Both volumes of the audiobooks, as well as the PDFs to the Special Reports are available to all paid subscribers. Downloadable links are included below behind the paywall.

Both audiobooks are also available on Gumroad and can be purchased using the links below:

Vol 1 (How the Cold War is Being Revived and What You Can Do About It): Purchase on Gumroad here

Vol 2 (Know Your Enemy): Purchase on Gumroad here

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Cynthia Chung and Jeremy Nell break down the fallacies of China's Social Credit with a focus on the western financial institutions that are behind the Fintech P2P predatory lending in China and the west, the efforts of Project Stargate and BlackRock institutions (tied to the City of London and South African oligarchs) which have attempted to introduce abusive social credit systems into China and the West alike... and how China has reined them in whereas the western nations have failed.

Follow the series below:

Part 1: The True Origins of China’s “Social Credit System”

Part 2: The Role of Goldman Sachs in Engineering Global Financial Crises

And follow Jeremy Nell on UK Column here:
https://www.ukcolumn.org/series/jerm-...

Cynthia Chung is the President of the Rising Tide Foundation and author of the books “The Shaping of a World Religion” & “The Empire on Which the Black Sun Never Set,” consider supporting her work by making a donation and subscribing to her substack page Through A Glass Darkly.

Through A Glass Darkly

On matters of geopolitics, counterintelligence, revisionist history and cultural warfare.

By Cynthia Chung

This is Part II of the series The True Origins of China’s ‘Social Credit System.’

Through A Glass Darkly

On matters of geopolitics, counterintelligence, revisionist history and cultural warfare.

By Cynthia Chung

Free-markets, Deregulation and “The Largest Bank Heist in History”

The global economic crash of 2008 cost tens of millions of people their savings, their jobs and their homes. The government regulators who should’ve been protecting the citizens had done nothing.

The result of Lehman Brothers and AIG collapsing was a global recession. Costing the world tens of trillions of dollars and rendered 30 million people unemployed globally.[1]

It also doubled the national debt of the United States.

As we can see in the above graph, the rapid increase in U.S. debt begins in the 1980s at the onset of deregulation and is accelerated dramatically after the 2008 crash.

In the 1980s the financial industry exploded. The investment banks went public giving them huge amounts of stockholder money. In the traditional investment banking model, the one that had been operating for over a century before, the partners put the money up and thus, would obviously watch their money very carefully.

One of the moral hazards that began to creep up with these investment banks going public was that the decisions that the CEO and partners of these firms were making were now involving massive amounts of money that were not their own and that was not being watched very carefully at all. In other words, major investment firms like Lehman Brothers (f. 1850), Merrill Lynch (f. 1914), Goldman Sachs (f. 1869), Bear Stearns (f. 1923) and Morgan Stanley (f. 1935) were making decisions on risk that would no longer affect the salaries (and bonuses) of their CEO, partners and managers.

The 1980s were full of cut-throat dealings in mergers and acquisitions. Increasingly there was nothing that could protect small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs)[2] if a much larger one wished to purchase (or “acquire”) them, and often with not even the desire to see the company expand and further succeed. Many of the acquisitions made during this period involved the actual scrapping of these companies into pieces sold off to the highest bidders, the workers laid-off after decades of working for a company that had at one time dedicated itself to a high-standard of quality in what they were manufacturing or providing as a service, such as airlines.

Ironically, in the increasingly “free-market” world of the 1980s and on, which people were told was a good thing because it would increase competition and thus promote the best and most excellent, the opposite was true. In truth, “free-market” meant the rule of the most powerful and influential. Larger companies and institutions purchased their competitors and scrapped them into pieces. Excellence if you were small now often sealed the end of the road, at best your company would be bought for a generous sum and continued under their massive rubric, at worse it would be purchased for pennies and eviscerated. The only thing certain was that you were not free to see your company through past a certain point of success under solely your own helm.

This new world of finance was made possible by the joint initiative of the Reagan Administration and Margaret Thatcher’s cabinet in the UK.

In 1981 President Ronald Reagan (1981-1989) chose as his Treasury of Secretary the CEO of the investment bank Merrill Lynch, Donald Regan (1981-1985). Regan had served as the CEO of Merrill Lynch for nearly ten years, from 1971 to 1980, before accepting the position of U.S. Treasury Secretary. It was Donald Regan[3] who promoted a new financial system that would be coined “Reagonomics.” Its critics and opponents called it “trickle-down economics” or “voodoo economics,” Reagan and his advocates preferred to call it “free-market economics.”

Whatever you want to call it - it started a 30-year period of radical financial deregulation.

In 1982 the Reagan Administration (or perhaps more aptly called the Regan Administration) deregulated savings-and-loan companies allowing them to make risky investments with depositors’ money. By the end of the decade hundreds of savings-and-loan companies had failed. This crisis cost taxpayers $124 billion and cost many people their life savings.[4]

As NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw famously stated: “It may be the biggest bank heist in our history.” referring to the savings and loan (S&L) fraud. And I think that is a pretty accurate statement, however, it pales in comparison to what would occur in 2008 as we will soon see.

“It may be the biggest bank heist in our history.” referring to the savings and loan fraud. Tom Brokaw NBC News. Clip from Inside Job (2010) Documentary.

However, unlike 2008, thousands of savings and loans executives actually went to jail for looting their companies. One of the most extreme cases was Charles Keating who ran the American Continental Corporation and the Lincoln Savings and Loan Association.

The 2010 documentary Inside Job, discusses how in 1985 when federal regulators began investigating him, Keating hired Alan Greenspan. This was two years before Greenspan would become Chairman of the Federal Reserve in 1987. Before this he had worked as an economic adviser for the Ford Administration and Nixon Administration, as well as the President of the Council on Foreign Relations from 1982 to 1988. In a letter to regulators, Greenspan praised Keating’s sound business plans and expertise and said he saw no risk in allowing Keating to invest customer’s money. Keating reportedly paid Greenspan $40,000.[5]

Keating went to prison shortly afterwards, convicted in both federal and state courts of many counts of fraud, racketeering and conspiracy. When Lincoln S&L Association failed in 1989 it cost the federal government over $3 billion and about 23,000 customers were left with worthless bonds.[6]

Alan Greenspan for his sound advice on Keating to regulators, one of the worse cases of fraud during the S&L debacle, was promoted to Chairman of the Federal Reserve by President Reagan. He was reappointed this position under President Clinton and George W. Bush, serving as Chairman of the Federal Reserve from 1987-2006, a total of over 18 years. Greenspan was the second longest serving chairman in the history of the Federal Reserve, missing first place by just a few months.[7]

Deregulation opened the doors to financial instability rather than stability, and the 1980s and 1990s resulted in the failure of about a third of U.S. savings and loan institutions, costing taxpayers $124 billion.

This American crusade for free-markets was happening in lock-step with the British crusade for the very same thing.

The UK under British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (1979-1990) came to be known as the era of “Thatcherism” where she and her Administration championed radical free-market reform, deregulation and neoliberal policies resulting in widespread privatization.

Both Reagan and Thatcher promoted minimal government intervention in the economy and strict control over public spending aiming to reduce the role of the state in the economy and they began to sell state-owned industries including telecommunications, utilities, transportation, energy etc. to private companies.

In fact, Thatcher’s government had specifically brought in Goldman Sachs to oversee the selling-off of these state-owned companies as an official adviser to the British Government in the 1980s.

In their own fluff piece documentary of themselves, Goldman Sachs at 150,[8] they describe how “the beginning of deregulation was the beginning of globalisation.” And how the deregulation policies of both Thatcher and Reagan allowed Goldman Sachs out of the cage effectively.

With these new wings of flight, Goldman Sachs began to work closely with the British Government and the City of London in the privatizations of great nationalised entities as an official advisor.[9] According to Goldman Sachs’ own biography, they handled every single one of these cases in the UK except for one.[10]

They then went on, in their own words into Germany to do the very same thing, then Scandinavia, then France, then Italy and pretty much everywhere else and as they put it “revolutionized finance in all of Europe.”[11]

Thus, according to Goldman Sachs themselves, they oversaw the privatization of finance in pretty much all of Europe, beginning first in the UK.

According to Goldman Sachs this liberated these previously state-owned entities to fully participate in the financial markets.

During the Clinton Administration deregulation continued under Alan Greenspan as Chairman of the Federal Reserve and Treasury Secretaries Robert Rubin (1995-1999), former chairman of Goldman Sachs and Treasury Secretary Larry Summers (1999-2001), later becoming the President of Harvard from 2001-2006. Robert Rubin is recognised as the long-time mentor of Larry Summers.[12]

According to the documentary Inside Job (2010):

By the late 1990s the financial sector had consolidated into a few gigantic firms, each of them so large that their failure could threaten the whole system.

In 1998 Citicorp and Travelers merged to form Citigroup the largest financial services company in the world. The merger violated the Glass-Steagall Act,[13] a law passed after the Great Depression preventing banks with consumer deposits from engaging in risky investment-banking activities.

It was illegal to acquire Travelers. Greenspan said nothing. The Federal Reserve gave them an exemption for a year and then they got the law passed.

In 1999 at the urging of Summers and Rubin, Congress passed the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act known to some as the Citigroup Relief Act. It overturned Glass-Steagall and cleared the way for future mergers.

Robert Rubin would later make $126 million as Vice Chairman of Citigroup.

The next crisis came at the end of the 1990s. The investment banks fueled a massive bubble in internet stocks which was followed by a crash in 2001 that caused $5 trillion in investment losses.

The Securities and Exchange Commission [SEC], the federal agency that had been created during the Depression to regulate investment banking, had done nothing.

These investment banks had promoted internet companies they knew would fail, which sounds awfully similar to the present financial crisis brewing. Stock analysts were paid by how much business they brought in. In December 2002, ten investment banks settled the case for a total of $1.4 billion and promised to change their ways. Despite the hefty fines, they did not have to admit to any wrongdoing.

These ten investment banks which had caused $5 trillion in investment losses, paid a $1.4 billion fine in total spread out amongst themselves.

And the list of fraud and criminal activity by banks just kept growing. This included the funneling of drug money.

Citibank, whose parent is Citigroup (the bank that Greenspan wavered Glass-Steagall to allow an illegal merger between Citicorp and Travelers to form Citigroup), was found guilty by a Mexican Inquiry of funneling $100 million of drug money out of Mexico.

HSBC and Standard Chartered would also be found guilty of funneling drug money, and in the case of HSBC, the funding of terrorism and weapons trafficking, including a great deal of drug money involving Mexico.

The CIA were also implicated in the training of drug cartels in Mexico and a former Green Beret was involved in setting up a bank to deal with this drug money coming out of Mexico and other places in Latin America.

In fact, intelligence agencies, military and finance often intermingled in the United States, including the case of Goldman Sachs CEO Henry “Hank” Paulson, as we shall soon see.

Citibank, JP Morgan and Merrill Lynch were also found guilty of helping Enron conceal fraud and were fined in total $385 million. But while these firms faced unprecedented fines they never have to admit to any wrongdoing. A practice that continues today.

Beginning in the 1990s deregulation and advances in technology led to an explosion of complex financial products called derivatives. Economists and bankers claimed they made the markets safer but instead they made them more unstable. Using derivatives, bankers could gamble on virtually anything. The rise and fall of oil prices, the bankruptcy of a company, even the weather.

By the late 1990s, derivatives were a 50 trillion-dollar unregulated market.[14]

According to Inside Job (2010):

In 1998 Brooksley Born tried to regulate them. After running the derivatives practice at Arnold and Porter, Born was chosen by Clinton to chair the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) which oversaw the derivatives market. In May 1998 the CFTC issued a proposal to regulate derivatives.

Clinton’s Treasury Department had an immediate response.

The banks were now heavily reliant on these sort of activities for their earnings.

Shortly after her call with Larry Summers [where he attempted to put some heavy-handed pressure on her to drop this proposal to regulate derivatives], Greenspan, Rubin and SEC chairman Arthur Levitt, issued a joint statement condemning Born and recommending legalisation to keep derivatives unregulated.”

Alan Greenspan would state to the House Committee on Banking and Financial Services on July 24, 1998: “Regulation of derivative transactions that are privately negotiated by professionals is unnecessary.”

She was overruled first by the Clinton Administration and then by Congress. To prevent any future attempts to regulate derivatives, in 2000, Senator Phil Gramm took a major role in getting a bill passed that pretty much exempted derivatives from regulation.

On June 21, 2000, Senator Phil Gramm serving as Chairman of the Senate Banking Committee stated: “They [derivatives] are unifying markets, they are reducing regulatory burden. I believe that we need to do it.”

After leaving the Senate, Phil Gramm became the Vice-Chairman of UBS. His wife Wendy served on the board of Enron from 1993 until the company filed for bankruptcy in late 2001. For those who are not aware, the Enron scandal was a massive corporate fraud that culminated in the 2001 bankruptcy of Enron Corporation. Executives utilized dubious accounting methods and secret off-balance-sheet partnerships to hide billions in debt and fabricate unrealized profits, ultimately destroying the company, bankrupting thousands of employees, and leading to federal criminal convictions.

During this period Larry Summer as U.S. Treasury Secretary stated “It is our great hope that it will be possible to move this year on legislation that, in a suitable way goes to create legal certainty for OTC[15] derivatives.”

Larry Summers later made $20 million as a consultant to a hedge fund that relied heavily on derivatives.[16] Alan Greenspan as Chairman of the Federal Reserve would state to Congress during this period, “I wish to associate myself with all of the remarks of Secretary Summers.”

In December of 2000 Congress passed the Commodity Futures Modernization Act HR 5660. It banned the regulation of derivatives. As a result, the use of derivatives and financial innovation exploded dramatically after 2000.

At this point the industry was dominated by five investment banks: Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, Bear Stearns. Two financial conglomerates: Citigroup and JP Morgan. Three securities insurance companies: AIG, MBIA, AMBAC. And three rating agencies: Moody’s, Standard & Poor’s, and Fitch.

Linking them all together was the Securitization Food Chain. A new system which connected trillions of dollars in mortgages and other loans with investors all over the world.

The 2010 documentary Inside Job did a good summary of how this system works and thus will be quoted extensively here:

Securitization means the people who make the loan [i.e. the lender] are no longer at risk if they [i.e. the borrower] fail to repay. In the old system, when a homeowner paid their mortgage every month their money went to their local lender. And since mortgages took decades to repay, lenders were careful.

In the new system, lenders sold mortgages to investment banks. The investment banks combined thousands of mortgages and loans including car loans, student loans, and credit card debt to create complex derivatives called collateralized debt obligations or CDOs.

The investment banks then sold the CDOs to investors. Now when home owners paid their mortgages the money went to investors all over the world.

The investment banks paid rating agencies to evaluate the CDOs and many of them were given a triple A rating, which is the highest possible investment grade. This made CDOs popular with retirement funds which could only purchase highly rated securities.

Lenders didn’t care anymore if a borrower could repay so they started making riskier loans. The investment banks didn’t care either, the more CDOs they sold the higher their profits. And the rating agencies which were paid by the investment banks had no liability if their ratings of CDOs proved wrong.

Subprime loans are riskier loans. Thousands of subprime loans were combined to create CDOs many of them still received triple-A ratings.

The investment banks actually preferred subprime loans, because they carried higher interest rates. This led to a massive increase in predatory lending.

Borrowers were needlessly placed in expensive subprime loans and many loans were given to people who could not repay them.

The most profitable products were predatory loans. The banker makes the most money if they put you in a subprime loan.

Suddenly hundreds of billions of dollars a year were flowing through the securitization chain. Since anyone could get a mortgage, home purchases and housing prices skyrocketed. The result was the biggest financial bubble in history.

The subprime lending alone increased from $30 billion a year in funding to over $600 billion a year in 10 years. All of the major investment banks were in on this.

Countrywide Financial the largest subprime lender issued $97 billion worth in loans.

It made over $11 billion in profits as a result.

On Wall Street annual cash bonuses spiked. Traders and CEOs became enormously wealthy during the bubble.

Lehman Brothers was a top underwriter of subprime lending. Their CEO, Richard Fuld, took home $485 million.

By 2006 about 40% of all profits of S&P 500 firms was coming from financial institutions. It was a global Ponzi scheme. It was not real income; money was created and then defaulted on.

Through the Home Ownership and Equity Protection Act the Federal Reserve Board had broad authority to regulate the mortgage industry. But Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan refused to use it. [Alan Greenspan was anti-regulation. He “didn’t believe in it.”]

The Securities and Exchange Commission conducted no major investigations of the investment banks during the bubble.

During the bubble investment banks were borrowing heavily to buy more loans and create more CDOs. The ratio between borrowed money and the banks’ own money was called leverage. The more the banks borrowed the higher their leverage.

In 2004 Henry Paulson the CEO of Goldman Sachs helped lobby the SEC to relax the limits on leverage allowing the banks to sharply increase their borrowing. The SEC somehow decided to let investment banks gamble a lot more.

On April 28, 2004, the SEC met to consider lifting the leverage limits on the investment banks.

Investment banks began leveraging up to the level of 33:1 which means a tiny 3% decrease in the value of their asset base would leave them insolvent.

There was another ticking time bomb in the financial system. AIG, the world’s largest insurance company was selling huge quantities of derivatives called credit default swaps. For investors who owned CDOs, credit default swaps worked like an insurance policy. An investor who purchased a credit default swap paid AIG a quarterly premium. If the CDO went bad, AIG promised to pay the investor for their losses.

But unlike regular insurance, speculators could also buy credit default swaps from AIG in order to bet against CDOs they didn’t own.

Since credit default swaps were unregulated, AIG didn’t have to put aside any money to cover potential losses. Instead, AIG paid its employees huge cash bonuses as soon as contracts were signed. But if the CDOs later went bad AIG would be on the hook.

AIG’s Financial Products division in London issued $500 billion worth of credit default swaps during the bubble many of them for CDOs backed by subprime mortgages. The 400 employees at AIGFP made $3.5 billion between 2000 and 2007.

Goldman Sachs sold at least $3.1 billion of these toxic CDOs in the first half of 2006. The CEO of Goldman Sachs at this time was Henry Paulson, the highest paid CEO on Wall Street.

Paulson had to sell his $485 million of Goldman stock when he went to work for the government. But because of a law passed by the first President Bush, he didn’t have to pay any taxes on it. It saved him $50 million.

Public Employees Retirement System of Mississippi sued Goldman Sachs, they had lost millions on bad CDOs that had been given a high rating by Goldman Sachs.

By late 2006 Goldman had taken things a step further. It didn’t just sell toxic CDOs it started betting against them at the same time it was telling customers that they were high-quality investments.

By purchasing credit default swaps from AIG, Goldman could bet against CDOs it didn’t own and get paid when the CDOs failed.

Goldman Sachs bought at least $22 billion of credit default swaps from AIG.

It was so much that Goldman realized that AIG itself might go bankrupt. So they spent $150 million insuring themselves against AIG’s potential collapse.

Then in 2007 Goldman went even further. They started selling CDOs specifically designed so that the more money their customers lost the more money Goldman Sachs made.

In April 2010 they were forced to testify before Congress. [When Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein had to testify in front of Congress he effectively said this was not illegal and thus they could not be held accountable for fraud.]

Hedge fund manager John Paulson [Paulson & Co.] made $12 billion betting against the mortgage market. When Paulson ran out of mortgage securities to bet against, he worked with Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank to create more CDOs.

Morgan Stanley was also selling mortgage securities it was betting against, and is now being sued by the Government Employees’ Retirement Fund of the Virgin Islands for fraud.

The hedge funds Tricadia and Magnetar made billions betting against CDOs they had designed with Merrill Lynch, JP Morgan, and Lehman Brothers. The CDOs were sold to customers as safe investments.

The three rating agencies, Moody’s, S&P and Fitch made billions of dollars giving high ratings to risky securities. Moody’s the largest rating agency quadrupled its profits between 2000 and 2007.

Moody’s and S&P get compensated based on putting out ratings reports. And the more structured securities they gave a triple-A rating to, the higher their earnings were going to be for the quarter. Imagine going to the New York Times and saying “If you write a positive story I’ll pay you $500,000 but if you don’t, I’ll give you nothing.”

The rating agencies could have stopped the party [and just like the regulators, they didn’t but in fact were complicit].

Securitization food chain imploded and the market for CDOs collapsed leaving the investment banks holding hundreds of billions of dollars in loans, CDOs and real estate they couldn’t sell.

At a G7 meeting in Tokyo, February 9, 2008, Paulson stated “We are going to keep growing okay? And, obviously, I’ll say it: If you are growing you are not in recession right? I mean, we all know that.”

The recession actually started four months before Paulson made this statement.

In March 2008, the investment bank Bear Stearns ran out of cash and was acquired for $2 a share by JP Morgan Chase. The deal was backed by $30 billion in emergency guarantees from the Federal Reserve.

[By July 2008 Henry Paulson continued to testify and publicly declare that everything was under control. During a time when the government could have stepped in and minimised the financial fallout.]

On September 7, 2008 Henry Paulson announced the federal takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, two giant mortgage lenders on the brink of collapse, he stated that day “Nothing about our actions today reflects a changed view of the housing correction or the strength of other U.S. financial institutions.”

Two days later Lehman Brothers announced record losses of $3.2 billion and its stock collapsed.

Merrill Lynch was also on the brink of a disaster and they were acquired by Bank of America within days. The British bank Barclays was the only bank interested in acquiring Lehman’s but the [British] government wanted some guarantees. Paulson refused. Neither Lehman nor the [U.S.] federal government had done any planning for bankruptcy.

The oldest money market fund in the nation wrote off roughly ¾ of a billion dollars in bad debt issued by the now bankrupt Lehman Brothers.

That same week AIG owed $13 billion to holders of credit default swaps and it didn’t have the money.

On September 17^th AIG is taken over by the government and one day later Paulson and Bernanke ask Congress for $700 billion to bail out the banks. They warned the alternative would be a catastrophic collapse.

When AIG was bailed out the owners of its credit default swaps, the most prominent of which was Goldman Sachs, were paid $61 billion the next day.

Paulson, Bernanke and Tim Geithner forced AIG to pay 100 cents on the dollar rather than negotiate lower prices. Eventually, the AIG bailout cost taxpayers over $150 billion. A hundred and sixty billion dollars went through AIG, fourteen billion went to Goldmans Sachs.

At the same time Paulson and Geithner forced AIG to surrender its right to sue Goldman and the other banks for fraud.

[Foreclosures in the United States reached 6 million by early 2010 with an estimated total of 9 million after a few more years of reverberating fallout.][18]

The top five executives at Lehman Brothers made over a billion dollars between 2000 and 2007. And when the firm went bankrupt they got to keep all the money.

Angelo Mozilo CEO of Countrywide made $470 million between 2003 and 2008. $140 million came from dumping his Countrywide stock in the 12 months before the company collapsed.

Stan O’Neal the CEO of Merrill Lynch received $90 million in 2006 and 2007 alone. After driving his firm into the ground, Merrill Lynch’s board of directors allowed him to resign and he collected $161 million in severance.

O’Neal’s successor, John Thain, was paid $87 million in 2007. And in December 2008, two months after Merrill was bailed out by U.S. taxpayers, Thain and Merrill’s board handed out billions in bonuses.

In March of 2008 AIG’s Financial Products division lost $11 billion. Instead of being fired, Joseph Cassano the head of AIGFP was kept on as a consultant for a million dollars a month.

In the U.S. the banks are now bigger and more powerful and more concentrated than ever before. JP Morgan took over Bear Stearns and then WaMu (Washington Mutual). Bank of America took over Countrywide and Merrill Lynch. Wells Fargo took over Wachovia.

[Not only were the regulators and rating agencies found to be complicit in the money heist, but Academia as well.]

The Analysis Group, Charles River Associates, Compass Lexecom and the Law and Economics Consulting Group manage a multi-billion industry that provides academic experts for hire. Two bankers who used these services were Ralph Cioffi and Matthew Tannin, Bearn Stearns hedge fund managers prosecuted for securities fraud. After hiring the Analysis Group they were acquitted. Glen Hubbard was paid $100,000 to testify in their defense [the Dean of Columbia Business School].

[Some of the fallout from the triumphs and tribulations of “free-market”, deregulation and derivatives:]

It was this younger generation coming out of the 2008 crash that for the first time in American history were less educated and less prosperous than their parents.

Tim Geithner became the U.S. Treasury Secretary under Obama one of the key players in the decision to pay Goldman Sachs 100 cents on the dollar for its bets against mortgages.

The new Fed president was William C. Dudley the former chief economist for Goldman Sachs.

Chief of Staff of the Treasury Department became Mark Patterson a former lobbyist for Goldman. One of the Senior Treasury Advisors was Lewis Sachs who oversaw Tricadia a company heavily involved in betting against the mortgage securities it was selling.

To head the Commodity Futures Trading Commission Obama picked Gary Gensler, a former Goldman Sachs executive who had helped ban the regulation of derivatives.

To run the SEC, Obama picked Mary Schapiro the former CEO of FINRA the investment banking industry’s self-regulation body.

Obama’s chief economic adviser was Larry Summers [the protégé of Goldman Sachs’ Robert Rubin].

