Central Bank Digital Currencies – John Titus (Corbett’s Interview 1604)
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Notes
I’ve borrowed this from James Corbett, created a transcript and added some further study resources.
Please do consider visiting the original over at https://www.corbettreport.com/interview-1604-john-titus-on-central-bank-digital-currencies/
I think it provides credible insights around one of the major forces driving the completely disproportiate response to SARS-CoV-2.
Remember, COVID-19 is not Ebola, it’s approaching the range of the 1968 Hong Kong Flu at very worst. In people < 70 years, the infection fatality rate is ~ 0.05%. Woodstock went ahead at the peak of the Hong Kong Flu.
Further Study
All rights belong to Paul Grignon for the Money as Debt trilogy.
- Debt by Design (2017) Book (Free PDF | Buy Printed)
- Money as Debt (2006) Documentary (LBRY | BitChute)
- Money as Debt II: Promises Unleashed (2009) Documentary (LBRY | BitChute)
- Money as Debt III: Evolution Beyond Money (2011) Documentary (LBRY | BitChute)
- How The Economic Machine Works (2013) by Ray Dalio (LBRY | BitChute)
- IMF Live Stream – Cross-Border Payment—A Vision for the Future (2020) (LBRY | BitChute)
- Richard Werner: Today’s Source of Money Creation (2018) (LBRY | BitChute)
Transcript
John Titus ➝ 00:00
And I, the more I think about it, I’m like there’s a crash coming. They need, they need a big, powerful crash to get people aligned, get vaccinated, whatever they’re going to do, but they need a big shakeup event. They need a Mike Tyson punch. Everybody’s got a plan till they get punched in the face, you know, and they’ll be much more amenable to some radical changes if they’re really beaten up. I think a huge crash is coming.
James Corbett ➝ 00:27
Welcome friends, James Corbett here at corbettreport.com and a conversation that’s being recorded on the 2nd of December, 2020 with our old friend, John Titus, who you will no doubt remember from my interview with him about seven and a half lifetimes ago, a.k.a. April of this year. Specifically Interview 1533 – John Titus Exposes the Fed’s Coronavirus Lies, where we were talking about one of the latest additions in his Mafiacracy Now series, which is an ongoing series that if you are not watching, then you are not properly well-informed because he’s doing some deep dives into some extremely important financial matters that I think are really at the heart of the crisis that we are living through.
Although I am dismayed to note that it is still only available on YouTube. So I guess I’ll have to promote your YouTube channel for now. Please get on other platforms, please. But having said that, of course, the links to that I will be in the show notes. And you will note, there is now a preview slash first episode for the season three of Mafiacracy Now, which is just starting to roll out. And I’m very excited about that. So let’s have him on to talk about it in more detail, John, thanks for joining us.
John Titus ➝ 01:37
James, thanks for having me again. Good to see you.
James Corbett ➝ 01:38
Absolutely. Well. Yes. As I say, I think there are many, many, many, many agendas that are at play right now. But I think if there is a base underlying one, it has to do with the changeover in the monetary paradigm that we are being led into right now.
And I cannot stress how important these matters are or how little the average person on the street understands about them, which is understandable because it has never been presented to them in a clear coherent way.
So my hat’s off to you for attempting to even bring these issues to the public’s attention. Let’s do some of that work here. First, let’s just set the table, talk a little bit about Mafiacracy season three, your preview episode, and what you’re hoping to do there.
John Titus ➝ 02:23
Well, the focus of the whole channel really has kind of become the monetary system because the more I studied and the more I read history, the more I understand how important the currently configured system is to controlling everyone. And it’s really the debt based system, the debt based monetary system that enables that control. And it really functions as a great way to control, you know, movements of capital, movements of money. And it controls in through history has done this, although you’re not taught this in your history books, it controls depressions, none of those depressions. Depressions are not a natural phenomenon. They are deliberate, they’re intentional. They are caused by the people who control the monetary system.
