His speech comes as the Fed ends quantitative tightening (QT) while the odds of a cut at the upcoming meeting continue to climb, which is a positive for the crypto market.

The Fed ends QT today, which is a positive for the crypto market.

Yah, I suspected the ending of QT was a positive for the crypto market, but perhaps not so positive for most everyone else, as you will read. I’ve previously listened to discussions about stable coins being used or tied into a US attempt to reduce it’s massive debt. Particularly considering all the changes the Trump White house has made to benefit digital currency. Must have made those changes for some reason?- Whitehouse.gov

The piece from the Atlantic is written by David Frum- If he was the only one talking about this issue I’d probably opt not to use this article. But he is not the only one talking about the problem, so I can’t discount what he’s written.

The Atlantic via Archive.ph

The GENIUS act– see link at Whitehouse.gov^

On July 18, President Donald Trump signed into law the boastfully named GENIUS Act. If the law wreaks havoc on the financial system, as seems highly likely, that name will become a grim joke: What genius thought that letting the cryptocurrency industry write its own rules would be a good idea?

The Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins Act purports to create a regulatory framework for a type of cryptocurrency called stablecoins. Despite their reassuring name, stablecoins—which promise a constant value relative to real-world currencies, usually the U.S. dollar—are by far the most dangerous form of cryptocurrency. Their danger lies in the way they are meant to be safe.

Most people understand that cryptocurrencies are volatile and speculative. Bitcoin, ether, and other name-brand cryptocurrencies fluctuate in value day by day, year by year. Stablecoins are meant to do away with these fluctuations, yet they pose what may be a larger threat to the wider financial system. The GENIUS Act, like the Markets in Crypto-Assets regulation adopted by the European Union in 2023, offers safeguards that will likely enlarge the stablecoin market considerably. If—or when—the coins explode, the GENIUS Act more or less ensures that the U.S. government will have to bail out the stablecoin issuers and their holders on a scale of hundreds of billions of dollars.

DC’s GENIUS Plan: Use Stablecoins to Soak Up Its Own Debt aka Financial Repression

Since the debt is owed in nominal terms, one way to reduce the debt would be to issue more dollars to buy it back. This would lead to higher inflation. Although technically not a default, higher inflation would effectively reduce the real (inflation-adjusted) repayment lenders receive.

That said, even an independent Federal Reserve could end up effectively monetizing the debt. Should debt continue on its unsustainable path, for example, concerns about the ability of the government to repay might lead to volatility in the bond market. The Federal Reserve would likely respond by acting as a buyer of last resort, expanding its balance sheet and ultimately causing higher inflation. Still, there is probably some limit to how much the Fed would monetize the debt, so long as it maintains its independence.

Financial Repression

That leaves financial repression. Financial repression is defined as a formal requirement by the government that certain financial institutions purchase government debt. The government might prevent certain financial institutions from holding any financial assets other than government debt. Alternatively, the government could require financial institutions to hold a specific fraction of assets in US Treasury securities. The effect of such policies is to increase the demand for the government’s debt, which weakens the tendency for rising debt issuance to lead to higher borrowing costs.

Enter the GENIUS Act.

Stablecoins are digital dollars, similar to the digital dollars in traditional bank accounts. Both are claims to a physical dollar issued by the financial institution. Whereas the digital dollars in one’s bank account reside on a ledger controlled by the financial institution and are transferred over the payment rails of the traditional financial system, stablecoins reside (and are transferred) on the blockchains of various cryptocurrency projects.

Stablecoin issuers are financial intermediaries. One deposits a dollar to receive a stablecoin. The issuer sets a fraction of the dollars it receives aside to meet redemption requests, and uses the remaining fraction to buy interest-earning assets. This is where the financial repression comes in. The GENIUS Act requires that these stablecoin issuers hold their assets in cash, short-term US Treasury securities, or as reserve balances at the Federal Reserve.

The hope is that stablecoins will expand global access to dollars. The issuers will then invest a fraction of those dollars into US government debt. To the extent that these stablecoin holders were not previously holding dollars or dollar-denominated assets, the new policy could significantly increase the demand for US government debt and keep borrowing costs down.

This isn’t mere happenstance. A number of current and former members of Congress are on record arguing that stablecoins expand the reach of the US dollar globally, reinforcing dollar dominance, while also creating a growing, passive demand for US government debt.