In 2009 Obama reappointed Ben Bernanke as Fed Chairman.

[Obama’s presidential campaign ran on the promise to increase regulation and investigate those responsible for the 2008 crash. However, once he was elected, his most senior advisors in his Administration were in fact the very people who had built the Ponzi structure. Obama had hired the architects of the 2008 crash, allowing them to cover up their trail while holding government positions.]

By mid 2010 not a single senior financial executive had been criminally prosecuted or even arrested. No special prosecutor had been appointed. Not a single firm had been prosecuted criminally for securities fraud or accounting fraud.

The Obama Administration has made no attempt to recover any of the compensation given to financial executives during the bubble.

That is how it has worked since the “Too Big To Fail” era began.

It might as well be called “Too Big to Prosecute.” These banks, and even their CEOs, are deemed too big, and thus the fines they pay are just a fraction of the fraud they are found guilty of committing less we risk the bank going under. This has been on a cycle of wash-rinse-repeat since the 1980s when radical deregulation began and we effectively gave Wall Street an infinite number of Monopoly “get out of jail” cards.

We are told that they are ‘too big to fail,’ but what no one ever seems to ask is “are they too big to regulate?” The truth is that the entire financial system structure, including the regulators, rating agencies and members of academia holding tenure in the economics department at prestigious universities, are all complicit in this endless looting of honest taxpayers and honest business incomes. It is sheer insanity to think that this cycle will stop on its own, when everyone that has some influence on the oversight of this system are getting a slice of the pie.

It can only stop when regulation is put in place that enforces sound banking practices (such as the Glass-Steagall Act), when derivatives are regulated and not allowed to be created as WMDs, when the grey line becomes a clear line, when breaking the law is not a hypothetical or an “opinion”, when those guilty of especially large sums of fraud go to jail for a long time and not just a few months or a couple of years or not at all.

The poverty level of the average American is reaching fever-pitch. And yet there seems to be hardly a peep about finally reigning in Wall Street, not even the behemoth level of fraud committed during the 2008 crash appears to be a good enough incentive. And it is highly concerning when the present Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is calling for even further deregulation. According to him, the 2006-2008 period had robust regulation, despite the fact that derivatives were not regulated at all.

On April 29, 2025, during a White House press briefing on the Trump administration’s first 100 days, Scott Bessent said “The big tax on consumers that goes unnoticed is deregulation or [I mean] regulation. And we are deregulating and bringing that down. So, you know, from a household income point of view, we would expect real purchasing increases.”[19]

It is unlikely that Bessent is not aware of what was truly behind the scenes of the 2008 crash. After all, he is the man who worked as the first lieutenant to George Soros and triumphs over playing an instrumental role in earning Soros the title “the man who broke the Bank of England.” Americans who laud this appear not to understand what this in fact signifies. It was not an attack on the City of London at the end of the day, but on the livelihood of the average British person. It was the average British person who lost money from Soros and Bessent’s predatory acts, not the City of London.

On top of destroying the real economy, pensions, unions and savings of British civilians, it is also a fact that the Soros-Bessent ‘breaking of the Bank of England’ gave the City of London a special crisis to manage as they ‘postponed’ entering the Euro trap that they had set for foolish European nations under the Maastrich Treaty framework.

George Soros will feature prominently in Part III of this series and will give you a better idea of the sort of man Bessent was closely working for.

It appears we are living in an age where foolishness abounds, and we are now celebrating the very looters of our hard-earn living as our liberators, while these very same people are in fact propping up the bank mafia, that consists of Wall Street and the City of London in front of all of our eyes. Denial is a powerful thing…

And it just so happens that this is the man that is in the role of Treasury Secretary while we are in the midst of another financial crash, this one threatening to be on a much larger scale. Coincidence? Perhaps, if you think Hank Paulson’s position as Treasury Secretary from 2006-2009 was also a coincidence…

Interestingly, Goldman Sachs itself would only go public in 1999, way after most of the other investment firms. As they discuss in their documentary, the subject was a controversial one amongst the partners. Going public typically meant losing a certain amount of control over the direction and values of the firm. The new board would constitute not members of those who held the most senior ranks within the actual firm, but those who owned the largest stake in the institution.

Most of the major investment firms had gone public long before Goldman Sachs. Merrill Lynch went public in 1971, Bear Stearns in 1985, Morgan Stanely in 1986, and Lehman Brothers in 1994.

Goldman Sachs, more so than any other investment firm, had carefully crafted for itself an internal culture of “family,” “values” and “ideology.” Goldman Sachs for its employees was not meant to be just a stage in a career, it was an indoctrination process that would forever change how you viewed the world and your role in it.

They very much wanted to protect this self-crafted culture and “tradition” as they say in their documentary. Going public threatened to sacrifice this centerpiece. Robert Rubin and Henry “Hank” Paulson formed the core leadership of Goldman Sachs in the 90s. According to their own biography, it was Robert Rubin who finally convinced the board to go public.[20] A way had been found to allow Goldman Sachs to go public and yet remain largely unchanged.

When Goldman Sachs went public it had the second largest IPO in history at that point, nearly 90% of the stock went to the firms’ current and retired employees. Barely 12% of its stock went to non-Goldman investors.[21]

They had found a way to massively increase the amount of money Goldman Sachs had access to for its new mission of globalisation, without having to sacrifice the core “culture” and “ideology” of their institution. By “keeping it in the family” so to speak, their going public was in reality more a reconstruction of the underlying partnership.

It is interesting that Robert Rubin is credited with this move of Goldman Sachs, considering they only went public in 1999. Robert Rubin worked for Goldman Sachs for nearly three decades (26 years). However, Robert Rubin was supposed to have officially left Goldman Sachs as its co-chairman to become the Director of the National Economic Council under President Clinton from 1993-1995 and the U.S. Treasury Secretary from 1995-1999. Clearly, Rubin had remained in close contact with Goldman Sachs, including Hank Paulson.

With this new massive influx of money from going public, with the second largest IPO in history at the time, a great deal of possibilities had now opened themselves up for Goldman Sachs and it would be Hank Paulson who would oversee this next phase of globalisation.

A Global Controlled Disintegration à la Goldman Sachs

“Perhaps in the circumstances, the objective of ‘controlled disintegration’—modest as it may seem to be—is indeed a legitimate goal…”[22]

- Paul Volcker in a November 1978 speech at the University of Warwick titled “The Political Economy of the Dollar.” Volcker served as Chairman of the Federal Reserve from 1979 to 1987.

Over 10 million workers in China lost their jobs as Americans cut back on spending as a result of the 2008 crash that wiped out many American families’ life savings. The 2008 crash would have reverberations throughout the world, costing tens of trillions of dollars and rendering 30 million people unemployed.[23]

It was during these trying times that former Goldman Sachs CEO (1999-2006) Hank Paulson served as U.S. Treasury Secretary (2006-2009).

His background is an interesting one. Paulson was a Staff Assistant Secretary of Defense at the Pentagon from 1970 to 1972.[24] He then worked for the Nixon Administration serving as the assistant to John Ehrlichman from 1972 to 1973.

John Daniel Ehrlichman served as White House Counsel and Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs under Richard Nixon. He was an important influence on Nixon’s domestic policy.[25] Ehrlichman became Nixon’s first White House Counsel before becoming Chief Domestic Advisor. It was then that he became a member of Nixon’s inner circle.[26] He and close friend H. R. Haldeman, whom he had met at UCLA, were ‘referred to jointly as “The Berlin Wall” by White House staffers because of their German-sounding family names and penchant for isolating Nixon from other advisors and anyone seeking an audience with him.’[27] Both were deeply implicated in the Watergate scandal. In fact, Ehrlichman created “The Plumbers”, the group at the center of the Watergate scandal.

Hank Paulson was assistant to Ehrlichman from 1972-1973 overlapping the period of the Watergate scandal which broke out in June 1972.

One year after, he joins Goldman Sachs in 1974 and becomes partner in 1982. He served on the board of directors from 1994 to 2006 and became co-chairman and co-chief executive officer in 1998, and sole chairman and CEO in January 1999 until 2006.

During his time at Goldman Sachs, Paulson had made a lot of inroads amongst certain Chinese political elites. It is reported that during this time he had visited China more than 70 times.[28] This was during a time when China was being heavily courted by the United States to adopt free-market reforms.

Paulson was especially interested in U.S.-Chinese relations as Treasury Secretary and was known to have persuaded President George W. Bush to allow him to spearhead and lead the U.S.-China Strategic Economic Dialogue, a forum and mechanism under which the two countries addressed global areas of immediate and long-term strategic and economic interest.

In the spring of 2007, Paulson warned an audience at the Shanghai Futures Exchange that China needed to free up capital markets to avoid losing potential economic growth, saying: “An open, competitive, and liberalized financial market can effectively allocate scarce resources in a manner that promotes stability and prosperity far better than governmental intervention.”

That is, in the midst of America’s own economic crash that would reach a peak-pitch one year later, Paulson was organizing hard to bring China further into free-markets, deregulation and derivatives.

Despite the endless denials from Paulson that anything was wrong but rather that the economy was doing “okay” between 2006 to 2008 and well into 2009 even, the truth was that Paulson was not only aware that there was indeed a tsunami headed for America’s financial market, but that he had in fact worked to build that tsunami up.

Recall Goldman Sachs’ central role in credit default swaps, speculation on bad CDOs they were in fact giving high ratings to and encouraging their clients to invest in, and insuring themselves against the collapse of AIG that they knew was coming and were complicit in. This was all happening under Henry Paulson, who was the CEO of Goldman Sachs from 1999 to 2006. The highest paid man on Wall Street.

Basically, Bush had hired one of the central engineers of the 2008 crash as U.S. Treasury Secretary! And this man was in turn traveling to other parts of the world, with an especial focus on China to spread the disease. Recall that the disease had already been spread throughout Europe during the 1980s as per Goldman Sachs’ own biography.

In addition, Paulson as CEO of Goldman had successfully lobbied the SEC to relax leverage limits on investment banks. This deregulation allowed Goldman Sachs and other firms to sharply increase their borrowing and take massive, unmanageable risks using complex derivatives including credit default swaps.

It was under Paulson’s leadership that Goldman Sachs aggressively created and sold billions of dollars worth of CDOs to investors. The firm then utilized credit default swaps to bet against the very same, often toxic, securities they were selling to their clients.

And it was under Paulson, as U.S. Treasury Secretary, that he was positioned as the central architect of the 2008 bank bailouts (such as TARP – Troubled Asset Relief Program). In other words, he decided the reorganization of the entire American financial system, who was going to come out on top, who was going to sink to the bottom, and who was going to acquire whom.

In fact, in the midst of the economic crash, Paulson as Treasury Secretary continued in his role of giving bad advice to investors, claiming everything was for the most part under control and that there was no cause for serious concern, certainly nothing that should influence what investors were already investing in.

With the passage of H.R. 1424, Paulson became the manager of the United States Emergency Economic Stabilization fund. He also became a member of the newly established Financial Stability Oversight Board that oversaw the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP).

Ironically, the radical free-market proponent Hank Paulson, was very hands-on indeed in organizing financial reform and restructuring as U.S. Treasury Secretary, of course, only after it was too late to avoid the full brunt of an economic crash that is.

Leading up to the crash, however, Paulson took a remarkably hands-off approach.

In August 2007, Paulson stated that the U.S. subprime mortgage fallout remained largely contained due to the strongest global economy in decades.[29]

In May 2008, The Wall Street Journal wrote that Paulson said U.S. financial markets are emerging from the credit crunch that many economists believe has pushed the country to the brink of recession. “I do believe that the worst is likely to be behind us,” Paulson told the newspaper in an interview.[30]

On July 20, 2008, after the failure of IndyMac Bank, Paulson reassured the public by saying, “It’s a safe banking system, a sound banking system. Our regulators are on top of it. This is a very manageable situation.”[31] Ironically, Paulson would state that the ”list of troubled banks will grow” but insisted nonetheless that the banks were safe.

On November 18, 2008, in a testimony before the U.S. House Committee on Financial Services, Paulson told lawmakers:

“There is no playbook for responding to turmoil we have never faced. We adjusted our strategy to reflect the facts of a severe market crisis always keeping focused on Congress’s goal and our goal – to stabilize the financial system that is integral to the everyday lives of all Americans.”[32]

He stated on another occasion:

“Well, as you know, we’re working through a difficult period in our financial markets right now as we work off some of the past excesses. But the American people can remain confident in the soundness and the resilience of our financial system,” Paulson said soon after the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy.[33]

This is the man we are supposed to believe could not have possibly understood the depth and seriousness of the 2008 financial crisis nor be in a position to reduce the massive global fallout that ensued.

Right. Not a very subtle evil villain plot if you ask me….

It was Lloyd Blankfein that became CEO of Goldman Sachs during this crucial period of 2006-2010 overseeing the firms safe landing in the midst of carnage and mayhem in the financial markets. Blankfein would continue on as CEO until 2018, serving as the longest CEO of Goldman Sachs for a total of 12 years.

Although China would be hit hard by the reverberations of America’s 2008 crash, they had not followed Paulson’s “advice” to the degree that he wished them to do so. We will talk more about how China escaped free-market “shock therapy” in Part III of this series, which features George Soros prominently, Bessent’s previous boss.

[Author’s note: This series is going to be longer than originally expected with several additional instalments that will be added to the original structure. Everything will be discussed that I promised to cover in Part I of this series but may be further pushed back in this series.]

However, the crash was not the work of just one man. It was the work of many, among the most notable being Chairmans of the Federal Reserve Paul Volcker (1979-1987), Alan Greenspan (1987-2006), and Ben Bernanke (2006-2014), Goldman Sachs man turned U.S. Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin (1995-1999), his protégé Larry Summers who served as Deputy Treasury Secretary under Rubin (1995-1999) and later as U.S Treasury Secretary (1999-2001), Summers was succeeded by Paul H. O’Neill as U.S. Treasury Secretary (2001-2002) a former chairman of the RAND Corporation. O’Neill was succeeded by John W. Snow (2003-2006) who had worked for Reagan in the 1980s as part of a four-man advisory group on regulatory policy.

There was another player that featured prominently in the engineering of this controlled disintegration – Tim Geithner.

Tim Geithner you could say was literally born to play this role, raised from a young age to be a major player in this vision for a new world order.

Geithner was born in 1961, his father was director of the Ford Foundation’s Asia program in New York during the 1990s, after working for the U.S. Agency for International Development in Zambia and Zimbabwe.[34]

During the early 1980s, Geithner’s father oversaw the Ford Foundation’s microfinance programs in Indonesia being developed by Ann Dunham Soetoro, Barack Obama’s mother, meeting at least once in Jakarta.[35]

Perhaps this explains why Obama decided to pick Geithner as his U.S. Treasury Secretary sharing a common vision that went back generations…

Geithner’s maternal grandfather served as vice-president of public relations for the Ford Motor Company from 1952 to 1964 and advised President Eisenhower as well as Nelson Rockefeller and George W. Romney on their respective presidential campaigns.[36]

His uncle served in the departments of Defense, Justice and State as well as the United Nations.[37]

Geithner spent most of his childhood living abroad, including Zimbabwe, Zambia, India, and Thailand, graduating from high school in Bangkok.[38] He studied Mandarin at the Peking University in 1981, and at Beijing Normal University in 1982.[39]

Like his father and grandfather, Geithner graduated from Dartmouth, earning a B.A. in Government and Asian studies. He then went on to graduate from John Hopkins University earning an M.A. in International Economics and East Asian studies.[40] He also studied Japanese.

Geithner went on to work for Kissinger Associates in Washington, D.C., from 1985 to 1988.[41] This is highly relevant to Geithner’s global role as an economic reformer. In 1982, under the direction of Kissinger, President Reagan would sign NSDD 77 under Cold War duress, which would launch Project Democracy, a sardonic name for a Trojan Horse.

NSDD 77 allowed Project Democracy the reins over “covert action on a broad scale” as well as overt public actions later to be associated with the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).

The structure of the NED essentially functions as a private CIA political operations arm of an invisible, secret government beyond accountability and beyond the reach of the law.

For more on this story refer here:

As we will see in Part III and IV of this series, both the CIA and MI6 played prominent roles in their hard-line attempt to get China to adopt radical free-market reforms.

Geithner later served as an attaché at the Embassy of the United States in Tokyo, then as deputy assistant secretary for International Monetary and Financial Policy (1995–1996), Senior Deputy Assistant Secretary for International Affairs (1996–1997), and Assistant Secretary for International Affairs (1997–1998).[42] He served as Under Secretary of the Treasury of International Affairs from 1998-2001, during this period he worked under Secretaries Robert Rubin and Larry Summers, who are widely considered as his mentors.[43]

While at the Treasury Department, he helped manage (or perhaps engineer) financial crises in Brazil, Mexico, Indonesia, South Korea and Thailand.[44] [45] In other words, Geithner was the point-man to manage international financial crises of the 1990s as a senior official in the Clinton Treasury Department.

This would have most notably included the Asian Crisis that tsunamied into Asia in the late 1990s, hitting Japan the hardest and leaving in its wake a wave of suicides. The Tiger Economies[46] of South Korea, Indonesia and Thailand were also hit hard. Ironically, or not so ironic if you understand how the game is played, these were among the most westernised economies in Asia. In other words, they were the economies that most readily adopted western radical free-market reforms.

The causes for this Asian crash went as far back as 1993. In that year, the Asian Tiger Economies – South Korea, Thailand, Indonesia – implemented a policy of aggressive deregulation of their capital accounts and the establishment of international banking facilities, which enabled the corporate and banking sectors to borrow liberally from abroad, the first time in the postwar era that borrowers could do so. In reality, there was no need for the Asian Tiger Economies to borrow money from abroad. All the money necessary for domestic investment could be created at home.[47]

As a result of the Asian Crisis, these economies had to further succumb to the orders of the Western financial diktat in how they were to reorganise their financial and banking sectors. The crisis was treated as proof by the western financial institutions that Asia still had much to learn. What was the medicine prescribed? Further deregulation of course!

These Asian Tiger economies never fathomed that the United States itself would enter into an even bigger financial crisis than what they experienced in the late 1990s. During the Clinton Administration it was easy to give off the impression that the western financial system was stable and strong and an excellent role model.

Note that it was after this period of financial crises hitting back-to-back around the world (by men trained in “managing” crises) that China was being courted heavily by Hank Paulson, among others as we will see in Part III, to adopt more radical free-market reforms, claiming that it would be a deterrent to financial upheaval.

As we will discuss in Part III of this series, it is because China did not adopt these reforms to the degree the U.S. wished that they were able to come out relatively well from the financial crises that would hit them from 2006-2009 from the U.S. economic crash and then between 2013-2018 as a result of the P2P loan crisis (first discussed in Part I of this series).

Just like derivatives, such as credit-default swaps, P2P loans were an Anglo-American creation (discussed in Part I) made up of complex algorithms to mask their true nature. Using the veneer that they were created to lessen economic hardship; they were in fact created to drive the knife ever deeper.

In 2001, Geithner left the Treasury to join the Council on Foreign Relations as a Senior Fellow in the International Economics department.[48] He was director of the Policy Development and Review Department at the International Monetary Fund from 2001 to 2003.[49]

Geithner then serves as the President of the Federal Reserve from 2003 to 2009. As President of the New York Fed, Geithner was a central figure in the U.S. government’s response to the 2008 financial crisis.

The Washington Post could not have come up with a better headline summing up Geithner’s legacy by 2008.

After 6 years as President of the Federal Reserve (2003-2009), President Obama selected Geithner for his Treasury Secretary, a position he held from 2009-2013.

During the 2008 fiasco, Geithner had worked closely with Paulson. They organised the rescue and fire sale of Bear Stearns to JP Morgan. In fact, the Fed agreed to provide financing for the deal and support up to $30 billion of Bear Stearns’s “less-liquid assets”, despite some internal protests.[50]

In doing so, the New York Fed allowed Bear Stearns itself to calculate the value of assets acquired by the government and exposed itself to losses should those assets have declined in value, though JPMorgan agreed to absorb the first $1 billion in losses.[51] [52]

The New York Fed stored these assets in the Maiden Lane limited liability company and awarded no-bid contracts to the Wall Street asset manager BlackRock for management of the assets, with the intent of ridding itself of the assets within 10 years.[53] [54]

For the relevance of BlackRock see:

Recall in Part I of this series that Goldman Sachs is the common denominator linking BlackRock (GIP), Project Stargate, Open AI, Microsoft, Alibaba, Tencent and SoftBank. The fact that Goldman Sachs was at the center of engineering the 2008 crash and overseeing financial and banking reform in its wake should be viewed in direct connection to these other projects.

As part of Geithner’s prescription to stabilize the financial market, he proposed that the traditional investment banks Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley transform themselves into bank holding companies to ensure continuing access to funding. Both banks completed the restructuring by September 21, 2009. [55] [56]

Although President Obama expressed strong support for Geithner, outrage over hundreds of millions of dollars in bonus payments (or employee “retention” payments) by the American International Group, which had received more than $170 billion in federal bailout aid, undermined public support in early 2009. In March 2009, AIG paid $165 million in bonuses to its financial products division, the unit responsible for the company’s near collapse the year prior, following $55 million paid to the same division in December 2008 and $121 million in bonus payments to senior executives.[57] [58]

In early November 2008, a joint committee of the Federal Reserve, Ernst & Young, and AIG concluded that the bonus payments, which were in contracts predating the government takeover, could not be legally stopped.[59]

Wikipedia writes:

In his book Bailout: How Washington Abandoned Main Street While Rescuing Wall Street, Neil Barofsky argues that Geithner never had the intention to utilize the Home Affordable Modification Program as intended by Congress. Instead of providing relief for homeowners to avoid foreclosures, it was Geithner’s plan that the bank should proceed with these foreclosures. Geithner said that he “estimates” that the banks “can handle ten million foreclosures, over time”, and that HAMP “will help foam the runway for them” by “keeping the full flush of foreclosures from hitting the financial system all at the same time.”[60]

As such, “banks participating in the program have rejected four million borrowers’ requests for help, or 72 percent of their applications, since the process began.”[61]

Citimortgage [owned by the notorious Citigroup that Greenspan wavered Glass Steagall to allow for its formation] and JPMorgan Chase were among the banks that refused the most HAMP claims. As such, the program only helped 887,001 people out of the over 4 Million people that were originally estimated to be able to benefit from the program.

In written comments to the Senate Finance Committee during his confirmation hearings, Geithner stated that the new administration believed China was “manipulating” its currency and that the Obama administration would act “aggressively” using “all the diplomatic avenues” to change China’s currency practices. The Obama administration would pressure China diplomatically to change this practice more strongly than the George W. Bush Administration had done. The United States maintained that China’s actions hurt American businesses and contributed to the 2008 financial crisis.[62]

Yes, you read right. Geithner as U.S. Treasury Secretary under Obama - who along with Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State and Jake Sullivan as Director of Policy Planning and Deputy Chief of Staff would organise hard in their Pivot to Asia stance - actually had the nerve to blame China for America’s 2008 crash….unfortunately too many Americans appear more than willing to accept these sort of condescending deflections from the real source of the problem that lies deep, very deep within American institutions today.

Instead of Obama focusing on addressing the underlying causes of the 2008 crash like he had campaigned on, that was the result of behemoth levels of fraud committed by the highest most powerful financial institutions in the United States…he decided to turn his attention to China and began increasing a military encirclement of the country.

Perhaps this was punishment for China not following the advice of Henry Paulson in setting up their own hangman’s noose, aka radical free-market reforms?

In July 2018, The Washington Post revealed that Mariner Finance, a company owned by the private equity firm, Warburg Pincus, of which Geithner was President (and now Chairman), engaged in predatory lending behavior. The Post’s interview with many former employees of Mariner Finance included a manager trainee at a branch in Nashville who characterized the company’s business model as “a way of monetizing poor people.” [63] [64]

On March 31, 2008, Henry Paulson released “The Department of the Treasury Blueprint for a Modernized Financial Regulatory Structure“. In remarks announcing the release of the report, Paulson cited the need to overhaul the financial regulatory system, saying:

“But capital markets and the financial services industry have evolved significantly over the past decade. Globalization and financial innovation, such as securitization, have provided benefits to domestic and global economic growth; while highlighting new risks to financial markets. We should and can have a structure that is designed for the world we live in, one that is more flexible, one that can better adapt to change, one that will allow us to more effectively deal with inevitable market disruptions and one that will better protect investors and consumers.”[65]

It was clear that what Paulson had in mind in this “Blueprint for a Modernized Financial Regulatory Structure” did not refer to just the United States alone, but the entire world.

According to Paulson, the only lesson one could confidently take from the 2008 crash was that the world had not undergone sufficient deregulation. As Goldman Sachs remarked themselves, the era of deregulation opened the doors to the era of globalisation. Without the former one cannot have the latter.