December 2, 20210“… the more I think about it, I’m like there’s a crash coming. They need, they need a big, powerful crash to get people aligned, get vaccinated, whatever they’re going to do, but they need a big shakeup event.”
The problem, though, with a debt based monetary system is that you have an interest rate attached to your money that whereby the debt continues to increase at massively higher rates than the real money increases.
John Titus ➝ 03:23
And so you have periodic bloodlettings. And we’ve seen that in 1929 was one, 2008 was sort of surprise, but now the system has spiraled utterly out of control.
And now the powers that be in my way of thinking are looking to, they need to get out of this.
They need to, it’s not that they need to get out of the system. They need to shift to another system of control because it’s gotten too big, the debts are too big.
And so they’re looking for a way to get out. And it would appear to be their choice of the means to get out or the new system would be central bank, digital currencies. That that’s sort of my sort of 40,000 foot take on what’s going on and where my channel is.
So I really want to touch on this in this season and Mafiacracy Now is how does the current monetary system work?
John Titus ➝ 04:21
You know, what are things like reserves, how do they function? How many types of money are there? What are the legalities of the money? Because you gotta remember. The money in the Western world, money in the modern banking era, modern meaning ever since the, basically since the constitution. Money is a legal construct.
And that implicates notions of sovereignty because laws are passed by countries.
And so the next ,way of the central bank, digital currencies, we’re seeing all the countries come together and you’re really starting to see, I think, you know, the first true international law will have to be.
You will have to have some supreme law, some global law, and that’s, that’s another first. I mean, that is a radical change from where we are now, where we are now is we have a series of nations.
John Titus ➝ 05:15
Each nation is sovereign, has its own laws, and that is not, I just don’t see that system surviving if the powers that be have their way. And I say that particularly after watching, and I know you saw it too, an October conference hosted by the IMF about central bank, digital currencies, generally, and about settling payments across borders in particular.
And at that conference, of course, was Jerome Powell, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, and Agustín Carstens, the GM, general manager, of the Bank for International Settlements. And you could see, okay, they’re going to do this and it’s going to bring very radical changes. So anyway, that’s sort of my summary of the situation in a nutshell.
James Corbett ➝ 05:58
And at this point is when I would suggest that people go back and watch the first episode of season three, watch the entire series if you haven’t seen it yet, it is absolutely worth watching. But let’s get into some of this. I mean, you’ve just raised about 15 points, each of which could be its own hour long conversation, but let’s just gloss over some of this foundationally important stuff that you’ve thrown out on the table, including the very important observation that money in our system is a legal construct.
I would say money generally speaking is a social construct, but it has been taken out of the hands of the people and put into the legal framework to make it a legal instrument that’s controlled, controlled by the government, but more accurately by the people who are controlling or pulling the government strings, the people who are creating the debt-based monetary instruments themselves.
James Corbett ➝ 06:45
So that’s an entire field of study right there. Also to visualize what you’re talking about, the debt based monetary system and how that works. I think the best visual cue for that, that I’ve ever seen, was in that Money as Debt documentary series.
There were actually three parts to that. I think a lot of people saw the original part about 12, 13, 14 years ago, when it first came out. Not a lot of people saw part two and probably no one saw part three other than me. But it was a really good documentary series and they, they had a good visual of that system where you are creating money as debt. So it’s, you’re creating these dollars into the system and people are trying to chase the dollars so that they can pay them back and interest.
James Corbett ➝ 07:26
So some, so they’re running on this treadmill trying to get the dollars and some people are gonna fall off because there are not enough dollars being created. And that’s of course that’s why, that’s the point of the system. That’s not a flaw in the system. It is the point to keep people on the treadmill, to keep them running like hamsters in the wheel, I suppose.
Again, foundationally important point, but I want to get to a point that a lot of people ask, because we’ve been hearing about the end of this system and the change over the system for decades, if not, I mean, well, certainly for decades at this point, and people are saying, well, they’ve kicked the can down the road and kicked the can down the road and kicked the can down the road.
