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Hey, you're listening to Unlimited Hangout, I'm your host Whitney Webb. Though some of the panic of the recent US banking crisis has subsided and things seem calmer, big things are still happening beneath the surface that suggests that the crisis hasn't really ended at all and will likely get worse in time. Not unlike the 2008 financial crisis which really began to unfold in 2007, the current banking crisis is likely to continue and enter a new and more
troubling phase in the not-so-distant future. Essentially it seems that the current calm on the surface has allowed the powers that be, or rather the financial powers that be, to kick the can down the road giving them time to line things up so they can control and manage the situation once chaos and panic return.
Yet, regardless of if and when another crisis rears its head, the aftermath is likely to be seen as an opportunity by the powers that be to roll out or dramatically advance the long-awaited central bank digital currency or CBDC paradigm.
Expected moves by the U.S. Federal Reserve, including the launch of its FedNow service in July, as well as the regulatory crackdown on any would-be digital currency competitors, to suggest that the march towards programmable money continues to progress, crisis or no crisis, panic or no panic. Joining me today to discuss the current financial situation,
the CBDC rollout, and much more is Catherine Austin-Fitz. Catherine is the president of Solari Inc., which publishes the Solari Report, and she is also a managing member of Solari Investment Advisory Services. Prior to Solari, she held top positions at the Wall Street Investment Bank, Dylan Read & Co., and was also Assistant Secretary of Housing and the the Federal Housing Commissioner for the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
For longtime followers of independent media, Catherine's name should be familiar for her investigations with Mark Skidmore into the missing $21 trillion stolen out of the U.S. government accounts, and more recently in the COVID era, Catherine has also been an important voice, particularly on matters related to digital IDs, vaccine passports, and central bank digital currencies. Welcome back to Unlimited Hangout, Catherine. It's great to have you back on.
and me, it's always great to be on with you. So thanks for the invite. Absolutely. The pleasure is all mine though this time. So since we last spoke a lot has happened in the world of finance and markets and money in general. And a few podcasts ago, I had some other people on to talk about the collapse of Silicon Valley bank, Signature Bank and that whole mess for lack of a better term. So I was wondering maybe we could start with your take on that crisis and the result in government's response?
Sure. And let me just say as a background, we see two wars going on. One war is to centralize control of financial transactions. And the other war is the people at the top fighting about who's going to get what turf. So it, you know, it can get chaotic and confusing, but the root, those are the two wars going on. And of course we know, the more you centralize, the more arbitrary you make banking regulation.
and the more, and really the weaker you make the general economy, particularly when you make concerted efforts to shut down small business and hurt and destroy the resiliency as you make everyone more dependent on central control. But let's take a look at just recently what happened. You had a group of banks in the California Fed district, one of which was SVB, another was Signature, who were part
of the FedNow prototype, interestingly enough. There were five banks who were part of the prototype, is my understanding, and it's remarkable how many of them have gotten into trouble. It's sort of a remarkable coincidence. What happened during the last few years, in 2019, the G7 central banks got together at Jackson Hole and voted on the Going Direct
Reset. We've discussed that numerous times. The Going Direct Reset is really a consolidation of the financial system coming out of what I call the financial coup, which started in 1998, and, you know, was a real push for consolidation, including the theft of 21 trillion that you just described. What happened when they did the going direct is the Fed did an unprecedented, within a one-year period, injection of $5 trillion into the economy and did it directly.
It was unprecedented in central bank history. it bubbled certain aspects of the economy, and those bubbles were part of the SVB and signature loan portfolio. And always the question is, did the bubble cause an unstable loan portfolio or were the things going on in that portfolio that somebody centrally wanted to control?
One of the things that happened was you ended up with banks, big banks, and the problem really is in the big banks, it's not in the small banks, But you ended up with some big banks with very large deposits, most of which were uninsured. So SVB, when it went down, had approximately six to 8% of its deposits insured, which is a very low percentage, you know, some very high uninsured deposits. It also had a holding company that was publicly traded, which meant short sellers could short the stock.
And then if they could start a run on the bank, then they could make a lot of money driving the stock down. Interestingly enough, when the regulators took over SVB, its stock was still trading at over 100, which begs the question, that's not as- it doesn't look like a bank that's insolvent.
The other problem was that the regulators have encouraged banks not to do loans in their community, but to put money in long treasuries to finance the government deficit, all part of building central control, and with the Fed taking interest rates up that your bonds go down in value as just, and banks can run a negative arbitrage on that portfolio because they have to, as interest rates go up, they pay more for deposits and then they have to carry that portfolio.
So that was one of the issues. So a couple of things that would have weakened the bank, but if you look at the run that occurred on that bank, it really did look like a combination short sellers and engineered run. Normally, one of the functions of the central bank is to help a bank in that position. But we saw, in fact, with the lead banks in the New York Fed that own and control the New York Fed engineering the run. So, JPMorgan Chase, a
big beneficiary of the deposits. And one of the things the Fed did was they essentially did a short-term insurance of all the deposits so there was enough time to move them across the streets of JPMorgan Chase and other banks. So it really did look to me like a predatory run, not to say that SVB didn't have weaknesses, but there's still, if you look at the unanswered questions, there's many unanswered questions on those sort of take downs.
What was most interesting to me is if you, if you look at the problems in the banking system resulting from, you know, the pump and dump of this blast bubble by the Fed, by the shutting down of small business during the pandemic, by the engineering of negative arbitrage investment portfolios... if you look at all those things, the majority of the problems are in the big banks, but yet we see the corporate media pushing the idea, oh, if you wanna be safe, you gotta get your money into a big bank,
which is quote unquote, systemically important. And so there is a real push to consolidate the banking deposits. That is very dangerous. We saw the pandemic shut down lots of small business, which really harms the resiliency in the economy. It didn't have to happen. It was highly, you know, it was, it was disaster capitalism. It was economic warfare. And now we're seeing a push to shut down or drain the small banks.
And, and let me explain, there is nothing more important to the health of a local economy than having lots and lots of small banks and credit unions and savings banks. These are a critical component of what creates and builds economy in the local area. It's fair to say, simplistically, the health of your economy is really a multiple of your healthy small banks, and that translates into healthy small farms and healthy small
businesses. And often these institutions are the repository of a wealth of financial and economic information and skills and expertise in communities, and there's a lot of academic work to support this premise. So the last thing you want is consolidating deposits out of healthy, capable small banks into criminal enterprises. You know, when I hear, "Move
your money to a big bank," I hear, "Oh, let's bank with the Russian mafia. Really? Do you really want to do that?" Anyway, but even more frightening, and I think this is at the root of the crisis, we've seen two things happen. One is the secretary of the treasury has said, you know, we will apply the protections we used in this last go-around of essentially
providing support to the investment portfolio for insuring the uninsured deposits. We will provide that support to systemically important banks. Now, traditionally, systemic important banks is a category used by the Bank of International settlements in Switzerland, which is the central bank of central banks, to denote certain large banks, which, from what we can tell, are literally enjoying the extension of sovereign immunity
and are functioning above the law. There's a wonderful video by John Titus, All the Plenarious Men, that go through the HSBC settlement in 2012, led by Eric Holder, a criminal par excellence former attorney general of the United States. And, and it describes how, uh, how lawless, you know, the big banks are literally being allowed to break the law and get away with it
anyway. So, so that's been the traditional definition. What, what Yellen has explained in testimony and press conferences is basically systemically important as she's using it is that is a, is a determination made by her and her secret advisors in a secret process, and no one can understand what the rules are, which means there's no law. In other words, Janet gets to make up who's important and who's not, and pick winners and losers in the economy.
