How Financial Extraction Was Invented—and Why We Mistook It for Reality “If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until…
“Permit me to issue and control the money of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws.” — attributed to Mayer Amschel Rothschild There is a narrative circulating today—let us call it the Promethean narrative—that offers a seductive explanation for global chaos. It tells its followers that the…
How the State Is Buying the Economy and Reshaping the Global Monetary System “Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.”— John Adams A few weeks ago, I woke with thoughts about Trump that I…
How the Fed Bails Out the World With Your Savings “How did you go bankrupt? Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.” — Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises The Man Who Downgraded America In August 2011, Deven Sharma did something unprecedented. As president of Standard & Poor’s—one of the three major…
Wars. Waste. Wall Street. Welfare. “The economy doesn’t work for you — it works to extract from you.” —Michael Hudson Financialization is a word you have probably heard in economic news, but its true meaning is rarely explained. The popular media treats it as the natural growth of finance in…
How the Law of Reversal Is Remaking the Middle East “The Middle East is no more. Welcome to West Asia.” —Mohammed Soliman The post-Cold War regional order has entered a period of systemic collapse. That’s the verdict from Mohammed Soliman, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute and one…
“The difficulty lies not in the new ideas, but in escaping the old ones.” — John Maynard Keynes If you have a 401(k), buy gas, or wonder why your grocery and utility bills keep rising, look no further than the invisible machine running our global economy. For most of the…
When the Revolutionary Becomes the Empire “It is in the nature of political bodies always to see the evil in the opposite group.”—Carl Jung The conflict between the United States and Iran is usually framed in terms of nuclear programs, sanctions, and regional power. That’s the visible layer. Beneath it…
Gold, yuan, and the end of dollar rule “He who owns the gold makes the rules.” — Anonymous A reader on Sunday’s post mentioned The Wizard of Oz. That single word—Oz—sent me back to an essay I wrote over two years ago called The Land of Ounces. I went back…
“The left hemisphere’s greatest triumph is the creation of a world that conforms to its own representation—and its greatest tragedy is that it has come to believe that this is the only world there is.” — Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary Three Diagnoses Last week gave us three…
“Outstanding, sophisticated, and mesmerizing…a spiritual intrigue similar to Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code.” —ForeWord Reviews