Why would it ever end? Why would they ever stop doing what they’re doing? Why would they ever need to change over in the system? Why, why do you think now, why is there this push right now to change over to some sort of new central bank digital currency paradigm?
John Titus ➝ 08:16
Well, there’s a couple of problems that leap to mind. One is that the, just the juice and the interest has gotten huge. And so every year that goes by the interest on the national debt just gets, consumes more and more and more of the total gross revenue of the US.
And eventually, you end up like the guy at the off-track betting facility, who’s borrowing to pay the interest and he ends up with his hands broken, or his kneecaps broken. So that’s one, the interest keeps going up.
So when people talk about, Oh, the interest rates are low because of this and that. No, the interest rates are low because they can’t go any higher. If they go any higher and the interest payment gets any bigger, suddenly a hundred percent of your budget is going to pay the juice and you’re dead. So that’s one, you’re up against that.
John Titus ➝ 09:02
But another one that’s come to light to me recently in my own research is I’ve started a wonder, you know, for a long time, the New York fed, and the New York fed is the, is the regional branch of the 12 regions that handles the sovereign debt of the US, that handles the bonds and the T-bills and also handles a lot of the mortgage backed securities.
For a long time – those transactions are run through the primary dealers – and for a long time, this country’s only had 24 primary dealers. And so you’ve seen over the years, over the decades, banks get more and more consolidated, just like in every industry. You have basically six guys at the top.
In commercial banking, it’s really four. But the sectors get more and more concentrated. They can’t get any more concentrated. And so I think what you’re seeing is as the debt spirals and it gets bigger and you have to buy more bonds, you’re running out of room on the balance sheet, you know, JP Morgan, Citibank, Fargo Wells, they can only take so much under the balance sheet.
John Titus ➝ 10:02
And the same is true for their primary dealers. Primary dealers, remember, they’re not banks. So they got to use their money where they’re brokering a deal with somebody else.
And eventually as the debt expands, expands, and gets bigger and bigger. Like you’re saying on the treadmill, you say treadmill, I use the analogy of musical chairs. You’re running out of chairs. You run out of slots for that debt.
And as that happens, you know, and these banks are less and less able to absorb, you know, treasuries and debt onto their balance sheet, either because they don’t have the money themselves in the case of the, of the primary dealers or in the case of the commercial banks, which can theoretically lend as much as they want.
They really can’t because of capital requirements and capital limitations. And so there, everybody’s feeling the pinch now is the debt gets bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger.
And you got to jump off. You got to get off the elephant where you’re going to, it’s going to run over the cliff.
James Corbett ➝ 10:53
But as the proponents of MMT, which I understand stands for magical money tree theory, tell me that there’s no way that a sovereign debt issuer where it can go bankrupt in the sovereign currency, that they are themselves issuing.
So there’s no problem. Just continue printing money forever.
John Titus ➝ 11:10
Well, the problem with MMT. Be careful not to throw out the baby with the bath water with MMT, they’re still fun double entry accounting is on the money. And to my way of thinking where MMT goes wrong, they don’t know what a sovereign is. They’re telling you. Well, it doesn’t matter that the fed, we can control the fed and you know, really, we’re the principal and the fed’s the agent, that’s absolutely false.
And they’ll tell you, the debt is money and money is debt. And ahaha we’re so clever, I am here to tell you as lawyer money is not debt and debt is not money. They are not the same. They are different.
You use money to pay off debts. So this notion that you can expand debt indefinitely is absolutely 100% false. MMT in a lot of ways is an elaborate mechanism that ends up apologizing for the private issuance of money, which is written in the constitution, it should be, belongs to the we, the people.
It’s really, if you look at article one of the constitution, it’s Congress and the Treasury that should be issuing money, not private banks like the New York Fed and not private banks like JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup and the commercial banks.
And that’s really where the fundamental problem is. Because when they do it, they issue it as debt. Whereas a sovereign, a real sovereign, we, the people, we did with Continentals and greenbacks, and there’s many number of times where real money is issued and there’s no debt attached to it.