Not just with the injection of the money from the Fed, but now, you know, who gets picked off and who gets run and who doesn't. Right. But would it be fair to say that the banks that they're likely almost very likely to define as systemically important are the same banks that in the previous financial crisis were labeled too big to fail? Right. And who grew tremendously as a result of the largess of the Treasury and
the Fed. And the problem is, you know, I always keep saying crime that pays is crime that stays. These are banks that operate in a criminal model. So several years ago I had one of our team spend about a month and put together a list of all civil and criminal settlements, both with enforcement agencies and private litigation on the part of JP Morgan Chase. And it's absolutely breathtaking page after page after page. And what you realize when anyone reads it,
you don't need to know anything about the financial system. You realize, Oh, this is their business model. This is their business model. And if you go through the Madoff case, which you know is, um, let me just step back. When I was interviewing Helen Chaitman on the Solari report, this is one of these breathtaking moments. And she explained that Madoff had had for the investment advisory part of this business, only one bank account from the mid nineties on at JP Morgan Chase.
And I said to her, well, Helen, who was the securities custodian? And she said, well, there was none because he never bought any securities. And I said, well, that means the JP Morgan Chase knew. I mean they knew there was no securities purchasing. They knew there was no, if no money is being transferred to a securities custodian, then they know there's no securities purchasing going on. and it turned out that Madoff would leave like $9 billion of deposits at essentially
no interest at JPMorgan Chase. So this was a tremendous financial boon to them, which means they knew. And I said to her, "Helen, don't you understand that JPMorgan Chase was the senior partner in the Madoff fraud?" Because without Morgan being willing to transact a a Ponzi scheme, Madoff couldn't do it. So, you know, we're, we're looking at an effort to encourage us to move into banks that don't respect the law. And now we've got a secretary of treasury saying no law.
And let me just add one thing. The credit squeeze workout happened at the same time in Switzerland and the Swiss national bank and the Swiss government agreed to protect selected equity holders at the cost of the bondholders. So the senior debt or debt that's senior to equity was wiped out, much of which I presume was held by the European pension funds, you know, to protect foreign equity investors. And this is an inversion
of the law. So on both sides of the Atlantic we see by the governments and the central bank astonishing inversions of the law on a make-it-up-as-you-go basis. And I think more than anything that's what has financial people spooked, because if there's no law, then it's only a matter of time till your financial system--you know, you're going to
have increasing instability. And that's what happens when you centralize control, let alone and you centralize control onto people who say, "Oh, well, the law is what we make up today." Yeah, so to go back to something you mentioned earlier, about sort of the government response to the banking collapses and about how it seemed very odd that these banks were declared insolvent, based on uncertain aspects of what was going on there. So there's the signature bank was part of this, right?
And essentially, it was admitted that the reason it was shuttered was because regulators had a quote, crisis and confidence over the leadership of that bank and it related to the leadership of that bank pre-collapse, being unwilling to end their crypto business. So I guess one other potential level to all of this here is sort of the regulatory efforts to bring crypto to heal that we're seeing sort of parallel happening in parallel to some of this other stuff.
Do you see that being related at all? Because in my previous podcast about that crisis, one of the guests brought up how a signature bank had some sort of payment settlement service called signet, I believe, that was sort of seen as being a potential competitor to FedNow, which we can talk a little bit about later, but do you see sort of the the extreme approach by the government right now as it relates to crypto regulation, which of course, seems to a lot of people have criticized
as being somewhat arbitrary, in some cases, somewhat illegal. Do you see that factoring into some of the recent events that we've seen in markets and banks? So three of the most unimportant unanswered questions on these, the sort of the takedown on signature and SBB happened contiguous with the Congress essentially losing control of the narrative on January 6th.
Yeah. And I have a lot of questions about the relationship because I think the money laundering through the Ukraine coming back to help rig the election was astonishing in size. If I told you what I really thought the total amounts were, you probably wouldn't believe me. And I think there's real questions about the crypto activities related to FTX and then signature back.
Well, I think it's fair to say FTX's potential role in laundering, that Ukraine money and the election stuff and donations to the DNC was probably much bigger than just FTX, right? Right. Yeah. And so I have serious questions about whether or not part of what happened to SVB and Signature was a document grab. Okay. Cause, cause, okay. So, so that's number one. Number two, We are watching both by the SEC and the Treasury Executive Branch, a real push to lock down and control crypto.
And we're not just seeing it in the United States, we're seeing it around the world. One of the economies I keep an eye on in terms of regulation is the Australia, because they're there. If you want, if you want to control the regulation, the Australians are brilliant at doing it and doing it very elegantly. And if you look at the moves they've made on crypto, you know, it was clear that this was going to come in the United States.
I've always believed that crypto was allowed to blossom as a way of prototyping, you know, to help the powers that be figure out how to do CBDC. Yeah, a lot of people have made that argument. Right. So I'm absolutely convinced that's the case. And now the time has come to just flip the wings of either most or all crypto other than the things they want to use for the CBDC system. or it wouldn't surprise me if they left some of them free, you know, for continued purposes.
There's a variety of purposes the officials can use them for as well. Anyway, so there's no doubt most crypto is in the crosshairs, but another thing I want to bring up is, um, there was enormous prototyping of life sciences and various kinds of biotech and bio warfare. And another question I have is the extent to which that's involved in the portfolio at SDB, even possibly in signature and some of the crypto activity.
So there's some pretty dark stuff being financed and tried now that the COVID this phase of the healthcare controls were through sort of, you know, the first two innings, uh, a lot of, a lot of stuff has been tried and prototyped and I think they know where they want to go next. So you want to shut down a lot of those prototypes. So whether it's the crypto prototypes or the life sciences and biotech prototypes, you know, this is sort of the shutting down of this phase.
Anyway, there are huge unanswered questions about this, but I think it's pretty fair to say, this is part of the move to lock down crypto. So I want to go back to what you mentioned about a potential tie to the collapse of the January 6 narrative. Because I think it's pretty interesting, actually, in terms of what you mentioned, the potential for there being a document
grab here. So apparently Signature Bank had a lot of very tight connections financially to Trump and his family, I think also like the Kushner's as well. And people like that, which is pretty interesting. And they actually apparently
stopped that banking relationship when January 6 happened. And that was used as justification by Signature Bank to sort of, you know, kick out the Trumps, I I guess, but they would ostensibly have a lot of documentation about Trump financial activity and you see this whole effort with the whole indictment and all of this, it's very possible that there may have been some sort of document grab aimed at, you know,
if the current effort to keep Trump from running doesn't succeed, it's possible that they might dig something up, that signature bank that might be useful to them. Just an interesting possibility. The other report was when the regulators grabbed SVB. Again, the stock was trading at 100. So my guess is the bank was not solvent at all. Central bankers had provided the kind of support they're supposed to in these situations.