On November 20, 2008, during remarks at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, Henry Paulson said

“We are working through a severe financial crisis caused by many factors, including government inaction and mistaken actions, outdated U.S. and global financial regulatory systems, and by the excessive risk-taking of financial institutions. This combination of factors led to a critical stage this fall when the entire U.S. financial system was at risk. This should never happen again. The United States must lead global financial reform efforts, and we must start by getting our own house in order.”[66]

In the midst of another financial crash brewing, this one threatening to be on a much larger global scale - we might do well to re-evaluate the significance when Lloyd Blankfein makes the statement in 2026 “I smell [another] crash coming”….

Due to the length of this article (they are always a lot longer than originally intended, the discussion of what China did to reign in Big Tech will be discussed in Part III, this is for certain. Part III will also include a discussion on how China escaped “shock therapy” in the 90s into the 2000s, where George Soros will feature prominently.

In Part IV of this series, I will discuss the involvement of the CIA and MI6 in their attempt to impose free-market reforms. This story will also involve Falun Gong.

In future instalments I will discuss the true origin of social credit, the significance of South Africa in all of this, as well as China’s move towards digital banking.

Cynthia Chung is the President of the Rising Tide Foundation and author of the books “The Shaping of a World Religion” & “The Empire on Which the Black Sun Never Set,” consider supporting her work by making a donation and subscribing to her substack page Through A Glass Darkly.

Through A Glass Darkly

On matters of geopolitics, counterintelligence, revisionist history and cultural warfare.

By Cynthia Chung

Footnotes:

[1] Inside Job (2010) Documentary

[2] SMEs: Small and Medium-sized Enterprises, are crucial to the economy, and used to represent 99% of all businesses in the United States and EU, providing significant employment opportunities.

[3] Regan studied at Harvard University before he served in the U.S. Marine Corps, achieving the rank of lieutenant colonel.

[4] Inside Job (2010) Documentary

[5] Inside Job (2010) Documentary.

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Keating

[7] The longest serving chairman of the Federal Reserve was William McChesney Martin Jr. (1951-1970) who served for 19 years. Greenspan was just a few months shy from being the longest serving chairman.

[8] Goldman Sachs at 150 Documentary. Part 6

[9] Ibid

[10] Ibid

[11] Ibid

[12] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Summers

[13] Glass Steagall footnote

[14] Inside Job (2010) Documentary

[15] OTC (over-the-counter) derivatives are privately negotiated financial contracts between two parties, allowing customized risk management and investment strategies outside of formal exchanges.

[16] Inside Job (2010) Documentary

[17] Inside Job (2010) Documentary

[18] Inside Job (2010) Documentary

[19] White House Trump 100 Days | Rev

[20] Goldman Sachs at 150 Documentary. Part 6

[21] Ibid

[22] Paul Volcker famously discussed “controlled disintegration” in a November 1978 speech at the University of Warwick. He did not coin the phrase; rather, he quoted and analyzed a statement by the late economist Fred Hirsch. The quote and context surrounding this idea can be found in Volcker’s speech, titled “The Political Economy of the Dollar”. In his speech, Volcker highlighted Hirsch’s view that a “’controlled disintegration in the world economy is a legitimate objective for the 1980’s’”. Volcker explained that this concept reflects the conflict between international economic integration and the desire of modern democracies to maintain national autonomy. He added that while interdependence is clear, the practical instinct is to exert independence, making “’controlled disintegration’—modest as it may seem to be—is indeed a legitimate goal,” even though the phrase left him “uneasy”

[23] Inside Job (2010) Documentary

[24] “Henry M. Paulson Jr.” Archived June 26, 2010, at the Wayback Machine, The Nature Conservancy 2006

[25] Interestingly, Paulson’s prominent advocacy for environmentalism appears to be directly influence by John Ehlichman who was also a strong proponent. Rinde, Meir (2017). “Richard Nixon and the Rise of American Environmentalism”. Distillations. 3 (1): 16–29.

[26] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ehrlichman

[27] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ehrlichman

[28] “U.S. faces global funding crisis, warns Merrill Lynch”. The Daily Telegraph. London. July 16, 2008. Archived from the original on July 17, 2008.

[29] Lawder, David (August 1, 2007). “Paulson sees subprime woes contained”. Reuters.

[30] https://www.cnbc.com/2008/05/06/paulson-says-markets-emerging-from-crunch-wsj.html

[31] “List Of Troubled Banks Will Grow, Paulson Says”. CBS News. July 20, 2008. Archived from the original on December 2, 2008

[32] “Testimony by Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr”. Treasury.gov. November 18, 2008.

[33] Daniel Gross (September 17, 2008). “The Fundamentals of Our Economy Are Strong”. Slate.

[34] ] “Ford Foundation Links Parents of Obama and Treasury Secretary Nominee”. The Chronicle of Philanthropy. December 3, 2008. Archived from the original on December 11, 2008.

[35] “Ford Foundation Links Parents of Obama and Treasury Secretary Nominee”. The Chronicle of Philanthropy. December 3, 2008. Archived from the original on December 11, 2008.

[36] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_Geithner

[37] Milton, Susan (November 25, 2008). “Treasury nominee has ties to Orleans”. Cape Cod Times. Archived from the original on March 6, 2012.

[38] Farley, Kate (October 3, 2008). “Family describes Geithner ‘83’s youth”. The Dartmouth. Hanover, NH. Archived from the original on December 21, 2008.

[39] Speech by Secretary Geithner Archived 2014-10-25 at the Wayback Machine 24 October 2014

[40] Farley, Kate (October 3, 2008). “Family describes Geithner ‘83’s youth”. The Dartmouth. Hanover, NH. Archived from the original on December 21, 2008.

[41] Fuerbringer, Jonathan (October 16, 2003). “I.M.F. Official Is Named President of New York Fed”. The New York Times. Business.

[42] “Timothy F. Geithner” Who’s Who. Marquis Who’s Who. November 22, 2008.

[43] Becker, Jo; Morgenstern, Gretchen (April 26, 2009). “Geithner, as Member and Overseer, Forged Ties to Finance Club”. The New York Times.

[44] Irwin, Neil (November 22, 2008). “A Treasury Contender Schooled in Crisis”. The Washington Post. p. A6. “Before becoming the Federal Reserve’s chief emissary to Wall Street in 2003, he [Geithner] helped manage the international crises of the 1990s as a senior official in the Clinton Treasury Department.”

[45] “Obama picks Geithner as treasury secretary”. The Financial Express. Mumbai. November 23, 2008. Retrieved November 23, 2008. Geithner is a protege of Lawrence Summers and has been involved in the bailouts of Brazil, Mexico, Indonesia, South Korea and Thailand in the 1990s as the treasury undersecretary

[46] Tiger Economy refers to an economy that is quickly developing and growing in Asia.

[47] https://cynthiachung.substack.com/p/why-shinzo-abe-was-assassinated-towards

[48] “Timothy F. Geithner”. Experts. Council on Foreign Relations. February 2013.

[49] “Timothy F. Geithner” Who’s Who. Marquis Who’s Who. November 22, 2008.

[50] Sorkin, Andrew Ross (March 17, 2008). “JP Morgan Pays $2 a Share for Bear Stearns”. The New York Times.

[51] Labaton, Stephen (April 4, 2008). “Testimony Offers Details of Bear Stearns Deal”. The New York Times.

[52] Sidel, Robin; Berman, Dennis K.; Kelly, Kate (March 17, 2008). “J.P. Morgan Buys Bear in Fire Sale, As Fed Widens Credit to Avert Crisis”. The Wall Street Journal.

[53] Labaton, Stephen (April 4, 2008). “Testimony Offers Details of Bear Stearns Deal”. The New York Times.

[54] “July 7: Meeting About Maiden Lane, Followed by Dinner With Ralph Schlosstein”.

[55] Stewart, James B. (September 21, 2009). “Eight Days”. The New Yorker.

[56] “Morgan Stanley Granted Federal Bank Holding Company Status By U.S. Federal Reserve Board of Governors”

[57] Fletcher, Michael A.; Faiola, Anthony (March 23, 2009). “Advisers To Obama Wary of Bonus Tax”. The Washington Post.

[58] Andrews, Edmund L.; Baker, Peter (March 14, 2009). “A.I.G. Planning Huge Bonuses After $170 Billion Bailout”. The New York Times.

[59] Phillips, Michael M.; Reddy, Sudeep (March 23, 2009). “Geithner Aides Worked With AIG for Months on Bonuses”. The Wall Street Journal.

[60] Barofsky, Neil M. (2012). Bailout : an inside account of how Washington abandoned Main Street while rescuing Wall Street. New York: Free Press.

[61] “Banks reject 72% of applicants under HAMP program”. The Real Deal Miami. August 9, 2015.

[62] Moore, Malcolm (January 23, 2009). “Timothy Geithner currency ‘manipulation’ accusation angers China”. The Daily Telegraph. London. Archived from the original on January 12, 2022.

[63] “’A way of monetizing poor people’: How private equity firms make money offering loans to cash-strapped Americans”. The Washington Post. July 1, 2018. ‘A way of monetizing poor people’: How private equity firms make money offering loans to cash-strapped Americans

[64] “Private equity firms are the new predatory lenders: Report”. www.cbsnews.com. July 9, 2018.

[65] “Remarks by Secretary Henry M. Paulson, Jr. on Blueprint for Regulatory Reform”. www.treasury.gov.

[66] “Remarks by Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. at The Ronald Reagan Presidential Library”. Treasury.gov. November 20, 2008.

To highlight some key points in this paper:

1. P2P fintech loans originated in the UK, under an arm of the British multinational bank Prudential, which was established during the Opium War era and now focuses on African and Asian markets.

2. Britain still holds a great deal of influence over Hong Kong banking and finance, controlling 2/3 of Hong Kong’s printed money.

3. Prosper and LendingClub, two American P2P fintech loan giants (the first in the U.S.) played a role in the 2008 financial crisis and created their own “social credit systems.” LendingClub has paired up with Google, and in the past was paired with Alibaba, in their services with questionable applications for an evolving “social credit system.” Prosper is financially backed by BlackRock, eBay and Google among others. Thus, Prosper and LendingClub’s private credit scoring are enmeshed with social platforms, most notably with Google.

4. Fintech companies in the West are either acquiring banking licenses or the right to purchase a registered bank and are acting as quasi-banks. The consequence of this will be less small to medium banks since they will not be able to compete. Only big banks will survive and as we have seen, are actually playing a large role in promoting these predatory fintech companies acting as quasi-banks.

5. BlackRock was born out of the notorious Blackstone which played a major role in the sub-prime mortgage crisis in 2008. BlackRock and GIP (which BlackRock owns) work directly for the Global Infrastructure and Investment Partners (GIIP) a G7 initiative to buy up infrastructure around the world in opposition to China’s Belt and Road Initiative.

6. It is the American people who had to foot the bill for the 2008 financial crisis and have been going further and further into debt. Meanwhile predatory lending is not only allowed to continue but is increasing in magnitude. With companies like DoorDash pairing up with a Swedish fintech company headquartered in London using the “Buy Now, Pay Later” model as an example. As Americans go further into debt, they will be increasingly vulnerable to American fintech companies private “social credit systems.”

7. The timing of P2P loans could not have been better. As the 2008 financial crisis hit the world, not only the United States, but all countries were in desperate need for loans as profits began to tank globally.

8. P2P lenders in China were giving out so many loans that they became known as the “shadow banking system,” a system that began to directly challenge China’s official banking and financial system. It was Zopa (UK), Prosper (US) and LendingClub (US), which formed the complex algorithm that was then used around the world, including in China, in spreading the epidemic of predatory P2P loans.

9. eZuBao, an arm of Yucheng Group, was the largest P2P fraud case in China. Yucheng Group is registered in the British Virgin Islands.

10. There are no P2P lenders in China anymore due to heavy regulation. However, P2P lending continues throughout Europe and the Untied States today.

11. It is Goldman Sachs that led a consortium of financial institutions to give Alibaba its first funding of $25 million in total in its embryonic state.

12. It should be noted that all of these online companies, like Uber, DoorDash, Opendoor etc. are headquartered in California, with many in Palo Alto and San Francisco as their hub. Again, this is very relevant to Project Stargate.

13. SoftBank Vision Fund, the world’s largest technology-focused investment fund, is headquartered in London, England despite being founded by Masayoshi Son, the head of SoftBank, who lives in Japan.

14. In January 2025, SoftBank Group, Oracle Corporation, MGX [Saudi Arabia], OpenAI, and other partners established The Stargate Project as a cooperative venture aimed at building AI infrastructure in the U.S.

15. Softbank is also working closely with Tether and OpenAI. SoftBank is the third largest stakeholder of OpenAI after OpenAI, and Microsoft. SoftBank is also a 40% owner of Project Stargate.

16. The year that China reigned in Alibaba/Ant Group and forced them to be beholden to Chinese regulation is the year SoftBank drops Jack Ma like a sack of potatoes.

17. Joseph Tsai ran Alibaba’s IPO which was managed by six behemoth western banks: Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley and Citigroup.

18. J. Michael Evans had worked as Vice Chairman of Goldman Sachs and Chairman of Goldman Sachs Asia and spent 19 years as a Partner before becoming Alibaba’s President.

19. Alibaba Group is registered in the Cayman Islands. After Jack Ma and Joseph Tsai the largest shareholders of Alibaba are Vanguard and BlackRock. The “Golden Share”, the only Chinese state-owned entity that holds an influential stake, which is 1%, is the Cyberspace Administration of China, established in Dec. 2022. The “golden share” gives the Chinese government the right to veto or approve any key decisions made in the Alibaba’s Group structure, function and direction.

20. Perhaps this is the reason why Masayoshi Son of SoftBank dropped Jack Ma like a sack of potatoes? He could see the writing on the wall that the Alibaba Group would not be an easy conduit for Project Stargate into China.

21. Martin Lau, the man who built Tencent to what it is today, was a McKinsey and Goldman Sachs man before joining Tencent.

22. McKinsey & Co. was at the center of America’s opioid epidemic.

23. Tencent’s majority shareholders are Prosus Naspers (South African), BlackRock and Vanguard. Tencent is registered in the Cayman Islands.

23a. There are no significant Chinese state-owned, bank or business shareholders of either Alibaba or Tencent. Only the 1% “golden share” for both, that gives the Chinese government the right to veto or approve key decisions the companies make.

24. Goldman Sachs is working closely and is heavily invested in Project Stargate, SoftBank, OpenAI, Microsoft, and GIP (BlackRock).

25. OpenAI has on its board the head of GIP (Global Infrastructure Partners) which is owned by BlackRock. Among the members of the board of OpenAI are notable affiliations with Microsoft and BlackRock. The two main entities tasked with heading the G7 initiative Global Infrastructure and Investment Partners (GIIP) in buying up infrastructure around the world to counter China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Thus, this initiative appears to be directly tied with Project Stargate via OpenAI.

26. Credit Suisse was also entangled in the opioid epidemic and directly tied to Purdue Pharma. It collapsed due to the magnitude of the scandal and was absorbed into UBS. Credit Suisse was one of the six banks that managed Alibaba’s IPO. UBS was one of two banks that managed Tencent’s IPO.

27. Adebayo Ogunlesi worked for Credit Suisse, then became the Lead Director on the board of directors of Goldman Sachs. He founded GIP which was purchased by BlackRock, he continues to run GIP. He is also on the board of OpenAI.

Breaking Free of Anti-China Psyops

Cynthia Chung is the President of the Rising Tide Foundation and author of the books “The Shaping of a World Religion” & “The Empire on Which the Black Sun Never Set,” consider supporting her work by making a donation and subscribing to her substack page Through A Glass Darkly.

Through A Glass Darkly

On matters of geopolitics, counterintelligence, revisionist history and cultural warfare.

By Cynthia Chung

Matt asks Cynthia Chung about the first installment of her newest groundbreaking essay series "The True Origins of China's 'Social Credit System'" which showcases the fact that the nefarious abusive technocracy fintech agencies which have entered China (and which spawned Tencent and Alibaba) are actually driven by Silicon Valley Stargate Project operations, Softbank, and Goldman Sachs.

While the City of London plays a directing role from above, having served as the true originator of the fintech peer-to-peer (P2P) loans acting as quasi banks that have been embedded into the USA via Silicon Valley, and Japan via Softbank, you will quickly discover by the end of this video that China has positioned itself in opposition to this supranational techno-feudal parasite.

In this interview we review the names of those institutions that have been funding and managing the infiltration of nations from above, and what can be done about it.

Read The True Origins of China’s “Social Credit System” Part I here:

Cynthia Chung is the President of the Rising Tide Foundation and author of the books “The Shaping of a World Religion” & “The Empire on Which the Black Sun Never Set,” consider supporting her work by making a donation and subscribing to her substack page Through A Glass Darkly.

Watch our other RTF and CP films and documentaries here.

Through A Glass Darkly

On matters of geopolitics, counterintelligence, revisionist history and cultural warfare.

By Cynthia Chung

One of the most infamous criticisms of China over the past several years that has formed the basis for viewing the country as an Orwellian surveillance state and its citizens as mere drone-like-automatons is its supposed “social credit system.” But what if I were to tell you that the origin of this Orwellian “social credit system” and the fintech (financial technology) credit loan bubble crises were actually created by the same Anglo-American institutions that also created the United States’ 2008 financial crisis? Or that fintechs such as Alipay, Antpay (both created by Jack Ma) and Wepay (Tencent) are not truly Chinese creations but have in fact been managed and funded by Anglo-American institutions that overlap heavily with Project Stargate? Or that China in fact cracked down on this back in 2020 which was portrayed by western press as a global scandal when the poor Big Tech billionaire Jack Ma was taken down a few pegs?

As this four-part series will go through in great detail, the reality was that these Big Fintech companies were giving out predatory loans on the level of what sparked the 2008 financial crisis. These Big Tech companies, like Alibaba and Tencent didn’t hold skin in the game and were going to come out on top, even if mass defaults of loan payments were to occur and which were already happening. This is something that even by a western viewpoint, should not be left unchecked. Alibaba and Tencent were effectively acting as banks while holding no responsibility of a bank. It was a powder keg ready to explode, and as I will showcase in this series, was engineered to do so.

In addition to this, these Big Tech giants Alibaba and Tencent, had created their own social credit scoring and were creating rewards and punishments based off of a user’s score that would determine what discounts/deals they would receive as a consumer on their platforms (think of Amazon, Apple Pay and Google Pay on steroids), or whether the penalised user would have limited access or temporary banning etc. to these platforms, such as music or films, video games, online shopping, restaurants, loans, rental deals on apartment units etc., thus, penalties meant you didn’t have full access or the best “deals” offered on their platforms.

Basically, think of a “Ready Player One” sort of world as the ideal for Big Tech. If you can get consumers to increasingly live their “reality” in a digital world, then who controls that digital world is like a God are they not? Well, you could say in 2020, Jack Ma was on a god-like high.

Alibaba and Tencent are still global giants in Fintech, however, they are beholden to proper banking regulation now which put at an end to the predatory loaning (they no longer give out P2P loans), as well as their reward and punishment social credit system. Thus, China clamped down on Big Tech’s social credit system and deemed it illegal to create rewards and punishments.

In truth, there is a double standard that is repeatedly applied to China. In this case, criticizing China for having been too lax on these Big Tech giants, which led to the P2P (peer-to-peer fintech loans) crisis that hit a boiling point in China from 2013-2018, and then when China regulates these Big Tech giants’ actions such that predatory actions are not tolerated, the West howls that China is being authoritarian. As we will see in this series, China’s P2P crisis was an Anglo-American construct, the same construct that also triggered the 2008 financial crisis within the United States.

In this series we will go through the history of how China clamped down on Big Tech in great detail, including members of its own government that were found guilty of corruption and went to jail. Yes, you heard right, China, unlike in the United States, responded to this financial crisis sparked by predatory loans by actually sending high-ranking government officials to jail.

Meanwhile, these very institutions continue to go largely unchecked in the West with the most recent BigTech Private Credit Loan bubble ready to burst in the United States. Even the former Goldman Sachs CEO who led the bank through the 2008 financial crash, Lloyd Blankfein, told the Telegraph recently that he “smells [another] crash coming.” The question is - is this just all reckless happenstance, or is it an engineered “reboot” of the financial system where Big Tech comes out on top?

As we will see, Goldman Sachs will play a central role in this story…

One example of Big Tech attempting to enter the banking world is Libra,[1] later called Diem, a stablecoin payment system proposed by U.S. social media company Facebook, that was ultimately rejected by U.S. regulators. The plan included a private currency implemented as a cryptocurrency. The launch was originally planned to be in 2020, the same year that China shutdown Jack Ma’s Ant IPO, what was to be the largest IPO in history.

Facebook’s bold attempt to create its own digital currency, if approved, would have had as its ultimate goal the eventual right to establish its own bank for said digital currency. It would not be long before other Big Techs would follow suit, such as Apple, Google, Amazon, Twitter X, Uber, DoorDash etc. With such a development, Big Tech would be in the position to give away risky loans, equivalent to loan sharking, with penalties if the borrower was late or defaulted on a payment.

In other words, these platforms could penalise a borrower by limiting or blocking their services to said borrower on platforms such as Facebook, Apple, Google, Amazon, Twitter X, Uber, DoorDash etc. etc. The reader should be aware that Apple Pay and Google Pay are already highly integrated into much of American consumer society.

Presently these companies do not have the right to give out loans or own their own bank, however, as we will see in this paper, fintech in the United States and Europe does have this right to give out P2P loans and own their own banks. It is only the merger of these consumer-based platforms mentioned above that are kept separate, however, massive pressure is whittling away at this flimsy barrier that is ready to break at any moment. In fact, Goldman Sachs is leading this charge into a “Ready Player One World” as we will soon see.

This had been something that was allowed to fester in China through Big Tech private credit loans such as Jack Ma’s Alipay and Antpay, along with WeChat pay (Tencent), something that had run amok earlier during their P2P crisis before the Chinese government began to clamp down, which led ultimately to the global scandal in 2020 when Jack Ma was taken down several pegs. The significance of this should be especially viewed in context to the fact that Alipay, Antpay, and Wepay are not truly Chinese companies but are funded and managed by powerful Anglo-American institutions as this paper will lay out.

This four-part series will showcase how not only are the origins of the social credit system not to be found in China, but that China had in fact blocked the attempt from Big Tech to essentially attempt a coup d’etat on its national banking/financial system. This series will go into great detail as to how this came about, as well as where the true origins of the social credit system lie. In Part III, we will discuss accusations of China using an Orwellian social credit system within their legal system, which we will see consists of a lot of hot air. Finally, in Part IV we will discuss what is China’s digital currency and how it differs from what Big Tech is attempting to bring about.

Through A Glass Darkly

On matters of geopolitics, counterintelligence, revisionist history and cultural warfare.

By Cynthia Chung

The 2008 U.S. Financial Crisis as a model for China’s P2P (Peer-to-Peer) Loan Crisis

In order to understand what hit China between 2013-2018 in their P2P crisis, we must first understand what the 2008 financial crisis was that hit the United States banking and financial system with catastrophic global effects – for it was this crisis that was the model used against China’s own banking and financial system.

Two especially big players that would play a prominent role in the U.S.’s 2008 financial crisis, were Prosper (f. 2005) and LendingClub (f. 2006), which were both founded in San Francisco, California.

Prosper is one of the first peer-to-peer lending platforms. Prosper specialises in personal loans, home equity loans, home equity lines of credit and open credit cards[2]. LendingClub is the first peer-to-peer lender to register its offerings as securities with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and to offer loan trading on a secondary market. At its height, LendingClub was the world’s largest peer-to-peer lending platform.[3] Both Prosper and LendingClub connect borrowers with investors directly with loan amounts ranging from $1,000 to $50,000. Since its launch, Prosper has facilitated over $28 billion in loans.[4]

However, Prosper and LendingClub, though the first P2P lenders in the United States were not the origin of P2P loans. That title belongs to Zopa Bank Ltd. which was founded in the United Kingdom in March 2005. Zopa Bank Ltd. is a British online bank which offers deposit accounts, personal loans and credit cards and is the world’s first P2P lending company, gaining a full banking licence in that eventful year of 2020 (the same year that Facebook’s Libra (Diem) attempted to get U.S. approval of its own digital currency and Jack Ma attempt to get approval for his Ant IPO in China).

The P2P side of Zopa closed in December 2021. It should be emphasized here that San Francisco-based Prosper was created on the very heels of Zopa, which is likely not a coincidence. Neobanks such as Zopa Bank, are fintech companies offering banking-like services and are growing in presence within western countries.[5]

Zopa, in turn, was created by the internet banking company Egg Banking. Egg, also headquartered in the United Kingdom, was founded in 1998. Egg was born out of the banking arm of Prudential, a British multinational insurance and asset management company headquartered in London and Hong Kong.

The reader should be reminded here that Hong Kong was a British colony for 99 years, part of the British Empire’s spoils from the Opium Wars and was only released back to China in 1997. However, there is still a great deal of pressure on China to stay out of the Hong Kong arena, with the “One Country, Two Systems” slogan (something that was promoted by the very British colonialists themselves) used to somehow justify keeping Hong Kong and Macau out of the Chinese government jurisdiction even though they are officially recognised as part of China.

