Banker Disruption Causes Delay in Publishing

'Mind the Gap' vicious cycle of verification eats up hours and days

An apology to subscribers for the absence of content so far this month. We’ve had to deal with a ban from Twitter, the uninvited arrival of a queen cat who delivered her litter, and that plague of expats, the expiring phone subscription. No matter whether you have tens of dollars stacked in the account, you didn’t use it for six months and now it’s gone.

To top it off, you log in to your online bank and it seems to have heard from your cell phone provider. So, for the first time in two years, the bank demands to send an SMS to your just-expired SIM card, despite having two “trusted” devices, a PC and a “preferred” phone available by Wi-Fi.

Tranferwise/Wise knows who I am, has previously verified my passport/identity, home address, knows the mac (media access control) address of two devices, has a two-year record of my location and spending habits…

And yet it decides that “for my safety” it must re-do the KYC (know your customer) rigmarole.

This is one of the mindsets (mind cramps?) behind The Great Reset. This box-ticking approach to humanity provides what passes for the moral sense of the bureaucratic self-selecting elite.

The other mindset is the Malthusian depopulation agenda which so many of the same financiers and industrialists support. This mystery alignment is the topic of an article in the works. We hope to have it with you in a day or two. In the meantime, take a step back, and consider the outlandish idea that our familiar Main Street faces are a source of the present turmoil.

May 5, 2022

Nick Youngson

Originally published: Jul 13, 2021

After suffering the latest round of mind-twisting insanity known as online banking, it dawned on me: the global response to Covid is banking on steroids.

The assumption of the customer’s malintent, every citizen an asymptomatic carrier requiring ever-more elaborate security kabuki, which in turn generates endless false positives locking you out of your account, while the banks work hand in glove with the real crooks who deal in nothing smaller than tens, even hundreds of millions…

Lock down the masses, drain their lifeblood, block their movement, paralyze their ability to exchange. Send them to an app to verify themselves. Again and again and again.

If you want to know who is behind Event Covid, the ever-changing regulations, masks bad-masks good, stand up wear a mask-sit down take it off… this is the doing of bankers. This is exactly the rigmarole they put us through to transfer $200 from A to B.

Covid has got the bankers’ fingerprints all over it — along with a dose of telltale Microsoft misanthropy. However hard you try, you will never succeed in complying. Eventually you concede, as you do in the face of Microsoft Windows: it’s broken but enough of it works. If you try to dot all the I’s and cross the T’s, it’ll never end.

Spending hours on the phone trying to add a bank account to PayPal or verify your identity only to get locked out the very next time you try to log in, or those tortuous weekends spent Activating Windows, has the same familiar tone as days locked down at home, complying with irrational and ever-changing demands.

Suddenly it makes sense that Bill Gates hails from a family of Federal Reserve bankers. He has the exact same mindset: the people are livestock who exist for Gates & Co to corral and vaccinate and tag and license and and slap with penalties for moving out of your box. At the end of the day Gates and the bankers will give the same smug riposte: you failed. Try again later.

You never exit verification because there is always a bank card that’s just expired, or a login from another city on a business trip or an innocent slip that triggered the algorithm — or you just tried to verify too many times. Details of existing bank accounts are never enough. After you have provided snapshots of passport and driving license one’s doubts begin to give way to suspicions. Maybe it’s this way by design.

This is what the PCR tests are about: they can find anything by increasing the cycle threshold; you are never fully compliant. Your vaccine passport is good until the day it’s not. Then you are asked to undergo another verification.

Banks love lockdown

If retail bankers could lock down everything and not see any money or customer data go out the door, they’d be happy. Sadly for them, they’re a a sour, unhappy bunch because they must transact and compete, even at low margins.

That is why they try so hard to stifle competition and slow the process of transactions, even as they shoo us onto smartphone apps. That is why they dream of a world in which banks have final and complete control of every aspect of our lives.

Forgot your pin code, go reset it on your phone. Changed your number? Oh, your bad. Now stuck in a loop: “your phone number or your pin is incorrect.” Try to reset. “Your phone number or your pin is invalid. That mobile number doesn’t look right” — the warning comes with a large red X: locked down, go no further.

The customer rationalizes: why does the bank care about the old phone number? I can hardly verify it nor can they ping it. Just verify the customer a different way and then update the number.

“Your papers are not in order. It says a different phone number here. Why haven’t you still got that phone. Why did you change your number?”

After this runaround I imagine that even the AI chatbot is passive aggressive. Its questions smack of the tortuous lunacy of an insane television bad cop with a chip on his shoulder.

Trust “the safe”

We’re just keeping you safe, the banks will claim. It’s all for a good cause: your ultimate and absolute security. Like the Covid slogan, “No one is safe till all are safe”, it is patent hokum.

Actually, banks are quite tolerant of fraud, and they do quite a lot of funky business themselves. For decades British and U.S. banks resisted smart chips in plastic cards because, they claimed, it would require new infrastructure. Meanwhile European banks were using chip and pin to reduce fraud successfully.

Anglo banks tolerated the cost of fraud — because it was customers, not banks, who bore the cost. By ignoring fraud and passing the cost on to insurance companies, the Anglo banks largely waved the problem away. So when banks say your safety is our priority, pull the other one: it’s got chips on.

For decades the punishment for banks taking risks with other people’s money has been ever-lower interest rates and more — of other people’s money. When a banker and a drug pusher promise to keep you safe, you’re probably better off with the pusher.