But my understanding from the public report was one of the first things the regulators did was shut off access to documents to the holding company. Interesting. Yeah, that's pretty astonishing. Remember, the CEO of SVB was on the board of the San Francisco Fed and got knocked off when the regulators grabbed the bank. So whatever management you had there, it was very experienced this season, including a guy who was senior at Enron. Makes you wonder.
Yeah, for sure. So one thing you brought up earlier, so essentially as you laid out and I totally agree with you. It was an intentional policy choice by the part of the federal government to push depositors to put their money in too big to fail institutions. So I guess the question is why? Why would they want their money in banks that as you laid out are extensively criminal?
So if you look at what I want to do to centralize, centralize financial transactions, centralize control of food, centralize control of politics. if you look at all the things I want to do to centralize, I need to dramatically consolidate the banking system. If you know we have 4,000 banks, most of which are community banks and credit unions, savings banks, those banks are a great, you know, along with small business and farms are the bedrock of democracy.
And again and again, we've seen the Fed try to institute policies and the small bankers rear their head and just start screaming and they can't do it politically. So, you know, there's no doubt if you want to go to the tight central control that they want of financial transactions, let alone some of these other things, you've got to kill the small banks.
Let me just mention, Whitney, we just published some people in Tennessee and some of the state legislators in several states were interested in getting a memo on why it makes sense for a state to have a sovereign bank like the Bank of North Dakota. Many states used to have a sovereign bank that would handle the state's deposits, and for a variety of reasons they went away. Most states, governments, most state and local governments are highly
dependent on big out-of-state banks, which is not a healthy situation politically. Anyway, So they asked us to write a memo, and I sat down and thought about it, and I just said, "Who's the top banking academic scholar who tells the truth in the world?" And it's Richard Werner, who is famous for his book on the Japanese central bank, The Princes of the Yen.
Anyway, so I thought, you know, long odds to get Richard to do this, but I approached Richard and said, "Richard, will you write a memo for us on why a sovereign state bank would be great for Tennessee. And he did. It's up at Solari. It's free. It's public. And we're going to use it in the first quarter wrap-up. I have a great interview with him
coming out next week. And this is a very serious, well-done memo. And it describes in very powerful ways, using examples from all around the world, both the U.S. and Europe, why the health of a local economy depends entirely on having lots of small financial institutions. It's an incredible work, and it represents decades of research by Richard and his colleagues. Anyway, so we did, and we just finished delivering it in hard copy here in Tennessee. It's about
Tennessee, but it relates to any national or regional economy. It applies, and from reading it, you'll understand why it applies to your state or your country. And, um, so, so that's why if there's any, you know, if there's anything we want to fight for, it's for the good local banks. And as I said, John Titus just finished doing a study. We talked about a money markets last week. Um, he's just finished doing this thing.
He's about to do a new video on the fact that all the problems are in the big banks. They're not in the small banks. So don't, don't let the media scare you out of your good local bank and head into a criminal bank. Don't do that. So I guess I'm talking about bank consolidation. How far do you see this going and how quickly? Because I think late last month you have former BlackRock fund manager Edward Dowd. He was claiming that by 2025 there will be only six banks left standing in the
U.S. What are your thoughts about that? I'm not a great believer in prophecy. So, you know, do I think that's what Yellen and Powell would love to do? You know, is that what, is Jamie Dimon trying to get down to six banks? You know, probably, you know, are we going to let him, I'm not willing to bet against myself. You know, my, I had used to have a wonderful colleague who would say, our circumstances are far too dire for the luxury of realism.
So, you know, I'm betting, uh, cause what I'm seeing in just my world and wandering around Tennessee on this trip, more and more people are using cash, more and more people. I've talked to several small bankers whose deposits are going up. So, you know, people are smart. And so I'm not willing to bet that it's six banks because if it's six banks, you know, we're talking about the end of human liberty. It's really interesting status to just put up a chart.
The status are visual capitalists, one of them. And it showed you what percentage of a population in different countries did all their borrowing from financial institutions.
And if you look at it, when you'll take your breath away, because it's, you know, the pandemic was always worse in the countries where everybody was dependent on the financial institutions and what I had never realized, you know, what the number one country that had the highest percentage of, of loans, not from friends and family and, you know, local businesses, but loans from big financial institutions, you know what number one was? Canada. Well guess where they shut down the truckers. Right.
Right. So, so I don't know this, as I said, this is a war. There's a war between those who wish to centralize and those who decentralize, you know, and there's a war going on between those who, uh, you know, want to control the market share versus the other guys at the top who want to control the market share. So we got these two wars going on. And it's my hope that the guys at the top kill each other and the rest of us can call back enough market share so we don't let this
happen. So I'm not, I'm, you know, I think things are much more complicated, uh, at, at sort of the grassroots than Ed does. You know, one of the things that's been the hardest and most frustrating for people who want to protect freedom is that the state and local legislators have always gone along with the feds. The feds always buy them. They throw a lot of money at the states. They throw a lot of money at the local areas.
And for the first time in my life, I'm beginning to see groups of very capable state legislators come together and say, "Wait a minute, these guys want to control us." And this federal money is draining us, it's not helping us, it's draining us, because it comes with rules and conditions, it gets us dependent on the Fed. And so we're starting to see groups of state legislatures who are backed up by the Constitution, they have the constitutional powers behind them to take action.
The question is, can they do it? I'm not ready to concede that the criminals are going to win. Yeah, I think I have a really similar view to that. I mean, basically I don't think these guys can really succeed in a lot of their plans and ambitions, and I think a lot of people in independent media treat their ambitions like it's a done deal, you know, and I don't really agree with that either. My concern is how much damage do we let the powers that be do before, you know,
their plans ultimately collapse around them? Right. Right now we're letting them do huge damage. Since 19, you know, I left the Bush administration thinking it was an emergency. That was 1991. So they have done huge damage. The financial coup starting in 1998 has done huge damage. The one thing I will say, the reason I continue to be an optimist, if you look at how much centralizing control has shrunk the economic buy, it's astonishing.
And if we can find our way to a model that will optimize, you know, sort of human productivity and an economic productivity, the wealth potential is fantastic. And you know, One reason if you're the top guys, you want to consolidate the way they're consolidating one, you want to protect yourself on risk because once everybody figures out what you've done and how much you've stolen, you know, people are going to be mad. So they're trying to protect themselves from the pitchforks. Number one.
But number two, if you look at what breakthrough energy technology can do in terms of optimizing wealth, it's unbelievable, you know, and they are pigs. They want to control that and they want to risk management that all to their benefit. And the problem is once you, that once that technology gets applied and the wealth starts being created, you know, the general population is going to push for meritocracy. And if meritocracy determines who leads, they're out. So, so this for them is survival.
Yeah. I mean, I think I would argue that's part of why we're seeing this change to, or this push to basically redefine what money and the economy and all of this is with the move to the CBDC because you know, once people figure out how they've been screwed essentially for so long and looted, you know, like you said, the pitchforks.
And the only way they can really avoid the pitchforks is moving to this new paradigm where they can keep the people with the pitchforks totally under control and surveillance and not have to worry about losing what they've looted essentially. Right.
And the clever thing they've done is until they can get to total control of transactions, they're using healthcare as the way to build the control so they don't have complete control through the financial system and they don't want to be obvious that it's the financial system because then everybody's going to go after the central bankers. So they've been very clever about using healthcare to engineer their economic
warfare and play their games. It's very clever. Yeah. Well, it's something that's definitely been concerning to me is that, you know, I've talked a lot about in my past work, how essentially Silicon Valley, big tech and the national security state are fused.
