wrong-way risk dynamics appeared to play a role during the 2010–11 Irish sovereign debt crisis. At that time, investors liquidated their positions in Irish government bonds after a CCP raised the haircuts on such bonds when used as collateral. This led to lower prices of Irish government bonds triggering further haircuts, further position closures and ultimately a downward price spiral.

Designed to fail

The BIS doesn’t admit it, but Webb says the CCPs themselves are deliberately under-capitalized and designed to fail. The start-up of a new CCP is planned and pre-funded. When that happens, it’ll be the “secured creditors” who will take control of ALL the underlying collateral.

Once more, the BIS:

…to mutualise potential default losses in excess of IM, CCPs also require their members to contribute to a default fund (DF). As a result, CCPs are in command of large pools of liquid assets.

That “large pool of liquid assets” is the full universe of traded securities.

In a market collapse, the stocks and bonds you think you own will be sucked into the default fund (DF) as additional collateral for the evaporating value of the derivatives complex. This is “The Great Taking”.

Buffett’s famous line rings true: “You only find out who is swimming naked when the tide goes out.”  Most of us are on the verge of learning that we’re the ones without any clothes.

If you haven’t read “The Great Taking” or watched the documentary, I recommend you pour yourself a stiff drink and watch it now.

3 WAYS TO SURVIVE “THE GREAT TAKING”

BY NICK GIAMBRUNO FOR INTERNATIONAL MAN

It’s a “scheme of central bankers to subjugate humanity by taking all securities, bank deposits, and property financed with debt.”

David Webb, a former hedge fund manager, and Wall Street insider, has blown the lid off a diabolical plan more than 50 years in the making in a shocking new book.

He calls it The Great Taking.

I consider it an urgent must-read (available for free here).

Here’s the synopsis (emphasis mine):

It is about the taking of collateral (all of it), the end game of the current globally synchronous debt accumulation super cycle.

This scheme is being executed by long-planned, intelligent design, the audacity and scope of which is difficult for the mind to encompass.

Included are all financial assets and bank deposits, all stocks and bonds; and hence, all underlying property of all public corporations, including all inventories, plant and equipment; land, mineral deposits, inventions and intellectual property.

Privately owned personal and real property financed with any amount of debt will likewise be taken, as will the assets of privately owned businesses which have been financed with debt.

If even partially successful, this will be the greatest conquest and subjugation in world history.

Private, closely held control of ALL central banks, and hence of all money creation, has allowed a very few people to control all political parties and governments; the intelligence agencies and their myriad front organizations; the armed forces and the police; the major corporations and, of course, the media. These very few people are the prime movers. Their plans are executed over decades. Their control is opaque.

To be clear, it is these very few people, who are hidden from you, who are behind this scheme to confiscate all assets, who are waging a hybrid war against humanity.

Webb shows how the dark forces behind central banking have spent the last 50 years meticulously putting the legal structures in place worldwide to sever property rights for securities.

Gone are the days of physical paper share certificates and bearer securities, where you had control and ownership of the asset.

Today, your control and ownership have become increasingly distant as stocks, bonds, and other investments have been centralized away from account holders and rehypothecated—a slimy practice where financial institutions reuse an account holder’s asset for their purposes, creating multiple claims on the same asset.

Contrary to what most brokerage account holders believe, they only have the appearance of ownership. If their broker goes bust, the stocks and bonds they think they own will be used to satisfy the other more senior creditors of their broker.

Webb shows how, during the 2008 financial crisis, a small broker in Florida went bankrupt.

Instead of sending the clients’ securities to another broker, as had traditionally been the case, they were swept up by the bankruptcy receiver.

But it’s not just some isolated small broker.

The bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers set the case law precedent for secured creditors to take client assets in the case of insolvency.

The most senior secured creditors are the most powerful financial institutions closest to the central banks—JP Morgan, BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, etc.

The net effect of The Great Taking will be the biggest centralization of money and power in history as they take everyone’s securities during a future crisis.