To give the reader a quick and effective example of how much influence Britain continues to hold over Hong Kong banking, we only need to look at who actually controls its money supply. Hong Kong has a currency that is separate from the Chinese Yuan ¥, called the Hong Kong dollar $. The date of its introduction was 1846. The First Opium War was from 1839 to 1842. One of the consequences of China losing this war against Britain was the signing of the Treaty of Nanking, which gave British subjects extraterritorial privileges in treaty ports, especially in the region of Hong Kong. This forceful “opening” up of China to European trade was mainly in opium. And it is clear that the Hong Kong dollar was born out of this nefarious history.

Today, three banks control the printing of Hong Kong money: HSBC, Standard Chartered and the Bank of China. Only the Bank of China is an actual Chinese bank. HSBC and Standard Chartered are British banks with their headquarters in the City of London.

Thus, HSBC (a bank that has continued to be caught in dope and money laundering) has reserved the right to this day, the authority to print 1/3 of Hong Kong currency, the only other two allowed agencies being Standard Chartered Bank (another British multinational bank with headquarters in the City of London) and Bank of China, the only Chinese owned bank. In other words, China has the authority to only print 1/3 of Hong Kong currency even though Hong Kong is legally recognised as part of China. And this despite HSBC being on a blacklist of foreign companies in China.

Standard Chartered, along with HSBC, are both British dope banks that were founded in service to Britain’s opium trade. Standard Chartered was founded in 1853 and opened its first branches in Bombay and Calcutta (India), as well as Shanghai and Hong Kong (China). Britain had colonised India and was where the opium production was centered with China chosen to be its main consumer in the name of British “free trade.” HSBC was founded in 1865, as the name implies in both Shanghai and Hong Kong (for more on this story refer here).

It is these two old British banks that were created specifically for opium trading that control the majority of Hong Kong’s money supply to this day.

China has until recently, not been strong enough to take on these old British banks, however, the tides are changing.

Suffice to say, old British banks like HSBC, Standard Chartered and Prudential’s heydays in Hong Kong appear to be numbered.

Now back to our story.

With this added context in mind, it has been demonstrated that Zopa was born out of Egg Bank, which was in turn, born out of Prudential, a British multinational insurance and asset manager. Prudential was also founded during the Opium War era, in London in May 1848, with a focus on having a strong presence in Hong Kong.[6]

Prudential would become a market leader in asset acquisitions in the UK, notably in real estate. In 1986 they acquired the American insurer Jackson National Life for $608 million and by 2020 held $297.6 billion in total assets while still owned by Prudential. Jackson National Life Insurance Company is a U.S. company whose subsidiaries specialize in asset management and retail brokerage.

Prudential had also acquired that same year, in 1986, Reeds Rain, the second largest estate agent chain in the United Kingdom.

In 1998 Prudential set up Egg which created the first ever P2P loan lender, Zopa. Egg was later sold to Citibank in 2007. In December 2008 the Financial Services Authority fined Egg £721,000 for the persistent mis-selling of payment protection insurance (PPI) on its credit cards.[7] In 2011 Barclays Bank purchased Egg’s more than one million credit card accounts from Citigroup.

In 2004 Prudential launched a new subsidiary PruHealth, a joint venture with Discovery Holdings of South Africa selling private medical insurance to the UK market.[8]

In 2019 Prudential attempted to purchase the pan-Asian life insurance company AIG, American International Assurance (AIA) but the deal later collapsed.

In 2021, Prudential announced it was to focus solely on African and Asian markets.

Looking at this history one cannot help but be reminded of Blackstone, but with Prudential focusing on African and Asian markets while Blackstone focuses on American and European markets. Blackstone, founded in New York City in 1985, is the largest commercial landlord in the world and is what BlackRock was born out of.

Blackstone made a killing off of the housing bubble bust during the 2008 financial crisis and is a big reason why Americans can no longer afford to purchase a house of their own today.

Blackstone has had a long legacy of buying up American assets such as houses, hospitals, nursing homes, and schools. When these infrastructures such as hospitals and schools came under the ownership of Blackstone all sorts of budget cuts were made to the detriment of health and educational services, including food rations to patients. Blackstone had also acquired the largest physician staffing firm in the United States in 2017 resulting in low-income patients facing far more aggressive debt collection lawsuits.

In addition, Blackstone is responsible for buying up homes and is largely responsible for the inflation of house prices such that most Americans today cannot afford decent housing, in addition to hiking rent rates (for more on Blackstone refer here).

And not coincidentally, Blackstone is at the center of the U.S.’s private credit loan bubble crisis that is threatening a repeat of the 2008 financial crash.

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Meanwhile, Blackstone’s spawn, BlackRock is still attempting to acquire 43 of the 53 CK Hutchison ports with China so far blocking the deal from going through, though the two ports in Panama have now been seized.

BlackRock just so happens to be the world’s largest asset manager, managing over $11 trillion of largely billionaire money. BlackRock was also officially brought in by the G7 to oversee acquiring infrastructure worldwide in service to the Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment (PGII), which was created to directly oppose China’s Belt and Road Initiative. BlackRock is working in partnership with Microsoft among other tech companies to accomplish this noble task. (For those who would like to know more about China’s BRI and its activities in other countries refer here)

Zopa was the first P2P loan lender, born out of the bowels of Prudential, however, fintech showed its real potential with the launch of the giants Prosper and LendingClub in the United States in 2005 and 2006 respectively.

Prosper is America’s first P2P lending marketplace with over $28 billion in funded loans.[9] Investors can consider borrowers credit scores, ratings, and histories and the category of loan. Prosper also offers tools for financial planning and credit monitoring.

Effective December 19, 2010, Prosper filed a new prospectus with the SEC, changing its business model to use pre-set rates determined solely by Prosper based on a formula evaluating each prospective borrower’s credit risk.[10] In other words, Prosper’s right to generate their own social credit system. Under the new approach, lenders no longer determine the loan rate via price discovery in an auction. Instead, they simply choose whether or not to invest at the rate which Prosper’s loan pricing algorithm assigns to the loan after it analyzes the borrower’s credit report and financial information.

Thus, Prosper decides the rate a borrower will be charged for borrowing depending on the credit score Prosper has created for them. The investor can either choose to accept this rate of charge for the loan or reject it, they are not able to change the determined rate decided by Prosper.

In fact, co-founder of Prosper Chris Larsen is known as a “Credit Score Pioneer.” Before founding Prosper, he founded E-LOAN in the early 1990s where he began his expertise in consumer credit scoring. He has also served on the board of Credit Karma, a credit and financial management platform that earns its revenue from lenders who pay the company when they successfully recommend a borrower to them.

It should also be noted that Chris Larsen went to Stanford University a Project Stargate recruitment hub.

In 2016, Prosper Marketplace unveiled Prosper Daily, a mobile app. The app is designed to give consumers tools to make financial decisions, including viewing all their financial accounts in one place, budgeting and tracking spending by category, identifying questionable charges, and monitoring their free credit score, which is updated monthly.[11]

Wikipedia writes:[12]

Prosper opened to the public on February 5, 2006, and was founded by Chris Larsen (the founder of E-loan) and John Witchel. Prosper is backed by BlackRock, Sequoia Capital, Accel Partners, Agilus Ventures, Benchmark Capital, CrossLink Capital, DAG Ventures, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Fidelity Ventures, Omidyar Network (an investment vehicle of eBay founder Pierre Omidyar), Meritech Capital Partners, TomorrowVentures (an investment vehicle of Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt), and QED Investors (an investment vehicle of Capital One co-founder Nigel Morris).

In 2008, the same year Egg was found guilty of persistent mis-selling of payment protection insurance (PPI) on its credit cards, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) found Prosper to be in violation of the Securities Act of 1933, that was put in place as a response to the stock market crash of 1929. The 1933 Act is based upon a philosophy of disclosure, meaning that the goal of the law is to require issuers to fully disclose all material information that a reasonable shareholder would need in order to make up his or her mind about the potential investment. If the issuer fails to do this, it is considered a “predatory” loan.

‘As a result of the SEC’s findings they imposed a cease and desist order on Prosper. In July 2009, Prosper reopened their website for lending (”investing”) and borrowing after having obtained SEC registration for its loans (”notes”).[13] After the relaunch, bidding on loans was restricted to residents of 28 U.S. states and the District of Columbia. Borrowers may reside in any of 47 states, with residents of three states (Iowa, Maine, and North Dakota) not permitted to borrow through Prosper.’[14]

‘On November 26, 2008, a class action lawsuit was filed against Prosper in the Superior Court of California, County of San Francisco, California. The suit was brought on behalf of all loan note purchasers in Prosper’s online lending platform from January 1, 2006, through October 14, 2008, and alleges that Prosper offered and sold unqualified and unregistered securities in violation of the California and federal securities laws. The lawsuit sought class certification, damages, the right of rescission and the award of attorneys’ fees.’[15]

The lawsuit was settled July 19, 2013, for 10 million dollars paid in installments over three years.[16]

P2P lending platforms are selling themselves as the solution to the increasing impoverishment of the have-nots, when they are in fact the culprits behind predatory loans. And in the midst of the present BigTech Private Credit Loan bubble that threatens another financial crash on an even larger scale than what occurred in 2008, who do you think is going to foot the bill? The American people yet again of course, like they did back in 2008, only to go further and further into debt. This mounting debt will soon encompass social credit scores that will be created, managed and controlled by such benevolent fintech companies like Prosper and LendingClub, who are both working with Google, and in the latter case has even managed to purchase a regulated bank to service its financial schemes.

We are even seeing companies like DoorDash engaging in predatory lending with their “Buy Now, Pay Later” partnership with Klarna. Klarna is another fintech company and digital bank founded in Sweden in 2005 but headquartered in London.

Here’s what US consumers had to say in a poll about the “Buy Now, Pay Later” experience.

As for Prosper, in 2022, Forbes gave a negative review of the Prosper credit card. According to Forbes, “Prospering with the Prosper® Card* seems unlikely... We hope you live long and… well, apply for a different credit card.”[17]

And then there is this…

Wikipedia writes:[18]

In December 2015, the FBI reported that Syed Rizwan Farook, one of the shooters in the 2015 San Bernardino attack, had borrowed $28,500 from Prosper to finance the purchase of weapons and explosives. This was investigated by the FBI, the House Financial Services Committee, and the California Department of Business Oversight. The investigation was concluded with no action taken.

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As already mentioned, LendingClub was the first American P2P to be registered with the SEC and at its height was the world’s largest P2P lending platform. In 2014, LendingClub raised $1 billion in what became the largest technology IPO of 2014 in the United States.[19] However, by 2020 LendingClub shut down its P2P lending platform after a series of scandals in 2016 made it difficult to attract investors.

Interestingly, LendingClub was initially launched on Facebook as one of Facebook’s first applications.[20] [21] After receiving $10.26 million in a Series A funding round in August 2007, from venture capital investors Norwest Venture Partners (which merged with Wells Fargo in 1998) and Canaan Partners, LendingClub was developed into a full-scale peer-to-peer lending company.[22]

Throughout the years it continued to raise funds from venture capital investors such as Morgenthaler Ventures, Foundation Capital, Union Square Ventures and Thomvest, owned by the family of Thomson-Reuters, owner of the Reuters news agency.[23] Thomson-Reuters founder Peter J. Thomson also invested an unspecified amount of his personal fortune into LendingClub.[24]

In 2012 LendingClub secured funding from another venture capital investor Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and $2.5 million of personal investments from John J. Mack, former CEO and chairman of the board at Morgan Stanley (a powerful investment bank and brokerage firm). Kleiner Perkins partner Mary Meeker joined Mack on LendingClub’s board of directors.[25] In May 2013, Google Capital purchased a stake in LendingClub.[26]

In April 2015, LendingClub CEO Renaud Laplanche told Forbes that LendingClub would expand into car loans and mortgages.[27] LendingClub also announced a partnership with Google to extend credit to smaller companies that use Google’s business services.[28]

The company signed partnerships with Google, Alibaba, BancAlliance, and HomeAdvisor, including vetting community bank lenders for BancAlliance (a group of 200 banks), in order to send people on its platform to various community finance institutions.[29]

That same year, 2015, LendingClub partnered with Opportunity Fund, announced by former President Bill Clinton at the Clinton Global Initiative. The partnership intended to provide $10 million to small businesses in areas of California that are “underserved by lenders.” [30] [31]

LendingClub actually partnered with Prosper to provide personal loans in 2015 using small banks including Radius Bank, which was eventually purchased by LendingClub.[32] [33] American Banker news wrote back in September 2015, “For months, Prosper Marketplace and LendingClub have been teaming up with small banks that refer customers to their online lending platforms.”[34] In other words, for those turned away by small banks deemed “too risky” to qualify for a loan, such individuals or businesses were likely to be accepted for a loan by Prosper or LendingClub. This is exactly the sort of predatory loans that are fueling the Private Credit Loan crisis as we speak.

In 2016 LendingClub announced that its CEO Renaud Laplanche had resigned after an internal investigation found improprieties in its lending process, including the altering of millions of dollars’ worth of loans.[35]

Due to difficulties finding investors after the 2016 scandal, LendingClub had to eventually shutdown its P2P lending platform in 2020. That year, LendingClub announced that it would buy Radius Bank for $185 million in cash and stock.[36] The deal was the first time a U.S. fintech lender bought a regulated bank, positioning it one step further in becoming a marketplace bank.[37] In 2021, Radius Bank was integrated into the LendingClub brand.[38]

Radius had been founded in 1987 as First Trade Union Bank by the carpenters union in Massachusetts, using pension funds.[39] The bank, however, struggled during the subprime mortgage crisis (i.e. the 2008 financial crisis), when it invested heavily in commercial real estate. In 2014, it was renamed Radius Bank.[40] In June 2016, private investors had acquired approximately 95% of Radius Bancorp in response to Dodd Frank regulations.[41]

Here we see a very clear example of the sort of carnage that was a predictable outcome of the 2008 financial crisis, the end of small banks or in this case the actual acquisition of a small bank from a P2P fintech company, which has received almost all of its funding from venture capitalists, members of big banks and lots of old money.

LendingClub also operates an online-focused community bank headquartered in Lehi, Utah.[42]

In April 2026, LendingClub announced their pending rebrand to Happen Bank, a formal name change that will become active in July 2026.[43] Clearly LendingClub agreed they were in need of a facelift after years of scandal.

With this backdrop on the Anglo-American origins of P2P lending and fintech we are now ready to delve into China’s P2P crisis and how fintech giants Alibaba/Ant Group and Tencent/WePay that are commonly thought of as “Chinese” fintech fit into this Anglo-American picture.

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The Origins of China’s P2P Crisis

China’s online peer-to-peer (P2P) lending industry launched in 2007, but the market didn’t experience its catastrophic crisis until a massive boom-and-bust cycle between 2013 and 2018. Over 6,000 platforms collapsed, wiping out billions in investments and sparking nationwide investor protests.

Thus, less than two years after the first P2P lending platform was created in the UK, quickly followed by the Americans, P2P lending platforms began a steady rise in China beginning in 2007, which promised to democratize finance and provide opportunities for young people. However, the ease of access to credit led to a cycle of serious levels of debt for many borrowers, resulting in a financial crisis. The crisis led to a crackdown on the P2P industry, with regulators tightening regulations and shutting down many P2P platforms. The details of how China cracked down on this will be discussed in Part II of this series.

The goal of P2P loan platforms is to offer borrowers loans that are provided by “peers” who accept repayment risk for a fee, hence the name peer-to-peer. While this sounds deceptively simple, the actual programs are complex. Several attributes that continue to make P2P lending attractive is that P2P loans don’t require an interview or going to the bank. You can apply online, and in general, the terms are more flexible. In many cases the borrower can go from application to receipt of funds within several days.

By digitizing everything and eliminating physical locations and highly paid employees – you’ve got a stripped-down internet loan machine that works 24/7 to connect borrowers to lenders. What makes P2P even more compelling is that it readily takes on individuals with bad or no credit scores, those who are underserved by traditional banks.

Though, this may seem like a very small portion of a western population, in Asia and especially Africa there is massive percentage of the population that still does not own a bank account. In the case of China during the advent of P2P loans, not only was this the case for most of its rural population but even those that owned a bank account would have limited or no access to a bank. This is because the number of physical branches were not enough to service the population and on top of this, if you happened to have a bank branch relatively close to where you lived, the lines were notoriously long and it was a normal occurrence to wait in line for hours to settle relatively simple matters.

P2P lending platforms offered to “resolve” these kinks in the system.

Richard Turrin writes in Cashless: China’s Digital Currency Revolution:[44] (note: SEC is in reference to the Securities and Exchange Commission within the United States)

The P2P concept is straightforward but the history of P2P in the U.S. should have been fair warning to China that this market was best not left to its own devices. Starting in 2006, P2P lenders in the U.S. operated without much regulation. The early versions of these companies had few restrictions on borrower eligibility. This caused adverse selection, attracting borrowers who would default on their loans, resulting in high loss rates. Still according to the U.S. Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), by the end of 2007 the P2P market had an estimated volume of $600 million. Perhaps not enough to ruffle the incumbent banks, but certainly enough to draw the attention of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

By early 2008, the SEC closed shop on all P2P lenders, including Prosper. In what would later turn out to be a stroke of genius [or insider information], Lending Club voluntarily ceased operations in 2007 just before the SEC closure. The SEC closed these lenders because it deemed that the notes issued to the lenders could be considered securities offered to the general public, and as such, amounted to investments. Consequently, P2P lenders would have to be registered by the SEC and cease operations until they received the necessary certification. In another interesting twist, the SEC commented that there was “no alternative regulatory scheme” that could adequately reduce investor’s risk. The SEC essentially admitting that P2P had no regulatory home [within the United States], a problem that would also plague China’s P2P market.

One reason why the SEC came down so hard was the prior abuse of sub-prime lending that contributed to the [U.S.] financial crisis. Raising the stakes for [U.S.] P2P lenders by requiring them to acquire a costly SEC registration resulted in the closing of all but Lending Club and Prosper.

When Lending Club reopened in 2008, it was a different world, one that was desperate for credit…and they were now the only game in town. Prosper opened six months later but was never able to overcome the delay.

The reason this is so important is that it demonstrates the efforts the SEC made in 2007 to regulate the P2P market in the U.S. Interestingly, these steps were taken after the lending market was launched, reinforcing the point that the speed of new technology adoption may exceed regulators’ ability to react.

The factors that made P2P so popular in the U.S. helped propel it to even greater heights in China. The ease of using online platforms (in a country with a significant unbanked population) [author’s note: unbanked in reference to having no bank account] made it an immediate success. The ability of P2P to provide credit for the masses of SMEs [Small and Medium Enterprises] was both practical and essential in speeding China’s development, and senior officials publicly praised the new system. Sadly, much of this praise would later be manipulated by P2P lenders to entice investors.

As noted previously, a critical feature of P2P lending is its availability to those with low credit scores. This is perfect for China, where there were no credit scores for the majority of the population…the national credit scoring didn’t exist in China until the founding of government sponsored Baihang Credit arrived in 2018. The PBOC did have the Credit Reference Center founded in 2006, but it had access only to bank data on personal account balances.

The lack of credit rating technology contributed to making bank lending next to impossible for ordinary people, who had no data for the banks to evaluate. That P2P lending could circumvent the banks and deliver a loan to someone who had never borrowed before and had no history was, and remains, a significant accomplishment. To fill this gap, Ant Financial and Tencent [devoted] tremendous resources to developing credit scores based on big data on their internet platforms. In the absence of credit ratings, big data [appeared] a logical alternative…

The rise of P2P loans in China was further inflamed by the West’s own 2008 financial crisis which created a rapid drop in factory orders, which caused Chinese businesses and individuals to rely on credit to compensate for the loss in funds.

We should really take a moment to pause here and let this sink in.

The timing of the creation of P2P loans could not have been better. As the 2008 financial crisis hit the world, not only within the United States, but businesses around the world were in desperate need for loans as profits began to tank globally.

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Richard Turrin writes:[45]

Most of the P2P companies did away with the direct matching of borrowers to lenders, and instead used a portfolio of loans (fund pools) whose constituents were impossible to check.

Investors received returned based on the portfolio’s performance, essentially a black box, and as along as the returns kept flowing, no one ever asked what was inside. Perpetuating this particular fraud is even easier for the P2P company, as a company did not need to show actual borrowers’ personal IDs. Dangerously, it gave the P2P company total control of the value of the pool. There is a certain irony that the assembly of these [Chinese] loan portfolios closely resembled sub-prime loan securitization in U.S. markets, which had similarly disastrous results.

During the run-up to the disaster many P2P lenders moved out of matching personal loans and into business lending creating securitization-like structures reminiscent of notorious Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDOs) in the U.S. market. P2P lenders had gone full circle to become quasi-banks, and all of their activities were “guaranteed.”

The transactions grew so large that the entire P2P sector became known as the “shadow banking system,” given that they supported China’s corporate debt from companies large and small. P2P lenders would regularly make loans to sizable companies who had been rejected by banks or could not even apply. To be fair, the problem for small and medium enterprises (SME) businesses in China was not one of creditworthiness. Many SMEs were simply not well served by banks and had no other route apart from P2P lenders or local loan sharks.

…

As if the news of P2P failures wasn’t disruptive enough, it was followed by the 2015 summer Shanghai Stock Exchange “turbulence” that removed about one-third of the market value. This shocked the system, laying bare P2P’s excesses and removing any hope of piloting the P2P market to a soft landing. Many of the P2P loans had gone to finance purchases of equities and housing down payments that helped fuel bubbles in both markets.

The market turmoil forced massive regulatory changes, in an interesting parallel with U.S. regulators and the sub-prime crisis. Regulators made the crucial decision to put P2P lenders under the China Banking Regulatory Commission. China’s regulators also began an extensive campaign to warn investors about the perils of P2P loans. These warnings fell on deaf ears due to China’s extraordinal high growth, nearing eight precent in prior years. People were still investing.

P2P platforms with the new law were prohibited from financing their own projects, depriving them of the ability to build Ponzi schemes. Rules also put caps on loans.

These laws fundamentally deleveraged the P2P business model and were prudent. They forced P2P lenders back into their traditional role of intermediaries rather than acting as shadow banks. Many P2P lenders found it impossible to support their existing business with such a highly constrained portfolio.

China’s P2P lending started in 2007. Recall the first P2P lenders were Zopa in the United Kingdom in 2005, followed by Prosper in 2005 and LendingClub in 2006 both established in San Francisco, California. It was these three, which formed the complex algorithm that was then used around the world, in spreading the epidemic of predatory P2P loans.

The largest predatory P2P lender in China was eZuBao, established in Feb. 2014, a subsidiary of Yucheng Group. eZuBao’s total transaction volume had amounted to 74.568 billion yuan (which is $10.998 billion USD) with 909,500 investors deceived.[46]

At the end of 2015, eZuBao was investigated for fraud by the Chinese authorities. Subsequently, relevant leaders of Yucheng Group and eZuBao were arrested by police on suspicion of fraud. On January 31, 2016, Xinhua News Agency revealed that eZuBao had illegally raised over 50 billion yuan ($7.375 billion USD), with victim investors spread across various regions of mainland China, totaling more than 900,000 persons.[47] eZuBao was shutdown Dec. 2015 by the Chinese authorities as a Ponzi scheme.

The former Chairman and founder of Yucheng Group, Ding Ning, who created and controlled eZuBao, was sentenced to life imprisonment in Sept. 2017 by the Beijing First Intermediate People’s Court for the crimes of fund-raising fraud, smuggling precious metals, illegal possession of firearms, and illegal border crossing.[48]

What is especially striking in this case, the largest P2P fraud case in China, is that Yucheng Group is registered in the British Virgin Islands, an Anglo-American tax haven [48a]. The relevance of this will become even more striking when we look into the cases of Alibaba and Tencent.

P2P lending in China is now completely gone, with the last P2P lender having closed in November 2020. However, P2P lending continues throughout Europe and the United States today.

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Who Really Created Alibaba and Tencent Chinese Fintech Giants?

The most powerful P2P platforms in China were, however, from Alibaba and Tencent. Alibaba and its affiliate Ant Group, along with Tencent, still operate in China, however, they have been forced to shutdown their P2P lending platforms, the most lucrative aspect of their business due to China’s enforcement on regulation. With this forced “skin in the game” Alibaba and Tencent could not afford to continue operating as P2P lenders.

It should be noted here, P2P loans are not illegal, not in the United States nor China. P2P loans can operate legally and there were some in China that were legal or were operating within the realm of “moral hazard” which is a fancy word for saying that if something is immoral or unethical but legal there is nothing “technically” wrong with what you are doing. It became a ubiquitous term throughout the 2008 financial crisis.

Thus, P2P loans are technically legal, however, most were operating without skin in the game. It comes to a matter of how a country decides to regulate P2P lenders, which again is a relatively new phenomenon. With no real overhead cost and no real loss if a loan is defaulted on, many P2P lenders were found guilty of giving out predatory loans if not of even more serious crimes.

Recall, both Prosper and LendingClub were accused of predatory lending and settled out of court, both still operate in the U.S. today. As we will see in Part II of this series Goldman Sachs was also under investigation.

