What to expect from the Great Monetary Reset

January 1, 2023 1 Comment

Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the “capitalist” system was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, in a covert way, a large share of the wealth of their citizens.

But it’s not just radical socialists who could use inflation as a weapon of social engineering. There are elements within the “capitalist” global elite who want to replace national currencies with a centrally controlled global currency.

The euro could be seen as a trial run for this plan. It has been used as a Trojan horse to undermine the independence of its member states.

Imbalances generated by the single currency brought economic crisis to much of southern Europe. In return for bailouts, countries like Greece and Italy were effectively directly controlled from Brussels and forced to follow EU orders.

Monetary policy has also been used to threaten countries into obeying the EU elite, with handouts restricted if the “wrong” leaders were elected, or EU orders disobeyed. Now there are plans to create a central Treasury with tax-raising and spending powers. This is justified as a way of correcting the eurozone’s imbalances by transferring resources to struggling member states. When this stage is reached, the plan to create a European superstate or EU empire will be close to completion.    

In 1988, the elite-controlled Economist magazine published a cover story with the title “Get Ready for a World Currency.” It called for the creation of a world central bank and a new global currency. This was predicted to happen around 2018, so the plan seems to be running behind schedule.

The transformation could be brought about by an economic crisis – which would push national governments into surrendering their sovereignty. 

The suggested name of the world currency is telling. The Phoenix is a mythological bird associated with worship of the sun. It obtains new life by rising from the ashes of its predecessor.

So, it is quite possible that high or even hyperinflation could be deliberately engineered to bring about economic collapse, creating a pretext for a new monetary regime.

Moreover, some commentators think the elite is planning a Great Monetary Reset – which may also involve the imposition of Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs).

Worryingly, these currencies can be programmable, meaning they could only be spent on goods and services that have been approved by the authorities. This level of social control could be sold to the public as a means of cracking down on criminals and the shadow economy. But it would also enable governments to “switch off” the finances of dissidents and non-compliers.

For example, people who refused an experimental “treatment” could be denied access to their own money as punishment; or perhaps severely restricted in what goods and services they were allowed to buy; or their purchases could be restricted to a particular geographical area in order to re-enforce some kind of lockdown. For tyrannical authorities, this is a far lower cost method of encouraging and enforcing compliance than, say, rounding up dissidents and detaining them in quarantine camps.

These totalitarian agendas appear to be related to the ongoing “War on Cash” and the shift to digital identity systems connected to biometric payment cards. Once again, it seems to be about surveillance and control. An engineered period of hyperinflation would raise the costs of holding physical cash and therefore accelerate the planned “reset” of the monetary system.

Another threat is the imposition of negative interest rates – in other words, overtly stealing people’s savings directly from their bank accounts. This policy is closely related to the War on Cash, and its leading proponents are also active promoters of a cashless society. 

At the moment, central banks are constrained if they want to push interest rates below zero. Savers can easily thwart their plans by removing their money from bank accounts and storing it as physical cash instead. They won’t earn any interest, but it may be better than losing out by keeping it in the bank. By abolishing cash, the central bankers want to force savers into negative-rate assets.

Negative interest rates are of course another warning sign of future high inflation. The argument is they’re needed because the economy is in the doldrums. But central bankers almost always get it wrong. They simply cannot obtain enough knowledge to successfully plan the economy. Thus, their economic forecasts are consistently inaccurate.

Loose monetary policies – for example, forcing interest rates too low – typically sow the seeds of inflationary bubbles and future financial crises, as we saw with the results of the Federal Reserve’s actions during and after the 2001 U.S. recession. (This is one reason that a temporary period of “deflation” can soon be followed by a period of high inflation).

Finally, it is worth emphasizing that if hyperinflation does not occur, a persistent inflation rate averaging 10% still has the potential to destroy a big chunk of people’s savings, particularly if interest rates stay close to zero.    

Richard Wellings

This article is a revised extract from my recent report, Hyperinflation Survival Strategies: Preparing for Soaring Prices and the Great Monetary Reset.

Image: Shutterstock

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The conspiracy to ban cash

November 20, 2022

You post a controversial tweet. Next thing you know, your bank account has been frozen, and you can’t buy food or access essential services. This is the nightmarish future being planned by powerful elements within the political and corporate elite.

My recent report explains how there are plans for a Great Monetary Reset. High or even hyper-inflation is part of this, but another element is the war on physical cash and the forced shift to a cashless society.

They not only want to destroy the value of our savings; they also want to track our movements, spy on every transaction, and control how we spend our own money.

