While You're Watching Israel The Great Reset Soldiers On...,

Off-Guardian  |  “We need a new approach to digital identity”, so say the authors of an “Agenda Article” for the World Economic Forum, published on the 28th of September.

Digital ID has been in the news a lot lately, obscured for the past week in the mist of the Israel-Hamas situation.

Last month the United Nation Developments Programme published its legal guidelines for digital IDs as well as “mobilizing” global leadership with a $400mn fund to “empower” digital identity programmes in over 100 countries.

Various nations are already making steps in that direction. Multiple US states are either already issuing digital IDs or planning to in the near future, as are Kenya, Somalia, Bhutan and Singapore. Austria’s system is going online in December.

Just last week, Forbes Australia published it’s guide to what “Australians need to know” about digital IDs, and 9News reported that they could be in place as soon as next year.

Just two days ago, the Journal of Australian Law Society predicted the same thing.

Meanwhile, also in Australia, the world’s 21st largest bank is changing its terms and conditions to allow it to “de-bank” customers.

The National Australian Bank’s “revised” terms and conditions go into force on November 1st and include, in clause 11: “NAB may close your account at any time at its discretion”.

The reasons NAB would consider enforcing clause 11 make for interesting reading [emphasis added]:

NAB can take a range of things into account when exercising its rights and discretions. These can include:
[…]
(e) NAB’s public statements, including those relating to protecting vulnerable persons, the environment or sustainability;
(f) community expectations and any impact on NAB’s reputation;

So – as of November 1st – NAB reserves the right to de-bank you if you get cancelled, or say something they don’t approve of about climate change or “vulnerable people”.

In the UK, just two days ago, it was reported the government is planning to upload every passport photo in their records to a facial recognition database. 

At the same time, despite “record profits” for energy companies last winter, the UK government reports they may need to further increase energy bills to “prevent energy companies going bust”.

Two days ago Japan announced it would be trading carbon credits on its stock exchange, and some Japanese firms are introducing a digital currency specifically for the settlement of “clean energy certificates”.

Just yesterday India announced the launch of trial wholesale digital currency, and the South China Morning Post reported a new “hard-wallet” for SIM-based CBDC payments, a joint project between the Bank of China and Chinese telecommunications giants.

Back to Australia, where it was reported on October 12th that Mastercard and the Reserve Bank of Australia had “successfully trialled” the interoperability of CBDC systems, whilst ensuring that “the pilot CBDC can be held, used, and redeemed only by authorised parties“.

Mastercard’s report also notes that the benefits of CBDCs are “programmability, transparency, and compliance”.

 

Chase DeBanks Mercola: DeBanking As A Weapon To Punish Covid Dissent

amidwesterndoctor  |  •At the end of June, English Politician Nigel Farrage reported that his bank accounts had been closed due to him sharing political views that challenged the conventional narrative. Although his bank originally denied deplatforming him for political reasons, an about-face occurred and a few weeks later, the CEO resigned.

•On July 4th, a federal judge ruled that the Biden administration was illegally violating the first amendment by encouraging social media companies to censor anyone who questioned the flawed COVID-19 narrative. Prior to this ruling, the Biden administration was actively having critics of the pandemic policy be censored and de-platformed. Since this ruling, as best as I can tell, it is no longer as easy for them to de-platform political opponents on social media.

Note: In May, a moderately large regional bank collapsed and the Federal Government decided to address the bank failure by having Chase bank to take the failed bank over. This suggests that the Biden Administration is working hand in hand with Chase and may be able to make requests in return for deals (like the bank acquisition) it offered to Chase.

•On July 6th, the FDA gave full approval to the Alzheimer’s drug that had received a questionable backdoor approval in January (discussed below). This approval was based on a 1795 person trial (with 898 receiving the drug) where it was found the drug caused a small decline in the rate of developing cognitive decline over 18 months (based upon the results of a survey that could easily be prone to bias) while at the same time 21.5% of those who received the drug experienced brain bleeding and or brain swelling.