They're essentially the same thing. And now you have that blob, I guess you could call it nominally through big tech, making all of these joint ventures with big pharma, whether it's Pfizer or GlaxoSmithKline, and they're all pushing for these wearables or nanotechnologies and, um, you know, things that as they say, modulate your central nervous system, right?
So, you know, there's a big effort to get a lot of this excessive, the most invasive really of the control, um, you know, grid technology into people under the guise of it being all about healthcare, oddly enough. They're looking to change and control your mind and your body with that, with no informed consent whatsoever. Yeah. It's astonishing. when I say these people are psychopaths, they truly are psychopaths.
Yeah. And it's amazing how people will fall for it. And again, I think it's, you know, I see a lot of, a lot of this only really being possible because of how the role of the smartphone, I guess you could say in people's lives, people have become so acclimatized to having a device around them
constantly that they can't live without. And so the powers that be, I think, see it as a very easy segue at this point in time, to basically be like, well, now we're just going to put the smartphone in you or on you, right? And look how much more convenient it will be for you. You won't have to worry about leaving your phone behind or whatever now that you can't live without it. We have an article called I want to stop CBDCs. What can I do?
You can just pick it up on a search. Just put CBDCs in it, it's Larry. And number 11, it's a long list of things everybody can do, but number 11 is to educate your family and friends. And we pick out six of the best videos, a lot of them real short that will show you how nuts this is.
And one of them is Richard Werner at a conference in Malmo, Sweden last May, May, 2022, talking about how one of the executive directors who runs one of the central banks of Europe saying, you know, CBDC is going to be a chip. We're going to put it in your hand. So they're, they're telling people. Yeah, man, unsettling stuff, but it's just unfortunate how far gone some people
are. You know, Off Guardian had a really great article about smartphones. I forget exactly what the title was, but it was out a few weeks ago, and we'll put it in the show notes for people to read. But essentially, what it said is people, you know, if you can't imagine living your life without the smartphone, then you've essentially already been enslaved by the system. The fact that you can't go without it because they argue, the author argues in this piece that it's really the
carrot to try and herd people into I guess the corral of digital enslavement. So for example here in Chile even though COVID's over and all this stuff, you can't really go to a restaurant unless you scan a QR code and I refuse to do it but what happens is that the waitress or waiter will be like "okay we'll just use my phone to scan it here" You know, they don't have physical menus anymore. So like, okay, if you want to go out to eat, now you have to have your smartphone with you at all times.
It's so funny. The first time a restaurant did that to me in the Netherlands, I walked in and they said, you know, we need your QR code. And I said, I don't have one. And they said, we need, you know, don't you have a smartphone? I said, you know, I don't have one with me. And they said, well, you can't come in. And the first thing I thought with me was, I wonder what they're putting in the food.
And I realized, this is a good thing. This is a way of screening, you know, this is a way of filtering restaurants. Yeah. But what concerns me, right, and what this article argued is that, you know, people that can't imagine themselves living outside of that paradigm have essentially already been lost to the system. And I thought that was a really powerful way of conveying it. We just covered a story on money in markets this week. it was an article about how the sales of smartphones are falling
and the sales of dumb phones are rising. And believe it or not, the greatest increase is in, they said generation Z. So it's the younger consumers who are preferring dumb phones. And I thought that was a very sort of piece of good news. Yeah, definitely sounds like it to me. Um, but you know, I mean, And so my problem initially, and I was a very late adopter of the smartphone.
I didn't have one until I think mid-2017 and it was because my former employer Mint Press News essentially required me to get one for work. And I ended up using it mainly as like an alarm clock, right? And it's actually really hard to find other regular types of alarm clocks here in Chile now.
got one when I was in in the States last year and now I'm like, yay I don't really have to worry about this thing anymore and it's it's nice to sort of go back to the Times of before I guess in a sense, but at the same time, you know I really do worry that some people have just become so Accustomed to it and that and and that there's sort of this unwillingness to live without it that I see in in people Regardless of their awareness of what the agenda is and you know
I've known people that are very aware and still very much unwilling to live their life without big tech and things like that. And then there's people that don't really know anything and are the same and, you know, it dominates socialization and so many other facets of our lives for people. And I don't know, I mean, I do think it is a really key point, as this off guardian article pointed out.
So if you do a search at Solari, just put it in mind control, you'll pick up a collection of links called mind control tactics used on young people and everyone else. And I'm a great believer. We've spent a lot of time on this. I think the number one obstacle between us and preserving freedom is surveillance and mind control technology. And essentially there is a real push including smartphones are a big part of it to get us to resonate with the cell towers instead of with life,
with the, I would call it the divine intelligence. Oriconner and I just did an incredible interview about all of this and the relationship between this and CBDC is called the economy of the energy body, because I think what they're trying to do is essentially control our electromagnetic
body. And it's both the invisible part of our body, some people call it the aura, the invisible part of our body, the energetic part of our body, as well as our intelligence and our ability to share intelligence with others. So Ulrich runs our Future Science series, and I would really recommend it to you because it gets into, you know, some of the most high-tech, invasive, invisible forms of control, which I think are very, very serious.
And so I think you're dead right on everything you're saying. We, we, at Solire events, we require that you leave your smartphone in the car or outside and we bring big Faraday bags. So if you won't, we, you know, we tag it and put it in a Faraday bag. And we, it's amazing because we will send emails out saying, you know, this is it and you can't bring it in. So leave it in the car, you know,
leave it elsewhere, blah, blah, blah. But, but the people who run the desk and the entrance end up having wars with people who will not let it go because there's a physical addiction. Scary.
Yeah. So I think, you know, and I've said in some recent interviews that I think, you know, we have to view a lot of the work that needs to be done to resist this agenda, not just as, well, a lot of people view it through certain terms, but I think a key part of it also is sort of having a mental revolution among people. And a lot of it is, you know, failing to fall into the fear trap because that's basically, you know, you know, there's a carrot and a stick, right?
That these guys are used to hurt us just like we were livestock. Right. Right. And to me, the carrot is almost always convenience. And the stick is almost always fear. And I feel like the convenience carrot thing is so centered almost all of the time, at least what we've seen with COVID, right, around the smartphone as like a key vehicle for that. So, you know, one part of it is the mental rejection of the fear tactics.
And I think some people have made good progress in that, especially, you know, after the COVID crisis, you know, maybe people fell into the fear initially, but we're able to sort of realize a lot of the tactics that were being used and
maybe may not be as susceptible, um, a second time. I mean, who knows really, but you know, I've seen people make progress there, but not necessarily on the other front where they've become so mentally conditioned to convenience and also mentally conditioned to having the smartphone, um, as you know, sort of an appendage, I guess, in a sense and with them constantly like a security blanket for some people, I guess, and there's this extreme mental resistance to letting it go.