And that leads to a situation where when you have real money and there’s no debt attached, that money is indestructable, you can’t just get rid of it.
December 2, 20210“I use the analogy of musical chairs. You’re running out of chairs. You run out of slots for that debt.”
The problem with debt based money is you get rid of the debts, right? You call in the loans, you shrink the money supply, you cause depressions. And the powers that be like that because they can then pick up assets depending on the dollars.
John Titus ➝ 12:56
They can crush all business, they can crush in street. They can pick up those businesses depending on the dollars with that accordion like money supply they’ve got. Now they’ve got total control in under a constitutional system, the money where the, whatever form it takes, I don’t care, gold, paper, whatever, to me, that’s not really that important.
What is important is that our issuing real money, and it’s not debt-based, it’s not expanding, you know, crazily because there’s interest rate attached to it and you can’t destroy it. So you can’t just willy-nilly create depressions, whenever you feel like shorting the agricultural sector or manufacturing sector, or what have you. So there’s a big difference.
So MMT, you know, like I say, it’s, there’s a lot of things that seem, you know, it’s amazing how these theories like MMT on the one hand or any number of others, they fit people’s politics, but they all have a way of circling back around and ended up saying, Oh, there’s nothing wrong with it with a debt based monetary system. That’s the whole problem.
James Corbett ➝ 13:56
I think your analysis there is correct. And also not to throw the baby out with the bath water, and also not to take these criticisms too lightly.
And someone who I think does a good job of that is Bob Murphy, he’s done some deep dives into, for example, Stephanie Kelton and some of these other MMT proponents, and really explained that where they’re going wrong and taking their ideas quite seriously.
So I would, I’ll throw that in the show notes, if people are interested in delving into that in more detail, but now we have the task of attempting to broach the subject of central bank, digital currencies where I’m sure I still, I mean, the question of what are reserves versus what is commercial bank money and how do they play together? And what does that mean when we’re changing over to a central bank digital currency paradigm? There are so many things that we have to try to explain here, hopefully in a few minutes and hopefully in a way that it’s perfectly crystal clear in everyone’s mind, but I will give the test to you.
How would you describe what this central bank digital currency idea that is now being floated by the BIS and being looked at by the Federal Reserve and many other central banks? What is this that they are proposing to do?
John Titus ➝ 15:00
Okay. Right now, let’s just start with the Federal Reserve. The Federal Reserve issues, it’s a bank of issue, which means they create money out of thin air.
And the Central Bank, the Federal Reserve is one of three money issuers in the US.
The other two are one, the Treasury, the Treasury issues coins. The second one is commercial banks, commercial banks issue bank money. And that’s the money you and I have in our checking accounts. We know we, we conduct transactions with credit cards that are commercial bank money. The third issue of money is the Federal Reserve, the Federal Reserve issues right now, two types of money. One is Federal Reserve notes and that’s cash. And the other is reserves.
And if you don’t understand what reserves are, I have a new video up called Wherefore Art Thou Reserves? There’s a big, long section, about 20 minutes long, go to the description box, click on the hyperlink, takes you right to it. It’s about the 15 minute mark, where I walk through what are reserves, but it’s basically a digital, it’s basically digital money from the Federal Reserve that acts as a counterbalance to digital money created by commercial banks.
John Titus ➝ 16:03
And let’s just leave it at that. And those, those forms of money, both of them. Let’s start with cash.
They are on the Federal Reserve balance sheet. Federal reserve notes are a liability and reserves are a liability. They, so they have a corresponding asset. And in both cases, the corresponding asset is typically either US bonds, where the US has to write, the US government has to write an IOU, a billion dollar IOU to the Federal Reserve banks, the private Federal Reserve banks, like the New York fed, in exchange for Federal Reserve notes that those banks create out of thin air.