Lastly, Kevin Hassett — a close ally of President Donald Trump with very little central bank experience — emerges as the frontrunner to lead the U.S. Federal Reserve.

Trouble Coming?

Merely hours before news of his arrest by Bahamian police, Sam Bankman-Fried took to Twitter to deny his involvement or knowledge of a secret group chat named “Wirefraud” — which allegedly involved former FTX and Alameda ranking executives.

In a Dec. 12 response to a report from the Australian Financial Review (AFR), Bankman-Fried used Twitter to deny involvement in or knowledge of a “Wirefraud” group chat on messaging app Signal, which reportedly included members of Bankman-Fried’s inner circle, including FTX co-founder Zixiao “Gary” Wang, FTX engineer Nishad Singh and former Alameda CEO Caroline Ellison.

The AFR report said the chat was used to send secret information about FTX and Alameda's operations in the lead-up to its failure.

Bankman-Fried however said on Twitter that if the group chat was “true” he “wasn't a member” and was “quite sure it's just false” as he had “never heard of such a group.”

Well I don’t believe those Bankman-Fried claims!

Until very recently, Bankman-Fried was expected to appear remotely before a United States House Committee hearing on Dec. 13 to explain the collapse of the FTX exchange. But he was taken into custody by Bahamian authorities on Dec. 12, to face U.S. charges that reportedly include wire and securities fraud and money laundering.

Committee Chair Maxine Waters on confirmed later on Dec. 12 that the panel “will not be able to hear” SBF’s testimony hearing due to the arrest.

Maxine Waters had been very sympathetic to Bankman-Fried. His timely arrest has me wondering if this was done so Bankman -Fried did not have to appear before the Senate House Committee?

House Financial Services Chief Waters Not Planning to Subpoena Sam Bankman-Fried: Report

House Financial Services Committee Chairwoman Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) told a group of Democrats that she doesn’t plan to subpoena former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried to testify at a hearing on the crypto exchange’s collapse next week, according to a report from CNBC.

Waters told members of the committee about her decision at a meeting with SEC Chair Gary Gensler on Tuesday, according to CNBC’s sources.

The sources said Waters prefers to try to persuade Bankman-Fried to testify voluntarily rather than subpoena him.

She later denied these reports. BUT, can’t help but notice the arrest now makes it impossible for Bankman-Fried to testify. Is someone/some party protecting this man?

Bankman-Fried was also requested to attend a separate hearing on Dec. 14 with the Senate Committee on Banking but had never confirmed his attendance, with his lawyers reportedly refusingto accept a subpoena compelling his testimony, according to a Dec. 12 joint statement from Senators Sherrod Brown and Pat Toomey.

Chief restructuring officer and FTX CEO John Ray, in written testimony released ahead of his appearance at the House Committee hearing, said FTX customer assets were “commingled” with Alameda’s funds.

Ray asserted that Alameda “used client funds to engage in margin trading which exposed customer funds to massive losses” and the trading firm’s business model required it to deploy those funds to “various […] exchanges which were inherently unsafe.”

Shortly before COP26, last year’s United Nations climate conference in Glasgow, financial institutions were rushing to announce their climate commitments. The conference’s leadership and Mark Carney, a special envoy appointed by the United Nations to push private finance to invest in climate solutions, announced the creation of the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net-Zero, or GFANZ.

The initiative’s goal was to increase the number of financial institutions committed to net-zero principles — essentially a promise that the work done by these institutions (investing, lending money, managing major assets like pension funds) would not cause an overall increase in the world’s carbon emissions. (this was an impossible goal. Absurd and unattainable) During the conference, Carney announced that the coalition had grown to 450 firms responsible for $130 trillion in assets, a pot of wealth equivalent to more than five times the gross domestic product of the United States.

“You need things like GFANZ that are relentlessly, ruthlessly, absolutely focused on that transition to net-zero,” he told Bloomberg at the time.  

But just a year later, many Wall Street firms are backtracking. In September, the Financial Times reported that several banks, including Bank of America and JP Morgan, were concerned about accidentally running afoul of United Nations climate rules and being held legally liable for their commitments, leading them to consider pulling out of GFANZ. Blackrock and Vanguard, the world’s largest asset managers, then confirmed in October that their net zero commitments would not preclude them from investing in fossil fuels, despite concerns that new fossil fuel investment is incompatible with timely decarbonization. (Asset managers steward money on behalf of major investors like sovereign wealth funds, insurers, and pension funds.) And finally, earlier this week, Vanguard officially announced that it is resigning from the Net Zero Asset Managers initiative, a sector-specific alliance under the GFANZ umbrella. 