Though it’s not just securities, they will also take ANY asset financed by debt—like real estate, cars, and small businesses—as people become unable to service their debts.

Webb provides all the details and proof in his book.

Here’s the bottom line.

The most powerful people in the world have succeeded in subverting the property rights of securities and ensnaring most of the world with debt.

The trap has been set, and the legal plumbing is in place.

All that is needed is a big crisis that will cause a tidal wave of bankruptcies, and the hidden forces behind the world’s central banks will be able to take everyone’s stocks, bonds, and any property financed by debt.

All the assets people think they own in brokerage accounts, bank accounts, pensions, and other financial accounts could vanish overnight.

Webb says, “There will be a game of musical chairs. When the music stops, you will not have a seat. It is designed to work that way.”

The Coming Collapse Is by Design

Webb makes a compelling case that the next financial crisis won’t be an accident; the global elite is making it happen to proceed with The Great Taking.

In short, it’s not plausible that such an intelligent, deliberate plan executed with persistence for more than 50 years could happen by accident.

Further, the forces behind central banking and (fake) money creation undoubtedly understand the dynamics of the boom-bust cycle they create by expanding and contracting the money supply.

They know the Everything Bubble they created will lead to a massive bust. That’s when they will execute The Great Taking.

Further, consumer debt is at record highs.

After many years of being encouraged to go deeply into debt, many Americans have reached their maximum debt saturation. They will be ripe for the picking.

As Webb explains:

“Debt is not a real thing. It is an invention, a construct designed to take real things.

The bottom line is that debt has for centuries had the function of dispossessing, of taking away property, capital and investments from someone.”

What You Can Do About It

Nobody knows the future or how The Great Taking will play out. The best you can do is to make yourself a hard target and not be among the low-hanging fruit.

You can do that by being debt-free and owning unencumbered assets within your direct control.

You don’t want to own something that is simultaneously someone else’s liability. That’s because the legal structures are already in place to take it from you during the next crisis.

Crucially, this includes fiat currency in bank accounts.

Remember, fiat currency is the unbacked liability of a bankrupt government.

Further, once you deposit currency into a bank, it is no longer yours. Technically and legally, it is the bank’s property, and what you own instead is an unsecured liability of the bank.

As The Great Taking unfolds, you won’t want to be on the other end of liabilities or IOUs.

Three solutions stand out to me.

First, physical gold and silver bullion coins in your possession are an excellent option. The best way is to purchase widely recognized bullion coins, like the Canadian Maple Leaf or the American Eagle. Also, never put precious metals in a bank’s safe deposit box. They will be among the first targets when The Great Taking unfolds.

Second, real estate, businesses, and other property are owned outright with no debt or any other competing claims attached to them.

Third, there is Bitcoin.

Bitcoin is a digital bearer instrument. A bearer instrument gives whoever has it in their possession ownership of it, like the physical paper share certificates and bearer securities of the past.

When you properly hold Bitcoin, you own an asset that is NOT someone else’s liability and remains totally under your control.

Bitcoin has the potential to separate money from the state and give monetary sovereignty to the individual by rendering central banks obsolete—along with their confetti currencies.

That’s why Bitcoin is like kryptonite to the dark forces behind The Great Taking.

However, it is crucial to emphasize the need to hold Bitcoin properly.

The whole point of Bitcoin is for you to control your money without needing any counterparty. Relying on a third party defeats the entire purpose.

For example, if you own Bitcoin on Coinbase, Cash App, or some other custodial platform, you don’t own your Bitcoin but rather a “Bitcoin IOU.” You can lose your Bitcoin if the custodian goes bankrupt. It’s happened numerous times before, and I have no doubt it will happen again.

It’s much more secure to eliminate this dangerous counterparty risk by holding your Bitcoin in your self-custody wallet, where only you control the private keys.

As Bitcoiners like to say, “Not your keys, not your Bitcoin.”