So I think, you know, people need to be looking at, you know, at both of those metrics, I guess, about how you're going to keep both the carrot and the stick from, from hurting you around and controlling you in a way that you don't necessarily want to be controlled. Well, there's something else I'm reading, um, a wonderful book that was published posthumously with the help of Nick Cook about Ingo Swann's, uh, it's called "Resurrecting Mysterious".
was one of the leading remote viewers and, and he's trying in this book to create a framework for the parts of our reality that are invisible to the naked eye. And again, it's called a resurrecting mysterious. And one of the things that Swan has documented throughout his whole career is, you know, we, we really are powerful. We have very powerful intelligence and which can be much more powerful than we more powerful than we are trained to use and know.
And I think a lot of these techniques like using smartphones to manipulate and control people are really shutting them off, shutting us off from accessing that power. And one of the reasons you want to get rid of all this stuff and not let it control you is, you know, now is the time in our history to find our real power and, and apply that real power.
And so there's an enormous opportunity if you can back yourself individually outside, you know, get out of the control grid and get out of the control grid because you don't want to be manipulated by others. You want to build and access your own power. So part of it is getting out of the control grid. But the other thing is understanding there's an extraordinary opportunity to build your power if you do. Yeah, I think that's a part of what you brought up there.
I want to touch on for a second before we go back to finance stuff. this idea of how this technology has sort of rid us in a sense of a lot of our abilities and our power mentally. Because I was talking about this when discussing ChatGPT a while ago. So I sort of started off explaining like if you think about the advent of the smartphone people just became really used to having the calculator always there through the smartphone, right? So like no one does mental math anymore and it's
really hard for a lot of people to do mental math now. It certainly is for me compared to when I was in grade school, but you know, in my defense, I'm more of a writing person and never really been a math person. But you know, I mean, it's true for a lot of people anyway, the whole idea if you don't use it, you lose
it. I think that's definitely true in the more of these handy tools and apps on the smartphone, we become dependent on that for these abilities, and we stop losing it because of the convenience of having it right there on the smartphone, right? And then we're not using our brains as much as we were before. And this whole chat GPT thing I sort of see is, you know, they were talking about, Oh, well, um, now people, a lot of the content on the internet is going to be written by generative AI
like this. And people in school aren't going to be writing their papers anymore. They're going to be using chat GPT to generate essays and all of this stuff. So now, you know, the more people that rely on that, you know, potentially we could just lose our ability to write and effectively communicate by outsourcing it to this quote unquote convenient technology that generates paragraphs and essays much faster than we can. Right. So.
Right. And I'll tell you, I spent a lot of time when I was an investment advisor, sort of helping people clean up from financial fraud. And one of the things clearly that was helping, you know, engineer and implement the financial fraud was people not thinking mathematically. They sort of diminished their ability to think mathematically and look at things mathematically, but also they were being worked by entrainment technology and subliminal programming through the phones. You
know, I'll just say it flat out. So whether it was consumer purchases or, you know, paying significantly more, a lot of the precious metal scams used entrainment technology, private equity, private REITs use technology. So, you know, that's why you want to absolutely think mathematically.
And I always tell people before they make a really important financial decision, whether it's an investment or purchase, you know, turn off all your media, you know, do the numbers with a number two pencil and a piece of paper and, uh, you know, go hug a tree, you know, spend some time in nature and then sleep on it before you turn it, you know, then make your decision before you turn on any media.
Yeah, I think that's some good advice. Um, because I don't know the more people become dependent on technology for all of the stuff. Again, you know, if you don't, if you don't use it, you lose it. And I mean, I don't know how much more stuff we can really stand to lose at this point. Um, so, um, well I really enjoyed that tangent, but I'm for the purpose of talking about financial stuff there is, there are some other things I wanted to get into. And one of those things, uh,
was the whole role that the Federal Reserve is playing in all of this. So we mentioned FedNow earlier and I want to touch on that. Before we get to FedNow and what it is and what people should know about it, maybe we could talk a little bit about what you see the Fed as likely to do over the course of the relatively short term. Can the can be kick down the road much longer and what's likely to happen in the coming months as it relates to this financial crisis.
So the Fed's in a tricky position in multiple ways because it's unleashed tremendous inflation, and the question is how you manage that. The first and most important job the Fed has is to manage the US dollar as both a major trading vehicle as well as the reserve currency around the world. And I think the Fed is going to give number one priority to protecting its position internationally, and that means high interest rates, even higher interest rates than where we are now.
But whatever they have to do to protect their Fed, you know, their global position, they will do. Now, some of that comes down to what the military can and cannot do, you know, and that's very hard to discern and get really reliable intelligence on. But I think the Fed is going to play a rough game. There are people who expect the Fed to back off and do more QE. I think they're going to have to be tough on inflation to play the international game. So that's number
one. But number two, there are numerous players within the Fed system who are not enthusiastic about the dangers of CBDC. So we saw the president of the Minneapolis Fed recently, and this is in the videos I described that are at number 11 in our article, "I Want to Stop CBDCs, What Can We Do?" You have the president of the Minneapolis Fed saying the only reason to do CBDCs is for central control and to have complete surveillance on anybody, and
I don't see why any Americans would ever let this happen. So there are a lot of people who work in the Fed system and in the banking system who don't want to be slaves, you know, and they understand the risks of where this is going. Another problem the Fed has is, you know, as I said, I wouldn't do any of this until I brought in the guns. And so I think they're slow walking, you know, they've been slow walking some of the centralization, except what they're doing with Fed now.
So I think there's a lot of ambivalence in the Fed system. The last reason is the Fed has, unfortunately, from 1998 on, played too fast and furious, in my opinion, with the Bank of International Settlements. And their danger is, of course, if you go to an all-digital financial system, there is a danger that the Eurodollar market and the BIS could end up controlling the Fed. So how can the Fed implement this technology without ending up being a victim of central control. Big question.
As I said, they're rolling out FedNow. There's a website at the Fed on the FedNow system. They've been sort of working on this since 2020, you know, so they started this Whitney, uh, when they started the going direct reset. And what FedNow will do is allow payment, the payment system to operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week. So much faster wiring and transferring of money. But what that potentially means is it's much easier to run a
bank. I mean, you, you leave, you go home on Friday, you know, and the bank run starts on a Saturday and you wake up on Monday and the next thing you know, you got a real problem. So now it depends, it comes down to some of the mechanics of whether how banks approve a transfer, but, um, it makes the system much more sensitive to these kinds of games on consolidation.
The Fed says they're rolling it out in July. My guess, and this is absolutely conjecture, is built into this is a lot more capacity in the digital systems to identify who's doing what. So I think the surveillance and the individual sanction monkey business that will be possible with the system is much greater, but you know, we'll see what happens when we roll it out. I would point out a lot of the banks have gotten into trouble in the California
district. We're the ones who've been part of the FedNow prototype. Is there a connection? I don't know, but it's a remarkable coincidence. Well, I want to bring your attention to some recent reporting about FedNow because it ended up trending on, on Twitter. And according to mainstream media, this was for all the wrong reasons. Yeah. So the American banker had an opinion piece out just earlier this week. It says FedNow's rollout might get complicated by misinformation.
The first sentence is, "A curious thing happened late last week. FedNow was trending on Twitter and for all the wrong reasons. I don't want to be too specific in outlining the accusations and aspersions about FedNow that were floating around out there. Part of this is because wrong information doesn't need to be amplified.
