RULERS OF THE WORLD
RULERS OF THE WORLD
by William Thomas
THE COLLECTIVE
The 500 or so members of the world’s richest investment firm call themselves, “The Collective”. “They sit within the Golden Triangle,” he explained. A triangle with three sides joining Industry, Government and the Military.
And they play. When you move hundreds of billions of dollars in a heartbeat, it’s easy to fuck with entire countries, Deep Pockets says.
One day a guy who worked closely with Banker’s Trust in New York had too many margaritas at lunch. “He got pissed and decided to smash the Australian currency to pieces, while sitting in his car.”
They get away with it because “everyone panics.”
“The primary banks are old school The big banks run the rest of the banks. The Federal Reserve is not separate but part of it.”
The young money brokers just laugh at big shot CEOs. “They’re nothing because the banks run ‘em,” Deep Sky explains. “The bank decides how a company gets how big its going to get and how much power it has. No questions. Period.”
Especially if he has 10 to 1 positioning in the banks. Give me a billion; I’ll let you trade on the foreign exchange with 10 billion - I’ll give you a float of 10. So even the big guys get owned, as they increase their risk.
MOVEMENT IS MANDATORY
The big money is in the movement of money. “Where’s there’s confusion, there’s profit. That’s set in stone. Financial markets have to have movement to formulate profit.”
Tranquility is anathema to the money movers, who” cause problems to get the reaction they want.”
DISASTERS ARE REQUIRED
Any big disaster or movement just makes them more money. Disasters are required.
THE IRAQ SCAM
He described people without morals, stressed out, running the show. “Sept. 11 was nothin’. The war is nothin’. Why is Iraq being crushed? So they can buy it cheap, and then come in to make it more valuable. It’s a formula for mass murder. And they don’t care.
He would go to parties and listen to conversations, thinking: You’ve got this, you’ve bought this – you must feel very proud.
Then he’d hear from the dwebes: “The war’s about freedom.”
And he would say, “Aw yeah?”
“It’s about oil.”
“Oh, okay.”
“It’s about our shores. We’re targeted.”
“All right.”
But Deep Pockets was really thinking, Oh, that’s why it happened. I thought it was because Jerry got drunk, had too many margaritas.
There are so many tiers of movements that people don’t count on. Like an audience mesmerized by a magician’s patter and sleight-of-hand, people keep looking at an incident and don’t see what is really going on.
OUTSIDER TRADING
A whole world that runs on Insider Trading, Deep Pocket asserts. “Outside Trading is done by all the bankers in charge of the Federal Reserve and the world. They decide where a currency goes – where it will bottom and turn it. They agree among each other where they’re going to turn it and lid it.”
“It’s a pyramid. Those at the top know more than those further down the food chain. The Federal Reserve has nothing to do with the government – except dictating policy.”
RUNNING THE WORLD WITH THE CARLYLE GROUP
Speaking of money brokers, he said, “When they do big movements they have close ties to the Carlyle Group, who have close ties to the banks. They warn a senior banker if a big upcoming transfer. They piggyback on each other and amplify the movement. They run the world.”
“The Carlyle Group – they’re one of the biggest cogs in the whole thing, Because they’re at the center of the financial movements between congress and the military.
As for the war against Iraq…
“The Collective calls it, ‘urban renewal’. You blow something up and then you fix it. You get money to build a rocket to send into a village and blow it up. Then you get money o go in and fix it. The Carlyle Group’s going to make billions out of Iraq. They get paid to facilitate things getting blown up. They get paid to go in and repair And there’s a four-year old kind in Iraq with a stick going, ‘What was that all about?’”
“The Falklands, the Iraq war, were created. They weren’t accidents.”
You don’t look at what’s happening. You look at who’s making money. You’re either in or you’re out.” “Bubble Wrap” is what people are called in banking circles because ordinary people are seen as “important packaging” for the activists the bankers want carried out, whether buying a house with a mortgage or starting a war with taxpayer’s money.
Though GW Sr. has left Carlyle’s direct employ, “Nobody leaves the old boys network,” says Deep Pockets. Bush Sr., he says, is too high profile; He’s better off as a “floater” - not a solid, accountable position. He’s “better off just being someone to go to lunch with.”