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WHY THE MONETARY MISSION SHOULD BE LEFT TO THE FREE MARKET

BY DAVID STOCKMAN

Current developments on the inflation front should be a stark reminder that discretionary monetary policy is one of the great–if not the greatest— statist cons of our times. At the end of the day, modern central banking is simply a cover story to enable expansion of government activities either by creating unnecessary crises and dislocations or owing to falsely cheap interest rates which enable vast increases in the public debt.

In the present chapter of post-Volcker monetary policy machinations the Fed is allegedly attempting to thread the needle to bring inflation back to the sacrosanct 2.00% “goal” while not sending the economy into the recessionary drink. But in that mission it will positively fail (again).

That’s because it has neither the tools to control the inflation rate with any precision (or any other macro-target), nor even measure it with the accuracy implicit in its policy targets. In this respect, monetary-policy-in-one-country is no more valid than was socialism-in-one-country when Stalin advocated it upon Lenin’s death in 1924. The predicate was just plain wrong, then and now.

In the current case, the Fed can do one tangible thing alone (aside from jaw-boning and open-mouth policy which can’t be taken seriously in today’s world). To wit, it can create or extinguish fiat dollar credits via its open market operations, but it has virtually zero control over the subsequent destiny and impact of these credits as they wind their way through the canyons of Wall Street initially, and eventually through the real economy and its global linkages to merchandise trade, international labor cost arbitrage and money and capital markets flows over the length and breadth of the world economy.

For instance, it has no control whatsoever over the Brent global marker price for crude oil, which has again pushed over $90 per barrel, bringing the related domestic WTI price up from a recent low of $65 per barrel (May 2023) to nearly $85. Moreover, crude oil supply is fixing to remain materially shrunken by upwards of 1.7 million barrels per day owing to the recently announced extension of production cuts by Russia, Saudi Arabia and lesser OPEC members.

As a result of these supply constraints and continuing healthy global demand, US crude oil inventories have hit a 40-year low of 46 days consumption. In part this is due to the foolish Biden policies which drained nearly 300 million barrels from the nation’s strategic reserve (SPR) in a blatant effort to lessen pump prices during last November’s Congressional elections.

As is shown so dramatically by the graph, current inventories are just 50% of the peak inventory that was reached in May 2020. Again, this was owing to a non-monetary development—the economic crash from the Covid Lockdowns—which caused oil demand to plunge, bringing prices down to the sub-basement with it.

Needless to say, that 46 days inventory swing was no drop in the bucket. It amounted to the equivalent of nearly 800 million barrels of crude oil or more than two-months of domestic crude production. And this was magnified globally owing to demand and inventory swings on a world-wide basis of equivalent magnitude.

Accordingly, the path of the WTI price (yellow line) in the chart below was violent, to put it mildly. Even on a monthly average basis, the price path plunged by 63%, from $52 in January 2020 to a low of $19 at the bottom of the Lockdown crash in April 2020; it then climbed relentlessly by 500% to a peak of $114/bbl. two years later in May 2022, only to fallback to the aforementioned $65 low in May 2023, thereby representing a 43% decline. And now its up by more than 30%, and destined to go considerably higher as inventories continue to shrink owing to daily consumption well above daily production on a global basis.

Goldman Sachs therefore now projects that the Brent market price may again exceed $100 per barrel by late 2024.

The bank had expected that in January the countries would bring back half of the 1.7 million barrel per day cut that was announced in April. Now the bank is floating the possibility of an even longer extension.

“Consider a bullish scenario where OPEC+ keeps the 2023 cuts…fully in place through end-2024 and where Saudi Arabia only gradually raises production,” analysts at Goldman Sachs wrote in the report.

In that scenario, Brent oil prices would likely climb to $107 a barrel in December 2024, the bank said.

Of course, with variable lags and coefficients, the drunken sailor path of the crude oil price pulled the headline CPI (red line) and the more stable 16% trimmed mean CPI (purple line) along with it.  In the case of the former, the pre-pandemic headline CPI rate of 2.5% on a Y/Y basis in January 2020 plunged to just 0.2% by May 2020, and then was off to a wild romp, rising to 8.9% Y/Y in June 2022, then falling to just 3.0% by June 2023 before climbing higher again, to 3.3% in July.