Or they have to, the US government writes a bond, say a billion dollar bond to get $1 billion of the digital form of money, which is reserves. Okay.
So those are the two forms of money from the Federal Reserve right now. As you saw in that conference call with Carstens and Powell, CBDC, central bank digital currencies are going to be the third type of liability on central bank balance sheets, where the users, by the way of me, let me back up, the users of reserves in our system is commercial banks.
John Titus ➝ 17:19
They use reserves, US government has a reserve account with the Federal Reserve, foreign central banks have accounts with the Federal Reserve. And then those are really the big players with the Federal Reserve. The Federal Reserve is the bank for commercial banks, the US government and foreign central banks, okay.
With the third type of money, central bank digital reserves, it will be digital money. It will be issued by the Federal Reserve, but the users of this money, of this liability on the Federal Reserve balance sheet, will be you and me, it will be regular people.
Okay. So we’ll have in the US, say 330 million accounts with the Federal Reserve where we’ll have a digital wallet or a credit card, or what have you. And then you say, well, what’s, you know, are there really are the 330 million assets corresponding to those 330 million liabilities? How does that work?
John Titus ➝ 18:10
No, it will be one. It will be one asset, it will be a US bond, maybe a mortgage-backed security, who knows. There’ll be the asset corresponding to those reserve accounts. And the big difference now with this to my way of thinking is when you have in the bank money system, you have a lot of issuers of money, so Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo, they’re issuing their own bank money. Okay.
They have to settle transactions at the end of the day because they’re all liabilities and they have to, they have to net out to zero. And that’s the function of reserves in our system is for, it enables commercial banks to settle up and everything balances out.
With central bank digital currencies, there’s only one issue, one issuer of the liability and that’s the bank. So there’s no need to settle.
John Titus ➝ 19:00
And that sets up interesting implications for you. So central bank digital currencies around the world, it’s like, well, okay, if you’ve got a bunch of central bank digital currencies around the world, does that mean that the bank for international settlement will have its own reserve in effect?
I mean, I don’t know. There’s a lot of unanswered questions to this. Another unanswered question is who writes the rules to settle transactions between people in different countries.
Who authors those rules. It won’t be the US, it won’t be England. It will be presumably some supernational organization like the Bank for International Settlements, perhaps, or the Financial Stability Board, or what have you. And when that happens, you know, basically it’s game over for the dollar as US reserve currency, to my way of thinking. That’s just, that’s my opinion.
I think when that starts to happen, it’s the clock is ticking on the US dollar. I think the clock is ticking now. It’s definitely ticking then.
James Corbett ➝ 20:05
There’s so much of import in what you just said there, but I want to draw people’s attention at this point to this video that that you and I’ve both been referencing in recent days is Cross-Border Payments—A Vision for the Future. It was streamed by the IMF on October 19th of this year.
And it’s a conversation between Kristalina Georgieva of the IMF, as well as Jerome Powell of the FED, Agustín Carstens, the general manager of the BIS and a couple of other participants. But you pointed out in your video, a particularly interesting dynamic that’s going on between Agustín Carstens, the rather rotund general manager of the Bank for International Settlements, who is positively wetting his pants over the amount of control that central bank digital currencies will give to central banks over the individual transactions in a way that they’ve never had before versus Jerome Powell, who seems to be tamping down the excitement and saying, Hey, don’t tip the can too much. Tell us a little bit about that dynamic and what’s going on in that video.
John Titus ➝ 21:05
So Carstens gets up and starts talking about the virtues of central bank digital currencies, and he uses a hundred dollar bills or a thousand pesos notes as an example. And he says, let me explain some differences here. He says, problem with a hundred dollar bill is we don’t know who’s using it. We don’t know what they’re spending it on, you know, we’re just, you know, we’re in, we’re in the dark. And then he says, what was central bank digital currencies? We keep track of every penny.