It was this new Chinese regulation at the 11^th hour, enforced “skin in the game,” that costed Ant’s IPO in 2020, what was to be the world’s largest in history if it had been allowed to go through unchecked. The reader should be aware that this decision also costed China heavily in its growing stock market, and their financial markets were set back greatly due to this decision.

Effectively the Chinese government decided that they rather go through this fallback on their stock and financial markets which was quite significant, rather than run the risk of Ant not being “good for the money.” In other words, in 2020 Ant Group was claiming that their practices were legit and not a repeat of China’s P2P crisis (which unleashed carnage and mayhem between 2013 and 2018). However, because the amount in P2P loans from Ant Group were at the levels just before the P2P loan blowout just a few years prior and fast exceeding those levels, China decided it best to slam on the brakes.

And the new regulation did just that. P2P lending was no longer considered profitable in 2020, and the outcome was that there have been no P2P lenders since 2020 operating in China. Again, the details of this story will be discussed in Part II of this series.

In this paper we will focus on who created and funded the Fintech giants Alibaba and Tencent.

Let us start with the Alibaba Group.

Alibaba was founded in 1999. As the story goes, on June 28, Jack Ma with 17 friends and students founded Alibaba.com in his Hangzhou apartment. In less than four months, Alibaba received $25 million USD in investment from Investor AB,[49] Goldman Sachs and SoftBank.[50]

How did a practically non-existent tech startup from a man that was relatively unknown in the field manage to get such a tremendous sum from three of the most powerful banks in the world in a matter of a couple of months?

The answer to this question lies with Joseph Tsai, the true creator and manager of Alibaba who is the Chairman of Alibaba and has held the roles of chief operating officer, chief financial officer, executive vice chairman and founding board member of Alibaba. Tsai became Alibaba’s executive vice chairman in 2013 and became chairman of the company in 2023. He has become the second-largest individual shareholder of Alibaba after Jack Ma.

Joseph Tsai’s family lineage is an especially interesting one. His grandfather, Ruchin Tsar was part of the Kuomintang (KMT) and close to its leader Chiang Kai-shek. The KMT were forced to flee mainland China and installed themselves on the island of Taiwan after losing the Chinese civil war to Mao’s forces.

According to Tsai’s Baidu Wiki page, Ruchin Tsar served under the Shanghai gangster Du Yusheng, a Chinese mob boss who was close to Chiang Kai-shek. Du Yusheng made his fortune in the opium trade before transforming into a financial tycoon. Du Yusheng joined the notorious Green Gang at the age of 16, who were also affiliated with Chiang’s Kuomintang. It was said that Du Yusheng ‘surrounded himself with White Russian bodyguards.’[51]

Wikipedia writes:[52]

By the 1930s, Du controlled much of Shanghai’s gambling dens, prostitution, and protection rackets. With the tacit support of the police and colonial government, he also now ran the French Concession’s opium trade, and became heavily addicted to his own drug. Du had close ties with Chiang Kai-shek, who in turn had ties to both the Green Gang and other organised secret societies from his early years in Shanghai. In April 1927, Du, along with his sworn brothers Huang Jinrong and Zhang Xiaolin, conspired with Chiang to form the Chinese Progress Association (中华共进会), a para-militant group masquerading as a left-wing group to prepare for Chiang’s coup.

[When this coup failed] in 1949, on the eve of the fall of Shanghai, Du moved to British Hong Kong…

For those who are not already aware, it was through Chiang Kai-shek, who worked with Anglo-American players, that the opium trade boomed in China. Recall that Hong Kong, along with Shanghai, were part of the British spoils from the two Opium Wars. Hence the dope bank HSBC, a city of London bank officially named the Hong Kong Shanghai Banking Corporation. Chiang continued to work for Anglo-American institutions including the CIA in the opium trade with Taiwan and Hong Kong helping to facilitate the infamous Golden Triangle, with Chiang controlling Taiwan and Britain controlling Hong Kong. For more on this story refer here. And also here.

Ruchin Tsar was also an adviser to the Kuomintang government of nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek[53] who established the Republic of China (ROC) in Taiwan (not to be confused with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) which is China’s mainland government). It was the ROC, under Chiang who ruled as a dictator of Taiwan, who worked closely with the CIA in opium production. This money was in turn used by both sides to fund paramilitary groupings. Again, for more on this refer to my paper here.

This lineage of Joseph Tsai is no small deal and gives us our first stepping stone in understanding where Tsai’s true allegiance lies. And as we will see, many of the Anglo-American institutional players in our story will have also played a role in opium to this very day.

Joseph Tsai’s wife, Clara Wu Tsai, is the granddaughter of Wu San-lien, the first elected mayor of Taipei City, Taiwan. Taipei is the capital of Taiwan. Thus, Wu San-lien was an important and close ally of Chiang, the latter who ruled over Taiwan from 1945 until his death in 1975, a thirty-year dictatorship (as in he was never elected and there were never any elections under his rule).

Thus, Clara Wu Tsai, like her husband, also comes from a prestigious political lineage of the Taiwanese aristocracy. Clara went to the elite Lawrenceville School, the same school as we will see that Joseph Tsai went to. She then went on to graduate from both Stanford and Yale.

Clara Wu Tsai serves on the board of trustees of Stanford University (a recruitment hub for Project Stargate).[54] The Stanford University’s Neuroscience Institute is named after her, basically in return for the very generous funding by the Tsais’ for Stanford’s neuro research. In addition, Yale University has created the Wu Tsai Institute, which includes the Center for Neurodevelopment and Plasticity, the Center for Neurocognition and Behavior, and the Center for Neurocomputation and Machine Intelligence.[55] Clara is also on the REFORM Alliance board, which includes Jay-Z as a board member, that focuses on “prisoner rehabilitation.”

Joseph Tsai’s father, Tsai Chung-tsai, became the first student from Taiwan to earn a J.S.D. degree from Yale Law School in 1957. Chang Tsai & Partners is one of the top three private law firms in Taiwan founded by Joseph Tsai’s father and grandfather.[56]

Joseph Tsai was born in Taiwan. However, at a very young age moved to Canada. At the age of 13 he was sent to the Lawrenceville School in New Jersey, one of America’s most prestigious boarding schools. He then enrolled at Yale in 1982 earning a B.A. in Economics and East Asian studies.

In 1990 he earned a Juris Doctor (J.D.) from Yale Law School. That same year he was hired by the Wall Street law firm Sullivan and Cromwell, a law firm that has employed many a prominent CIA agent, including CIA godfather and Council on Foreign Relations president Allen Dulles. Foster Dulles also worked at Sullivan and Cromwell, who was the U.S. Secretary of State under Eisenhower and worked lock and step with CIA Director Allen Dulles.[57]

After three years at the law firm, Tsai switched to private equity and joined Rosecliff, Inc., a small management buyout firm based in New York, as vice president and general counsel. He left for Hong Kong in 1995 to join the Swedish Wallenberg family’s investment conglomerate Investor AB, where he was responsible for its Asian private equity investments.

It just so happens that Joseph Tsai meets Jack Ma for the first time ever right around the time Ma comes up with the idea for Alibaba.com. As in a matter of a couple of weeks or less. Joseph Tsai is apparently so excited over this business venture that he not only quits his lucrative job with Investor AB and accepts a pittance first-year salary of $600 in total but is the guy who convinces three of the most powerful banks in the world to invest in Jack Ma’s “concept” at the drop of a pin.

As the story goes, in August 1999, less than two months after Ma comes up with the idea for Alibaba, Tsai persuades Goldman Sachs to invest in Alibaba.[58] In October of that year, Goldman Sachs led a consortium of institutions including Fidelity Capital, the Singapore Government Technology Development Fund, and Investor AB (Joseph Tsai’s former employer) to invest $5 million in Alibaba. In the same year, Joseph Tsai led the establishment of Alibaba Group’s Hong Kong headquarters.[59]

This all happened in less than four months from Ma’s brainstorming session in his apartment with no previous experience with anything on this level or scale.

In 2000, Tsai takes Ma to Japan to meet Masayoshi Son, the eccentric billionaire of SoftBank and persuades him to invest massively in Alibaba, $20 million USD to be exact.[60]

Before we go further, let us look into who the Wallenberg family is and SoftBank.

The Wallenberg family’s own stakes in Swedish companies is worth over $600 billion. This includes ABB (Swedish-Swiss technology company), Ericsson (Swedish multinational networking and telecommunications company), AstraZeneca (a Swedish-British multinational pharmaceutical and biotechnology company with its headquarters in Cambridge, UK), SEB Bank (translates to “Scandinavian Private Bank” headquartered in Sweden), SAAB (Swedish Aerospace and Defence) and 30 other corporations.

In the 1970s, the Wallenberg family businesses employed 40% of Sweden’s industrial workforce and represented 40% of the total worth of the Stockholm stock market.[61] Their flagship company, Investor AB, has a market capitalization of over $100 billion and is Sweden’s most valuable publicly traded company.[62] Because of their massive stake ownership in Swedish companies, 40% of the Swedish stock market moves based on the decisions made in the Wallenberg private offices.

This is who Joseph Tsai stopped working for to embark on this project with the unknown and relatively unaccomplished Jack Ma. However, when we see how readily these powerful banks poured millions into this project with Joseph Tsai at the helm, it looks like Tsai never really took a gamble on Ma, but was clearly given the blessing from these high-level players in finance to head the Alibaba project with full support from most notably the Wallenberg family (Investor AB), SoftBank and Goldman Sachs who would not have come to the table without Tsai.

SoftBank is a Japanese bank, a multinational investment holding company headquartered in Tokyo. Part of its focus in investment is AI, biotechnology and robotics. SoftBank has a history of working very closely with American Big Tech.

In order to see what SoftBank is a part of, besides what gave Alibaba its meal ticket, we will have to go through a bit of a rabbit hole so bear with me, but I promise you, all the names of the institutions that are being brought up are to paint a coherent picture at the end of this. This is especially important to understand since, as we will soon see, SoftBank is a co-founder and primary funder of Project Stargate.

In the 1990s SoftBank formed a joint venture with Yahoo! creating Yahoo! Japan (now LY Corporation).[63] In 2000, as already mentioned it invested heavily in Alibaba, a project that essentially had been given the blessing of the global power-house Goldman Sachs.

In May 2015, Masayoshi Son (founder of SoftBank) said he would appoint Nikesh Arora, a former Google executive, as Representative Director and President of SoftBank. Arora had been heading SoftBank’s investment arm.[64] In 2016, amidst pressure Arora steps down and is replaced by Baer Capital Partners (an apparently unregulated holding company) founder Alok Sama.[65] [66] Baer Capital Partners is headquartered in London, England and was founded in 2006 to provide growth capital and financial advisory services.

On 6, December 2016, after meeting with United States President-elect Donald Trump, Masayoshi Son announced SoftBank would be investing US$50 billion in the United States toward businesses creating 50,000 new jobs.[67]

On 14, November 2017, SoftBank agreed to invest $10 billion into Uber.[68] On 29 December 2017, it was reported that a SoftBank-led consortium had invested $9 billion into Uber. The deal, to close in January 2018, would leave SoftBank as Uber’s biggest shareholder, with a 15 percent stake.[69] The deal was secured after Uber shareholders voted to “sell their shares to the Japanese conglomerate at a discounted price.”

On 1, March 2018, SoftBank’s Vision Fund led a $535 million investment in DoorDash.[70] On 27 September 2018, SoftBank announced the investment of $400 Million in Home-Selling Startup Opendoor.[71]

Opendoor Technologies Inc. is an online company that buys and sells residential real estate. Headquartered in San Francisco, it makes instant cash offers on homes through an online process, makes repairs on the properties it purchases and re-lists them for sale. It also provides mobile application-based home buying services along with financing. As of November 2021, the company operates in 44 markets in the U.S. Basically buying and selling houses as an online company.

Property owners bid to sell their properties on the online platform. When a bid is accepted, Opendoor purchases the property as-is, charging a fee comparable to the commissions real estate agents collect in return for the convenience of closing a sale quickly without home showings.[72]

In August 2019, Opendoor launched mortgage services through Opendoor Home Loans.[73]

On December 21, 2020 Social Capital Hedosophia Holding Corp II[74] finalised its merger with Opendoor. Social Capital Hedosophia Holdings Corp. II is a Cayman Islands-based SPAC formed to pursue mergers or acquisitions in the technology sector.

On August 1, 2022, the Federal Trade Commission reported that Opendoor had agreed to pay a settlement of $62 million over charges of misleading potential home sellers in its marketing campaigns.[75] [76]

It should be noted that all of these online companies are headquartered in California, with many in Palo Alto and San Francisco as their hub. Again, this is very relevant to Project Stargate.

SoftBank continued to invest heavily in Alibaba including $10 billion stake under former president of SoftBank Alok Sama.[77] However, between 2020 and 2024 SoftBank dropped all of its investment into Alibaba despite its business continuing to boom.

That same year, the year that China clamped down on Alibaba, Ant and Tencent, and crushed Ant’s hope of achieving the largest IPO in history, Jack Ma was forced to step down from SoftBank’s board of directors on June 25, 2020.[78] This marked the end of his 13-year tenure as a SoftBank board director.

In other words, the year that China reigned in Alibaba/Ant Group and forces them to be beholden to Chinese regulation is the year SoftBank drops Jack Ma like a sack of potatoes.

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It should also be noted here that SoftBank has created the SoftBank Vision Fund the world’s largest technology-focused investment fund, specializing in AI, robotics, and advanced technologies with over $166 billion in assets under management.

Though the founder of the SoftBank Vision Fund (2017) is Masayoshi Son who is Japan-based, the Fund is headquartered in London, England. Notable investments by Softbank Vision Fund include OpenAI, where SoftBank committed over $60 billion for ~13% ownership.[79]

In addition, SoftBank owns SB Cayman, an offshore investment holding company in the Cayman Islands which is primarily operating under the umbrella of SoftBank Vision Fund.[80]

In May 2024, SoftBank launched a joint venture with healthcare technology company Tempus AI. The aim of the venture was to provide precision medical services in Japan by utilising AI.[81]

In December 2024, it was reported by CNBC that Softbank plans to invest $100 billion in the US over the next 4 years, with funding coming from various sources controlled by Softbank, including the Vision Fund, capital projects or chipmaker Arm Holdings. The investment is said to create 100,000 jobs focused on artificial intelligence and related infrastructure.[82] [83]

In January 2025, SoftBank Group, Oracle Corporation, MGX [Saudi Arabia], OpenAI, and other partners established The Stargate Project as a cooperative venture aimed at building AI infrastructure in the U.S. With an estimated $500 billion in investment, the program seeks to generate 100,000 new jobs in the U.S. by 2029.[84]

In February 2025, SoftBank announced a joint venture with OpenAI called SB OpenAI Japan which would develop “Advanced Enterprise AI” called “Crystal Intelligence.” SoftBank would spend $3 billion annually to deploy OpenAI solutions across SoftBank companies. The 50:50 joint venture of OpenAI and SoftBank will “serve as a springboard for introducing AI agents tailored to the unique needs of Japanese enterprises.”[85]

On April 23, 2025, Cantor Equity Partners, a SPAC announced a merger with Twenty One (XXI), a bitcoin acquisition company. SoftBank will own a 25% stake in the business led by stablecoin issuer Tether and bitcoin exchange Bitfinex.[86]

In October 2025, SoftBank Group announced an agreement to acquire the ABB Robotics division from the Swiss industrial technology company ABB for an enterprise value of US$5.375 billion, replacing ABB’s earlier plan to spin off the unit.[87] [88] SoftBank chairman and CEO Masayoshi Son described the acquisition as part of the company’s strategy to expand into “Physical AI,” combining ABB’s robotics capabilities with SoftBank’s expertise in artificial intelligence and next-generation computing.

In October 2025, SoftBank Group approved a second installment of $22.5 billion to complete its $30 billion investment into OpenAI.[89]

On December 29th, 2025, SoftBank Group announced an agreement to acquire U.S.-based digital infrastructure investment firm DigitalBridge Group, Inc. in an all-cash transaction valued at approximately $4 billion. The deal, which would take DigitalBridge private, reflects SoftBank’s continued expansion into artificial intelligence–related infrastructure, including data centers, fiber networks, and wireless assets. DigitalBridge is expected to continue operating as an independent investment platform following the completion of the acquisition, which remains subject to regulatory approvals.[90]

In February 2026, SoftBank Group’s investment into OpenAI exceeds $30 billion USD, accumulating an 11% stake. SoftBank is also presently in talks to invest as much as $30 billion USD more in a round that would value the startup at about $750 billion to $830 billion USD.[91]

SoftBank Group announced plans to invest up to €75 billion to develop 5 gigawatts of AI data center capacity in France, stating that it would be its largest AI infrastructure investment in Europe. The project is expected to create thousands of jobs across data center development, engineering, energy systems, robotics, operations, maintenance, and advanced manufacturing.[92] [93]

SoftBank is the third largest stakeholder of OpenAI after OpenAI, and Microsoft.

SoftBank is a 40% owner of Project Stargate.

That was the largest rabbit hole I expect to take you in this paper, though I hope you found that rabbit trail useful in mapping out who is really behind the “Ready Player One” dream.

The third large donor to Alibaba in its embryo state back in 1999 was Goldman Sachs, arguably the largest investment bank in the world. We will discuss more on Goldman Sachs soon. However, for now I hope the colossal status of these three funders to a start-up which hadn’t even been fleshed out yet is beginning to sink in. As we have and will see, both SoftBank and Goldman Sachs in particular are deeply embedded and invested in Project Stargate.

Back to Joseph Tsai, the man who brought the Wallenberg family, SoftBank and Goldman Sachs to invest in Alibaba, or was he hired by them?

Soon after meeting Ma, Tsai quit Investor AB and joined Alibaba’s founding team. He eventually held the roles of chief operating officer, chief financial officer, executive vice chairman and founding board member of Alibaba. Drawing from his background in corporate law and finance, Tsai led efforts to establish Alibaba’s financial and legal structure.[94] Tsai was clearly running the entire ship.

He became Alibaba’s executive vice chairman in 2013 and became chairman of the company in 2023. He has become the second-largest individual shareholder of Alibaba after Ma.[95]

In 2004, together with his former colleague Alexander West from his old employer Investor AB (the Wallenbergs), he established a hedge fund called Blue Pool Capital in Hong Kong, China.[96]

In August 2005, Joseph Tsai led the negotiations for the acquisition of Yahoo China and Yahoo’s investment in Alibaba Group. After the deal was completed, Alibaba not only received $1 billion from Yahoo but also acquired Yahoo China’s assets worth $700 million. This transaction also provided Alibaba with ample resources, laying a solid foundation for the subsequent development of Taobao, a Chinese online shopping platform. Later, under Joseph Tsai’s leadership, Alibaba successively acquired several well-known internet companies including AutoNavi, YTO Express, Youku, and UCWeb.[97]

In 2013, he stepped down as Alibaba’s Chief Financial Officer and became the Executive Vice Chairman of the Group’s Board of Directors. In 2014, Joseph Tsai led the company’s IPO and established its strategic investment team.[98] As we will see, Alibaba’s IPO was run and managed by six behemoth western banks.

In July 2015, Jack Ma and Joseph Tsai, following the example of former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, established their own family office, managed jointly by Oliver Weisberg, Managing Director of the hedge fund Citadel in Hong Kong, and Blue Pool Capital.[99] Citadel is an American multinational hedge fund and financial services company, it has more than $67 billion in assets under management as of January 2026.[100]

By the end of 2017, Alibaba had conducted $80 billion in strategic investments, overseen by the Alibaba Strategic Investment Department led by Joseph Tsai.[101]

There is one other notable character that influences Alibaba and that is J. Michael Evans. Evans is a Canadian technology executive and the President of Alibaba Group. And he just so happens to have spent 20 years working for U.S. investment bank Goldman Sachs before becoming president of Alibaba, a position he continues to hold today.

Evans had worked as Vice Chairman of Goldman Sachs and Chairman of Goldman Sachs Asia and spent 19 years as a Partner after joining the firm in 1993.[102] So, Evans was a massive Goldman Sachs player before accepting the Presidency of the Alibaba Group.

In fact, the six banks that led Alibaba’s Giant IPO, the second largest in history…

…were Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup.

The New York Times writes:[103]

Six firms were listed as Alibaba’s lead underwriters, listed mostly in alphabetical order: Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley and Citigroup. They emerged as winners for the honor of running an I.P.O. that could ultimately end up raising more than $20 billion…For months, Wall Street firms competed fiercely for the chance to take a piece of the stock sale.

…Top banks pulled out the stops, sending top deal makers to Asia to meet with top executives at the Chinese company, notably its founder, Jack Ma, and vice chairman, Joseph Tsai. JPMorgan Chase’s chief executive, Jamie Dimon, for instance, attended a dinner held for Mr. Ma in Hong Kong last year.

…The six banks listed on Alibaba’s prospectus officially are regarded as having equal status as lead underwriters, with a say on important I.P.O. matters, according to people with direct knowledge of the matter.

…Two of the firms undeniably had longstanding relationships with Alibaba. Credit Suisse and Morgan Stanley worked with the e-commerce concern well before it attained its sky-high valuations, including on fund-raising rounds in recent years.

Both firms were the main drafters of the prospectus…

…Two prominent banks are notably absent from the list. Bank of America Merrill Lynch and UBS did not receive spots in part because they are working on the forthcoming I.P.O. of JD.com, a competing Chinese Internet retailer backed by Alibaba arch-rival Tencent, according to people briefed on the matter.

So in reality, the giant Alibaba fintech company threatening China’s banking and financial system, was in fact led and funded by giant western banks!!! More on this in Part II of this series.

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In 2019 Evans was charged for his involvement in the 1MDB scandal, which took place during his time at Goldman Sachs. The 1MDB scandal was a massive international financial fraud involving the embezzlement of over US$4.5 billion from Malaysia’s sovereign wealth fund, implicating political leaders, financiers, and global banks. Part II will discuss Goldman Sachs’ role in the 2008 financial crisis and its long list of scandals. We will also talk in detail about Jack Ma in Part II of this series.

Who are the major shareholders of Alibaba Group?

Interestingly, after Jack Ma and Joseph Tsai the largest shareholders of Alibaba are Vanguard with 9% and BlackRock with 5%. The Vanguard Group, Inc. is an American registered investment adviser with approximately $12 trillion in global assets under management as of 2025. It is the largest provider of mutual funds and the second-largest provider of exchange-traded funds (ETFs) in the world after BlackRock’s iShares.

Then we have JPMorgan Chase with a 3.5% shareholding.

Finally, we have the “Golden Share”, the only Chinese state-owned entity that holds an influential stake of 1%, which is the Cyberspace Administration of China, established in Dec. 2022. I think it is pretty obvious what this really is. After the clamp down on Alibaba and Jack Ma in particular in 2020, moves like this from the Chinese government are part of the reigning in of Big Tech. The “golden share” gives the Chinese government the right to veto or approve any key decisions made in the Alibaba’s Group structure, function and direction.

Perhaps this is the reason why Masayoshi Son from SoftBank dropped Jack Ma like a sack of potatoes? He could see the writing on the wall that the Alibaba Group would not be an easy conduit for Project Stargate into China.

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Where is Alibaba Group registered you might ask? In the British Cayman Islands of course!

It should be noted here that not just any company can be accepted as registered in the British Cayman Islands. This is a select elite club for off-shore haven status. The fact that the “Chinese” Alibaba Group is registered in the Cayman Islands shows where its true colors are at.

In addition, note that other locations included in its registration statement are the historically British Hong Kong which still has its own legal system separate from China’s mainland, and New York.

Interestingly of the addresses given for copies of communications are Palo Alto, California. Palo Alto is a Project Stargate hub.

Trident Trust was founded in London in 1978 as a privately owned and independent provider of corporate, fiduciary and fund administration services. In 1983, Trident Trust expanded beyond the UK with an office in Jersey, in the centre of St. Helier, to “serve clients and explore new opportunities in offshore markets.”[104]

The island Jersey is an infamous British off-shore haven, a self-governing British Crown Dependency to be exact.

The following year, 1984, marked the company presence in the U.S. and Caribbean and U.S. Virgin Islands. And then later into the British Virgin Islands. For more on the relevance of offshore havens refer to my paper here.

Now let us move on to what is behind the creation of Tencent. Because the length of this paper is already quite long, I will focus here on strictly who built up Tencent, while in Part II we will discuss the function of Tencent in detail.

Interestingly, the origin story of Alibaba Group and Tencent have a lot of similarities. Pony Ma, along with four other individuals[105] are credited as the founders of Tencent. However, when we look into Tencent deeper we soon find that the true brain of the operation is Martin Lau, the Executive Director and President of Tencent.

Martin Lau born in Beijing was raised in British Hong Kong and was educated in the United States, graduating from University of Michigan, Northwestern University and Stanford (Project Stargate recruitment hub).[106] Lau studied Science and Electrical Engineering at both Michigan and Stanford and gained an MBA from Northwestern.

After graduating, Lau was hired by the incredibly competitive and prestigious management consultant firm McKinsey & Company before joining Goldman Sachs.