Owing to the inherent smoothing mechanism built into the 16% trimmed mean CPI (purple line), the path over this 42-month period was much flatter, but still far from the Fed’s targets. Thus, the 2.4% Y/Y increase posted in January 2020 fell only slightly to 2.3% in May 2020 and then climbed smartly but far less dramatically to a peak of 7.3% in September 2022 and has now settled at 4.8% in July.

However, the latter is still nearly 2.5X the Fed’s inflation target—even as global oil and other commodity price development now threaten to send the consumer inflation gauges higher once again.

Crude Oil Price Versus Headline CPI and 16% Trimmed Mean CPI, January 2020 to July 2023

For avoidance of doubt, here is a similar story for food prices over the same 42-month period since January 2o2o. In this case, the global food price index (purple line) was running at +4.9% in January 2020 and then dropped to negative -8.5% on a Y/Y basis at the April lockdown bottom—before soaring to +41% Y/Y gain in May 2021. Thereafter it headed violently southward, bottoming at -14% in May 23, only to hook sharply upward as of July, rising at a +22% annualized rate.

The food component of the CPI (red line), of course, followed a similar, if more modulated, path. But it did rise from less than 1% Y/Y in January 2020 to a peak increase of 13.5% in August 2022. By July 2023 the Y/Y measure had cooled to 3.6% but again the global trend is now rising sharply, meaning that this CPI component has likely bottomed as well.

In either case, wars, weather and government supply control policies all around the world vastly outweigh any negligible impact on food prices which may result from the machinations of the Fed. Indeed, we doubt whether such impacts are even detectable since even if the Fed manages to trigger a notable recession, food demand will be scarcely impacted.

Y/Y Change in Global Food Index Versus Grocery Store Prices in the CPI, January 2020 to July 2023. 

Tens of millions of actors on the free market—producers, workers, distributors, retailers, savers, investors and speculators—have a far better chance of “discovering” the right price for economic inputs than the 12 supposed geniuses who sit on the FOMC.Moreover, the advantage of price discovery on the free market is that it is continuously adjusted and self-corrects as new information arises and new economic conditions unfold. Indeed, on the free market there is virtually zero chance that interest rates would be held too low for too long, as was the case with the monetary politburo’s 12 decision-makers during the recent past.

Yes, inflation is still everywhere and always a monetary phenomena but the money in question is that produced by dozens of fiat central banks, not simply the Federal Reserve; and its lag effects are so variable and extended in time as to be unknowable for any practical purpose, such as monthly Fed meetings or even a whole year’s worth.

That’s why at the end of the day, the best case for even general price level inflation is to leave it to the free market.

THE U.S. FEDERAL RESERVE’S EMPIRE OF SPECULATION

BY CHARLES HUGH SMITH 

The Federal Reserve has so completely normalized speculative excess that these extremes are no longer even recognized as extremes. Rather, they are simply “the way the world works.” This Empire of Speculation is complex and plays out on multiple levels.

The primary mechanism is obvious to all: whenever the equity market falters, the Fed unleashes a flood tide of liquidity, i.e. fresh currency, that rushes into the market at the top–corporations, banks and financiers–because the Fed distributes the fresh liquidity solely into the top tier of market players.

The Fed’s ability to conjure up liquidity in a variety of ways appears limitless: expand its balance sheet (QE), use the reverse repo market and bank reserves, launch new lending mechanisms, and so on.

The Fed has long relied on useful fictions to mask its agenda. One useful fiction is that the Fed is independent and apolitical. Despite being risibly shopworn, this mirth-inducing fiction is still dutifully trotted out by every Fed chairperson.

Another useful fiction is that the Fed’s mandate focuses on promoting stable expansion of the economy, not the equity market. This masks the reality everyone knows and acts on, which is the market isn’t a reflection of the economy, it is the economy.

This is why the Fed will pursue ever greater policy extremes to rescue the market from any decline and keep equity markets lofting higher: should the market falter, the economy will quickly follow, as the animal spirits of the market are now the primary engine of expansion.

