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January 1, 2024

Under a veil of benevolence, the Great Reset engineered by the World Economic Forum (WEF), aims to shift wealth from individuals and small businesses to global organizations controlled by the elite.  As part of this agenda, a revamping of the financial system has been underway for – believe it or not – over half a century, says David Rogers Webb in his recent book The Great Taking and its accompanying documentary.

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Webb’s research and insights demonstrate that the WEF’s dubious catchphrase You’ll own nothing, and you’ll be happy already has risky implications for investments in securities, mutual funds, pension funds, and the like. Investors, he shows, are no longer ‘owners’ of securities; they are only ‘unsecured creditors.’ Besides, investments are vulnerable to the vagaries of the opaque derivatives market.  If the system collapses – he says this is inevitable – investors will not only lose money, they will receive no compensation.

This is the ‘Great Taking’ of the title, the beginning of the end of property rights, deemed the bedrock of prosperity by our Founding Fathers and enshrined in the Constitution.  We no longer really own shares; soon, we no may longer own anything.

Having been an investment manager for decades, Webb has a keen understanding of the markets and the intricacies of the financial system.  He realized early on that Wall Street was out of sync with Main Street: money creation by the Federal Reserve, a privately owned institution controlled by large private banks, dwarfed real economic activity.  The movement of financial markets is in fact steered by private banks and big investment firms.

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During the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s, Webb noticed that the velocity of money – the rate of money exchange in an economy, calculated as GDP divided by the money supply – was falling, indicating an economic downturn.  There was far more money than the production of goods and services warranted.  He realized that important data was being corrupted to fit the script of economic strength and growing prosperity.

During the presidency (2001-2009) of George W. Bush, American manufacturing was gutted by outsourcing it to communist China.  This augmented gross profit, but caused widespread job losses and weakened America’s industrial base.  Even so, spending was maintained through massive money creation (quantitative easing) and debt expansion.  Foreclosures skyrocketed, tax collections fell, municipalities were forced to cut services, and whole communities were destroyed.  All this, Webb maintains, was done at the behest of, and for the enrichment of, the Fed, not for the benefit of the public.

The thrust of his work, however, is on how, from the late 1960s on, property rights to securities were usurped through a series of furtive modifications in how assets are managed and controlled.  It began with the deceptive ‘dematerialization’ of securities to forestall a paperwork crisis.  Electronic bookkeeping eliminated share certificates, which were tangible proofs of ownership.

In 1970, the Banking and Securities Industry Committee (BASIC) was established to standardize and automate the processing of securities certificates and set uniform rules for trading and settlements.  This led to the creation of the Depository Trust Corporation (DTC) in 1973, a Fed subsidiary that would serve as a repository for all securities.  Now known as the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC), it is the world’s largest electronic depository of securities.  Curiously, Webb points out, William Dentzer, a career CIA operative with no background in finance and banking, was made chairman and CEO of the DTC.

The next step was amending the Uniform Commercial Code (UCC) to redefine ownership of securities and change bankruptcy laws.  Full-fledged ownership was changed to “security entitlements,” and the investor was transmogrified into an “unsecured creditor” with mere pro-rata securities claims.  Legal ownership now vests in the entity that controls, but does not really own, the securities.  Issuers can borrow pooled securities as collateral for trading and financing or confiscate them on insolvency.  Securities are now fungible assets held in pooled form, to be taken as needed sans judicial review.

Securities have become collateral underpinnings of the derivatives complex – a trading exchange of financial contracts based on the value and performance of underlying assets or investment instruments.  Derivative contracts – formerly bilateral instruments in which investors knew and could assess the quality of their counterparty – are now run through a central clearing counterparty (CCP).  This opacity makes assessments impossible.  Webb believes the CCP is purposely undercapitalized; the end-game strategy, should the CCP fail, is to merely pre-fund a start-up rather than resurrect the existing institution.