And then he goes on to say that there was a great deal of confusion and conflation between the imminent debut of the Fed's faster payments network and its mauling the creation of a central bank digital currency. And he goes on to argue that there's not really a relation between the CBDC ambitions of the Federal Reserve and the FedNow service.
If you look at mainstream media, there are actually a lot of reports right now saying there's nothing to do with FedNow and a central bank digital currency or a digital dollar. It's all about faster payments and want it faster payments be great, faster, more convenient. Hooray FedNow. I mean, that's basically the mainstream line. So what do you think about that Catherine? So here's what I would say to the American banker.
If you look at the HSBC decision by the Department of Justice to let HSBC skate on major criminal activity, if you look at the Department of Justice's support for major skating by JPMorgan Chase or the incredible steal by the New York Fed member banks during the financial crisis, finally culminating with Janet Yellen basically saying, you know, systemically important banks can essentially get away with anything they want, and we decide secretly who that is.
Friends of Janet Getaway are above the law. What you're proposing is complete lawlessness by the Secretary of the Treasury, the Chairman of the Fed, and the banking regulators and enforcement agencies, and it's a pattern of lawlessness from 2012 to date. Now, in a situation where very sophisticated financial people go with very sophisticated experience and credentials are tracking extraordinary lawlessness using taxpayers' credit that advantages certain
parties for no reason other than their insiders. When you see that, which I would describe as a financial coup, you stop trusting anything the Fed and the Treasury say. And that is where we are. And so if people don't trust the rollout of Fed now, it's for very good
reason. I don't take anything the Fed or the Treasury says on face value. How can I? They They have repeatedly said that they are above the law and they reserve the right to make certain parties above the law and disadvantage other parties using taxpayers' credit. So that's a financial coup, and in a financial coup, I don't trust a word they say. And it's not surprising that lots of experienced financial people who post on Twitter don't trust them either. They're not trustworthy.
Yeah, I mean, the more you investigate banks and banking over the past several decades, as I have had to do recently in a lot of my work and for my book, I find it, frankly, impossible to trust them. Like you mentioned earlier, there's a deliberate policy on the part of these entities right now to force, herd depositors really into too-big-to-fail banks, and these too-big-to-fail banks, like JP Morgan we were talking about earlier, are
insanely criminal. So like, you know, I've been writing a lot about JP Morgan recently, as you know. Right. And you know, I just found it very astounding that, uh, three of the four top banks used to launder arms profits as part of the Iran Contra affair, never held accountable. And they're, they're all part of JP Morgan now. What do you know?
But what I would also say is I have found the majority, not all, but the majority of small community that, you know, I would trust my bankers with my life. They are extraordinary people. They are excellent people. They do an excellent job. They build economy, they build community, they run a great bank. They are the salt of the earth. I love them.
You know, and I can't tell you how many great bankers and community banks, you know, but they are accountable to their local business community, their local government. and they spend a fortune complying with usurious regulations and all the games they're subject to. So this country is full of great banks and great bankers who have traditionally done--it's remarkable how much they've protected privacy and respected individual rights, because a
lot of them believe in financial freedom and freedom. So I have to tell you, to me, we're watching a banking system that bifurcates into the good guys and the bad guys. And I would just remind people there are a tremendous number of, you know, there are more good guys in the banking system than there are bad guys.
I'm glad you said that, but at the same time, um, from a lot of my research, I feel like, um, the, the secretary, uh, the treasury secretaries specifically since the nineties onwards have just been totally insane, whether it's like Robert Ruben and Larry Summers. in the nineties followed by Hank Paulson under George W. Bush. And I mean, some of these people, it's hard to divorce that particular position at this point in time from
criminal. They're criminals. They're criminals. These people are criminals and, and they have engaged in massive criminal. Now in their defense, Whitney, what I will say is that the U S economy is highly dependent on criminality. And the general population has supported that. So, you know, every -- you know my red button story. I won't tell it again because I've told it so many times. If anybody doesn't know what it is, they can look it up on our website. Just put
in "Fitz" in the red button story and you'll get it. But there is tremendous political support for whatever brings in the check. And so, you know, our dependency on war and organized crime has gotten a lot of support from the general population because it funds subsidy to them. They get the check. So as long as you give the American people the check and the story of I am good, they go along. It's part of the convenience that we're talking about earlier.
But, um, I think now we're reaching a point where people feel like, well, we're not just going along with a certain level of corruption, which sort of juices the machine. Now we're talking about ending democracy and ending a market economy and going into a slavery system. And I think the frustration that you've had to deal with is most people cannot fathom that the leadership would think of them and treat them like livestock.
And they do though. That's for sure. But it's a hard realization for a lot of people. Yeah. Right. So, you know, I spent a lot of time inside the room, listening to these guys, more and more frustrated with the general population. And, and, you know, Jeb Bush once said there's no constituency for financial responsibility. I can assure you that government government officials who, who argued for financial responsibility got no popular support.
You know, everybody was on board for another check. You know, give me a free check, give me a free this, give me a free that. So, so there has not been a constituency for financial responsibility. And you and I, you know, you and I have experienced that. So when, when does the general population stop being gullible and understand these people are psychopaths, they are headed into a vision that will treat us like livestock. And, And it's not convenient to go along with that at some point.
So when will they make the turn? Well, it's only convenient in the sense that being in prison is also convenient, right? You know, in prison, they give you your food, uh, they give you tedious stuff to do and fill your time. If you behave well, you get a few little privileges here and there, you're clothed and you have a bed and whatever, you know, I mean, it's, it's convenient in that sense. Right. But if you look at where this is going,
what they're going to do. I mean, first of all, they're going to have to depopulate significantly. They're going to have to lower the average life expectancy, which is what they've been doing ever since the, they couldn't broker the budget deal in 95. So one, they lower life expectancy to, they do depopulation. Clearly we're experiencing depopulation over the last three years. The rise in all cause mortality is breathtaking and that's not an accident.
And you know, But the other thing is they're, they're literally planning on putting us in digital concentration camps where we can't travel. You know, we can't necessarily buy or eat the food we want. We're going to be eating bugs and insects and they're going to take our kids away. In other words, they're going to take the position, you know, you're not allowed to own property. They're going to confiscate property.
Jamie Dimon is out now in his latest shareholders letter saying, you know, not for profits and businesses should be able to confiscate property if they want it for climate change, you know, for renewable energy investment. You know, it's basically insane. It's lawless. But they're saying that they're going to take your land, they're going to take your kids. That's why they want to get the guns. This is not going to turn out to be convenient.
No, of course not. There's nothing convenient about that. But there's a certain segment of the population that, you know, doesn't care about land ownership. They live in cities, they're accustomed to certain standards of living and I think that's the population they're trying to appeal
to with a lot of this. The same people that fall in, um, you know, are total suckers for the faux communitarian selling points of like, oh, this is about the community, the needs of the mini outweigh the needs of the few, this is for the good of the planet, this is for the good of your grandma and all young people and old people and you
know, all that stuff. I mean the people that are suckers for that, and don't want to live without their creature comforts and all of this stuff and already live in cities are the ones that are going to be sort of suckered in with the convenience arguments and if someone like Jamie Dimon is like, "Oh, well, for the greater good, we need to seize all this private property in the Midwest or whatever," I mean, those people aren't going to care, they'll cheerlead it.