Initiatives like the Net Zero Asset Managers initiative “can advance constructive dialogue, but sometimes they can also result in confusion about the views of individual investment firms,” the company said in a statement, which appears to reference the backlash that Vanguard and other firms have received from Republican attorneys general for considering environmental concerns in some of the investments they offer.

In the last few years, as the global costs of climate change have become more apparent, pressure on companies to reduce carbon emissions and prioritize environmental initiatives has increased dramatically. Asset managers like Blackrock and Vanguard largely joined this call and were supportive of many shareholder-led climate proposals that resulted in the appointment of new directors at ExxonMobil, the adoption of emission reductions at companies like Chevron, and the reporting of risks from the energy transition to a company’s bottomline. 

But as climate-focused investment practices (such as screening out fossil fuel companies in certain boutique index funds) gained traction and companies joined GFANZ, questions mounted about whether Wall Street’s apparent climate-consciousness was actually moving the needle on net zero, if climate commitments would run afoul of firms’ fiduciary duties (by steering investors away from profitable-but-polluting investments), and if they would be able to abide by the United Nations’ climate targets. 

The discussion is complicated by the fact that many fossil fuel investments managed by Vanguard and other asset management firms are held in index funds that track the performance of the overall stock market — the kind that many American workers use to save for retirement, for example. These index funds invest in a broad range of companies regardless of those companies’ carbon emissions, and GFANZ didn’t change that — in part because changing the makeup of a fund would require the approval of investors and could result in legal challenges. As a result, Vanguard’s commitments apply primarily to a subset of funds that it actively manages to adhere to vaguely-defined environmental, social, and governance principles, or ESG. It offers these funds to investors who also support those principles and want to put their money behind them.

Vanguard appeared to underscore this distinction, however vaguely, in its decision to withdraw from GFANZ, stating that it wanted to “provide the clarity our investors desire about the role of index funds and about how we think about material risks, including climate-related risks — and to make clear that Vanguard speaks independently on matters of importance to our investors.” More than 80 percent of its clients’ assets are in index funds, it noted. 

Kremlin says its goals in Ukraine can be achieved through talks

LONDON, Oct 13 (Reuters) – Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov was quoted as saying on Thursday that the goals of Moscow’s “special military operation” in Ukraine were unchanged, but that they could be achieved through negotiations.

“The direction has not changed, the special military operation continues, it continues in order for us to achieve our goals,” Peskov was quoted as saying. “However, we have repeatedly reiterated that we remain open to negotiations to achieve our objectives.”

Peskov added, however, that he did not see any prospects for talks with the West in the near future because of its “hostile” attitude towards Russia.

“It takes two sides to have a dialogue. As the West is now taking a very, very hostile stance towards us, it’s unlikely that there will be any such prospect in the near future,” – Peskov told Kazakhstan’s Khabar 24 TV channel, according to the Russian news agency TASS.

“Nevertheless, Turkey, as well as a number of other countries, continue to try to mediate in some way.

Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Tuesday that Moscow was open to talks with the West, but the United States dismissed the statement as “posturing”.

Lavrov returned to the issue on Thursday, telling Izvestia: “We won’t run after anyone. If there are specific serious proposals, we’re ready to consider them.”

He added: “When we get some sort of signal, we will be ready to consider it.”

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has ruled out talking to President Vladimir Putin

YES, he has! As was previously mentioned here.

Russia is prepared to quit Black Sea grains deal, writes to UN with demands

The agreement helped stave off a global food crisis (allegedly but not assuredly)

Moscow has submitted concerns to the United Nations about an agreement on Black Sea grain exports, and is prepared to reject renewing the deal next month

The agreement, brokered by the United Nations and Turkey in July, paved the way for Ukraine to resume grain exports from Black Sea ports

Moscow has repeatedly complained about its implementation, arguing it still faces difficulty selling fertiliser and food.

