The New York Stock Exchange Goes Global
By Joan M. Veon
Overview of how world banking system has been all set up and is continuing to evolve to this day.....for yet greater control of the multitudes... Peace, Joy
very interesting 'accounting'....
THE NEW YORK STOCK EXCHANGES GOES GLOBAL-
THE CHERRY ON WORLD GOVERNMENT
Joan M. Veon
On Wednesday the New York Stock Exchange world's biggest stock
exchange founded 213 years ago will go public. Its goal is to build a
war chest in order to buy up other stock exchanges around the world.
These actions herald a new phase in the new world order.
With stock exchanges around the world going public, it is the New York
Stock Exchange that is the last of the private non-profit companies to
offer shares to the public. You can imagine that if all the exchanges in
the world are listed companies, then the mergers and acquisitions that are
common among other stocks will also be part of the stock exchange empire.
Can you imagine the NYX, as the new public company will be called, buying
the Euronext and/or the London Stock Exchange? Talk about power! This is a
parallel to the central banking power that now runs the global banking
system.
Furthermore, within the last eleven years, the coming of a global stock
exchange will compliment an evolving global currency and global tax. For
those who say world government is far off, you had better point them in
this direction. In order to understand what Wednesday really means, let us
review structures that have been put in place that compliment a global
stock exchange.
When Andrew Jackson was elected President in 1828 he announced in his
first message that he would not renew the charter of America's first
central bank. He ended up vetoing the law Congress passed to re-charter
the Bank. Jackson pointed out that the bank's stock, valued at $8 million,
was held by foreigners--chiefly in Britain. His concern was that a
majority of shares of its stock might fall into alien hands, which if we
were involved in a war, could use its influence against the United States.
In 1913, the question of a central bank came up again. The people involved
in this effort included some of the wealthiest people in America: Senator
Nelson Aldrich (grandfather of David Rockefeller); Jacob Schiff and Paul
Warburg of Kuhn, Loeb and Company, an international banking house; Piatt
Andrew, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury; Henry P. Davidson, Senior
Partner of J.P. Morgan & Company; Charles D. Norton, and Frank Vanderlip,
President of National City Bank which today is CitiGroup. The passage of
the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 was done through chicanery. Those in the
Senate who favored the Act did not go home while those that were against
it went home for Christmas. In a special session convened with quorum, the
Act passed at 11:45 p.m. on December 24, 1913.
With the passage of the Federal Reserve Act, our monetary system changed
back to one of control by a private corporation and not the U.S. Treasury.
Our currency now says, "Federal Reserve Note". Earlier in the day on
December 24, 1913, Congressman Charles A. Lindberg, Jr. stated from the
House floor: "This Act established the most gigantic trust on earth. When
the President signs this bill, the invisible government by the Monetary
Power will be legalized. The worst legislative crime of the ages is
perpetrated by this banking bill." We should note that President Woodrow
Wilson could have vetoed this bill like Andrew Jackson did, but he was put
in power by the same powers that passed the bill.
Since 1913, the Federal Reserve has evolved into a very powerful entity
globally. The Federal Reserve Act has been amended over 195 times with
greater empowerments in the last ten years that have included more types
of discount window loans. The discount window is where banks borrow from
the Fed overnight to maintain their stated level of capitalization. The
Fed now accepts for collateral: Treasury and federal agency securities,
gold certificates, Special Drawing Rights, foreign currencies, and
discount window loans made under Section 13 of the Federal Reserve Act.
What this means is that as the indebtedness of America grows, the Fed is
willing to take more types of collateral to secure their loans to the
government!
As a result of the Asian Crisis in 1997-1998, the Group of Seven finance
ministers, under the direction of President Bill Clinton and then Treasury
Secretary Robert Rubin invited the central bank ministers of the G7
countries to join them in their discussions. Since 1998, it is both the G7
treasury secretaries and the central bank ministers who are directing the
global economy.
The role of central banking in the United States was seen after the crash
of the stock market in 1929. The Crash came about as a result of (1)
America reducing the gold content of the dollar by 40%, (2) Speculation in
the stock market, much of which was financed by credit, (3) Foreign
investors selling their stocks, and (4) the Federal Reserve taking money
out of the banking system which the Fed thought would stop the frenzy. In
other words, this private corporation used the same technique used to
burst the Nasdaq bubble seventy-two years later-they took money out of the
banking system which made the market drop.
The Fed or any central bank is able to create market highs or lows by the
amount of money they pump into the banking system (they buy U.S.