•On July 25th, Dr. Mercola announced not only he, but also his employees and their families had been abruptly deplatformed by Chase:

There are a lot of ways to interpret what happened. The most common interpretation has been that debanking dissidents is fast becoming the preferred way to suppress political opposition (e.g., do you remember last year when Justin Trudaeu had Canada’s banks close all the bank accounts of anyone who peacefully attended the Trucker protests against Canada’s vaccine mandates).

This is likely being pushed forward since debanking is a relatively easy way to create compliance in the population and there is an increasing risk of widespread political rebellion against the bad policies (e.g., the COVID-19 vaccine mandates) that have been pushed by governments around the world. Typically, when policies like these are done, initially small but visible tests are carried out (e.g., a lot of people can clearly see what was done to the families of Dr. Mercola’s employees was wrong) to gauge how the public will react to them and if that tyranny can be normalized. Much of this in encapsulated by a famous poem I live my life by:

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

For example, during Obama’s presidency, I watched easy to disparage groups affiliated with the alt-right first be censored online and then be deplatformed by Silicon Valley payment processors (e.g., Paypal). Many of my left-wing friends who were worked in natural health applauded this persecution and could not process why it might not be in their best interests to promote it. That same censorship was then rolled out against them (at which point no one stood up for them) and not to long after that, against anyone who dissented against the COVID narrative.

Note: Since the Federal Government was recently forced to back off from overtly violating the First Amendment on social media, less overt ways of suppressing speech are likely becoming a more and more needed tool for those nonetheless wishing to do so.

However, while all of the above is likely true, there is another important facet to this entire story—antitrust violations.

After the civil war, the US economy was taken over by a group of conniving scoundrels who eventually came to be known as the Robber Barons. A key approach they all shared was creating absolute monopolizations of their respective industries, which allowed them to milk obscene amounts of money as possible from everyone else.

Eventually Theodore Roosevelt put a stop to this through the 1890 Sherman Antitrust act, and broke up their monopolies. I and many others believe that Roosevelt was not entirely successful, because he caused the Robber Barons to diversify into other areas (e.g., after Rockefeller had to break up Standard Oil, he bought out the medical industry).

Since Roosevelt’s time, efforts have been made to prevent big players from monopolizing their respective industries (e.g., in the 1990s, Antitrust Lawsuits against Microsoft revolved around Bill Gates having his Windows operating system not allow competitors software on it), but they have not been as successful. Since that time, Gates appears to have followed in Rockefeller’s monopolizing footsteps and has gradually bought out the global health industry through the leverage created by his foundation and its media advertising dollars (which became obscene during COVID-19).

During Obama’s presidency, we began to see a merger between Big Tech and Big Pharma (as each invested in the other)—discussed further here and here. This was then followed by a gradually increasing censorship of any information online which challenged the pharmaceutical industry’s narrative.

During COVID-19, this kicked into overdrive. First, people were denied access to information about numerous lifesaving therapies for COVID-19 (ultimately resulting in many of them instead being forced to succumb to the remdesivir-ventilator protocol). Following this, a blockade was enacted against any information even hinting at the widespread harm emerging from the COVID-19 vaccines, something most of us believe now caused even more harm than denying the public access to early treatment options for COVID-19. As you all know, many of the things Big Tech censored for being “misinformation” (e.g., COVID-19’s origin from a lab) have since been proven true.

Many have thus argued the Big Tech companies should be held accountable for the harms that resulted from their monopolistic censorship. Although their conduct is beyond egregious, it nonetheless makes a lot of sense if you consider how many investments each industry had in the other and the incentives they all had to monopolize the marketplace so they could all make astronomical amounts of money off COVID-19.

Elvira Nabiullina: Even Russia's Central Bank Chief Is Vastly Superior To Ours The Feds

NYTimes |  For the second time in less than a decade, Elvira Nabiullina is steering Russia’s economy through treacherous waters.

In 2014, facing a collapsing ruble and soaring inflation after barely a year as head of the Central Bank of Russia, Ms. Nabiullina forced the institution into the modern era of economic policymaking by sharply raising interest rates. The politically risky move slowed the economy, tamed soaring prices and won her an international reputation as a tough decision maker.