Most people are completely unprepared for this. In the worst-case scenario, their life savings will be stolen, and their pensions made worthless. They’ll be forced to rely on government handouts and forced to do as they’re told.

They should be taking simple steps to protect themselves, but instead complacency rules – even though parts of this agenda are now being implemented in plain sight.

Governments are at the forefront of this. In many countries, they’re making it harder and harder to use physical cash. They prefer their citizens to use digital payments – cards or smartphones that in the near future will be linked to a totalitarian system of digital IDs.

To give a couple of examples, in many locations it’s now impossible to pay for parking without a smartphone and payment card. And public transport is increasingly off limits to people who want to pay with physical cash.

It’s obvious why governments are doing this. The power elite are feeling threatened. The internet, while increasingly censored, has alerted a significant minority to their agenda. Myths that we live in a free society, or a democracy with a free press, or enjoy freedom of speech, have been thoroughly busted.

Their geopolitical power is also waning, as the West enters a period of economic decline. This increases the likelihood of protests and resistance. A shrinking pie makes it harder for those in power to pay off various interest groups. The rise of the East also creates alternative narratives, as emerging world powers create new propaganda outlets that challenge the incumbent ones.

Crony capitalism is of course the main cause of the West’s problems. But tackling this would mean undermining the various scams on which powerful special interests rely, including the rigged banking system. So, instead, it seems the preferred strategy is to crack down on free speech and persecute dissidents – in other words using violence and coercion to shore up the power elite’s position.

A cashless society with payments linked to digital IDs will make it far easier to impose control. Traditional enforcement methods are costly to implement on a large scale and expose the violent underpinnings of supposedly free societies. By contrast, encouraging compliance could soon be as simple as a government official clicking a name on a list of dissenters.

If they refuse to obey, people who challenge or upset the establishment might have their bank accounts frozen, payment cards disabled, or be denied access to basic services. The authorities have already started to test this out.

Vaccine passports were clearly a trial run. Many observers thought it made little sense for healthy young people to take experimental treatments given the risks from Covid were so small (the shots don’t stop transmission either). Yet huge numbers were “nudged” into compliance because they were forced to get proof of injection to keep their jobs – or even to go to a restaurant or travel.

The digital IDs/war on cash agenda isn’t just a government initiative, however. The role of big business in driving this forward is perhaps more difficult to comprehend.

I recently took a trip to the North of England. On the way back we stopped at some services. At the pizza place near the entrance, a large sign declared the restaurant “card only.” Further in, a fast-food outlet was refusing to let customers pay with cash. Hungry travellers had to wait in line before struggling to use the self-service touchscreens – which only accept cards.

Then a trip to a local supermarket. All the self-service tills are now card only. To pay with cash you have to queue up to use a staffed till. Only one was open at the time of my visit.

It’s obvious what they’re up to. They’re trying to “nudge” people to abandon physical cash. If you don’t use a card, you’ll have to queue for ages or face the inconvenience of going elsewhere.

Perhaps the retailers in question would argue that banning cash is good for business, allowing them to cut costs and pass on those savings to their customers. Yet cash-handling costs are a tiny, trivial percentage of turnover, and often compare favourably to the transaction charges associated with card payments.

Moreover, it’s hardly good business to annoy a significant percentage of customers with long delays and poor service.

In this context, it speaks volumes that the very same big retailers relentlessly promote certain agendas in their advertising, whether cultural transformation or radical environmentalism. Undoubtedly, this also alienates many of their potential customers. So, why do they do it?

The ugly truth is that Western economies are a million miles from a free market. We actually have a predominantly crony-capitalist system. For supermarket executives and other business bosses, it’s more important to gain favour with the powerful than offer a good service to their customers.

In the current system of rigged markets, company profits – and career success – depend more on special favours from government, the manipulation of state regulation, and support from financial institutions, than competing successfully by satisfying consumers’ wants. Indeed, this economic model actually functions by restricting competition, especially from small, independent firms.

As well as the carrot, there’s also a stick. A business that seriously resisted establishment agendas would face persecution from state bureaucracies. The regulations and tax rules would suddenly be applied very strictly. It might also be smeared by the controlled media and “state assets” posing as journalists, its reputation left in tatters. Banks and investment funds would threaten to pull out their money.  

The next time you see a company behaving bizarrely, angering its customers, and promoting some weird or disturbing agenda, remember who’s really pulling the puppet strings.

Richard Wellings

Image: Shutterstock

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An injection of tyranny: from vaccine passports to digital IDs?