Treasuries, which puts money into the system) or by taking money out of
the banking system by selling U.S. Treasuries. When the Federal Reserve
took money out of the banking system, it caused the Depression. John
Maynard Keynes, a British socialist and economist, came over to advise
President Franklin Roosevelt. His solution was to go into debt in order to
stimulate the economy. President Roosevelt financed all of his New Deal
programs by borrowing money.
The legacy today of Roosevelt and Keynesian economics is that every level
of government is broke: local, county, state, and federal and every level
of government is selling assets in order to pay down debt. In the last
several years, the City of Chicago sold the Chicago Skyway, a toll road to
Spain's Grupo Ferrovial and to a unit of Australia's Macquarie Bank for
$1.8B. Since then other toll roads around the country are being sold. The
ports are part of the same equation.
When President Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected on his 'New Deal for the
American People' program, his first act as president on his inaugural,
March 4, 1933, was to declare a national bank holiday. For the next 8
days, banks were closed because of the number of people withdrawing their
savings in gold.
A little more than a month later, on April 20, Roosevelt passed the
Emergency Banking Act of 1933 which took America off the gold standard.
It put an end to the following: (1) Convertibility of notes into gold for
Americans but allowed foreign countries to convert their gold-backed
dollars at any time and (2) Private ownership of gold was made illegal
except if you were a rare gold coin collector. In essence the American
financial system was transferred from a standard of accountability which
used gold to guard against excess debt, to a system in which there is no
accountability. All a government has to do is print money. This opened the
door for the massive debt which is Keynesian economics at its finest: a
world in debt to a private group of bankers.
However, if you really want to control the monetary system of the world,
not only do you have to control the banking system, but you have to
devalue its money. It was President Nixon who severed any remaining ties
the dollar had to the gold standard in 1971. Between 1933 and 1971,
foreign countries that owned gold backed dollars were able to redeem them
for gold. However, when Nixon closed the "Gold Window", it changed the
monetary system of the world from one in which currency was gold-backed to
a paper system. Basically what Nixon did was to DEFAULT on millions of
dollars that those countries held in their vaults.
There is no other historic incident that can equate the financial
devastation that Nixon did when he took the dollar off the gold standard.
Never before in the 6,000 year history of trade, was a piece of paper being
used. During Biblical times and earlier, traders used animals, jewels,
expensive clothing, and gold and silver to trade. These all have TANGIBLE
value. Today, the world is on a fiat monetary system that has nothing of
value supporting it. The purchasing power can drop simply by government
printing more paper money! From what we can understand, this was the first
phase of changing the monetary system of the world.
The second phase was to internationalize it. In 1944, finance ministers
from over 40 countries of the world met in New Hampshire to set up
financial international institutions that would deal with a post-War
world: the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. Their objective was
to set in place global institutions that would facilitate the financial
and economic integration of the nation-states. That however was not the
immediate objective. Both of these institutions were set in place to
facilitate loans to help rebuild war-torn Europe. Today on a bi-annual
basis, finance ministers from 186 countries of the world meet to determine
the state of the world's finances. Both of these organizations have been
instrumental in 'harmonizing' financial growth around the world and
redistributing growth from strong countries to weaker countries. In fact,
the World Bank established the International Finance Corporation that has
established over 60 stock exchanges in third world countries.
From an economic standpoint, if you are going to put a global economic
infrastructure in place, it must also be political and encompass trade.
The United Nations was established in 1945 and the final piece of a global
trading system was birthed in 1994 when our Congress passed the 27,000
page General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs which established the World
Trade Organization. The purpose of which is to have a completely flat
trading system-no barriers of any kind. No longer does the American
farmer, accountant, manufacturer, or engineer compete with his competition
across town, but he now competes on a global playing field. Since
President Bush II has been in office, 2.7 million jobs have left the U.S.
Open borders supported by the World Trade Organization need for the
countries of the world to de-regulate laws that restrict where people can
invest. In 1980, during the Carter presidency, Congress passed the
Monetary De-Regulation Act of 1980. It impacted the U.S. in several ways:
First, it changed various federal laws as foreigners could now invest in
America and Americans could now invest outside the United States. These
changes led to the proliferation of foreign and global mutual funds,
global mergers and acquisitions between companies, and $2T in stateless
money running around the world daily looking for higher returns and a
quick currency play. Obviously the integration of investments and
corporations is part of making the world one and in changing its currency
from individual nation-state currencies to a global currency. Secondly, it
gave the Federal Reserve more power over the U.S. banking system.