December 2, 20210“So we’ll have in the US, say 330 million accounts with the Federal Reserve where we’ll have a digital wallet or a credit card”
We know where every penny is and this is even better is somebody in a recipient country. So if somebody in America wants to spend their money in Canada, the Canadian bank can just decline the transaction basically. They have to consent to the transaction for it to go through. And he says in this way, because central banks, you know, you have to require their consent.
John Titus ➝ 21:50
We can implement all sorts of policies that achieve higher objectives. And then he goes on, it’s like, well, higher objectives. Like what? And one of one, one of them is efficiency. And that’s, that’s always the one they cite like, Oh, we’re doing this for your convenience.
But then he says, Oh, we’re also doing it for, I think it was the words like inclusion and diversity and you know, the whole green stuff. And it’s like, Oh my God, these guys are using their currency. You’re using your money to implement God only knows whatever policies they have in mind or whatever the flavor of the month is.
And he’s all excited about this. And then there’s a couple, there’s a couple of people speak in between. And then Powell says, Hey man, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa. You know, Powell, this guy cut his teeth. He’s a lawyer. Powell cut his teeth at a law firm called Davis Polk & Wardwell, one of the top 10 most profitable law firms on a per equity partner basis forever.
John Titus ➝ 22:44
It’s a big white shoe conservative law firm. Powell’s like, wait, wait, Hey man. Well, you know, there may be some, some really good things about central bank digital currencies, but there’s a lot of legal issues here. Like, you know, your security, you know, hacking and privacy, it sort of throws a bone. Like there’s an issue of privacy, which of course there is. I don’t really think that’s what he’s worried about.
But, my point is Powell recognizes that what Carstens is waiting into is a very slippery slope from, you know, you’re implementing your policy to you’re writing outright law and you’re superseding the laws of the US and you’re positioning us, the Federal Reserve, you know, we can’t just do whatever we want, Carstens, okay.
The Fed’s got legal limits, maybe that other countries don’t because the US has a constitution. I mean, if it gets too far out of line, you’re going to force a big legal issue and the powers to be don’t want that.
And Powell understands that Carstens does not, but it was a very interesting exchange between those two.
James Corbett ➝ 23:46
You’re exactly right to pick up on that. And after you pointed it out, I went back and rewatched and saw exactly that dynamic you’re talking about. And I think you’re right. I think they’re, obviously, they’re both inclined towards the same sort of excitement over the possibilities of this, but I think Powell is much more concerned about the potential sticky issues.
And I think you’re right. They don’t want to force the issue and make it so apparent that totalitarian tiptoe is always the better way to lead people into a system where the trap can be sprung. And you’re exactly right to point out that, for example, Carstens just happily wades into this minefield, without seeming to even understand that his own BIS innovation hub, which is this new branch of the BIS that’s working on all of these types of ideas, they in all their white papers, they’re always very careful to talk about, well, we can implement this in different ways and we can have more or less anonymity, and we have to weigh these sorts of things.
He just goes in and says, now we can control everything guys.
John Titus ➝ 24:45
Yeah. He just did. He takes a belly flop off the high dive.
Another thing to keep in mind with that dynamic is, you know, think about their respective constituencies.
You know, Powell knows eventually I’m going to get hauled up in front of Congress. I gotta be really careful with this. Carstens constituency is, you know, God only knows who, the BIS the bank for international settlements in Basel, Switzerland is one of the most secret organizations in the world.
Who knows who his bosses really are. And he, but anyway, he’s happy to do their bidding and he can do so without constraint cause he doesn’t answer to anybody else. Whereas Powell does and Powell’s gotta be like, Hey, you know, we have a lot of serious legal issues to think through.
James Corbett ➝ 25:24
All right. You raised another exceptionally important point earlier. The prospect of the changeover of the world reserve paradigm from US, a US dollar to something else in the future, given this digital currency paradigm that’s coming into view.
Let’s talk a little bit about that. Of course, because the specter of Bretton Woods has been placed on the table by none other than Kristalina Georgieva, who recently said we’ve reached a new Bretton Woods moment. And for people who are historically illiterate, Bretton Woods, of course, was the, towards the end of World War II, the big conference in New Hampshire to basically carve out the new monetary order for the world, which really formalized and cemented a process that had been taking place for decades.