You get Junior dealing with the Carlyle Group and the Saudis. The Saudis are hooked up with the banks, If they want to create a disturbance to facilitate funds transfers between countries” - sell short – “most money made when one currency drops, one goes up. They can cause turbulence in a country and sell it [‘s currency] off. Buy a currency at 50 and sell at 80 [cents on the dollar] – that’s a pretty good return.”
“They deal in thousands of billions of dollars – a huge amount of wedge. It’s not the corporations that run America. It’s the banks.”
Money brokers like to say, 'Where there’s movement, there’s profit.'
The reason the Carlyle Group’s so intimately involved is because the banker needs this as mediation between actions and funds transfers. Bankers say, 'We want movement, and the CIA engineers it'.”
STIFFIES AND TEARS
In this vicious, conscienceless world, survival is uppermost, Deep Pockets says. “They don’t care about the consequences.”
“When big banks have arrangements with Carlyle, it’s almost worth causing a war in a country to drop [its] currency… They have no conscience. It’s not about people – their feelings or lives.”
In the end, there are only “Stiffies” and “Tears”. As Deep Pockets explains, “You want to make sure that you’re the one who’s got the stiffy, and they’re the ones with tears.”
IT’S RIGGED
While everyone remains riveted on wars, few see the countries and currencies that are being transformed for perpetual corporate profits
“Billions are moving through Carlyle. Country’s economies are being changed” through “global confusion, which creates money movement.”
“All you want to do is make them run around. You need chaos to facilitate movement.”
What if it all collapses?
He laughs long and hard.
“Collapse? That’s some broker on the radio. There is no collapse. There is only up and down. While people are looking at something collapsing, some people are making a lot of money.”
Speaking financially,
“Something can’t collapse unless it’s being sold, it means someone is in a short position.”
“They sell it off. And buy it back.”
The scam is “primarily controlled out of Zurich. That’s why no one’s fired a bullet at that place. No one told them to. Have you noticed that all the wars happen in shit countries where there’s nothing to gain?"
"The guys with the gold make the rules. It’s the oldest rule in the world.” The rule you live and die by are very different from the rule they create for themselves. They make the rule for everyone else and they make their own rule.”
"NEWS" IS A SIDESHOW
“It’s a circus. I’ve seen it from the other side. I can’t look at anything seriously. It’s really just a bunch of lads having fun, making money, having a lark and causing the world to move the way they want.
“If you get a guy like Saddam and the Saudis and some guys in the Carlyle Group” - then “you can dictate to Bush what they need to keep going.”
“Money was the reason Sept. 11 happened.” It was about “nothing as small as oil pipelines.”
“The money market doesn’t produce anything. They only make money by moving money. The only thing produced is profit.”
“This is why I laugh when I see Martha Stewart handed a stick for some pots and pans deal.” He laughs now, but there is little humor in it. “And these guys are running amok.”
“Politics are designed to give the common man a sense of involvement and distraction – keeps him busy so we can do what we do best: make tons of money, while producing absolutely nothing.”
ON THE STREETS OF SYDNEY
At the age of 12, “I was doing what I wanted.”
At 15, he left home. He moved onto the streets. He was as quick and sharp as a feral dog. From 15 to 19 he worked as a bouncer in a club King’s Crossing in the red light district of Sydney – “the roughest part.”
“And the street punks are the best at it. It’s survival of the fittest. And it’s kill or be killed…Some of the best brokers in the world were street kids.” They are “quick, brutal, can think on their feet.” One day when he was 19, he was standing at a bar with a customer. Brian ran one of the brokerage houses in Sydney. We’re talking money brokerage, not piddly stocks. “I remembered him because his watch worth $60,000.”
The kid looked after him – moving people out of tables he wanted, so that Brian could have some space. They got chatting. After a bit, Brian looked straight at him and said, “You’re actually quite sharp aren’t you?”
Brian recognized he was “pretty street smart”. He asked the kid, “Ever thought about doing something else?” “Every fucking night.”