Interestingly, we come across another powerful institution caught up in the opioid epidemic which China is typically blamed for: McKinsey & Company.

McKinsey & Company, headquartered in New York City, has been the subject of significant controversy and is the subject of multiple criminal investigations into its business practices. The company has been criticized for its role promoting OxyContin use throughout the opioid crisis in North America.[107] [108]

McKinsey & Co. has also drawn controversy for its involvement with the notorious Purdue Pharma,[109] basically the cause for America’s opioid crisis. For more on Purdue Pharma refer to my paper here.

McKinsey advised opioid makers on how to “turbocharge” sales of OxyContin, proposed strategies to counter the emotional messages from mothers with teenagers who overdosed on OxyContin, and helped opioid makers circumvent regulation.[110]

McKinsey & Co. also advised Purdue Pharma to offer pharmacies rebates based on the number of overdoses and addictions they caused.[111] Records show that McKinsey worked for Purdue Pharma and other opioid makers in a 15-year period, from 2004 to 2019.[112]

In February 2021, McKinsey paid $600 million to settle investigations into its role in promoting sales of OxyContin and fuelling the greater opioid epidemic.[113] In April 2022, the New York Times reported that McKinsey had frequently allowed partners and other consultants to work for both government clients, such as the FDA, and pharmaceutical clients, such as Purdue.[114] These actions violated McKinsey’s own internal ethical guidelines.

In December 2023, Reuters reported that McKinsey had agreed to pay an additional $78 million to settle claims with health insurers McKinsey’s consulting helped to fuel “an epidemic of opioid addiction through its work for drug companies”.[115] Reuters reported the settlement would be the last in a series and that McKinsey “admitted to no wrongdoing.”

‘In 2024, the company became the subject of a criminal investigation by the U.S. Justice Department into its role in advising opioid manufacturers how to boost sales. A grand jury was convened to determine charges to be brought against the firm. It is also under investigation for obstruction of justice during the period that concerns were mounting about their activities. The firm settled the investigation in December 2024, for a sum of $650 million and with conditions that it cannot market controlled substances for a period of five years. This agreement was filed in federal court in Abingdon, Virginia, with aims to resolve criminal charges which were brought up as part of the latest corporate prosecution concerning the marketing of addictive painkillers.’[116]

McKinsey & Co. have also worked with ICE and the Riker Island jail complex with their fair share of controversy.[117]

McKinsey & Co. has been associated with a number of other notable scandals, including the 2008 financial crisis[118] and facilitating state capture in South Africa.[119] We will talk about these role in further detail in Part II of this series.

Back to Martin Lau.

After Martin Lau worked as a management consultant for the notorious McKinsey & Co. he joins Goldman Sachs and becomes the Chief Operating Officer of the Telecommunications, Media and Technology (TMT) group in the Investment Banking Division of Goldman Sachs Asia.[120]

Interestingly, in 2004 Lau meets Pony Ma (founder of Tencent) while working for Goldman Sachs’ handling of Tencent’s IPO. Once again, similar to the story of Joseph Tsai and Jack Ma (no relation to Pony Ma), Lau is so enthusiastic about Tencent, which is still in its humble stage, that he quits his incredibly prestigious job with Goldman Sachs worth tens of millions in salary to work for Tencent.

Lau within a short period becomes the Chief Strategy and Investment Officer of Tencent, responsible for the company’s strategy, investments, mergers and acquisitions, and investor relations.[121] Basically Lau is running the Tencent ship, like Joseph Tsai’s (along with Goldman Sachs J. Michael Evans) running of Alibaba.

Looks increasingly like Goldman Sachs is running the show doesn’t it?

In 2007 Lau is promoted to Executive Director in 2007 and served as a Non-executive Director of Kingsoft in 2011. In 2012, he became the Chairman of Tencent E-commerce Holdings, during which he promoted strategic partnerships such as investments in JD.com (backed by Tencent) [122] and Didi Chuxing. Martin Lau has served on the board of JD.com, Didi Chuxing, Tencent Music, Kingsoft, and Meituan.[123]

Recall, that Bank of America Merrill Lynch and UBS were not part of the Alibaba IPO because they were working on the IPO of Tencents’ JD.com. Interestingly, Goldman Sachs man, Martin Lau served on both the board of JD.com and Tencent. Small world…if you work for Goldman Sachs that is.

Martin Lau’s Baidu Wiki page writes:[124]

Before Lau joined, Tencent rarely used external investment methods, preferring to invest internally in departments like R&D, pursuing whatever was trending. This [Martin Lau’s] approach led to Tencent’s rapid development in areas such as gaming, portals, and internet value-added services, ushering in the company’s subsequent “golden five years.”

Who owns Tencent’s holdings?

Prosus Naspers is the majority stakeholder of Tencent, some estimates go as high as a 29% stake, is headquartered in South Africa, historically part of the British Empire. Prosus and Naspers are technically two different entities that hold majority stake in each other. Naspers has a particularly notorious history, and was heavily involved in the South African apartheid, more on this later in this series.

Suffice to say for now, that is an interesting majority stakeholder for Tencent to have, is it not? Note that BlackRock and Vanguard are again, like the case of Alibaba, among the most significant stakeholders of Tencent.

Another thing that should be noted here is that there are no Chinese state-owned institutions, banks or businesses that hold significant stake in either Alibaba or Tencent. Hmmmm…..

As in the case with Alibaba, Tencent has also given the Chinese government a 1% “golden share” which is a fancy way of saying that the Chinese government has the right to veto or approve of any major decisions that Tencent makes in its current and future structuring.

And where is Tencent registered? You guessed it, the Cayman Islands yet again!

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Goldman Sachs as the Common Denominator

I imagine the prevalence of Goldman Sachs role in not only Alibaba and Tencent has been clearly pronounced for you at this point, but as we will see in Part II of this series, Goldman Sachs also played a central role in the 2008 financial crisis.

For now, let us look further into where the Goldman Sachs tentacles have reached. This will be done here summarily since this paper is getting quite long, however, this discussion will be continued in further detail throughout this series.

First let us look into Goldman Sachs relationship with Project Stargate.

Thus, Goldman Sachs is the major financial advisor and financier of Project Stargate and is a leader in shaping and monetizing the AI boom.

Let us look at Goldman Sachs relationship to SoftBank.

So, Goldman Sachs and SoftBank have not only a tight financial relationship with each other, but are mutually committed to the AI boom, and more specifically Project Stargate. Recall, SoftBank is a 40% stakeholder in Project Stargate.

What is Goldman Sachs’ role with OpenAI, the other 40% stakeholder of Project Stargate?

Thus, Goldman Sachs along with Morgan Stanley are handling OpenAI’s IPO right this minute.

Who is on the board of OpenAI?

GIP (Global Infrastructure Partners) is owned by BlackRock. Among the members of the board of OpenAI are notable affiliations with Microsoft and BlackRock. The two main entities tasked with heading the G7 initiative Global Infrastructure and Investment Partners (GIIP) in buying up infrastructure around the world to counter China’s Belt and Road Initiative.

Thus, this G7/GIP initiative appears to be directly tied with Project Stargate via OpenAI. Recall OpenAI holds a 40% stake in Project Stargate and is one of its co-founders.

It should also be noted that concerning the attempted purchase of the two Panama ports owned by Hong Kong’s CK Hutchison last year, the consortium for this purchase included BlackRock, GIP and Terminal Investment Limited, funded by BlackRock and run by the Mediterranean Shipping Company (MSC) owned by the Swiss-Italian billionaire family Aponte.

China blocked the deal from going through but since early this year, the two ports were seized by the Panamanian government and handed over to the Mediterranean Shipping Company (MSC) who is working in partnership with BlackRock and GIP.

The MSC has been implicated in the trafficking of cocaine in numerous circumstances. For more on this refer to my paper here.

What is Goldman Sachs relationship with Microsoft?

Thus, Goldman Sachs was the lead book-running manager of Microsoft’s IPO.

What is Goldman Sachs relationship to GIP, which is owned by BlackRock?

Adebayo Ogunlesi, who served as the Head of the Global Energy Group of Credit Suisse First Boston from 1997 to 2002, founded GIP in 2006. GIP was a joint venture with Credit Suisse and General Electric.[125] He currently serves as its Chairman and Managing Partner. Recall Credit Suisse was one of the six leading banks that led Alibaba’s IPO, the second largest in history.

Interestingly, Credit Suisse was also entangled in the opioid epidemic and directly tied to Purdue Pharma. It collapsed due to the magnitude of the scandal and was absorbed into UBS. One of the two leading banks that handled Tencents’ JD.com IPO, which Martin Lau was also on the board of.

In 2012, Ogunlesis was appointed on the board of director of Goldman Sachs and in July 2014 he was named their lead director.[126] [127]

In 2024, BlackRock bought GIP, with five out of the six founding partners continuing on, including Ogunlesi.

In January 2025, Ogunlesi joined the board of directors of OpenAI.[128]

Thus, Goldman Sachs, and BlackRock’s GIP are also now tightly intertwined. For more on relevance of GIP and BlackRock refer here.

I will end Part I here. Part II which will continue this story with a focus on the relevance of the 2008 financial crisis, today’s private credit tech bubble which is ready to pop for the next big financial crisis, as Goldman Sachs man Lloyd Blankfein says he “smells coming” and Project Stargate - all for a new Global Reset where we are under a Big Tech/Big Brother Governance and most importantly what China is doing in opposition to this.

You can read Part II of this series below:

To highlight some key points in this paper:

1. P2P fintech loans originated in the UK, under an arm of the British multinational bank Prudential, which was established during the Opium War era and now focuses on African and Asian markets.

2. Britain still holds a great deal of influence over Hong Kong banking and finance, controlling 2/3 of Hong Kong’s printed money.

3. Prosper and LendingClub, two American P2P fintech loan giants (the first in the U.S.) played a role in the 2008 financial crisis and created their own “social credit systems.” LendingClub has paired up with Google, and in the past was paired with Alibaba, in their services with questionable applications for an evolving “social credit system.” Prosper is financially backed by BlackRock, eBay and Google among others. Thus, Prosper and LendingClub’s private credit scoring are enmeshed with social platforms, most notably with Google.

4. Fintech companies in the West are either acquiring banking licenses or the right to purchase a registered bank and are acting as quasi-banks. The consequence of this will be less small to medium banks since they will not be able to compete. Only big banks will survive and as we have seen, are actually playing a large role in promoting these predatory fintech companies acting as quasi-banks.

5. BlackRock was born out of the notorious Blackstone which played a major role in the sub-prime mortgage crisis in 2008. BlackRock and GIP (which BlackRock owns) work directly for the Global Infrastructure and Investment Partners (GIIP) a G7 initiative to buy up infrastructure around the world in opposition to China’s Belt and Road Initiative.

6. It is the American people who had to foot the bill for the 2008 financial crisis and have been going further and further into debt. Meanwhile predatory lending is not only allowed to continue but is increasing in magnitude. With companies like DoorDash pairing up with a Swedish fintech company headquartered in London using the “Buy Now, Pay Later” model as an example. As Americans go further into debt, they will be increasingly vulnerable to American fintech companies private “social credit systems.”

7. The timing of P2P loans could not have been better. As the 2008 financial crisis hit the world, not only the United States, but all countries were in desperate need for loans as profits began to tank globally.

8. P2P lenders in China were giving out so many loans that they became known as the “shadow banking system,” a system that began to directly challenge China’s official banking and financial system. It was Zopa (UK), Prosper (US) and LendingClub (US), which formed the complex algorithm that was then used around the world, including in China, in spreading the epidemic of predatory P2P loans.

9. eZuBao, an arm of Yucheng Group, was the largest P2P fraud case in China. Yucheng Group is registered in the British Virgin Islands.

10. There are no P2P lenders in China anymore due to heavy regulation. However, P2P lending continues throughout Europe and the Untied States today.

11. It is Goldman Sachs that led a consortium of financial institutions to give Alibaba its first funding of $25 million in total in its embryonic state.

12. It should be noted that all of these online companies, like Uber, DoorDash, Opendoor etc. are headquartered in California, with many in Palo Alto and San Francisco as their hub. Again, this is very relevant to Project Stargate.

13. SoftBank Vision Fund, the world’s largest technology-focused investment fund, is headquartered in London, England despite being founded by Masayoshi Son, the head of SoftBank, who lives in Japan.

14. In January 2025, SoftBank Group, Oracle Corporation, MGX [Saudi Arabia], OpenAI, and other partners established The Stargate Project as a cooperative venture aimed at building AI infrastructure in the U.S.

15. Softbank is also working closely with Tether and OpenAI. SoftBank is the third largest stakeholder of OpenAI after OpenAI, and Microsoft. SoftBank is also a 40% owner of Project Stargate.

16. The year that China reigned in Alibaba/Ant Group and forced them to be beholden to Chinese regulation is the year SoftBank drops Jack Ma like a sack of potatoes.

17. Joseph Tsai ran Alibaba’s IPO which was managed by six behemoth western banks: Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley and Citigroup.

18. J. Michael Evans had worked as Vice Chairman of Goldman Sachs and Chairman of Goldman Sachs Asia and spent 19 years as a Partner before becoming Alibaba’s President.

19. Alibaba Group is registered in the Cayman Islands. After Jack Ma and Joseph Tsai the largest shareholders of Alibaba are Vanguard and BlackRock. The “Golden Share”, the only Chinese state-owned entity that holds an influential stake, which is 1%, is the Cyberspace Administration of China, established in Dec. 2022. The “golden share” gives the Chinese government the right to veto or approve any key decisions made in the Alibaba’s Group structure, function and direction.

20. Perhaps this is the reason why Masayoshi Son of SoftBank dropped Jack Ma like a sack of potatoes? He could see the writing on the wall that the Alibaba Group would not be an easy conduit for Project Stargate into China.

21. Martin Lau, the man who built Tencent to what it is today, was a McKinsey and Goldman Sachs man before joining Tencent.

22. McKinsey & Co. was at the center of America’s opioid epidemic.

23. Tencent’s majority shareholders are Prosus Naspers (South African), BlackRock and Vanguard. Tencent is registered in the Cayman Islands.

23a. There are no significant Chinese state-owned, bank or business shareholders of either Alibaba or Tencent. Only the 1% “golden share” for both, that gives the Chinese government the right to veto or approve key decisions the companies make.

24. Goldman Sachs is working closely and is heavily invested in Project Stargate, SoftBank, OpenAI, Microsoft, and GIP (BlackRock).

25. OpenAI has on its board the head of GIP (Global Infrastructure Partners) which is owned by BlackRock. Among the members of the board of OpenAI are notable affiliations with Microsoft and BlackRock. The two main entities tasked with heading the G7 initiative Global Infrastructure and Investment Partners (GIIP) in buying up infrastructure around the world to counter China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Thus, this initiative appears to be directly tied with Project Stargate via OpenAI.

26. Credit Suisse was also entangled in the opioid epidemic and directly tied to Purdue Pharma. It collapsed due to the magnitude of the scandal and was absorbed into UBS. Credit Suisse was one of the six banks that managed Alibaba’s IPO. UBS was one of two banks that managed Tencent’s IPO.

27. Adebayo Ogunlesi worked for Credit Suisse, then became the Lead Director on the board of directors of Goldman Sachs. He founded GIP which was purchased by BlackRock, he continues to run GIP. He is also on the board of OpenAI.

Cynthia Chung is the President of the Rising Tide Foundation and author of the books “The Shaping of a World Religion” & “The Empire on Which the Black Sun Never Set,” consider supporting her work by making a donation and subscribing to her substack page Through A Glass Darkly.

Through A Glass Darkly

On matters of geopolitics, counterintelligence, revisionist history and cultural warfare.

By Cynthia Chung

Footnotes:

[1] Here is an interesting article by the NKAFU Policy Institute an African think tank warning Africans that Facebook Libra is not to be trusted. Facebook’s Libra had set its sights on the large “unbanked” (i.e. people without bank accounts) African population hoping its currency along with its services for purchase and the ability to give out loans, would be a shortcut to forming what would essentially be a banking service for Africans and African businesses, but beholden to Facebook’s social credit system. https://nkafu.org/facebooks-libra-is-bad-and-emerging-markets-will-suffer-the-most/

[2] An open credit card refers to a type of credit account that allows you to borrow funds up to a predetermined limit and repay them as you go.

[3] Schumpeter Peer review The Economist January 5, 2013; Accessed June 5, 2026.

[4] https://www.prosper.com/about

[5] Neobanks are digital-only financial platforms that provide banking services primarily through mobile apps or web interfaces, often with lower fees and enhanced user control compared to traditional banks.

Definition and Core Features: Neobanks, also known as challenger banks, are fintech companies that offer banking-like services without physical branches.

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prudential_plc

[7] Inman, Phillip (10 December 2008). “Bank fined £721,000 for misselling credit card insurance“. The Guardian. Retrieved 1 June 2024.

[8] Insurance boon for health conscious. BBC News, 2004.

[9] https://www.prosper.com/about

[10] Prosper Marketplace Inc., Post Effective Amendment to Form S-1, SEC Edgar Archive

[11] “Prosper Marketplace and HomeAdvisor Partner to Bring Home Improvement Financing to Millions“. 10 March 2016.

[12] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosper_Marketplace

[13] Kim, Jane (28 April 2009). “Peer-To-Peer Lender Relaunched“. No. Money. United States: The Wall Street Journal. Dow Jones & Company Inc.

[14] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosper_Marketplace

[15] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosper_Marketplace

[16] U.S. SEC FORM 8-K Report. Sec.gov.

[17] Prosper Credit Card 2022 Review by Chauncey Crail (contributor), Robin Saks Frankel (Editor),

[18] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosper_Marketplace

[19] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LendingClub

[20] Barret, Victoria (December 2, 2010). “Making Personal Loans For Fun And Profit“. Forbes.

[21] Allen Stern (August 6, 2007). “LendingClub Founder and CEO, Renaud Laplanche – Interview“. Center Networks. https://web.archive.org/web/20120308063509/http://www.centernetworks.com/lendingclub-founder-and-ceo-renaud-laplanche

[22] Barret, Victoria (December 2, 2010). “Making Personal Loans For Fun And Profit“. Forbes

[23] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LendingClub

[24] Wade Roush (September 8, 2011). “Thursday Deals Roundup: Zagat, Platfora, Lending Club & More“. Xconomy.

[25] Taylor, Colleen (June 6, 2012). “Lending Club Lands $17.5 Million from Kleiner Perkins and Morgan Stanley Chairman John Mack“. Tech Crunch.

[26] Dakin Campbell & Ari Levy (May 2, 2013). “Google Buys Stake in LendingClub Startup Valued at $1.55 Billion“. Bloomberg News.

[27] Baptiste Su, Jean. “Exclusive Interview: Lending Club CEO Plans Expansion Into Car Loans, Mortgages”. Forbes.

[28] Buhayar, Noah (April 23, 2015). “Lending Club Wants to Broaden Its Membership“. Bloomberg.com. Bloomberg.

[29] Farrell, Maureen (February 10, 2015). “Lending Club’s Newest Deal Fuels Investor Excitement“. Wall Street Journal.

[30] “Will LendingClub-Opportunity Fund Affiliation Spur Growth? - Analyst Blog“

[31] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LendingClub

[32] “This Small Bank Is Putting Its Brand on Prosper’s Loan Experience“. American Banker.

[33] “Prosper Marketplace and Radius Bank Join Forces to Offer Personal Loans Through Online Lending Platform | Prosper“. Prosper.com.

[34] https://www.americanbanker.com/news/this-small-bank-is-putting-its-brand-on-prospers-loan-experience

[35] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/10/business/dealbook/as-lending-club-stumbles-its-entire-industry-faces-skepticism.html?_r=0

[36] “LendingClub to acquire Radius Bank for $185 million“. Reuters.

[37] Son, Hugh (February 18, 2020). “LendingClub buys Radius Bank for $185 million in first fintech takeover of a regulated US bank“. CNBC.

[38] “With OCC approval of Radius Bank, LendingClub is one step closer to becoming a marketplace bank – Tearsheet“. tearsheet.co.

[39] Fernandes, Deirdre (November 4, 2014). “Union’s bank is set to go public“. The Boston Globe.

[40] Engage121 (September 26, 2014). “First Trade Union Bank to Become “Radius Bank”“. GlobeNewswire News Room (Press release).

[41] “Radius Bank Announces Closing of Transaction With Investor Group“. Marketwired. June 7, 2016.

[42] “Contact Us | Save with LendingClub“. www.lendingclub.com.

[43] “Happen Bank | New Name, Same Promise“. www.meethappen.com.

[44] Richard Turrin (2021). Cashless: China’s Digital Currency Revolution

[45] Ibid

[46] https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/E%E7%A7%9F%E5%AE%9D

[47] Investigation into the Truth of the “eZubao” Illegal Fundraising Case. Xinhua News Agency. January 31, 2016

[48] https://baike.baidu.com/en/item/Ding%20Ning/34604

[48a] https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/E租宝#cite_note-10

[49] Andersson, Klas (9 May 2014). “Investors mäktiga miljardmiss i kinesiskt megabolag”. Svenska Dagbladet. Archived from the original on 7 February 2023.

[50] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alibaba_Group

[51] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Du_Yuesheng

[52] Ibid

[53] Boudway, Ira (22 January 2020). “Nets Owner Joe Tsai Is Caught Between Brooklyn and Beijing”. Bloomberg. Archived from the original on 3 April 2022.

[54] Dunn, Sam (2023-06-08). “Clara Wu Tsai’s Game Plan”. Boardroom.

[55] Walsh, Dylan (May 2021). “Interdisciplinary hub for researching the brain”. Yale Alumni Magazine.

[56] https://baike.baidu.com/en/item/Joseph%20Tsai/17117

[57] For more on this story refer to Chapter 4 of my book “The Empire on Which the Black Sun Never Set.”

[58] https://baike.baidu.com/en/item/Joseph%20Tsai/17117

[59] Ibid

[60] Ibid

[61] “A Nordic pyramid”. The Economist. 10 March 2016.

[62] Burja, Samo (4 May 2022). “The Family That Finances Sweden”. Medium.

[63] “Mr. Japan.com How Son Captured Japan’s Internet Economy”. money.cnn.com. 16 August 1999.

[64] Martin, Alexander (11 May 2015). “SoftBank CEO Taps a Future Successor in Nikesh Arora”. The Wall Street Journal. The Wall Street Journal.

[65] “SoftBank President Nikesh Arora to Step Down”. The Wall Street Journal. The Wall Street Journal.

[66] Alok Sama is now the Senior Advisor to Warburg Pincus LLC, Chairs the Advisory Board for Valhalla Ventures and is a director of Baer Capital Partners. https://www.linkedin.com/in/aloksama/

[67] Knutson, Ryan (6 December 2016). “When Billionaires Meet: $50 Billion Pledge From SoftBank to Trump”. The Wall Street Journal.

[68] “Tech in Asia - Connecting Asia’s startup ecosystem”. www.techinasia.com.

[69] Hook, Leslie (29 December 2017). “SoftBank deal helps clear path towards Uber IPO”. Financial Times. London.

[70] “DoorDash is raising $535 million from SoftBank and others at a $1.4 billion valuation”. Recode.

[71] Brown, Eliot; Kusisto, Laura (27 September 2018). “SoftBank Invests $400 Million in Home-Selling Startup Opendoor”. The Wall Street Journal.

[72] “Home-flipping giant Opendoor says it’s time to resume buying”. Bloomberg. 4 May 2020

[73] Lane, Ben (29 August 2019). “Opendoor is now a mortgage lender, launches Opendoor Home Loans”. HousingWire.

[74] Social Capital Hedosophia Holdings Corp. II (IPOBU) is a blank check company, also known as a SPAC, incorporated in the Cayman Islands on October 18, 2019. Its primary purpose is to effect a merger, share exchange, asset acquisition, share purchase, reorganization, or similar business combination with one or more businesses, with a focus on technology companies primarily in the United States.

[75] Herbert, Amy (1 August 2022). “Closing the door on home buying company Opendoor’s false claims”. Federal Trade Commission.

[76] Clark, Patrick (1 August 2022). “Opendoor to pay $62 million to settle FTC claims it misled home sellers”. Los Angeles Times.

[77] https://www.linkedin.com/in/aloksama/

[78] “Alibaba’s Jack Ma quits SoftBank board after $18B Vision Fund loss”. NYPost. 18 May 2020.

[79] https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/13/softbank-earnings-fy-2025-vision-fund-openai-stake.html

[80] https://uk.marketscreener.com/quote/stock/SOFTBANK-GROUP-CORP-40331193/company-group/

[81] “SoftBank Group Establishes Joint Venture “SB TEMPUS” with Tempus for Further Advancements of Japan’s Healthcare Through the Utilization of Medical Data and AI”. SoftBank Group. 26 June 2024.

[82] Melloy, John (16 December 2024). “Softbank CEO and Trump to announce $100 billion investment in U.S. by firm”. CNBC. Retrieved 16 December 2024.

[83] “Trump, SoftBank CEO announce $100 billion US investment, in echo of 2016 event”. 17 December 2024.