By that point, the eclipse of the British empire in the old British led banking system by Wall Street and America and the Federal Reserve and the US dollar is literally enshrining it as the center of the world monetary order. That has persisted for 70, 80 years now.
James Corbett ➝ 26:21
Even though of course it was really formally scrapped in 71 by Nixon all the way that really had barely even functioned. When you get into the nitty gritty details of it. But at any rate, it was formally scrapped in 71 and we’ve had the petrodollar paradigm.
We’ve had other ways of trying to keep the US dollar as the center of the world currency order. But now we’ve got the central bank digital currency.
And as you say, the issue of settlements between different reserves in different countries is going to involve some sort of supernational organization. Sketch that out for us a little bit. What do you think the next paradigm will look like? Who will it be run by? I mean, obviously this is all speculative at this moment, but let’s, let’s talk about how that could plan.
John Titus ➝ 27:05
Okay. so what happens in 71, Nixon closes the gold window and breaks the link between the dollar and gold. And gold was supposed to be the ultimate reserve, right? It would, you could settle all transactions, it’s real money and all that. Nixon breaks that.
We shifted the petrodollar in 73, really the world’s reserve currency as a matter of fact is, you know, other countries trust the dollar. And so they’ll convert some of their paycheck, say in Argentina into the dollar, they’ll have dollar bills.
You know, Powell even said in that conference, I found it interesting that there’s $2 trillion in Federal Reserve notes out there. And he thinks that a trillion of them are abroad. I think it’s north of that, but whatever, it’s a big chunk and that’s not legislated. That’s just a matter of fact.
Anyway, the central bank digital currencies. Take two countries. Let’s take US and Japan. So, you know, I spend say a thousand dollars of central bank digital currency in Japan, and you turn around, James and buy $500 worth of stuff in the US from me. And now, because those were liabilities and, you know, Japan is going to be like, Hey, you know, we just took on a thousand dollars of your liabilities, and you only took on 500 of our liabilities. You owe us, you know, we need to settle. You basically, you owe us $500. How are we going to settle that?
And I think, you know, the one possible, but you know, there’s a lot of potential answers to that. One would be anything that everybody agrees on to settle transactions is just what it’s going to be. So it could be gold. It could be silver, it could be whatever. It could be, you know, seashells, but they have to agree on it.
John Titus ➝ 28:52
But I think the more likely thing is that somebody like the BIS is going to propose, or the IMF or whoever, something like special drawing rights. Where you will have a basket of currencies that will include, you know, all the big players. It’ll be weighted or whatever, and the transactions will be settled that way.
But they’ve got to be settled though, because of the settlement process. And the fact that Powell and Carstens themselves, you know, they’re right, this is monetary policy 101.
Money from central banks, really money in our system, it’s liabilities. And because they’re liabilities, there’s assets that gotta go with them and things they’ve got to balance out.
I walked through that in my video pretty well, I thought. And the same principle would apply to central banks with liabilities issuing cross borders. How are those transactions going to be settled? And is the BIS planning on issuing some sort of reserve that functions as an asset? And if it does, then that will become the world reserve currency, whatever asset that is, because it is the ultimate reserve, the US dollar having broken the link to gold 50 years ago, long time ago.
That’s just kind of my read on that, you know, again, from, from 40,000 feet, that’s kind of where I think this has headed.
James Corbett ➝ 30:17
Yeah. I mean, obviously there are so many variables at play and it could turn out a million different ways, but we see the writing on the wall and when they started woking Bretton Woods and talking about this new form of payment and all of this, I mean, there’s clearly some massive tectonic shifts that are taking place right now.
And again, I think obviously people have their minds on a million different things right now, but I think this is one of the base underlying issues of what is going to be driving world events in coming years.