July 21, 2021 2 Comments

The imposition of vaccine passports represents a major expansion of state power. While they are portrayed as a means of restoring pre-pandemic freedoms, in reality they will extend restrictions on people who refuse to comply.

There is also evidence that vaccine passports form part of a wider agenda to introduce biometric digital identity systems. The EU was already making plans for vaccine passports in 2018, long before anyone had heard of Covid-19. And there are other disturbing initiatives, such as ID2020, backed by powerful transnational foundations with deep links to Western governments.

The UK appears to be following a similar path domestically, embarking on a digital identity programme and undermining civil liberties more generally. There was a previous attempt to impose ID cards under Tony Blair and support for their high-tech successors clearly remains strong within the establishment.

The agenda is proceeding particularly quickly in developing countries, where – often funded by Western governments and foundations – digital ID systems are being rolled out to control access to essential services and even food.

In this context, vaccine passports can be interpreted as a stepping stone towards comprehensive digital IDs, a way of getting the public and businesses used to presenting and accepting them.

Such IDs will hold not just health records, but also financial information, biometric details and other data on individuals. They will obviously be terrible news for privacy, but they could also be made mandatory for voting, access to jobs and bank accounts, to rent housing, conduct transactions, obtain health services etc.

They would enable governments to exclude people who refuse to take part in the system and also people who carry the IDs but upset the “elite” in some way. Dissidents could find their access to basic services switched off, both to punish them and nudge them to comply.

The imposition of vaccine passports might be less worrying if it wasn’t taking place in the context of rapidly expanding state surveillance. Suspicions about governments’ real motives are raised further by the weakness of the health arguments for the policy.

It has now been openly admitted that a key reason for vaccine passports is to encourage young people to get injected. This is basically a threat: if you don’t get jabbed you won’t be able to travel easily and you won’t be able to go to bars and restaurants.

The problem is that for the vast majority of younger people, it is far from clear that the benefits of the shots outweigh the costs. At present no one knows the long-term effects of either the jabs or Covid-19, so policymakers are groping around in the dark. It’s also unclear to what extent these unconventional treatments prevent transmission. And there’s a further danger that the jabs will encourage people to behave more recklessly.

A plausible scenario is that the injections prove less effective than hoped at preventing illness and transmission. It may also become clear that the side effects are worse and more frequent than initially acknowledged by governments and the media. At the same time, the jabs and related misinformation may encourage recipients to behave as if they can’t catch Covid-19 and can’t pass it on. Such developments could at least partly undermine the stated policy objectives, and the vaccine passports agenda would be partly to blame.

Finally, any assessment of vaccine passports should examine their economic impact. It might be assumed that a certain percentage of the population will refuse the injections, perhaps because they are at low risk of either catching Covid-19 or falling seriously ill with it.

Say 10% of adults fall into this category, plus a significant percentage of children (the figure is likely to be significantly higher in some countries). Many of the businesses forced to require vaccine passports as a condition of entry will face reduced revenues. A lot of people won’t bother going through the hassle of testing, if that is the alternative. Moreover, the unjabbed won’t be distributed evenly across areas, age groups and subcultures, so certain businesses in certain areas are likely to be particularly badly affected.

Some businesses may, however, see the trade-off more positively if they view the alternative as a return to lockdown or other restrictions. Yet presenting vaccine passports as alternatives to lockdowns and social distancing relies on highly questionable assumptions about the effects of the shots on infection, transmission and behaviour. In any case, given their recent authoritarian turn, it is possible that governments will simultaneously impose both vaccine passports and draconian lockdowns this winter.

The impact of vaccine passports on the labour market is likely to be particularly serious. It looks like certain jobs will be denied to people who refuse the injections. They will find it difficult to travel overseas too. Certain employers will therefore face a reduced pool of skills and talent, potentially resulting in recruitment difficulties and staff shortages. It will be harder to get the best person for a particular role.

The opportunities for people to engage in entrepreneurship and exchanges with partners in other countries will also be diminished. Some of the uninjected may decide to reduce their economic activity in response to all the hassle and discrimination. These effects will tend to have a negative effect on productivity and therefore tend to reduce growth in output, harming government finances in the process.

In conclusion, it is far from clear that any benefits of vaccine passports will outweigh the costs. Indeed, if the objective of vaccine passports is to protect health while opening up the economy, then the reasoning behind the policy appears to be flawed. It is difficult to imagine that political leaders, or at least their advisors and officials, are unaware of the downsides. This strengthens the suspicion that there is more to vaccine passports than meets the eye. Could their real purpose be to condition the public into accepting the widespread and routine use of privacy-destroying digital IDs?

First published on the Transport Watch blog.

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