“A shadow is cast wherever he stands
Stacks of green paper in his
Red right hand”
Red Right Hand by Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
In March alone, the month that lockdown in the UK was imposed, 21,000 more businesses collapsed than the same month in 2019.
In May, the Bank of England warned the UK economy could contract by up to 30% in the first half and that unemployment might double over the year, due to lockdown measures.
It is now clear that Britain is in its deepest recession since records began. In the three months to June, the economy shrank by 20.4% according to The Office for National Statistics (ONS).
This is double the fall in the US (10.6%) and nearly double that of the Eurozone (12.1%), including France, Germany and Italy.
Spreading out across the service, production and construction industries, this precipitous plunge into the abyss, occurring over 3 months, has set back the UK by 17 years.
For the year as a whole, it is predicted the economy could shrink by 14%, the greatest drop in more than three centuries.
Unemployment continues to rise while businesses struggle to survive. The jobless rate is expected to more than double before Christmas as the furlough scheme comes to an end and the tsunami of job cuts washes over the nation.
Even amongst those keeping their jobs, many have suffered a great reduction in working hours. This, combined with lowered standards and depressed wages eroded over decades of deregulation, poses an unprecedented threat to the already fragile UK labour market.
Predictably, many large corporations such as British Airways and EasyJet have proceeded to implement sweeping job cuts despite being on the receiving end of generous government bailouts totalling £1.8 billion via the Covid Corporate Financing Facility (CCFF).
On March 17th UK Chancellor Rishi Sunak (who is a former Goldman Sachs banker) unveiled a £330 billion ‘care package’ to help businesses furlough staff. Borrowing surged prodigiously from this period onward.
By the end of July, government debt was just over £2 trillion. However, this is excluding the Bank of England’s contribution to debt, largely as a result of its quantitative easing (QE) activities – the injection of new money into selected sectors of the economy. Following the announcement of QE in June of a further issuance to the tune of £300 billion, the amount of money owed to the state-owned Bank of England, or rather, by the Bank of England-owned state, is now £745 billion.
Now it is a fact that this money, newly created as debt, is actually owed by the government to itself. One must ask, why the necessity for this ridiculous charade? The answer is to hide the fact that it is effectively laundered back through the Bank of England. The Bank acts as a façade, a shell institution, masquerading as a regulator and overseer, but in reality, a front for the City of London.
The ultimate source of this debt, both public and private, and the destination of the interest paid on it, is a network of private banks that create money out of thin air and lend it out at interest.
This network has majority ownership of the mega-corporations that are the primary beneficiaries of the ‘care package’, with the debt interest being paid by the public. Smaller and medium-sized businesses are having to wade slowly through bureaucratic red tape whilst in a state of lockdown, with limited or no earnings. The network looks to buy out struggling businesses and consolidate more power and control with the very money that should have been bailing out those small businesses.
In September, the government drew up plans to carry out up to 10 million covid-19 tests a day (with all the false positives that would entail) by early next year as part of a huge £100 billion expansion. This money will also find its way through to the majority-owning financial network via the private sector companies involved – GSK for supplying tests, AstraZeneca for laboratory capacity, and Serco and G4S for logistics and warehousing.
In the US, in late February, the S&P 500 Index dropped by more than 20% from its high. This was the fastest stock market crash to happen in the United States at any time in the last century, surpassing even the speed of the great stock market crash of 1929.
The U.S. budget deficit this year is projected to hit $3.8 trillion, which would be more than double the previous record set during the financial crisis ($1.41 trillion in FY2009).
The US Federal Reserve added over $1 trillion of newly created money to its balance sheet of debt, in under a month. James Turk of GoldMoney stated in April that the Fed was now leveraged 148 – 1.
For comparison, at the peak of QE in the financial crisis of 2008-09, the Fed bought $120 billion of Treasuries every month.
In April it was buying $70 billion EVERY DAY.
From February 26th to June 17th, a period of 4 months, $2.936 trillion was added to its existing balance sheet of $4.159 trillion to make a total of $7.1 trillion.
It has been argued by Fed apologists that this money exists in a separate circuit and will not “leak” into the “real” economy or the stock market. However, as explained by John Titus of BestEvidence, it is clear when looking at the M2, the most accurate calculation of the money supply, that it rose in tandem with the Fed interventions from $15.15 trillion at the stock market freefall on Feb 26th by $2.82 trillion to reach $18.329 trillion in June, when the stock market returned to its original levels.
The Fed has announced that further unprecedented levels of money would be injected into selected sectors through “open-ended” asset-buying programs to “support the economy”, which will add even more to its current $7.1 trillion balance sheet.
Titus also points out that despite the fact that the Fed expanded its balance sheet by $2.9 trillion, the cheques issued to stimulate the economy only totaled around $0.2 trillion, leaving $2.5 trillion sitting in commercial bank accounts unaccounted for.
In April the US unemployment rate jumped to 14.7% as the country lost a staggering 20.5 million jobs in the worst plunge since the Great Depression of the 1930s.
In the midst of all this, American billionaires have become richer by $434 billion during the pandemic, with the top 5 billionaires gaining $75.5 billion.
Many Main Street businesses are about to go bankrupt and get picked up for pennies on the dollar, whilst Wall Street banks and financial institutions have, in a perverted form of Crony Socialism, gorged themselves on the money spigot. As in the UK and elsewhere, the oligarchs that run Wall Street also happen to own the mega-corporations that, having re-bubbled their stock market value, will devour the distressed smaller business.
It is the same around the world, as wealth is transferred from the lower tier of the disrupted economy into the pockets of the few financial institutions that sit at the top of the pyramid.
The International Labour Organisation has warned that 1.6 billion people risk losing their livelihoods due to the coronavirus and the lockdown.
A spokesperson for the International Monetary Fund stated the loss to world gross domestic product could amount to $9 Trillion, more than the economies of Germany and Japan combined.
Yet, as we shall see, in an Armageddon of interest, the world-spanning Philanthro-capitalistic Pharmaceutical Network stands to carry out the greatest wealth transfer of all time.
For now, it is clearer than ever which end of the puppet strings the financial oligarchs find themselves and on which end the government minions dance…
‘Governments do not govern, but merely control the machinery of government, being themselves controlled by the hidden hand’.
– Benjamin Disraeli, British Prime Minister
Baker Street Rising 
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