Brian kept looking at him. “You’d make a good broker.”
“What’s that?”
“You buy and sell currency.”
“Oh,” the kid said. But inside he said, “Oh yeah!”
So he cut his hair off and got rid of his earring. “Brian bought me five suits.”
He went to work and got his eyes opened wide.
BRUTALITY REDEFINED
“I thought the street was violent and rude and horrible. That was nothing!” He laughs. International currency trading, he found, is “The most brutal killing machine in the world.”
But it was creative, too. “Chaos and harmony” at the same time. Violence and beauty in one.”
Just like the universe.
ASTRONOMY LESSONS
“The galaxy brings it into perspective. Suns like specks of sand.”
“The hub of the wheel is the financial hub and everything else is just plugged into it The volume of money that moves is so preposterous in most people minds like astronomy so big and so far away.”
“The money markets put me into astronomy because it was the only way I could get a perspective. Like they’re runnin’ on the moon and looking at the Earth. They run the world like ant farm.”
FEEDING FRENZY
He talked about “$20 million traumatic seconds” as a money mover. The twenty-somethings would gather for lunch and have a laugh. “We’d joke we would [retire and] do something slow like air traffic control or bomb disposal.”
Spot currency brokering is the “fastest, riskiest job in the world,” he asserted. At work he was confronted by “20 banks of phones on each table.”
And there were 15 guys around him, “each with 20 phones, linked to centers” with their own banks of brokers and phones. He would sit there listening to 14 guys, each of them talking to 10 other guys and follow it all. He got “so tuned to ambient conversation” he could sit in a restaurant and know what everyone at eight tables around him was saying.
“It’s a fucking feeding frenzy,” he said. “We’d move billions of dollars a day in our own center – trillions on a global scale.”
SENDING ROCKS
“That’s gonna send a rock through that country. They must be looking at real estate over there.”
“We’d see the effects in the real world three days later, and it would be in the news for months.”
TRADER JARGON
“The average Joe thinks $300,00 is a lot of money. Most bank’s float is a million.” A million dollars is called a “buck”. “The average transaction is five. If someone offers one – fuck off, not interested.”
A “yard” is a billion.
“I want to move a few yards out of Saudi this afternoon.”
“Line ‘em up.”
Boom!
“Next.”
Half a million is half a buck. Round up to within a million – float in till. Go after people for a buck. “Small Willie” syndrome. As a 20 year old street kid fresh from his years as a nightclub bouncer, he’d toss another half-a-billion dollars into the markets before lunch, like chips in a perpetual casino, making millions for his bosses before his cohorts had finished their first margaritas.
After coming to work in a casino that never sleeps, “Between six and eight, I would move a half-billion dollars in fund transfers.”
A friend called him up and asked how he’d like to cruise the Great Barrier Reef for a month aboard a 55-foot Robertson ketch. Sat nav, sat com, a big Zodiac and lots of scuba gear.
He said, “right.” He went to work and told the owner he wanted to take some time off without pay. “No,” came the reply.
So he left. When he came back from sailing and diving inside the Great Barrier, his former boss wouldn’t take him back. So he called his opponents. “How much you making?” they asked him. He inflated his former salary only about $20,000. They gave him another 30 on top of that.
After he was working for them awhile, his former employer decided he wanted him back. “How much they paying you?” he was asked. As expected, he added a bit to his current salary. And as expected his former employer nearly doubled it. He told his new old boss, “That was expensive wasn’t it?”
But of course no one cared.
But something was starting to bother him big time. “The mindset behind it all.
“There’s gonna be some movement around this,” the money movers decide. “And yes, the war in Iraq.”
The tried and proven formula is to “scare everyone. Get three million people to do what you want by taking out 3,000. The sniped and anthrax just back up the scare tactics. ‘We need to kill this guy in Iraq.’ ‘YEAH!’ Off you go.”
MATH AND WEDGES
In the money markets, he learned, “two and two equals seven. It doesn’t equal four. It’s a different dimension.”
His job: “Drive a wedge into wood and it starts to split. When it starts to split, it opens up.”