In the world of central bankers, among technocrats tasked with keeping prices under control and financial systems stable, Ms. Nabiullina became a rising star for using orthodox policies to manage an unruly economy often tethered to the price of oil. In 2015, she was named Central Bank Governor of the Year by Euromoney magazine. Three years later, Christine Lagarde, then the head of the International Monetary Fund, effused that Ms. Nabiullina could make “central banking sing.”

Now it falls to Ms. Nabiullina to steer Russia’s economy through a deep recession, and to keep its financial system, cut off from much of the rest of the world, intact. The challenge follows years she spent strengthening Russia’s financial defenses against the kind of powerful sanctions that have been wielded in response to President Vladimir V. Putin’s geopolitical aggression.

She has guided the extraordinary rebound of Russia’s currency, which lost a quarter of its value within days of the Feb. 24 invasion of Ukraine. The central bank took aggressive measures to stop large sums of money from leaving the country, arresting a panic in markets and halting a potential run on the banking system.

In late April, Russia’s Parliament confirmed Ms. Nabiullina, 58, for five more years as chairwoman after Mr. Putin nominated her to serve a third term.

“She’s an important beacon of stability for Russia’s financial system,” said Elina Ribakova, the deputy chief economist of the Institute of International Finance, an industry group in Washington. “Her reappointment has symbolic value.”

Cleaning up the banks

Besides her record on monetary policy, Ms. Nabiullina has drawn praise for pursuing a thorough cleanup of the banking industry. In her first five years at the bank, she revoked about 400 banking licenses — essentially closing a third of Russia’s banks — in an effort to cull weak institutions that were making what she termed “dubious transactions.”

It was considered a brave crusade: In 2006, a central bank official who had started a vigorous campaign to close banks suspected of money laundering was assassinated.

“Fighting corruption in the banking sector is a job for very courageous people,” said Sergei Guriev, a Russian economist who left the country in 2013 and is now a professor at Sciences Po in Paris. He called her program flawed, though, because it was largely limited to private banks. This created a moral hazard problem that left state-owned banks feeling comfortable taking on lots of risk with the protection of the government, he said.

Ms. Nabiullina’s integrity has never been questioned, added Mr. Guriev, who said he had known her for 15 years. “She’s never been suspected of any corruption.”

 

Open Thread On Fred - WHAT HAPPENED?!?!?!

stlouisfed | Source: Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (US)  

Release: H.6 Money Stock Measures  

Units:  Billions of Dollars, Seasonally Adjusted

Frequency:  Monthly

Before May 2020, M1 consists of (1) currency outside the U.S. Treasury, Federal Reserve Banks, and the vaults of depository institutions; (2) demand deposits at commercial banks (excluding those amounts held by depository institutions, the U.S. government, and foreign banks and official institutions) less cash items in the process of collection and Federal Reserve float; and (3) other checkable deposits (OCDs), consisting of negotiable order of withdrawal, or NOW, and automatic transfer service, or ATS, accounts at depository institutions, share draft accounts at credit unions, and demand deposits at thrift institutions.

Beginning May 2020, M1 consists of (1) currency outside the U.S. Treasury, Federal Reserve Banks, and the vaults of depository institutions; (2) demand deposits at commercial banks (excluding those amounts held by depository institutions, the U.S. government, and foreign banks and official institutions) less cash items in the process of collection and Federal Reserve float; and (3) other liquid deposits, consisting of OCDs and savings deposits (including money market deposit accounts). Seasonally adjusted M1 is constructed by summing currency, demand deposits, and OCDs (before May 2020) or other liquid deposits (beginning May 2020), each seasonally adjusted separately.

For more information on the H.6 release changes and the regulatory amendment that led to the creation of the other liquid deposits component and its inclusion in the M1 monetary aggregate, see the H.6 announcements and Technical Q&As posted on December 17, 2020.

Suggested Citation:

Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (US), M1 Money Stock [M1SL], retrieved from FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis; https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M1SL, April 27, 2021.