Russia’s ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva, said Moscow had delivered a letter to U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Wednesday setting out a list of complaints. U.N. officials are due in Moscow on Sunday to discuss the renewal of the agreement.

“If we see nothing is happening on the Russian side of the deal – export of Russian grains and fertilisers – then excuse us, we will have to look at it in a different way,” he said.

Asked if Russia might withhold support for the grains deal’s renewal over the concerns, he said: “There is a possibility…We are not against deliveries of grains but this deal should be equal, it should be fair and fairly implemented by all sides.”

Can Truss and Kwarteng survive economic turmoil – and is a U-turn imminent?

Is this a coup in motion backed and incited by the bankers

‘Stop the market jitters’: IMF chief chides UK as pressure grows on Truss for U-turn

The British government has come under varying degrees of veiled criticism from the world’s financial leaders over its disputed mini-budget proposal.

The jibes — some direct, some more muted — came as they gathered in Washington for the autumn meetings of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank and the G20’s top finance ministers and central bankers.

On Thursday, IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva called for “policy coherence” in response to a reporter’s question about the UK.

Do some parties want another government in place?

BRITAIN’s biggest banks are no longer “too big to fail” in any future financial shocks, with shareholders rather than taxpayers ready to bear the cost, the Bank of England said Friday (10).

Following a major review of eight lenders — including Barclays, HSBC, Lloyds and NatWest — the BoE concluded “that if a major UK bank failed today it could do so safely: remaining open and continuing to provide vital banking services to the economy.

“Shareholders and investors, not taxpayers, will be first in line to bear the costs, overcoming the ‘too big to fail’ problem,” the central bank added.

Following the financial global crisis more than a decade ago, the UK taxpayer pumped £137 billion into the country’s banks, while also being able to benefit from significant BoE support.

The government also took control of the Royal Bank of Scotland — rebranded as NatWest ahead of its recent return to the private sector.

Despite the bailouts, “the disruption to the financial system contributed to the UK and global recession that followed. We cannot forget these lessons”, the BoE added Friday.

The central bank was publishing its first assessment of the eight major UK banks’ preparations for resolution under the Resolvability Assessment Framework.

RAF “is a core part of the UK’s response to the global financial crisis, and demonstrates how the UK has overcome the problem of ‘too big to fail’”, said Dave Ramsden, deputy governor for markets and banking at the BoE.

“The UK authorities have developed a resolution regime that successfully reduces risks to depositors and the financial system and better protects the UK’s public funds.”

The other four banks assessed were Nationwide, Santander UK, Standard Chartered and Virgin Money UK.

The Globe and Mail had an article in it’s print edition pushing this very agenda –Is it time to make ‘natural capital’ an asset class?

As I’ve always said the “green” movement is all about money. Profit. Plunder. Exploitation. Profiteering. Monopolization of everything. Denial of your human right to use what nature has given you to use. Since you and I are part of nature we shall be further exploited for profit. You know ‘pandemics and ‘vaccines’ as one form of crony capitalist, technocratic abuse.

Link

It’s called a Natural Asset Company. With it the New York Stock Exchange has unveiled the most radical and potentially most destructive plan yet to make literally trillions of dollars on something that is the natural right and heritage of the entire human race—nature itself, all nature, from air, fresh water to rainforests to even farmland. It is being promoted as a way to incentivize the preservation of nature. In fact it is a diabolical scheme to financialize potentially trillions of dollars of nature, ultimately allowing a globalist financial elite to control even this. And the Rockefeller Foundation is a founding partner. The combination of the NYSE and that foundation ought to sound loud alarm bells.

The term financialize refers to the act of converting intangible value into financial instruments. Now hiding behind the fake facade of the Green Agenda that the UN and Davos WEF are promoting along with major OECD governments, Wall Street and the world’s largest financial institutions are promoting a scheme to financialize virtually all of nature. They even hired McKinsey and others to put a dollar value on it. They claim it all is worth 4 Quadrillion dollars or 4000 trillion dollars. Yet how can we put a dollar price on something given by nature?

Rockefeller Foundation is Behind it Too

The NYSE project to create a new class of stocks—NACs or Natural Asset Companies, to be traded alongside stocks like Apple or Boeing or Chevron—was developed in a collaboration by the Rockefeller Foundation and something they founded known as the IEG group or Intrinsic Exchange Group.