A MORNING’S WORK
The largest banks in the world, federal reserves from the biggest nations, are on the phone to Deep Pockets: “The Aussie hasn’t been sold off has it?”
“It won’t be going past the figure,” he assures a voice on the other end of a phone connected to a power greater than kings. He means that the Australian federal reserve is buying the Aussie dollar “at the figure” – or at 00, the bottom of a cent. If the Aussie fed could be forced to buy its own currency as “05” or half a cent, big money could be made by whoever had bought low.
KOP Helsinki comes on the phone in the morning, which is really out of his time zone. “What’s the Aussie dollar?” Deep Pockets is asked.
“At the money,” he answers briskly. “It’s suiting steady in early market this morning: 78.85, 78.90.”
This half cent difference divides the buying from the selling price for the Australian dollar.
“From where I’m sitting I’m thinking it’s sitting at 50 offered – down to five,” says the voice on the phone. With a play in the making Deep Pockets pays even closer attention. “So what I want you to do,” The voice continues. “You have my approval to move the currency from 90 to 5 and at this figure I pay. Off you go and give and give me progress reports.”
Deep Pockets has just been ordered to move the Australian dollar down another half cent in its selling price, doubling the spread between the buying and selling price to a full cent - a monster move in any currency.
Deep Pockets turns to a table crowded by phones and money brokers as young as himself. “Get my price on 20, 50 , 80, 90, 100,” he orders, speaking in shorthand for volumes in millions of dollars – called “units” by the traders.
“At the bid, yours,” he confirms. Meaning, if you get the new asking price, buy hell out of it.
Within an hour, the traders have goosed the Aussie currency, forcing it to “move a dollar” – or 1Australian cent – down from the morning’s opening price. If they sold three billion dollars at 75, driving the price down, and bought back the currency 1 cent lower, their bosses have make some three-billion cents or $3,000,0000 on the action.
That few hours’ work has also bankrupted businesses, ruined lives, stressed families and possibly triggered severe depression, addiction and divorce among faceless victims who are their own countrymen and women.
“There’s carnage and tears and blood everywhere,” Deep Pockets says. “But they don’t care about that.”
The only thing that comes out of the carnage is profit - pieces of paper with words and numbers powerful enough to make or ruin lives. Yet, nothing is produced. While the financial markets sit behind every headline, no one can point a finger at anyone. No one is accountable. Everyone tells each other, “This is what we have to do to make money.”
HARD CORE CRAZY SHIT
Money markets move about a hundred-times faster than the rest of the world. “It’s the fastest, highest-risk most immediate work anyone in the world can do. Which is why I look at everything else like a joke. There’s nothing like it. Very addictive. It’s the ultimate power position. Young guys 20 years old driving around in convertible Mercedes, sniffin’ cocaine, prostitutes…walkin’ through six security doors in the morning. Guys get into it.”
“We’d sit around, you know, young guys, laughter at lunchtime.” They looked at stock brokering “like a retirement village.” Somebody would mention quitting an insanely high-pressured rat-race where millions of dollars rides on lightning decisions and exchanges, each as quick as a knife-thrust – and almost as dangerous.
“I’ve seen guys die."
So somebody would mention moving over to becoming a stockbroker and the groans and jeers would start like he’d flipped a switch. And what he’d get would not be some MBA bullshit. The boss asked what he knew and the new kid recited some degree and the boss said, “Never mind all that. Go downstairs and get me a sandwich. With two centimeters of pate on it and two tomatoes. On white bread. Do that. Because that’s what counts around here.”
“Aw yeah,” the young tigers would growl. “It’s too quick around here for you.”
If the person persisted in his expressed desire to quit a fraternity whose brotherhood was as tight as street kids, combat veterans, they’d sneer, “Fucking Nancy. Gay boy.” – money street slang meaning stock-brokers.”
Deep Pockets says, “We were the hardest core of anyone on the planet. Nothing came close. I saw guys blow up. Physically and mentally. Start to cry. Just lose it.”
He paused. Though we had never met in person, I could see him shaking his Aussie head over the phone. “It’s crazy shit.”