When banks make a song and dance about ordinary citizens complying with anti-laundering rules it has nothing to do with fear of drugs. The retail banks make billions from the proceeds of heroin and fentanyl sales, as the prosecution of HSBC showed. In 2012 the U.S. Department of Justice slapped HSBC with the biggest ever bank fine in history – almost $2 billion – for laundering drug money. Yet the DoJ only went after foreign banks.

Why, then, are banks suddenly so obsessed with security and verification. It’s about making banking slow as molasses so that customers wade knee deep, while banks scoop up and sell their data, and snoop on behalf of the U.S. Treasury through its Fatca reporting regime. This is the weaponisation of the U.S. dollar yet it’s also ingrained in banking mentality.

Competition, not drugs or security or your safety, worries the banks. Why can’t you transact between PayPal and Stripe? Because they’re in the same business, so both companies avoid cooperation. Why do supposedly digital online banks demand that you hold a physical debit card or demand that you register a checking account: because that pushes you back into the clutches of the traditional banks. Without the need for a physical card you’d be able to bank with whoever you like. The banks admit this privately but in public they’re evasive.

“Some of your info isn't correct. Please try again.”

That’s a lie. My user name and password are correct.

Why do banks lie, instead of admitting that it’s just another security check? Does it help anyone when banks, whose selling point is honest broker, lie to their customers?

Banks love social credit

Don’t ever get on the wrong side of the banks because they tittle-tattle to each other. Social credit scores were invented by the banking and insurance industries.

It is a fact that the banking industry and our friend Mr Gates of Microsoft have been discussing for decades how universal digital IDs would help them control even more of your wealth.

The opportunities are obvious: eliminate cash transactions, shut down the black market, take effective control of all flows of commodities including food, track all wealth, switch people’s access to money on and off, integrate tax at source, impose universal basic income and social credit, and whatever other social engineering or political desires the bankers are harbouring.

The Federal Reserve for its part is keen to eliminate cash, because its business is credit and the coinage falls under the U.S.Treasury. Event Covid just happened to come along when the monetary system had hit a brick wall after decades of money printing and refusal to address the banks’ manipulation of the markets through successive booms and busts. Since the repeal of the 1930s Glass Steagall Act, the banks have been gambling with our assets, privatising the profits and socializing the losses.

Why would the Fed stop such malfeasance when the richest banks gain from it? With each boom and bust the banks inflate asset prices and then tank them. Yes, it is deliberate manipulation. Read J.K. Galbraith’s The Great Crash. After each crash the banks call in debts, taking assets as collateral. Each time they own a bit more of the pie.

In 2008, instead of letting prices settle after the bust, sitting everyone down and accounting for who owed whom, the Fed just printed ever more money. This ensured that asset prices kept rising in nominal terms so that banks never had to confront their losses (or their own insolvency).

There was a fatal flaw: there was never enough money. It proved impossible to stop printing money. Every time the Fed reached to tighten the spigot, the market panicked and hoarded cash until there was nothing available to borrow even as interest rates jumped. That is what happened in autumn 2019 when the interbank market seized up.

Banks foresaw Co-Vid

Big investors were already advising the Federal Reserve to print money and give it directly to companies, public and private, instead of the traditional quantitative easing via banks and the treasury bond market. In August 2019 BlackRock, an investment vehicle of some of the world’s richest people, told the Fed to put trillions of dollars of stimulus money “directly into public and private hands when the next downturn arrive,” as the financial commentator John Titus explains.

So the stimulus response was put in place before Covid was even a thing and it was planned by big investors in collusion with the Federal Reserve – not a government agency, by the way, but a cartel of 12 private banks.

In September 2019 the interbank market froze up. Institutions couldn’t borrow money even at rates of 8% a day. The Federal Reserve had a choice: let interest rates skyrocket or shut own the economy. It decided to freeze all borrowing and lock down the economy. The lockdown was not triggered by the coronavirus pandemic. It was part of the monetary plan presented to the Fed six months before.

And so we got Event Covid. Why does the state-corporatist media not tell us this? Its silence is the answer. The media is owned by those same banks and investors. That is why it ignores the very obvious connection of the financial apocalypse in late 2019 and the response to Covid. “The ‘novel’ coronavirus pandemic marks the greatest turning point in U.S. monetary history since the creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913,” writes Titus.

The central bankers had just met at Jackson Hole to discuss “going direct” which is a euphemism for the Fed printing money and giving it to private entities. Later the central bankers let us know that they were considering a major shape up of the monetary system — not just a new kind of money but a new system of exchange, one that is digital, universal and that a built-in calculation of energy use. Yet another plan for which Covid is a useful coincidence.

In November 2020 the City of London, the financial hub that’s home to Britain’s banks, hosted the Green Horizon summit on the “role of green finance in the recovery from COVID-19.” It turns out that this climate-driven agenda serves the same ends as the BlackRock monetary plan. Green Horizon, presented by central banker Mark Carney, former governor of the Canadian and English central banks, says “unsustainable” companies will die as part of The Great Reset.

That means small and mid-size companies will perish because they cannot afford the bureaucracy to comply with environmental, social and governance (ESG) criteria. Nor can ordinary businesses afford to buy carbon offsets to avail themselves of unforseen energy consumption or resulting pollution.

We are being sucked into another’s mind. So many people show signs they are trying, but failing, to accommodate themselves to this alien world view. The media circus are likewise showing ever greater evidence of dissonance as they bleat and fact-check until they are blue in the face.

This mindset belongs to someone. If they don’t claim responsibility in public we must find the owner and make clear we want no part of it. For it is a sickness, a diseased mind that, unlike the rest of us, needs to be quarantined.