[84] Seetharaman, Deepa. “Tech Leaders Pledge Up to $500 Billion in AI Investment in U.S.” The Wall Street Journal.

[85] “OpenAI and SoftBank Group Partner to Develop and Market Advanced Enterprise AI”. SoftBank Group Corp. 3 February 2025.

[86] “Tether, SoftBank Group, and Jack Mallers Launch Twenty One, a Bitcoin-native Company, Through a Business Combination With Cantor Equity Partners” (Press release). 23 April 2025.

[87] “ABB to divest Robotics division to SoftBank Group”. ABB. 7 October 2025.

[88] “Acquisition of ABB Ltd’s Robotics Business” (PDF).

[89] “SoftBank approves remaining $22.5 billion of OpenAI investment, the Information reports”. 25 October 2025.

[90] “SoftBank Group to Acquire DigitalBridge for $4 Billion to Scale Next-Gen AI Infrastructure”. DigitalBridge. 29 December 2025.

[91] “SoftBank swings to profit on valuation boost from OpenAI bet”. The Business Times. 12 February 2026.

[92] “SoftBank Group to Build 5 GW of AI Data Center Capacity in France”. SoftBank Group. SoftBank Group.

[93] “SoftBank pledges €75bn to build Europe’s biggest AI facility in France”. Financial Times. Financial Times.

[94] https://baike.baidu.com/en/item/Joseph%20Tsai/17117

[95] Ibid

[96] Ibid

[97] Ibid

[98] Ibid

[99] https://baike.baidu.com/en/item/Joseph%20Tsai/17117

[100] Burton, Katherine (December 23, 2025). “Citadel to Return $5 Billion of Hedge Fund’s Profits to Clients”. Bloomberg.

[101] https://baike.baidu.com/en/item/Joseph%20Tsai/17117

[102] “Michael Evans: A Closer Look at Goldman Sachs’ New Wonder Boy”. Wall Street Journal. January 27, 2011.

[103] https://archive.nytimes.com/dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/05/06/the-six-banks-who-are-leading-alibabas-giant-i-p-o/

[104] Grokipedia

[105] The official founders of Tencent are Pony Ma, Tony Zhang, Xu Chenye, Charles Chen and Zeng Liqing.

[106] https://baike.baidu.com/en/item/Martin%20Lau/20870

[107] Bogdanich, Walt; Forsythe, Michael (December 8, 2020). “McKinsey Issues a Rare Apology for Its Role in OxyContin Sales”. The New York Times.

[108] Foley, Stephen; Barnes, Oliver; Palmer, Stefania (April 24, 2024). “McKinsey Faces US Criminal Investigation over Opioid Industry Work”. Financial Times. London.

[109] Bogdanich, Walt; Forsythe, Michael (November 27, 2020). “McKinsey Proposed Paying Pharmacy Companies Rebates for OxyContin Overdoses”. The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Archived from the original on November 27, 2020.

[110] Forsythe, Michael; Bogdanich, Walt (February 1, 2019). “McKinsey Advised Purdue Pharma How to ‘Turbocharge’ Opioid Sales, Lawsuit Says”. The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Archived from the original on December 4, 2019.

[111] Bogdanich, Walt; Forsythe, Michael (November 27, 2020). “McKinsey Proposed Paying Pharmacy Companies Rebates for OxyContin Overdoses”. The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Archived from the original on November 27, 2020.

[112] Hamby, Chris; Bogdanich, Walt; Forsythe, Michael; Valentino-DeVries, Jennifer (April 13, 2022). “McKinsey Opened a Door in Its Firewall Between Pharma Clients and Regulators”. The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331.

[113] Forsythe, Michael; Bogdanich, Walt (February 4, 2021). “McKinsey Settles for Nearly $600 Million Over Role in Opioid Crisis”. The New York Times. Archived from the original on December 28, 2021.

[114] Hamby, Chris; Bogdanich, Walt; Forsythe, Michael; Valentino-DeVries, Jennifer (April 13, 2022). “McKinsey Opened a Door in Its Firewall Between Pharma Clients and Regulators”. The New York Times.

[115] “McKinsey to pay $78 million in US opioid settlement with health plans”. Reuters.com.

[116] McKinsey and Co. Wikipedia page

[117] McKinsey advised New York City’s Rikers Island jail complex and tested an anti-violence strategy named “Restart” which occurred in Rikers housing units. Jail administrators reported that the strategy resulted in violent crimes dropping more than 70% inside the Rikers housing units. Later, it was found that McKinsey consultants and jail officials rigged the program by grouping compliant inmates into the housing units, and that violent crimes including “slashings and stabbings” increased over 1000% from 2011 to 2016.

[118] Chu, Ben (February 7, 2014). “McKinsey: How does it always get away with it?”. The Independent. Archived from the original on April 15, 2019.

[119] Bogdanich, Walt; Forsythe, Michael (June 26, 2018). “How McKinsey Lost Its Way in South Africa”. The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331.

[120] https://baike.baidu.com/en/item/Martin%20Lau/20870

[121] https://baike.baidu.com/en/item/Martin%20Lau/20870

[122] Tencent holds a 15% stake in JD.com

[123] Ibid

[124] https://baike.baidu.com/en/item/Martin%20Lau/20870

[125] “President-elect Trump Establishes the President’s Strategic and Policy Forum” (PDF). Global Infrastructure Partners. New York, NY. 3 December 2016. Archived from the original (Press Release) on 15 December 2016.

[126] “Board of Directors - Adebayo O. Ogunlesi, Lead Director”. Goldman Sachs. Archived from the original on 26 November 2016.

[127] Alden, William (25 July 2014). “Goldman Sachs Names Ogunlesi New Lead Director”. DealBook, The New York Times. Archived from the original on 30 September 2019.

[128] Criddle, Cristina; Gara, Antoine (14 January 2025). “OpenAI appoints one of Wall Street’s most powerful dealmakers to its board”. Financial Times.

How did Theosophical priests concoct the forgery known as the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion?

How did Wall Street and London bankers finance fascism?

And how did Hitler literally attempt to re-write the Bible and inserted such new commandments as ‘honor thy Fuhrer’ and ‘keep thy blood pure’?

And perhaps, most importantly, why is Hitler increasingly perceived as the hero of WWII instead of the occult magician which he always was? Qui bono?

Find out the answers to these questions and much more by watching full 75 minute film Black Sun Rising: The Esoteric Roots of Fascism Past and Present available for paid subscribers on Substack, or on Atalalux (for $4.50 rent or $19.50 to purchase)

ONE MORE THING:

In tandem with the release of this new film, Matt has published a 200 page Special Report which is now available for purchase on Amazon as a hardcover, paperback or Kindle… as well as PDF on Gumroad.

To support this crowd-funded series, donate here: https://canadianpatriot.org/support-us/

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Matthew and I are proud to announce the publication of the second Rising Tide Foundation Anthology ‘The Art of Liberty’ with a theme of ‘Conquering Tyranny and Defeating Tragedy’.

In this epic 200 page special report, you will be introduced to a sweeping overview of universal history with a fresh look at Plato’s fight against the Temple of Delphi and the broader Babylonian Priesthood, the rise of Cicero who took up the torch laid down by Plato to save the soul of the Roman republic as it slid into a dystopic transformation as a new Babylonian marcher lord.

We will review the mystery cults that took control of Persia, and went to war with early Jewish and Christian leaders who sought to resist the forces of Baal and Molech.

The early fifth century fight led by Augustine of Hippo to bring forth a City of God on earth, all the while battling the Gnostic high priests during the collapse of the western empire is explored. The battles by Platonists from the Academy to organize young Alexander to break apart the Persian empire setting the stage for the Han Dynasty’s creation of the Silk Road, and kingdom of Gandara are also explored… and also the ongoing Augustinian/Platonic movement that kept humanity progressing against all odds via the 6th century Celtic Augustinian movement at Clonmacnois, the Carolingian renaissance, the battles of Peter Abelard against the new gnostic Templar sorcerer knights, Ramon Lull’s efforts to spark a renaissance while trying to stop the Crusades.

You will see how this incredible movement has represented the most potent renaissance tradition throughout history and invokes the same principles of Natural Law when it was awoken in India, China, Africa, Egypt, the Americas and Europe.

We trace this fight through the Florentine renaissance movement, the Brotherhood of Common life, the battles to destroy the new Babylonian hive in Venice via the League of Cambrai, and of course the American Revolution.

The potent battles of Homer, Aeschylus and later Shakespeare and Schiller’s revival of classical tragedy are outlined along with an assessment of the revival of the mystery cults in the 20th century.

Throughout the book, don’t be surprised to find an array of beautiful paintings, especially as we explore the poetic mind of Rembrandt van Rijn who chose to leave his mark on immortality through several creative renditions of biblical lessons which bookend this issue.

We are sensitive to peoples budgets, but still wanted to have a premium full color edition of this anthology available (they are remarkably expensive to print on Amazon)… so we decided to make available one softcover edition in black and white which is less than $19 USD, and a more expensive premium hardcover edition… as well as a digital PDF and Kindle version.

CLICK HERE TO PICK UP YOUR COPY OF VOL. 2 TODAY

AND GET VOLUME 1 HERE (ONLY FULL COLOR AVAILABLE)

Of course, for paid subscribers, you can download a complementary copy of the past two RTF anthologies by going to the links below:

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Cynthia Chung discusses the impact of AI on attention spans, the historical context of the limits to growth narrative, and the importance of innovation in resource management.

She emphasises the fallacy of mathematical models in predicting future outcomes and the political motivations behind the concept of resource scarcity.

Cynthia advocates for a reimagining of population density and resource use, highlighting the potential of nuclear energy and regenerative practices.

The discussion also touches on the influence of media in shaping public perceptions and the successes of China's development model.

Ultimately, Cynthia calls for a collective pushback against the limits to growth ideology, urging individuals to recognise their power and responsibility in fostering a future of abundance.

You can learn more by watching Cynthia’s RTF lecture “What Determines a “Limit to Growth” (transcript included) as well as the RTF film “The Curse of Game Theory.” Links are included below:

Cynthia Chung is the President of the Rising Tide Foundation and author of the books “The Shaping of a World Religion” & “The Empire on Which the Black Sun Never Set,” consider supporting her work by making a donation and subscribing to her substack page Through A Glass Darkly.

Watch our other RTF and CP films and documentaries here.

Through A Glass Darkly

On matters of geopolitics, counterintelligence, revisionist history and cultural warfare.

By Cynthia Chung

To purchase our books in Spanish (in either book or PDF form) visit our website here.

All paid subscribers can access the PDFs of my books in Spanish (as well as in English here). Downloadable PDFs in Spanish are included past the paywall at the bottom of this page.

Thank you again to all our supporters and happy reading!

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Originally published on The Cradle May 14, 2026.

When US President Donald Trump visited Beijing on 14 May, flanked by top American industrialists, the optics told their own story. Washington came armed with tariffs, secondary sanctions, port fees, and threats over maritime chokepoints. But the executives at Trump’s side revealed the weakness behind the pressure campaign – the US cannot cut China out of the global economy without cutting into itself.

That confrontation explains why Trump’s Beijing delegation mattered. The presence of American executives from finance, technology, manufacturing, and logistics was not a show of US strength alone. It was an admission that corporate America still needs the Chinese market, supply chain, and payments ecosystem at the very moment Washington is trying to discipline all three. That contradiction now sits at the center of the present global crisis.

Through A Glass Darkly

On matters of geopolitics, counterintelligence, revisionist history and cultural warfare.

By Cynthia Chung

Beijing draws its legal lines

That is the real context for Beijing’s new legal architecture. On 7 April 2026, the Chinese State Council promulgated Decree No. 834, the Regulations on the Security of Industrial and Supply Chains. Less than a week later, on 13 April, it issued Decree No. 835, the Regulations on Countering Foreign Improper Extraterritorial Jurisdiction. Both took effect immediately.

Together, these measures mark a shift from reactive Chinese complaints about US overreach to a formal countersanctions framework that can target commercial conduct, regulatory compliance decisions, cross-border legal conflicts, and foreign attempts to impose unilateral rules on Chinese entities.

Beijing has turned Washington’s sanctions regime into a legal battlefield, arming itself to punish the governments, firms, and institutions that enforce US extraterritorial pressure.

This is why the US war against Iran now carries consequences far beyond West Asia. It is testing the dollar’s role as the currency of global oil trade and accelerating the emergence of Chinese-backed payment channels designed to bypass the western financial system. As Iran holds firm over the Strait of Hormuz, negotiations are taking shape for yuan-traded oil in return for safe passage through the waterway.

Iran’s parliament has also officially approved the implementation of tolls of up to $2 million on oil vessels transiting through the strait, which are also likely to be paid in yuan.

Deutsche Bank has stated that the Iran war could be the making of the petroyuan. That would signify the end of US dominance over global finance and trade, and with it, Washington’s self-appointed role as the world’s policeman.

The petrodollar is the foundation of dollar dominance in world trade. It sustains the dollar as the global reserve currency and gives Washington its ‘big stick’: the ability to weaponize sanctions, isolate individuals and institutions, and cut entire states off from global commerce.

In response to this threat, the US Treasury Department has issued another warning: any financial institution caught supporting Iran may face secondary sanctions. At this stage, the policy resembles economic carpet bombing.

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Beijing stops playing defense

The threat is aimed largely at the alternative systems China has used to circumvent US sanctions on Russia, Venezuela, and Iran. Since Iran came under heavy sanctions, Beijing has been developing modes of trade that bypass the sanctions laws of the western financial system.

In fact, China does not legally recognize unilateral sanctions on countries, having passed the Anti-Foreign Sanctions Law (AFSL) in June 2021.

Chinese individuals and businesses can still be cut out of the western financial system by US measures. Beijing cannot prevent Washington from weaponizing access to US-controlled networks. But the Chinese state does not recognize those measures as lawful and refuses to enforce them.

In other words, if Chinese institutions find other means of trading with sanctioned entities, including sanctioned countries, the Chinese government will not treat that conduct as a violation.

Decrees 834 and 835 now deepen that posture. China has moved from ad hoc countermeasures to a comprehensive, multiagency countersanctions legal framework capable of addressing commercial conduct, regulatory compliance choices, and cross-border legal conflicts. US sanctions threaten to cut targeted individuals, entities, and states from global trade. But in a world increasingly dependent on Chinese trade, Beijing increasingly holds cards Washington cannot easily match.

Because China rejects the legitimacy of unilateral sanctions – overwhelmingly wielded by the US – it has now created a legal precedent to respond with counter-sanctions. Crucially, this framework now reaches Hong Kong, long treated as too sensitive to fold fully into Beijing’s countersanctions system because of its role as an international legal and financial hub.

The decrees give Beijing a weapon it lacked when the AFSL was passed in 2021: a legal shield for Chinese banks, insurers, ports, shippers, and contractors caught between US pressure and Chinese national security law. Multinationals now face the dilemma Washington has long imposed on others. Obey US sanctions and risk Chinese penalties, or comply with Chinese law and face American retaliation.

That hesitation has become harder to sustain. The war on Iran, the US threat of secondary sanctions, and the pressure campaign over CK Hutchison’s Panama ports have turned Hong Kong from a financial exception into a national security question for Beijing.

Iran oil builds the parallel economy

Out of this pressure has grown a complex network engineered by China and Iran to settle oil payments outside the international banking system. It is, in effect, an oil-for-infrastructure arrangement that blends economic barter with strategic investment, similar to China’s arrangement with Venezuela under President Nicolas Maduro.

In return for Iranian oil, Chinese state-owned companies support Iran’s transport, energy, and infrastructure sectors. Intelligence estimates suggest roughly $8.4 billion moved through this channel in a single year.

This alternative network rests on two core pillars: Sinosure and Chuxin.

Sinosure is a state-owned export credit insurance agency that supports Chinese exporters and overseas investment through risk coverage and financing solutions.

Chuxin is a semi-covert financial entity that manages money flows between Chinese contractors and Iranian oil entities while bypassing the western-monitored banking system.

Much of this Chinese financing takes the form of export credit. Analysts describe the arrangement as a “sanctions-parallel economy” combining insurance tools, project finance, and barter-style settlement. It allows Iranian oil to keep moving while turning western pressure into a pipeline for Chinese-built infrastructure.

Iranian oil reaches China via convoluted maritime routes involving shadowy ship-to-ship transfers and then blends the sanctioned oil with other Asian crude grades, making source tracing difficult. In return, China pays by financing long-term construction projects inside Iran, including airports, refineries, and highways – effectively converting infrastructure into indirect payment for oil shipments.

This cooperation between China and Iran reflects a quiet economic alliance aimed at reshaping the global financial system toward reduced western dependence – generating a parallel economic order based on goods, projects, and alternative financing instead of hard currency controlled by Washington.

Despite the US Treasury’s awareness of this mechanism, it has so far imposed only limited sanctions on smaller Chinese entities. Major players such as Sinosure and Chuxin remain untouched – largely due to their deep entanglement in the global economy. It is the same reason why the US has not sanctioned China as a whole; since China is so crucial to world trade, it would be equivalent to sanctioning most of the world.

China’s trade weight is becoming an umbrella for states subjected to weaponized US sanctions, which are no less destructive than direct acts of war. If this approach continues to expand, it could become a cornerstone of the global shift away from dollar-centered finance toward multi-track economic systems.

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Hong Kong and the shadow-bank corridor

Another component of this complex alternative system by the Chinese consists of shadow banking. A Treasury Department analysis found that entities in Hong Kong – most of them likely shell companies – engaged in $4.8 billion in financial activity potentially related to Iranian shadow banking in 2024.

Last year, the US imposed sanctions on five more companies in Hong Kong and one in the mainland Chinese city of Shenzhen for allegedly acquiring western parts and tools for Iranian drones.

Several top Hong Kong officials have also been hit with US sanctions. Hong Kong Chief Executive John Lee, his predecessor Carrie Lam, and senior police and security officials were targeted because Washington objected to how they handled the 2019 Hong Kong protests.

As of November 2025, the US had imposed Iran-related sanctions on at least 366 entities in mainland China or Hong Kong, according to the US–China Economic and Security Review Commission. Some of those targets were accused of helping to move Iranian oil, using front companies in Dubai and Hong Kong.

The system reportedly works like this. Money from oil sales moves through a web of front companies, often routed through Chinese financial institutions, to Hong Kong, before it is then converted into other currencies.

Much of the cash from oil sales to China remains in bank accounts abroad, in financial hubs such as Hong Kong, Dubai, and Singapore. Iranian importers and exporters then trade foreign currency among their various front companies on ledgers maintained in Iran.

These payments are largely routed through smaller Chinese banks that have limited global operations and less to lose if they are sanctioned. Front companies established by Iran in Hong Kong and elsewhere help manage the proceeds.

One such bank, US officials say, is the Bank of Kunlun. In 2012, Washington cut Kunlun off from the US financial system for allegedly providing hundreds of millions of dollars in financial services to Iranian banks, including moving money and paying letters of credit. That punishment only solidified Kunlun as a preferred channel for facilitating trade with Iran in China’s currency.

The bank grew rapidly. A “significant portion” of Iran’s oil revenue was deposited at Kunlun as of 2022, according to the US Treasury. According to indictments filed in US federal courts, front companies in Hong Kong and elsewhere have been used to convert Chinese yuan into dollars, euros, and other foreign currencies that Iran needs.

Shadow fleets and maritime chokepoints

The shadow fleet is the transport arm of this system. These vessels change names and flags, report false GPS signals, go dark, report as different ships during their journeys, and even duplicate transmissions to create ghost ships.

There are now more than 1,470 tankers classed as being part of the shadow or dark fleet, according to the ship monitoring website TankerTrackers.com, which represents approximately 16.3–19.6 percent of tankers currently transporting oil, oil products, and chemicals around the world.

Russia’s shadow fleet has also been trading oil in either rubles or Chinese yuan, further undermining the petrodollar.

These shadow tankers often use a “flag of convenience” provided by smaller, non-western nations such as Gabon, Comoros, or Cameroon. Flag states’ ship registries are responsible for recording ship ownership and loans secured against vessels, as well as investigating incidents. In return, the shipowners pay fees. Some small states outsource their shipping registry to third parties.

The Jun Tong oil tanker, known as the Fair Seas until January 2024, and the Tai Shan until August, appear to be part of China’s shadow fleet. It has sailed under the Cameroon flag, the flag of Malta, the flag of the Marshall Islands, and the flag of Panama.

Shadow fleet vessels typically change ownership multiple times, reportedly relying on shell companies in places with loose registration regulations, such as Dubai, Hong Kong, and the Marshall Islands, to disguise the identities of their ultimate owners.

Panama becomes the pressure point

In fact, the flag of Panama appears to be the second most prevalently used flag amongst shadow vessels.

That is a major clue to the real story behind US pressure on Panama to oust Hong Kong-based CK Hutchison from its two ports in the Panama Canal.

US sanctions are not working as intended. Washington has increasingly resorted to enforcing unilateral sanctions through military force, as seen in recent months when US forces seized shadow tankers such as the Bella-1.

If the US controls major maritime chokepoints such as the Panama Canal, it can enforce unilateral sanctions by force while reserving the right to charge selected vessels. Trump has already announced plans to impose “port fees” on Chinese-built ships passing through ports under US jurisdiction. These fees could reach $1.5 million per vessel.

This is the deeper logic behind BlackRock and MSC’s attempt to purchase 43 of CK Hutchison’s 53 ports internationally – and why China blocked the sale. BlackRock was brought in under former US president Joe Biden’s administration to work for the US government and oversee the Build Back Better World (B3W) partnership, now called Global Infrastructure Partners (GIP).

BlackRock, the largest asset manager in the world, and its infrastructure acquisitions are directly tied to the G7 agreement with GIP. This relationship has continued under the Trump administration.

The GIP was designed to undermine China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which is building critical infrastructure across the world. GIP, officially owned by BlackRock, is now attempting to purchase or find ways to seize strategic infrastructure, as seen in Panama.

Panama, connected to Hong Kong through both CK Hutchison and possibly the shadow fleet system, has faced intense pressure this year to seize the ports under vague “constitutional” grounds that have not been clearly specified. CK Hutchison is seeking arbitration.

This is where China’s April decrees matter most. In the Panama case, the government’s claim that the seizure rests on constitutional grounds makes the decision harder for Beijing to contest directly. But Panama now faces potential economic consequences under Chinese law. Beijing reserves the right to respond with sanctions of its own. Panama would not be the first country to unlawfully seize major Chinese assets.

The warning is also aimed squarely at Washington. China is preparing to respond if the US pushes further after kidnapping Maduro from Venezuela, cutting off Cuba’s access to oil, freezing Iraqi oil revenue, and waging an illegitimate war on Iran in the span of only a few months.

If Washington escalates its economic carpet bombing, Beijing now has a legal arsenal with which to answer.

Alongside its rapidly growing Cross-Border Interbank Payment System (CIPS), which can operate outside SWIFT, China is moving toward an alternative financial system in which states can trade with whomever they choose, free from the western financial diktat that has long functioned as the monetary architecture of imperialism.

The war on Iran has dragged a parallel financial system into view, exposing an architecture already built through years of sanctions pressure and now pushed further into the open by every new US threat.

Cynthia Chung is the President of the Rising Tide Foundation and author of the books “The Shaping of a World Religion” & “The Empire on Which the Black Sun Never Set,” consider supporting her work by making a donation and subscribing to her substack page Through A Glass Darkly.

Through A Glass Darkly

On matters of geopolitics, counterintelligence, revisionist history and cultural warfare.

By Cynthia Chung

You can check out the video version of our discussion here.

You can also watch on Rumble here, Bitchute here or Odysee here.

You can watch our “The Hidden Hand Behind UFOs” series below!

Cynthia Chung is the President of the Rising Tide Foundation and author of the books “The Shaping of a World Religion” & “The Empire on Which the Black Sun Never Set,” consider supporting her work by making a donation and subscribing to her substack page Through A Glass Darkly.

Also watch our RTF and CP films and documentaries here.

Through A Glass Darkly

On matters of geopolitics, counterintelligence, revisionist history and cultural warfare.

By Cynthia Chung

You can watch the entire series here:

Cynthia Chung is the President of the Rising Tide Foundation and author of the books “The Shaping of a World Religion” & “The Empire on Which the Black Sun Never Set,” consider supporting her work by making a donation and subscribing to her substack page Through A Glass Darkly.

Also watch our RTF and CP films and documentaries here.

Through A Glass Darkly

On matters of geopolitics, counterintelligence, revisionist history and cultural warfare.

By Cynthia Chung

- Matthew Ehret

All paid subscribers can download the audiobook at the bottom of this page.

You can also Pick up your audiobook on Gumroad here

Graham and Darren’s work on this audiobook surpassed all expectations, and if you happen to be an author itching to get your work transformed into audio format, check out their work and contact info here.

To pick up physical copies of the Revenge of the Mystery Cults Trilogy, click here.