Well, we're talking about the mind control troops. Yeah, they exist. But again, they don't need the whole population on board with their stuff. They're appealing, I think, to a specific segment of the population, a specific percentage, though I don't necessarily claim to know how large that is, but they have to have some sort of base for all of this, right? Whether or not it doesn't have to be a majority necessarily either. Well, this is why you and I need to be sufficiently ornery.
I'm getting there. I'm getting there. Some of my last interviews have been much saucier than before, so maybe it's having an effect. Oh man.
Well, there's one thing I wanted to talk about really quickly before I get into a couple questions I had for you about CBDCs and the role of commercial banks in the CBDC paradigm, and that is, as I'm sure you've known, there's been, and probably most people listening to this podcast have seen, because it's pretty much impossible at this point not to have noticed it, there has been an extreme acceleration in the shift away from the dollar as the global
reserve currency in sort of what I would describe as an intentional baton pass from the unipolar American Empire world order to the BRICS, multipolar world order and sort of the BRICS bank and a different global reserve currency of some type. And then oddly enough, you've had this launch by the IMF of what they call "Unicoin" and weird stuff going on there.
So I was wondering if you could speak a little bit about what is likely to happen as a result of the dollar losing its global reserve currency status, particularly as it relates to inflation, for people living in the United States and federal reserve policy. Right. So if you look at the dollar's role in the global economy, it plays a role as the reserve currency. So sovereign nations and central banks hold reserves for fluctuation.
old reserves for fluctuations in trade and other things. And so their portfolios own treasuries and dollars as reserve. But the other thing is that the dollar is used for trade. So you hear the expression "petrodollar" and traditionally to make purchases globally of oil you had to go in and out of the dollar, and that gave the dollar in the US jurisdiction. So there's both the dollar's role as a reserve currency, but the dollar's role as trade.
What happened, starting with the financial crisis in the '90s and then accelerated with the financial crisis in 2008 to 2012, is many countries around the world said, you know, this dependency on the dollar is a problem. And particularly it became a problem, Whitney, when the U.S. started to implement sanctions using their position as sort of the major liquidity player in trade, they started to
use that position to instill sanctions. And so countries went about the work of creating ways of trading directly with each other through swap lines, through gold and silver, a long variety of mechanisms. And that has taken decades to begin to come to fruition. We have a wrap-up I did several years ago called "The State of Our Currency." I go into a lot of the sort of things that have been going on quietly for decades now to build much more
resiliency away from the dollar. I can't tell you what a major effort it takes for other countries to come together and build these arrangements and learn to trust them. You know, this is a big job to try and move away from the dollar, but again, they've spent decades doing it and now it's coming to fruition. So I see, what I see is where you're seeing
the big moves away from the dollar is in the trade relationships. So we see the Saudis agreeing to trade oil with other countries directly in their currencies and swap lines
instead of going in and out of the dollar. And that's very big because what we're watching as part of this is the commodity producers around the world are saying to both the ECB and the Fed, you know something, we're not going to swap real assets for currency that you just print out of thin air and then you just, you know, you inflate our value away.
We're not going to do that, which is why, as I said, the Fed's role in protecting the value of the dollar internationally is so powerful in its role vis-à-vis what it's doing domestically. Okay, so there's no doubt that trading relationships are moving away and the commodity producers are saying, "We're not going to play your game," and that's why
this sort of--the tensions with Russia and China are so important. The reserve currency has been steadily diminishing, but the dollar is still very dominant in reserve currency, where the real erosion is coming in trade. But the erosion is happening. Now, I've always believed that how fast that erosion happens will be a function of military power. And a lot of the military power that's enforcing the role of the dollar is sort of high-tech weaponry and is very invisible.
So there's a big question mark about how fast this can erode. And the erosion has been much slower than many financial people have predicted because they underestimate the power of that invisible weaponry, things like weather warfare. So, so big question mark.
Now what's going to happen is the, as that erosion occurs and it's very likely to continue to occur, We just don't know at what speed the pressure of dollars coming back, working to buy real assets or commodity producers demanding real assets in exchange for their real assets is going to cause explosive inflation in the rise of household goods. So I don't know if you've ever seen a website called the Chapwood index, but I recommend it to you.
The Chapwood index tracks the real increase in the cost of goods sold, not monetary inflation, but household price inflation. And, um, I, as of a year ago, the annual rate of inflation in Chicago and Ohio was 18%. So that's food, that's, you know, Clorox, that's detergent, that's, um, he started off tracking 50 sort of the basic goods and services. Now I think he tracks 500, um, but he tracks it for the 50 metropolitan areas in the United States.
One of the reasons, you know, I reside in the Memphis areas, it was traditionally one of the lowest, you know, lowest rates on the Chaplin index, but inflation in the, during the pandemic dropped, you know, increased dramatically because of that enormous injection that the fed put into the, into the dollar system.
And we talked about $5 trillion of the going direct. Okay. So, So this deterioration is going to make household good inflation higher, which is why it's absolutely imperative to everybody listening to this. You do everything you can to build resiliency. You know, I'm always telling people any investment you can make to lower your, your cost of goods permanently. You know, if you can build a well, instead of paying a water bill, you want to do that. Um, because inflation is here.
Now there are many ways that the power that we have of creating offsetting deflation. Um, during the seventies and eighties and nineties, of course it was globalization to devalue the cost of labor. And that helped offset tremendous monetary inflation by the central banks during
the pandemic. Every time Anthony Fauci shut down all the small businesses, that was deflation that helped offset the monetary inflation and also made it possible for the people who got that $5 trillion to buy up assets cheap, you know, a very elegant game of economic warfare.
So, um, what, what everyone listening has to understand about this process is Washington and wall street have been able to get buy in politically for their model of organized crime and warfare by delivering a subsidy to the American people. And what this means is they are losing their power to deliver their subsidy, which is why they want techniques of complete control. And it's why they moved $21 trillion out of
the federal government. They're stockpiling money. My guess is some of the money they they wander through the Ukraine is they're stockpiling money, because they know the game is up and they have to reset. So what that reset means is they're going to squeeze our income
and things are going to happen that raise our expense. You know, at the same time, we're putting up with very arbitrary management of the legal system, whether by the feds or, you know, as it works down all the way into our enforcement, how enforcement impacts us locally, whether it's the IRS agent or many of these other ways. So bottom line, we need to build much more local resiliency.
The big opportunity is if we're in a good jurisdiction, if we can get behind local leadership, um, you know, there are a couple of state legislatures that are taking tremendous action. One that really brought national attention was DeSantis two weeks ago had a press conference and announced he was proposing legislation to outlaw CBDCs in Florida, not just US CBDCs, but global CBDCs, and said, you know, that Florida would not permit the end of financial transaction freedom.
That video is also in the group of videos of the CBDC article that I described it. So just do a search for CBDCs and you can pick it up. So you know, If you can back your state legislators in protecting your transaction freedoms, you know, we can dramatically improve our position. But these guys are, you know, they are coming into a reset, they have to do a reset, and they feel much safer if they get complete control.
