Western “liberal democracies” seem stuck on the road to nowhere. The most dismaying aspect of this is that voters seem entirely unable to effect any course correction of their nations’ ruinous trajectories. If anything, we are only hurling toward collapse faster and with greater conviction. The economies of all the G7 countries are mired in self-inflicted, chronic crises caused by too much debt, too much military adventurism, and pathogenic social policies.
And yet, our elected officials seem determined to deliver more of the same. Even when the people vote for change, the candidates who propose changes are either disqualified from holding office, sabotaged in their work, or otherwise co-opted into perpetuating the same agendas that the voters rejected. The most obvious example was President Trump who won three elections on his MAGA platform, promising to end the forever wars, bring troops home and make the United States a global manufacturing superpower.
The MAGA mirage
Trump had a certain credibility. For one thing, he wasn’t a typical politician and in many ways, his rhetoric seemed like s a breath of fresh air. During his last electoral campaign he called on voters to join him in the battle against the global financier class, suggesting that he understood the ultimate source of our problems. Unlike his predecessors, he didn’t start any new wars during his first term, and tried to withdraw US troops from Afghanistan and Syria. He even talked about withdrawing them from Germany and made a serious attempt to reconcile the two Koreas.
During the first year of his second term he re-established US diplomatic relations with Russia, pacified the Balkans (which were on the precipice of a major war, brokered a cessation of hostilities between India and Pakistan and between Azerbaijan and Armenia. He even pressured the Israeli government to stop their rampage in Gaza and allow humanitarian aid to the Palestinian people.
Then, in February of this year, he shocked the world and many of his supporters by joining the Israeli attack against Iran which he clearly and explicitly promised to his voters that he would not do. It seems that when push comes to shove, our elected leaders can all somehow be coerced to implement policies that serve certain interests, regardless of what the voters demand.
This is even more obvious in the case of Great Britain where for decades, cabinet after cabinet, whether conservative or labour, pursued the same ruinous policies without even pretending that there’s any other alternative on the menu. The will of the British people is hardly an afterthought for their supposed servants in the political class. The same can be said about France and Germany, none of which are ever shy about lecturing other nations about “our values,” freedom, prosperity, human rights, transparency, etc.
What’s the explanation?
If economic, social, and foreign policies are voter-proof, we must conclude that the policies must be formulated, not at the grassroots, but elsewhere. But that “elsewhere” is clearly concealed from view and anyone who begins to notice is dismissed as a communist, conspiracy theorist, transphobe, islamophobe, antisemite, antivaxxer, or some such label. We are also instructed never to ascribe to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence. Stuff just happens because we somehow consistently elect the most incompetent losers to shape our future. So unlucky!
However, even if they are incompetent losers, our politicians seem to be strangely consistent in their policies, and if we draw the line under their performance, it’s clear that we can never seem to get what we want (peace, prosperity, clean and safe streets, etc.), but keep getting more and more of what we don’t want (more taxes, more immigration, more surveillance, more censorship, more wars…). The system’s performance is clearly not random. It follows that there must be some driving force behind it all, and that driving force must have certain objectives in its sights.
About this we have many clues almost as soon as we open our eyes and observe what’s presented around us. Perhaps the best clue was dropped by Mayer Amschel Rothschild, who said, “Permit me to issue and control the money of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws.” Another clue was dropped by the current Prime Minister of Canada, Mark Carney, a former Goldman Sachs banker and governor of the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England.
In November 2020 Carney was the appointed global czar in charge of fighting climate change and at that time, he smugly explained how he planned to do that:
“We need a whole economy transition... it’s really about looking for, and at the transition plans from all companies and backing those who are part of the solution and talking capital away from those who are part of the problem.”
Carney’s statement revealed that the bankers have the power to fund their pet projects and kill the ones they don’t care for. If they can effect “a whole economy transition,” then they hold the power to shape the future of society. We might like freedom, but they prefer us under surveillance, so we get surveillance. We might like peace, but they need wars, so we get wars. We might like to feed our children healthy foods, but they prefer that we all eat fake meat and insect fodder, so they’re killing cows and building insect farms. That, by the way, is part of Carney’s fight against climate change, since science says that cows are destroying the planet.
Another important clue came from Britain’s former Prime Minister Liz Truss. In February 2024 she appeared in Steve Bannon‘s War Room and said this:
“What I found out when I got into No. 10 is, I thought that if I got to the top of the tree, I would be able to implement those conservative policies... And what I discovered was that I was not holding the levers. The levers were held by the Bank of England, by the Office of Budget Responsibility, they weren’t held by the Prime Minister or the Chancellor...”
Truss then pointed out the obvious problem with this: you can sack the Prime Minister, but you can’t sack the BOE officials who hold the levers of power. This all dovetails with the quote that, “the issue which has swept down the centuries and which will have to be fought sooner or later is the people versus the bankers.”
That quote has been widely, but mistakenly attributed to Lord Acton (including by yours, truly). Thanks to AI, I was able to check and find its real author, so I thought I’d set the record straight: apparently, it was Sir Alexander James Edmund Cockburn (also known as Alexander Cockburn), Lord Chief Justice of England from 1859 until his death in 1880.
It’ll have to be fought, sooner or later…
If we accept the premise that the bankers are in charge, and not our democratically elected officials, we can begin to analyze why bankers do what they do, and what incentives drive their conduct. Thankfully, that’s not as complicated as it seems. In a nutshell, Bankers are after quality collateral, wherever and in whatever form it can be found. Collateral enables bankers to issue loans, which become assets on their institutions’ balance sheets, and which all the rest of us get to repay with interest.
If they can issue and control a nation’s money, and the rest of us are obliged to use that money (or else..), then all our debts become their assets. Effectively, we all become their serfs and our democracies provide no mechanism for us to overturn that arrangement at the ballot box, since our central banks are all “independent.” As Alan Greenspan famously told us, no institution of government can overturn the decisions made by the Fed. Therefore, it will have to be fought, sooner or later.
Alex Krainer – @NakedHedgie is the creator of I-System Trend Following and publisher of daily TrendCompass investor reports which cover over 200 financial and commodities markets. One-month test drive is always free of charge, no jumping through hoops to cancel. To start your trial subscription, drop us an email at TrendCompass@ISystem-TF.com, or:
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As an American expat who lived my first 62 years in the USA, I would say your positive assessment of Trump's record in his first term and first year of his second term bordered on erroneous as to his "positive" record. IMO this had been the one weakness in your analyses over the past several years. Trump was "trained" by arguably the most evil American of the second half of the 20th century, Roy Cohn, a NY city mafia thug. (No, they are not all ethnic Italians.) Let me re-phrase that to the most evil American man (thus eliminating Hilary from contention.) Part of his training from Cohn was to learn to lie without the slightest remorse, hesitation, and continuously. He was obviously a "victim" of malign narcissism, going way back to the days that The Simpsons predicted his "rise" to the presidency, which is the more polite way shrinks refer to full blown psychopathy. The 2016 election was a choice between the two leading psychopaths that the US population could offer. If a gun had been held to my head to vote for one of them, it would have been a soul wrenching choice.
Liberal Democracy is an orgy of traitors.