QUITTING TIME
“While you’re all looking up” – at chemtrails or the burning WTC – “then it’s worked.” The real players who largely dictate our lives, we never see, never hear from. They live in a world that’s different from everyone else. I just got sick of it, mate.”
This guy was living it - every day - seeing how the abrupt movement of billions of dollars could move the countries attached to that money. Because ultimately every cent they played with before or after lunch impacted someone’s life. Real people. With real children, needs, hopes and fears.
But they don’t count. They’re not even on the radars of the people moving the money that makes or breaks or blows up their lives. “When people look for tangible reasons why, they’re always looking in the wrong direction.” (sighs) “It’s so…When I think about this stuff, it makes me…” (starts to cry).
“That’s why I quit.” Put on a backpack “and left the market.” After spending five years in a windowless room behind six secure doors, he put down his security keys and walked through six locked doors past two security guards. “We had more phones than Malaysia.”
Deep Pockets couldn’t handle the greed or the guilt. At 21 he was easily making 200 grand a year. But the wild lifestyle, and “the valuelessness seeking for profit” were starting to rot his soul.
As long as there’s profits to be made, he says, “It doesn’t matter what is happening.” On Sept. 11, 2001 he looked at the TV and thought, “That’s a good little fireworks display.” Just chips, he says, in a bigger game.
“What are you gonna do?” they asked him when he walked out. “I’m gonna get my backpack and travel around the world. I’ll be all right,” he told them. “I can swim down 60 feet and spear a fish anywhere in the world, and I know how to grow fuckin’ vegetables. What are you gonna do if something happened – and it stopped? Can you spear a fish? Can you grow vegetables?
Can you do things that are really intrinsic to survival?”
At seven or eight years of age, he was snorkeling in the Tasman, spearing fish in waters patrolled by the Great White, bringing his catch “back home riding ‘em on me bike, fish over shoulder, mask and fins.”
He left Australia’s foreign exchange. “FX” the traders called it. In the movie business, the same acronym stands for the “Special Effects” used to create illusions.
The end came when he laid down on his bed one Friday night, woke up and called his friend for the Saturday walk they’d agreed to take. Only it was Sunday.
“That’s tired,” he says today.
So he packed up. He went to work and told buddies he’d served with every day for five years under fire, “I’m putting down the phone.”
They just looked at him like he was speaking Martian.
“I’m going,” he repeated.
And he did. For the next two years he traveled the world, “backpacking” – though not without some change in the bank. He says he “looked at it all and giggled. Because we were running the world.”
“Politicians are just talking heads who do what they’re told. Money puts them where they are. Money makes them do what they want.”
“They” being the people with the money.
CRYING TIME
The way Deep Pockets describes it, “sub banks” - the great corporate cathedrals we use daily for personal and business transactions - and the federal reserve banks of nations, appear to be separate entities. But all the primary banks, including federal reserves, are owned by the same families.
“The appearance of being different allows them to do horrible things,” Deep Pockets says. They run regular “sweeps” – which is like the sweepstakes only a thousand times bigger. Playing with huge blocks of currencies, he explains, “They get the big primaries to punch the hell out of it. Then the feds come in with outside trades and block it.”
“It’s the oldest trick in the book,” he adds. Drop the interest rates so the poor rubes and businesses go and hock themselves to the hilt. This creates movement. Things get sold. People go broke. Then the banks jack up the rates and buy it all back at pennies on the dollar. “And they run the world again. It’s just insidious. It’s so mad, so mental there’s no one can talk to about it. The average person has no idea…”
“But it’s not unthinkable. It’s been going on for a long long time. The whole world is waiting for Greenspan to come out of a meeting. Primary losses here, stop losses, buys here, execute main parameter here. All the reserves will come in at this point.”
And make more money. Which jacks the game even higher.
“They own it and print it and run it,” Deep Pockets said. It sounded like he was starting to cry. But that couldn’t be. Not this tough ex-nightclub bouncer and remorseless money trader who cared deeply about the intertwined fates of the Earth and Sky, his three year-old daughter.
“I’m crying,” he said over the phone.