And the reason is they can no longer deliver the subsidy that they've used to buy us off traditionally. Well, one thing I want to touch on with CBDC is that I think is really relevant to this conversation. So a lot of people have argued as the CBDC agenda has advanced and become more overt and open and out there for the public to see is that, you know, there's been
this claim circulated that their rollout would make commercial banks irrelevant, right? And, you know, like we've been talking about, there's been this push by the same people creating the CBDC paradigm to consolidate the banking sector and make fewer and fewer banks, but not necessarily eliminate commercial banking entirely, right? So I just wanted to point out how a commercial bank may exist within a CBDC paradigm, according to some articles that have been published recently on the issue.
And of course, I wanted to get your take about what the likely role of commercial banks in the CBDC paradigm would be. So this particular article I'm going to be quoting here was published in the Global Treasurer, and the article starts off as follows. It says, quote, while the potential of central bank digital currencies is substantial and more and more central banks explore their options in adopting a CBDC strategy, there are many challenges and considerations to cover.
They range from cybersecurity and privacy concerns to the impact on financial markets, legislation, and the role of commercial banks. The two-tier banking system, which has long provided the traditional setup for commercial banks, has typically supplied the fundamental support for the real economy in some of the largest nations in the world.
To truly maintain the integrity of this working relationship between state-owned central and private commercial banks, it's important to consider both the banking system and how CBDCs are implemented and programmed. It is key in this relationship that central banks issue the value and grant its authenticity, while commercial banks as well as financial services providers issue the wallets that handle CBDC and are responsible for the application. So, what are your thoughts about that, Catherine?
So in the short run, the Fed is much better off involving all the banks in playing a role on CBDC 1, the Fed is not set up to do customer support, they're wholesale banks, not retail. And my understanding from Richard Werner is China has rolled out their CBDCs and involved the banks. So the big problem you have rolling out of CBDC, if you get political opposition from all 4,000, most of the small banks, you're going to run into major headwinds.
So the way to do this, if you're going to roll it out, is to buy them all in and assure them great fees and other things, playing ball with CBDCs on the tech support customer service. You can use the banks as well as the tech firms. In the long run, if you buy into CBDCs, it's pretty easy to, once you get everybody onto the platform to squeeze and cut out almost all the banks. Now, the Fed is not a government
institution. It's owned and controlled by a group of private banks. And the people who are the leading controllers of the New York Fed and the Fed banks, they're not going to cut themselves out until they want to. So why would I cut myself out of my own position?
So I think when someone like Ed Dowd says we're going to be down to six banks, he's thinking the guys who own and control the New York Fed are going to hog everything for themselves, and I'm highly confident that that is their intention. But first they want to pay off all the small banks and buy them in. So they'll bring them in with honey, not with tyranny in the first blush, but on the second, third, fourth, fifth round. How many rounds will it take till they cut them out?
You know, they'll get cut out. All right. Well, I guess as we wrap up here, uh, probably a question a lot of people would like answered is what are some things people can do to prepare financially? Um, you know, you mentioned not abandoning local community banks, but what should people be looking for, um, in a bank? Um, you know, questions like that. Where should people be putting their money? Um, do you have any suggestions on those fronts for people?
there's tremendous numbers of things that people can do. And the most important thing you need to do is get yourself out of the control grid. So let me suggest three sources. If you, if you go to Solari, all of these are public. Um, I want to stop CBDC's, what can I do? You absolutely want to review that list and do the things that give you energy. Um, that will include finding a great local bank or institution. We have a great article called how to find a, uh, a good local bank.
And I think it's linked in the CBDC article as well. So you can pick that up. I did an episode, Carolyn Betts is our general counsel and I do financial rebellion on CHD TV every week. Last year we did episode 31 and I went through, where to stash your cash in 2022. And it's, you know, scores of ideas on how to make sure you are as resilient as possible.
Finally, I mentioned the mind control tactics for young people, protect your mind because to make sound choices about investing your time and money, um, you absolutely want a clear, coherent mind. So Whitney's emphasized on, on protecting yourself from interference by smartphones and these other things. There's a reason she's on that and, and to make wise decisions about your resources, you've got to, you know, your mind has to be clear, free and coherent. So very, very important.
So there's a wealth of resources for those who want to get even more serious. We have a new curriculum called Building Wealth, and it's all about how to avoid all the tricks that these guys do. So I spent many, many years as an investment advisor learning. You know, I thought I knew a lot about the tricks, the games they played, but when you work with hundreds of families, you just learn an amazing amount about what they're up to and how they trick
people. And so we've built it all into something called the building wealth curriculum. That's for subscribers only now, but, um, if you want a deep dive, I would go there. The public resources I gave were, you know, we'll give you plenty and plenty to chew on. There are millions of things you can do. It's far from hopeless. Never, never buy into the hopelessness. The last thing I could do, I just have to make a pitch.
The one of the most important things that protects us all from the abyss is really great, uh, intelligence. So I'm a great believer in actionable intelligence. And I have to tell you, I think there's no more important investigative researcher and author operating today with me than you. And I'm very grateful for your wow. Thanks. That's very humble. I'm very grateful for your work. It helps us tremendously. It's the literary,
you know, I'm always, as soon as you publish something, I'm looking for it. Um, your new series on Jamie diamond is just a barn burner. And um, I, you know, I just have to tell everybody, I know because you're listening to unlimited hangout, you're already onto how great Whitney is, but absolutely support Whitney, donate to her support her, uh, her website, sent her work around because the more we can have excellent people, you know, shining a light on what's going on, it backs the roaches up.
It's just like walking into your apartment in New York. You turn on the light, man, the roaches head for, you know, they head for the corners. So keep the lights on the roaches. It backs them up. Well, thanks so much for saying that. I really appreciate that. And of course I appreciate everyone that supports my work and helps keep me, you know, doing this work I do because I either do it independently of, you know, big donors or I don't do it at all. So, you know,
thanks a lot for saying that Catherine. So as we wrap up here, could you let people know where to find your work and how to support Solari? Yeah. So solari.com and we published the Solari report. Some of the material is subscriber only. We're delighted to have you as a subscriber. There's a tremendous amount that's public. our business model is basically whatever we have to say. When we say it publicly, I do a lot of public interviews.
You can find it at Solari At the News on solari.com And then for people who want to do a deep dive, become a subscriber, there's a tremendous archive. And as I said, this new curriculum, Building Wealth, is really, really designed to help you navigate. I always say, Whitney, there's an official reality and then there's reality. And the official reality is for cocktail parties and reality is for the management of your time and resources.
Don't get the two confused. Anyway, but that's what we try and do. We try and help you see both realities and navigate them and do appropriate risk management to make sure you and your family are healthy, happy, and safe. All right. Well, thanks so much, Catherine,
for being here and thanks everyone for listening. Um, you know, definitely in this episode, I would really encourage people to share this information around because there were a lot of great tips shared by Catherine about what people can do to prepare because really, you know listening to podcasts educating yourself and online Activism is just one piece of the puzzle if you're not doing stuff in your real life to prepare
For what's coming or develop resilience locally, you know or offline, you know You're gonna I really think regret that in the not so distant future if you don't take the time to do that now
So definitely, if you found this information helpful, make sure to share it around. I would definitely encourage people to look for Catherine's interviews and support Solari. I personally get a lot out of their content, including their subscriber only content as well. So definitely take a look at that, if you haven't already. Thanks again, Catherine so much for being here. And thanks again to everyone for listening and people who support this podcast couldn't do it without you. And with that being said, thanks so much, everybody.
And catch you all next episode. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) [Music]