At the 1995 Group of Seven meeting in Halifax, the heads of state and the
G7 finance ministers embarked on putting in place a 'new international
financial architecture'. It included a number of deep empowerments and
structural changes being made to the International Monetary Fund and the
World Bank in order to prepare it for a world without borders. The IMF has
the responsibilities which include "surveillance" of the world's banking
systems and the flow of monies worldwide. In addition, the IMF makes
available lines of credit for countries in trouble, our Congress
graciously made $18B available for this purpose. These changes were touted
by both Robert Rubin and his successor Larry Summers as necessary for the
21st century. This is all part and parcel of the evolving global stock
exchange.
Of course, no take-over of the global economic infrastructure would be
possible without changing key laws. In 1999, Congress passed HR10 which
was the "Banking Modernization Act". It helped modernize our banking
system by repealing the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act which separated commercial
banking from investment banking. HR10 merged these two activities, thus
returning the stock market to pre-1929 times. In addition it provided for
foreign banks, insurance companies, and brokerage firms to buy American
banks, insurance companies, and brokerage firms.
So now if you are going to globalize the entire financial architecture,
you then need international accounting standards. Using Enron as an
exampled, former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker called for
international accounting standards. The fact that he is chairman of the
Board of the Trustees for the International Accounting Standards Committee
(IASC) which is located in London was very convenient! Now countries
around the world are converting to these new rules.
Getting "Joe Average" into the market was also necessary. By the end of
the 1990s, the highest number of Americans, 45%, owned stocks either
through a 401k, IRA, or personally. Today, the market has a psychological
affect on people. When it is up, people feel good and when it is down,
they are not happy. When Greenspan was Fed Chairman, the bottom line is
that "When Greenspan speaks, the markets listen".
Lastly, to facilitate a global financial architecture, you need
"a market-based democracy" - that is what Treasury Secretary John Snow
called it in February, 2004. He basically told the world that every market
is dependent on growth in another country and that we need to let market
forces work.
Secretary Snow was signaling the new MARKET BASED GOVERNANCE
SYSTEM in which the stock, bond, commodity, and currency markets now rule
the world. This change has been coming for some time and began with President
Reagan and the privatization or selling off of government assets that he
encouraged. Those assets, in some cases, went into the market. The World
Bank also developed the market by setting up stock exchanges in many
developing countries where there were none: China, Russia, Brazil, South
Africa, Ghana, Poland, etc. To help these countries have stock to trade on
their new exchange, they sold or privatized state owned assets: railroads,
banks, telephones in order to list them on their new exchange. According
to the World Bank, more than 80 countries are selling state-owned assets.
At one point in our banking history, banks held the loans they made as
part of their portfolio: mortgages, automobile loans, credit card loans,
and personal loans. Today, banks have sold them and transferred the risk
that they use to assume to the market (you and me). This technique is
called 'securitization.' What this means is that the market now is like
the kitchen sink-everything is in it: mortgages, auto loans, credit card
loans, home equity loans, stocks, bonds---everything and now stock
exchanges!
In 2002, based on remarks by Dr. Jacob Frenkel, I asked him if he saw a
global currency in the market for a globalized world. He told me that
before we could have a global currency, we needed harmonization of
economies. Eighteen months later I asked former Federal Reserve Chairman
Paul Volcker if we needed a global currency and he told me, 'For the long
term-but it's a long ways off, if we are going to be successful in a
globalized world, we should have an international currency. Since 2004, I
have been asking key officials at the Bank for International Settlements
in Basle about a global currency, they have told me it is a long way off.
I don't know what they call "a long way off" for chief economist William
White just issued a Working Paper, #193, in which he says the global
imbalances that the world economy currently has will lead either to a
return to the gold system (which is highly unlikely since you can't print
paper like we are currently doing) or an international currency.
So now we have the harmonization of world economies, the calls for an
international currency, a market based system in which all assets are now
traded on the stock or bond exchange and we are seeing now the rise of a
global stock exchange! All we need now is global taxation and that too, is
in the works.
The United States is the only country in the world NOT to have a Value
Added Tax and this is now part of President Bushes "tax simplification"
measures. As well, France is the first country to put a tax on airline
tickets to help the poor countries of the world. There are ten other
countries that are considering it as well. I asked French President
Jacques Chirac what he thought about a tax on airline tickets and he told
me that if it was a success many more global taxes of this kind were
being planned. Welcome to the new world order. World government is not
coming. It is here.