“Why?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Every time I talk about this, I start to cry.”
Like soldiers, I thought. In combat. And sailors hurricanes at sea, when you are being visited with overwhelming truths for which there is no argument or denial. “There’s always going to be war. It’s not because the average Joe wants to kill their neighbors. It’s not in anyone’s interest to kill anyone else. What do you get out of it? You lose your soul. You spend your life aggravated. It’s because a group of people wants movement. It runs the whole planet.
“The banks decide who is Third World country. To the money market, countries are no more than companies that produce a product. The US, the US dollar. Europe produces the ECU. Japan produces the yen. All you look at is US, yen, Aussie, Swiss – there’s no humans involved in this, you’re just looking at the products
“It’s so fuckin’ diabolical to talk about,” he says, his voice catching. “There’s a guy sittin’ there with a cigar…I get emotional talking about it. It brings tears to my eyes.” [Crying…]
“There’s a realization as you grow and have children, what’s really in store for them in the future. Ads on TV show the biggest, greatest thing you can achieve in your life is buying a house, and you have to work your whole life to get it - and these people are trading whole countries like nickels and dimes. It’s overwhelming. When you have a guy in his car in the traffic, he puts businesses out of business in the morning while he’s smoking a cigar and having a coffee He doesn’t care. He doesn’t care.
“Once you’ve seen this. It’s like guys who’ve been to war. If I could get on the air and just explain to the world that they’ve been totally had…” his voice trails off.
“What then?” I press. “What can we do?”
“The best thing that everyone could do is basically dismiss all these activities on the planet as futile acts of profit and don’t buy into them. See, everyone’s buying into it, and that’s what they count on. That’s why they have power. Take money out of exchanges, and they don’t have power.”
Instead, “Everyone buying into what’s not real. Most people on this planet will do things for money before they’ll do it for any other fuckin’ reason. It just gets back to money. It always does.”
WHAT NOW?
So what to do?
“I can control myself. Information and knowledge – taking responsibility for what you know. What does ‘taking responsibility mean?’
For one thing it means not telling this story to most people – or as Deep Pockets puts it, “not knock the piss out of them.” He never talks like this to his friends, because if they learned how totally they are being jerked around by faceless men in windowless roomy, “they would lose focus in their direction in life.”
“I can choose how it effects me. There’s beautiful things in this life. Great diving. Good people to meet. You can have a nice wife, a nice baby, ride a motorbike, make some money – and leave. That’s all. You just take your experiences with you. The rest of its is all a kind of waffle.”
His wife sometimes asks him if he wants to buy a new shirt. After wearing $400 suits, with $400 shoes, a Monte Blanc pen and his own Rolex, he doesn’t see the point. He wears the same tracksuit pants, sandals and a t-shirt “because they’re comfortable.”
“We live within our means. Other people we know don’t. And they’re always stressed out. They’re talking success – and happiness is the only success.”
vWe gotta stop ‘em because this is insane. This doesn’t make any sense.
“I JUST GIGGLE”
Knowing that for all but a select group of people, what the rest of us does is ultimately fruitless can be a bit hard to take. Especially for activists and a small band of independent professional reports, it’s tough to acknowledge that any life spent striving to change institutions or protect the planet is useless. Meaning, we will lose. Because the people moving the money that fuels entire nations make waves that roll right over the rest of us with the same implacable disregard as the rogue sea that ambushed Celerity a hundred miles off the California coast.
Through the constant fire and hammering of his job as a foreign exchange broker on behalf of the Australian government, Deep Pockets had undergone the same alchemical transformation. He came to know how the world really works. And it wasn’t anything written in books the masses were allowed to read. And because he proved he could walk away from it – this all-rewarding, all-consuming death trip – he knew he was in control of his own destiny. And that’s what mattered most.
Now, he says, he can’t get sucked into the hype, all the hysteria, constant crisis. “Everyone else is so seriously drawn into this,” he says. “I just giggle.”
Photo Credits:
Only Big Bankers can flout the rules and get away with It -thestreet.com
Those with the gold make the rules -Getty
20 Richest Investment Bankers in the World - moneyinc.com