And I don’t know, I’ve just noted that, I mean, it took depression, World War I, depression, trade wars, World War II, to affect that change over in world reserve paradigm previously.
Do you think that we’re all the way through the crisis yet? That will affect the next?
John Titus ➝ 31:03
I think we’re in the second or third inning and I, the more I think about it, I’m like there’s a crash coming. They need, they need a big, powerful crash to get people aligned, get them vaccinated, whatever they’re going to do, but they need a big shakeup event.
They need a Mike Tyson punch to that. Everybody’s got a plan until they get punched in the face, you know, and they’ll be much more amenable to some radical changes if they’re really beaten up. I think a huge crash is coming. I could be of course be wrong about that, but I don’t see there’s a lot, there’s too many.
There’s a lot of changes that need to take place before they can put this system into effect in the timeframes they’re talking about. Sometimes it’s like, well, how, you know, how is that going to happen by 2023, 2024?
John Titus ➝ 31:48
You know, these, like you say, tectonic is the word, you know, plates under the planet, just don’t shift around overnight. They take years and decades to move. So I think a lot more work has to be done.
I think a crash works to the benefit of the powers that be at the end. I think they’re in a lot of trouble now.
I think we never had an answer to what happened to that repo market, right, back in September of 2019. I never really got a clear answer to that.
And remember, it’s the repo market tends to be the Canary in the coal mine. It was in 2007 to that’s exactly the same things. It was that there start to tremor start in that repo market. And it’s like, Whoa, what is coming our way?
And I don’t know, but I think a crash is coming and I think the powers that be would have be happy with that. Yep.
James Corbett ➝ 32:34
Yeah. I’m afraid you’re exactly right. And, and all the analogies, it’s interesting. You used the according analogy earlier, just as I was thinking that in my head, the blowing up of the bottle and then, and then collapsing it for their own benefit to make their own music to buy up pennies on the dollar.
Also, the tectonic shift. Yeah. It takes years, decades of rubbing. And then finally it happens in what seems like this cataclysmic event that happens all at once. But in fact, it’s been building up for years and years and decades.
John Titus ➝ 33:01
And in hindsight is obvious.
James Corbett ➝ 33:03
Yeah, exactly. Right. It, wow. How did we not see it coming? And I’m afraid you’re exactly right. And it may not necessarily be just a financial crash. It may. I mean, there was a million different types of events or scenarios we could see coming, but I think financial crash would be one of them.
John Titus ➝ 33:18
Right, pandemic being, you know, this is a new to, as far as I know, a new play in their playbook, you know, something, this manufactured, obviously manufactured. I’m not familiar with it with any sort of historical precedent for something.
John Titus ➝ 33:36
But even then I say that the groundwork has been laid for decades now for this precise type of scenario legislatively and otherwise.
John Titus ➝ 33:43
For sure. Yeah. And this, the prepping of the culture to accept, you know, virus, virus, virus, I mean, how many movies have come out along these lines? There’s been a lot of predictive programming to sort of soften the public up, to get them to accept what’s been happening and it’s become this, you know, the virus, the virus, the virus, you know, go jump under your bed. It’s so scary.
But, you know, I just don’t think 20 years ago this would have happened. Viruses weren’t that scary.
James Corbett ➝ 34:12
And I think the digital infrastructure wasn’t in place to affect the sort of shutdowns and moving us onto the digital economy. I mean, so many things to discuss. Anyway, I am sure you will be covering a lot of this in great detail in your Mafiacracy Now series, which will be continuing and spilling out through your feed shortly.
December 2, 20210“Right, pandemic being, you know, this is a new to, as far as I know, a new play in their playbook, you know, something, this manufactured, obviously manufactured.”
And hopefully not just on YouTube, but anyway, I will direct people to your recent video so that they can catch up if they haven’t seen it yet. I think it’s exceptionally important work that you’re doing. So my hats off to you for that. And thank you for joining us today.
John Titus ➝ 34:43
Well, thanks for having me, Jim James, good to see you.
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