The Fed’s focus on inflating the equity markets entered a new phase of policy extremes in 2008, a phase that continues to this day. The Fed’s willingness to “do whatever it takes” time and again has created a feedback loop that has expanded the influence of the market on the economy and the Fed’s influence on the market, to the point that the market is now keyed to every Fed utterance and policy tweak.

The market rallies on the expectation of Fed pauses, Fed easing, Fed bank bailouts, and so on: every Fed action sparks a rally because everyone knows there are no limits on what the Fed will do to further inflate the equity market.

Speculative gains are not actually growth in the sense of increasing productivity and wages in the real economy. Much of what passes for “growth” is actually profiteering by corporate monopolies, corporate trickery (stock buybacks, etc.) that boost earnings per share without actually producing more goods, services or productivity, corporations reaping the gains of offshoring production, financiers using the Fed’s flood tide of liquidity to skim gains while producing nothing, and so on.

This is not the “growth” generated by the expansion of productivity, it’s a phony simulacra of “growth” generated by Fed-liquidity-driven skims and scams. The only possible outcome of this dynamic is the soaring concentration of wealth and income in the hands of those with access to the Fed’s flood tide: the already-super-wealthy, which is exactly what has happened.

These dynamics have drawn the entire populace into the Fed’s speculative casino. With the real economy’s productivity stagnating, the only way to get ahead is to join the crowd in the casino. Everybody’s playing, one way or another. In the 1929 analogy, every shoeshine boy and taxi driver was working a hot new speculation. Now it’s every Uber jockey and delivery driver.

As we may soon rediscover, there is a limit on Fed policy extremes in support of ever-higher equities: inflation. The more liquidity the Fed pumps into unproductive speculation, the more it stokes inflation, which is driven by expanding the flood tide of currency and credit without actually boosting productivity.

Global scarcities, either contrived or the result of depletion, are another source of inflation the Fed can’t control. A third source of inflation is investment that is required by factors other than boosting productivity, such as pollution remediation, reshoring of production, etc.

All three of these sources of inflation manifested in the 1970s, as I have often explained. Now they’re manifesting again.

Denial doesn’t negate system dynamics or history, but denial does offer the false solace of comforting illusions. And so speculators are piling in on the Pavlovian expectations that the Fed will push interest rates back to near-zero and continue to find new ways to unleash new flood tides of liquidity: Dow 100,000, indeed.

Except this time around, inflation will bite the Fed’s head off and swallow it whole. And since we as a nation have compensated for stagnant productivity by borrowing tens of trillions of dollars in public and private debt, the Volcker Fed’s policy of jacking rates high enough to suppress the expansion of currency will crush debtors large and small like cockroaches.

Economists love to discuss “Fed policy errors” in the 1920s, but they rarely mention the dominance of massively excessive debt and speculation, excesses that had to be unwound one way or another. Absent policies designed to deflate these unproductive excesses slowly, a stock market crash and tsunami of defaults were the only mechanisms available to mitigate the excesses.

Feeding speculative manias and relying on their permanent expansion as the foundation of economic “growth” is folly, and the only possible outcome is the unraveling of the Empire of Speculation.

The echoes of 1929 abound, but nobody’s paying attention because speculative extremes have been normalized by 15 years of Fed policies. What speculative excess? This is just normal market functioning: the Fed hints at easing and the market soars to new highs.

The 1970s offers a roadmap of how belief in the omnipotence of the Fed and the permanence of Bull Markets fades. Every rally is assumed to be a new Bull Market, and it takes repeated losses to empty out the casino.

All speculation is inherently unproductive, and we’ve persuaded ourselves that getting rich from speculation is an excellent substitute for increasing productivity. But this is mere rationalization, a self-serving comforting illusion that is bound to unravel, either slowly or in a spectacularly unexpected fashion.

Unfortunately, we can’t act on what we no longer even recognize. Speculation has its own expiration dynamics, and they don’t depend on us recognizing speculative excess for what it is. They will unravel the excesses regardless of what we think, hope or deny.