What is the IEG? To quote from their website, IEG was created by the Rockefeller Foundation together with World Bank affiliate IDB of Latin America. Two years ago IEG began work on the NYSE project. Their “Strategic Advisor”, Robert Herz, was Chairman of the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) from 2002 to 2010. That says volumes about the thinking behind the IEG project. Herz today sits on the boards of many corporations including Morgan Stanley bank and US Government-sponsored real estate enterprise, Fannie Mae.

As they state on their website, IEG has created “a new asset class based on nature and the benefits that nature provides (termed ecosystem services). These services include carbon capture, soil fertility and water purification, amongst others.” They plan to bring this about by creation of the NYSE-recognized “new form of corporation called a ‘Natural Asset Company’ (NAC). The NYSE agreement will serve as their “platform to list these companies for trading, enabling the conversion of natural assets into financial capital. The NAC’s equity captures the intrinsic and productive value of nature and provides a store of value based on the vital assets that underpin our entire economy and make life on earth possible.” They further state, “IEG is proposing a transformational solution whereby natural ecosystems are not simply a cost to manage, but rather, an investible productive asset which provides financial capital and a source of wealth for governments and its citizens.” Note the “source of wealth for governments and it’s citizens.”

Nothing can go wrong here, or? The same Rockefellers who created the oil trust and the deadly GMO patented seeds now want to put a price on all nature. This is the financialization of nature and it is not going to be for charity or good-hearted motives, but rather for profit of investors, lots of it. The key to it all is who defines the “nature agenda” and you can be sure it is the corrupt UN Agenda 2030 “sustainable” goals and its cousin the Davos WEF Great Reset of the world economy. The agenda is imposed top down and it is not good.

How it Works

The NAC is to be created through an IPO like any new stock listing. The NAC then publicly sells shares to investors who could include Institutional Investors such as BlackRock–the $9.5 trillion asset manager, the world’s largest–or Vanguard Group or, say, the Norwegian or Chinese Sovereign Wealth funds. BlackRock CEO Larry Fink conveniently sits on the board of Klaus Schwab’s World Economic Forum, promoters of UN Agenda 2030 and of the Great Reset of the global financial system to a “sustainable” one.

The IEG describes the possibilities: “…as the natural asset prospers, providing a steady or increasing flow of ecosystem services, the company’s equity should appreciate accordingly providing investment returns. Shareholders and investors in the company through secondary offers, can take profit by selling shares. These sales can be gauged to reflect the increase in capital value of the stock, roughly in-line with its profitability, creating cash-flow based on the health of the company and its assets.”

Where the Money Goes

Shares in the NAC can be bought by others but it will clearly be dominated by big financial actors as are all important stocks. The new company, say one which claims ownership of a part of the Amazon Rain Forest, will then be subject to accounting standards including a new IEG-created “Statement of Ecological Performance: The financial value of the flow of ecosystem services and the assets that produce them.” The value placed on the flow of ecosystem services is the key, and that is being controlled by people like IEG’s Robert Herz, a board member of Morgan Stanley bank.

As IEG states, via the NYSE platform, “IEG converts natural asset value to financial capital in order to provide owners a way to financially benefit from the value of their natural assets.” But the rewards would also go to the shareholders like BlackRock or others by creating “financial transactions valuing natural assets that allow institutional investors to recognize, participate in and preserve nature’s value.” That means to make a profit on their stocks. Here the door is wide open to manipulation.

According to the statement of the IEG the proceeds from the NAC stock offering or IPO can be used by the sponsoring government to invest as it will. That means a corrupt regime in say, Ukraine or Mexico or Lebanon could use it to buy arms or whatever. The opportunities for misuse are staggering.

The fact that this NAC scam is being orchestrated by the Rockefeller Foundation is more than revealing. That foundation has been behind every major transformation of the global economy since more than a century to bring control into the hands of a global oligarchy committed to population reduction. The Rockefeller Foundation created the destructive GMO patented plants coupled with the toxic glyphosate weed killers that are ruining out food supply and poisoning our waters. The foundation is playing a key role in the covid pandemic lockdown strategy, as well as in reorganizing the world food production to destroy self-sufficient farming in favor of “sustainable” carbon free farming. The New York Stock Exchange and its project with the Rockefeller Foundation does not promise benefit for mankind or nature, only for the money trust.

F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and geopolitics, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.