All paid subscribers also have access to a PDF copy of Mystery Babylon which you can access below:

All paid subscribers have access to the audiobook below:

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You can read the transcript with images to this lecture here:

You can find Part II and III to this lecture series here:

You can also watch the lecture series on our RTF youtube channel below:

Cynthia Chung is the President of the Rising Tide Foundation and author of the books “The Shaping of a World Religion” & “The Empire on Which the Black Sun Never Set,” consider supporting her work by making a donation and subscribing to her substack page Through A Glass Darkly.

Also watch our RTF and CP films and documentaries here.

Through A Glass Darkly

On matters of geopolitics, counterintelligence, revisionist history and cultural warfare.

By Cynthia Chung

You can also listen to an interview he did years ago on this series with Whitney Webb here:

Matt Ehret's Insights

Whitney Webb and Matt Ehret Discuss: Fabians and Fascists on Unlimited Hangout

In this episode of Whitney Webb's Unlimited Hangout Podcast, Matt was invited to shed light on the Fabian Society roots of the Great Reset and World Economic Forum. This exposition takes us through the origins and overlap of the Cecil Rhodes Round Table Group and the earlier T.H. Huxley directed X Club that promoted a new imperial religion of statistics…

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a year ago · 105 likes · 17 comments · Matthew Ehret

Matt Ehret's Insights

Historical analysis, geopolitics, cultural warfare and other studies in Conspiracy Science

By Matthew Ehret

As I am writing this we are now day 51 into the Iran War. And it is time we talk about the economic fallout that has begun to hit the United States.

If you didn’t know already, you should be informed that the United States is facing the most dire debt crisis in its entire history. And if the US government can’t make good on this, Day X has effectively come. The day of reckoning. The day the U.S. defaults on their debt and kisses goodbye to it being the center of the universe in economic affairs. It will lose the USD as the world reserve currency, which will cause the House of Cards that is the U.S. economy, to come tumbling down.

This is the soft underbelly of the American Empire and everything that it has done at a desperately accelerating rate since 2025 is to delay Day X’s reckoning.

Scott Bessent has been tasked with steering the ship away from the upcoming iceberg, however, this plan does not have a hope without some very real and major sacrifices. I will go over what these sacrifices will entail in this new series.

Through A Glass Darkly

On matters of geopolitics, counterintelligence, revisionist history and cultural warfare.

By Cynthia Chung

Let’s first begin with how the economic fallout has hit the average American and the country’s manufacturing base.

First off, to be clear, the American consumer, business and manufacturing base paid 94% of the brunt of the 2025 tariffs, with only 6% being passed onto the foreign exporter.

Recall Bessent’s repeated claim last year that it would be the foreign countries, notably China, who would be “eating the tariffs.”

In an interview with Tucker Carlson, Scott Bessent said:

“And this is the first step towards realigning that a lot of our trading partners, including some of our allies, have not been good partners. If tariffs are so bad, why do they have them? Or, if the American consumer is going to pay all the tariff then why do they care about tariffs [referring to foreign exporters]. Right, because they are going to eat them.

…

So this is a national security issue that we’re seeing here but it’s also an economic security issue and it’s to, I don’t want to say redistribute, but it is to give working Americans real wage gains and enhance their lives…Wall Street’s done great, it can continue doing well, [but] it’s Main Street’s turn…”

Yet clearly the 2025 tariffs did not work out that way. As was feared by many analysts, the American base, that is the American consumer, manufacture and business base paid almost all of the tariff fees, which functioned for all intent and purposes as a revenue tax.

Thus, the 2025 tariffs were most certainly not Main Street’s turn.

In fact, U.S. exports fell during 2025. This had a lot to do with trade with China. Scott Bessent claimed he was confident China would have no choice but to “eat the tariffs.” In his interview with Tucker Carlson, he described China’s economy as weak, that it was in a recession/depression, words he also used during his Senate hearing.

“Well, I don’t know if they [China] can retaliate for a couple of reasons. If you look at the history, and I used to teach economic history, and when you look at the history, we are the debtor nation, we have the trade deficits. The surplus nation is in the weaker position because the Chinese business model and the economy are the most unbalanced, imbalanced in the history of the modern world. We’ve never seen anything like this in terms of their export level relative to their GDP, relative to their population. They’re in a deflationary recession/depression right now. They’re trying to export their way out of it and we can’t let them do that.”

Using an odd form of “logic”, Bessent claimed that being the debtor nation was the superior position in a trade war. That the trade surplus nation, that is China, was in the weaker position. Realise that this only makes sense if you are focused on propping up a financialized debtor economy not an industrial based economy.

In the past this sort of upside-down logic has functioned because America’s hyper-financialized debtor economy was uncontested in its USD holding world reserve currency status. The global financial system was rigged into propping up the “American Dream.” And American debt was being used as something that so-called “wealth” could be generated from, what the Wall Street speculators made a “killing” on.

Contrary to what Bessent claims, the collapse of America’s manufacturing base was done as a result of the U.S. becoming a hyper-financialized debtor economy ruled by Wall Street. The banks were further and further deregulated thanks to the era of Alan Greenspan and Paul Volcker and towards a ‘controlled disintegration” a la Trilateral Commission, free to prey upon America’s real wealth that had been generated by its industrial base.

Thus, when Wall Street’s man Bessent is discussing his vision for restoring “balance” in opposition to China’s “unbalance” note that it has always been in the context, within the framework, of a hyper-financialized debtor economy that rules over the global economy, the very thing that sucked the life out of America’s real wealth industrial base.

Bessent was effectively stating in his interview with Tucker that he was confident that China would not be able to escape the stranglehold of the global financial mafia so to speak. Yet clearly, there is a very real fear that China might be able to do this very thing and is why Bessent has been attempting to rally the world to support a restoring of “balance” to China.

Despite Bessent being confident that China could be reigned in, that they would have no choice but to bend the knee and “eat the tariffs,” China simply walked away. This is the main reason why U.S. exports fell.

Very significantly, this included China walking away from purchasing American energy in 2025 as a result of Bessent’s attempt to impose “rebalancing” tariffs on China.

By June 2025, Chinese imports on American energy fell to ZERO. A foreshadowing of America’s agenda towards Venezuela and Iran in 2026, and yes, it was always about America’s attempt to control global energy supply chains.

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Before we get further into this, let us first return to the state of affairs within the U.S. economy.

The 2025 tariffs were a failure in their attempt to “contain” China, however, as already mentioned revenue was indeed collected, nonetheless.

The U.S. government made a profit of $264 billion off of the tariffs, effectively a tax on the American consumer and manufacturing base. Most of these funds are going into military industrial projects, including the AI bubble and rather ominous pharmaceutical and bioengineering projects (see below graphic on foreign investments).

This was the amount paid to just “defense” spending alone for the fiscal year of 2022. The amount is assuredly much higher today.

It is true that the Trump Administration managed to get an array of countries and companies pledging Roman tributes, here is a graphic showcasing what sort of projects the U.S. government is focusing these pledges towards.

The top investments the U.S. government would like to focus on are pharmaceuticals and bioengineering endeavours and coming at a close second are AI and semiconductors. These are aimed at primarily military industrial projects. That amounts to $300 billion of pledged foreign investment for these projects. The total pledge shown here is $379 billion, so 79.1% of these pledges are intended to be spent on pharmaceutical, bioengineering, AI, and chips. 0.02% of the pledges were allocated to future investment in the actual manufacturing base.

The automotive sector comes in third place at 11.9% of the pledges, however, Trump has announced that he intends the automotive industrial base to also be incorporated into the military industrial complex…

This military spending is occurring while U.S. job numbers are plummeting.

The Kobeissi Letter reports that U.S. job numbers were revised down by over one million in 2025, the largest annual revision in at least 20 years. Since 2019, 2.5 million jobs have been erased from the official data. This is compared to 1.2 million downward revision in jobs from 2009-2010 as a result of the 2008 financial crisis. In other words, 2025 performed worse than the years 2009 and 2010 (almost combined) in terms of jobs lost.

The Kobeissi Letter reports in just the first six months of 2025, 371 large U.S. companies went bankrupt. That is the highest number of bankruptcies in 15 years.

Out of the 371 bankruptcies, 58 were large industrial companies, 49 large consumer companies, and 27 large healthcare companies.

The reason why there is a reporting of “growth” in the U.S. economy is because of the AI bubble.

In other words, AI is the only part of the economy that has been “growing,” though again this is not manifesting as “real wealth” but speculation on a market bubble that is ready to pop. The reality is that 80% of the U.S. population has been living in a recession.

Hence why we are seeing graphs like this.

On that note, this sort of thing (see below graph) has been happening as a consequence of Trump’s bipolar tweets that have been wreaking havoc on the stock and bond markets, with a notable few making large fortunes…

And on the note of a looming AI bubble ready to pop, there is something else you should know about Scott Bessent’s “good” intentions towards the American people. And it has to do with private credit giving out risky loans to tech industries culminating in what appears to be a tsunami of defaults headed their way.

U.S. private credit looks like it may be the first to collapse as the U.S. economy teeters on the brink. The contagion is spreading… Corporate private credit is less than 10% of the $25 trillion market that asset managers like BlackRock operate in, responsible for about $3.5 trillion in assets. But U.S. private credit are the canary in the coal mine. If they collapse, it will signal that the entire credit market, the $25 trillion time-bomb, is also ready to blow. Hence the term that private credit is acting like a “contagion” in the financial system.

As a consequence of the 2008 financial crisis, there were some added regulations in terms of what were deemed appropriate circumstances for banks to give out loans. That should not be a bad thing, though according to Scott Bessent it is.

In a White House press conference, Scott Bessent said “The big tax on consumers that goes unnoticed is deregulation or [I mean] regulation. And we are deregulating and bringing that down. So, you know, from a household income point of view, we would expect real purchasing increases.”

So according to U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, deregulation is in fact the friend of the average American despite the 2008 financial crisis being the result of extreme deregulation of banks, where “Too Big To Fail Banks” were bailed out with average Americans’ hard earn savings.

And as we will soon see, Bessent is repeating history with the oncoming 2026 financial crisis where average Americans are expected yet again to bail out Wall Street’s predatory antics.

In reality, nothing has changed since 2008. Banks continued to give out loans like candy by going through private credit firms such as Blackstone and Apollo. Essentially these private creditors function as loan sharks. In fact, these very private credit firms made a killing off of the 2008 financial crisis.

With the window dressing that regulation would increase around U.S. banks after 2008, the reality was that they continued to give out risky loans to unregulated private credit firms such as Blackstone and Apollo. Much of the information on these private credit firms lending practices are not publicly available. However, we do know that many of these risky loans were given to emerging tech companies.

Below is a useful graphic to gives us an idea of how the “AI Boom” is in truth just another bubble ready to pop, and has managed to bankrupt the software sector in the process. Bravo.

A lot of money has gone into the “AI Boom” with hardly anything to really show for it in terms of tangible results. The amount of money going into this is very much unsustainable. And a great deal of these loans are coming out of the private credit sector.

By late 2025 to early 2026, there were some major bankruptcies involving private credit. Much of this domino effect is occurring in reaction to the increase in interest rates. In a world of higher interest rates, the riskiest loans are hit first. The weakest link in the financial structure is impacted first, and that is private credit. Those who have a high probability of defaulting are turned away from bank loans and can only get loans for their businesses through loan sharks, i.e. private credit, that charge exorbitant interest rates. As the basic interest rates fly up, the higher the probability that people are going to default on their loans. That is why private credit is tanking.

In the first three months of 2026, Blue Owl Capital’s stock fell by over 40%. Blue Owl is a major financial firm that is deeply involved in private credit.

Even the massive private credit firm Blackstone saw its stock fall by nearly 30% since the beginning of this year.

It is also impacting some of the largest asset managers on earth. BlackRock and many other Wall Street giants have actually been forced to limit withdrawals from their credit funds in response to the panic around private credit tanking.

[Note to reader: Also keep in mind here that BlackRock is working for the U.S. government in buying up infrastructure worldwide to facilitate a massive global centralisation. This is very much relevant, as we will see, to Bessent’s vision for a new global order.]

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The drop in stocks for Blue Owl and Blackstone is symbolic of a bank run that is occurring right now. Investors of private credit are freaking out and demanding all of their money, which is leading to many of these companies trying to sell their holdings, but the problem is that many of these holdings are not liquid. They cannot be quickly converted to cash. Hence, when BlackRock and other major Wall Street firms put limits on withdrawals, this only creates further panic.

It looks like 2026 is due for the next tier in a U.S. financial crash.

Scott Bessent is taking this seriously. But not how you are probably thinking. Recall, Wall Street made a killing from the 2008 financial crisis because the policy-makers work for Wall Street not the American people. The 2008 financial crisis worked to effectively centralise the U.S. economy into fewer hands, in terms of its finances, its banking, its business etc. etc. Big business became bigger, small business shrinked. Big banks became bigger, small banks disappeared. You get the gist.

In other words, if you are a “big fish” you see another looming financial crisis as “chow time.”

These are the rules of a hyper-financialized debtor economy that has been feeding off of what is increasingly looking like the corpse of America’s former industrial empire.

However, this time around there is a very big caveat to Wall Street’s “feast.” And that is the challenge to the USD’s world reserve currency status. The Wall Street parasite has grown, and America’s decayed economy is not enough for it to feed on, it needs to feed off of the world economy. The world needs to quite literally buy into America’s debt, its U.S. stocks but even more importantly its U.S. Treasury bonds, to not only prevent it from defaulting but to actually prop up its status as the world’s largest financial system, such that the U.S. can dictate the rules and conditions of global trade.

Thus, the challenge of navigating the U.S. economy through this storm for Bessent is how to allow Wall Street to have its “chow time” while upholding the USD as the world reserve currency. However, it appears that many global investors are not only catching on that they are in fact on the menu, but that there is now increasingly an alternative financial system that is being brought on line that would allow all these little fish an escape route.

Thus, Bessent’s job is to hide the trail of fishbones long enough for a massive global centralisation to occur and be brought on line. The “Too Big To Fail” apology will be used again along with the convenient launch of a new global order. The rules of this new global order will be dictated by the “big fish” that will find themselves at the center of this global centralisation endeavour. However, as we will see, this fantasy is a long shot and does not have a hope in hell without first going through a lot of bodies first. In other words, the level of carnage required to make this new global order happen is going to be epic, that is, if they get their way.

Since private credit in turn took out loans from U.S. banks, these large U.S. banks are also extremely exposed to private credit firms going under.

Moody’s estimated that U.S. banks are exposed to nearly $300 billion of private credit loans. If these companies start defaulting on their private credit loans, which we are already seeing happen, then many of the private credit firms could go bankrupt which means they will not be able to pay back the loans they in turn had received from the major Wall Street banks.

In response to this crisis that could be seen on the horizon in 2025, the Trump Administration, which has been supporting the private credit industry, put out an executive order in August 2025 titled “Democratizing Access to Alternative Assets for 401(K) Investors”.

In other words, Scott Bessent and White House co. were being lobbied by some of their major supporters and donors from Wall Street to find new investors to hold the bag for these bad investments in private credit. These more seasoned investors on Wall Street could see there was a crisis brewing in the private credit sector in advance and successfully lobbied the White House to encourage the average American to put their life savings from their 401(K), their pension funds etc., into these bad investments in private credit so that Wall Street investors could sell their holdings, so that they could sell off these bad loans to the average American before the stocks started to tank.

And Scott Bessent is complicit in this, make no mistake. We now have the White House attempting to con the American people out of their savings to bail out Wall Street! So much for Main Street’s turn. For those who thought Bessent somehow had a Road to Damascus conversion from his Wall Street, Soros days, this should be a major wake-up call.

It should also be noted here that Blackstone was among the largest funders to Trump’s most recent presidential campaign.

Unfortunately, this economic fallout on the average American and the industrial base was a predictable outcome. Something I was writing about back in May 2025.

And I can tell you with certainty, Scott Bessent also knew it was going to play out this way.

On a Manhattan Institute panel in 2024, Bessent stated:

“I think we are also at a unique moment geopolitically. And I could see in the next few years that we are going to have to have some kind of a grand global economic reordering. Something on the equivalent of a new Bretton Woods, or if you want to go back like something back to the Steel Agreements or the Treaty of Versailles. You know, there’s a very good chance that we are going to have to have that over the next four years and I’d like to be a part of it.”

As Bessent likes to remind people, he used to teach economic history at Yale as an adjunct professor from 2006 to 2011. So, it is safe to say he has a very clear reason for referencing the Treaty of Versailles as the model for the “grand global economic reordering” that he would “like to be a part of.”

The Treaty of Versailles was one of the major blueprints for establishing the New World Order after the First World War. Influential players in this included the circles around Herbert Hoover, Secretary of State Frank Kellogg, Owen D. Young, Bernard Baruch, Walter Lippmann, Colonel Edward Mandell House, General Tasker Bliss, Hamilton Fish Armstrong, Thomas Lamont, and Justice Hughes.

The Paris Peace Conference of 1919 was also heavily promoted by this same grouping. Col. Edward Mandell House was an especially important figure in all of this.

The reader should be aware that the Treaty of Versailles is recognised as what created the political and economic tension that led to WWII. More specifically, what led to the National Socialism of Mussolini and Hitler.

And what was the ultimate goal in creating such tension? A global reordering a la “League of Nations.”

Count Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi was an instrumental player in attempting to bring about the League of Nations and was closely linked to the above circles mentioned. He was also the father of Pan-Europe and created the first version of what would become the official flag of the European Union. The original flag being the Apollo Sun with the Crusader Cross.

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In his 1954 autobiography “An Idea Conquers the World,” Kalergi wrote:

“The use of mass hypnotism for propaganda purposes is most successful at times of crisis. When National Socialism made its bid for power, millions of Germans had been thrown completely off their balance: middle-class families had sunk to the level of the proletariat, whilst working-class families were without work. The Third Reich became the last hope for the stranded, of those who had lost their social status, and of those rootless beings who were seeking a new basis for an existence that had become meaningless…

The economic background of the Hitler movement becomes apparent when one recalls that Hitler’s two revolutions coincided with Germany’s two great economic crises: the inflation of 1923 and the recession of the early 1930s, with its wave of unemployment. During the six intervening years, which were relatively prosperous for Germany, the Hitler movement was virtually non-existent.”

The father of Pan-Europeanism and spiritual father of the European Union, Count Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi, often spoke well of Austrian and Italian fascism and even Catholic fascism, and thus the above quote by him takes on another layer of eeriness. Kalergi acknowledges that Hitler’s rise would not have been possible if there had not been two periods of extreme economic crisis for Germany. The question is, were these crises organic in their occurrence or rather engineered?

Kalergi further writes in his autobiography, “there is not doubt that Hitler’s popularity rested mainly on the fanatical struggle which he waged against the Versailles Treaty.”

In other words, the Versailles Treaty was purposefully engineered to unleash an economic crisis that would allow for the restructuring of entire nations a la League of Nations.

If we look at the political ecosystem Kalergi was navigating in we get some further hints, which included such men as Max Warburg, Baron Louis Rothschild, Herbert Hoover, Secretary of State Frank Kellogg, Owen D. Young, Bernard Baruch, Walter Lippmann, Colonel House, General Tasker Bliss, Hamilton Fish Armstrong, Thomas Lamont, Justice Hughes. All of these men are named by Kalergi directly as his support base in the United States in his autobiography. They were adamantly supportive of Kalergi’s Pan-Europeanism, aka a “United States of Europe,” were staunch supporters of a League of Nations vision and were architects within the Paris Peace Conference (1919-1920) which was responsible for the Treaty of Versailles which launched Germany into its first wave of extreme economic crisis.

For more on this story refer to Chapter 2 of my book “The Empire on Which the Black Sun Never Set.”

This is also why the father of neo-conservatism and head of the CIA’s Psychological Strategy Board’ (PSB) division of the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC), James Burnham had this to say in his book The Managerial Revolution:

“We cannot understand the revolution by restricting our analysis to the war [WWII]; we must understand the war as a phase in the development of the revolution.”

In Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution (1941), he makes the case that the formation of a new organizational structure made up of an elite managerial class was in the process of being created, the type of society he believed was in the process of replacing capitalism on a world scale.

The Managerial Revolution was about how a new elite of “managers” (the planners and administrators, organizers and technicians who controlled industry) obeying the “historical law” that “all social or economic groups of any size strive to improve their relative position with respect to power and privilege in society” was replacing the hitherto dominant capitalists as the ruling class. This supplanting of capitalism by managerialism would bring a radical transformation of the economy. Collectivism and central planning would replace private ownership and the free market.

But the managers would go beyond the economic realm to transform political, social, and cultural life as well. An “unlimited” state, “a fused political apparatus” of corporate managers, government bureaucrats, and the military, would come into being, supported by ideologies placing authority and discipline above freedom and private initiative. Probably, this totalitarian system would prove temporary, a phase of the transition to mature managerial rule. But it would be a long, long time before real democracy appeared again, and “drastic convulsions” would occur before it did.

Burnham reasons that just as we observed the transition from a feudal to a capitalist state being inevitable, so too will the transition from a capitalist to managerial state occur. Within this framework, Burnham predicts that ownership rights of production capabilities will no longer be owned by individuals but rather the state or institutions. He writes:

“Effective class domination and privilege does, it is true, require control over the instruments of production; but this need not be exercised through individual private property rights. It can be done through what might be called corporate rights, possessed not by individuals as such but by institutions: as was the case conspicuously with many societies in which a priestly class was dominant…”

Burnham proceeds to write: “If, in a managerial society, no individuals are to hold comparable property rights, how can any group of individuals constitute a ruling class?

The answer is comparatively simple and, as already noted, not without historical analogues. The managers will exercise their control over the instruments of production and gain preference in the distribution of the products, not directly, through property rights vested in them as individuals, but indirectly, through their control of the state which in turn will own and control the instruments of production. The state – that is, the institutions which comprise the state – will, if we wish to put it that way, be the ‘property’ of the managers. And that will be quite enough to place them in the position of the ruling class.”

This has been the policy outlook of the Trilateral Commission (though is not limited to this institution). It is in fact the League of Nations’ vision that has been on the wish list of those who began WWI in hopes that the world would accept a one world government of regionalisations in service to an empire. It is what orchestrated the Great Depression to again attempt an implementation of a League of Nations outlook through the rise of a “National Socialist” brand of fascism seen in Italy and Germany (which would not have been possible without an engineered economic crisis).

On Nov 9th, 1978, Trilateral Commission member Paul Volcker (Federal Reserve Chairman from 1979-1987) would affirm at a lecture delivered at Warwick University in England: “A controlled disintegration in the world economy is a legitimate object for the 1980s.” However, it would no longer be called by such a name, but rather as a “managed integration.”[1] This is also the ideology that has shaped Milton Friedman’s “Shock Therapy”. By the time of Jimmy Carter’s Administration, the majority of the government was being run by members of the Trilateral Commission.

Today we are seeing the final stages of this “controlled disintegration,” however, there is one very big problem to this over century long plan (that was set back with the “wrong side” winning WWII as per these architects), and that is the rapid rise of an alternative financial system…

More on this in Part II of this series.

Cynthia Chung is the President of the Rising Tide Foundation and author of the books “The Shaping of a World Religion” & “The Empire on Which the Black Sun Never Set,” consider supporting her work by making a donation and subscribing to her substack page Through A Glass Darkly.

Watch our other RTF and CP films and documentaries here.

Through A Glass Darkly

On matters of geopolitics, counterintelligence, revisionist history and cultural warfare.

By Cynthia Chung

Footnote:

[1] Although Volcker would shy away from the continued use of “controlled disintegration” in this speech, encouraging rather to call it “managed integration” the two are effectively the same and lead to the same goal, that is to a League of Nations (more on this here.) In his speech Volcker stated: “To me, the charge to find a crisis-free system could not be satisfied. The passage of time has not altered the judgment. In an open-system, the external constraint is there. If ignored for long, a crisis will develop. But a crisis can also be therapeutic - it forces a response....The problems in reaching that limited agreement provided ample warning of the inherent difficulty of reconciling the varied objectives of different countries when no single participant felt itself strong enough to, in effect, take the risks of underwriting the system. In retrospect, it still seems a remarkable achievement for the industrialized countries to have agreed together on a new grid of exchange rates...Moreover, there was no urge to settle unresolved disputes about the form and nature of convertibility obligations in a new monetary system in the heat of crisis. So, when the new rates came under attack in the market, the alternative of permitting the dollar to float for an indefinite period no longer seemed so unthinkable a step. The industrial countries were tired of trying to make a fixed exchange rate system work, at least without reaching fundamental agreement about the manner in which such a system would work.“ Hmmm, sounds a lot like a “controlled disintegration” theory after all. He goes on to say “I do not depart from the strong consensus that we have, on a worldwide scale, no other practical choice than to work ahead within the broad framework of a floating system - and that system offers the most promising framework for ‘managing integration’ as far ahead as we can now see.” The floating system effectively removed the economic sovereignty of nation states which is precisely the goal of the League of Nations. So there you have it, Volcker acknowledges that there needed to be a crisis (he does not call it a manufactured crisis of course because that would be rightfully regarded as criminal), that there needed to be a crisis in order for them to push through the floating system on a world-scale, as Volcker said, that because they were in the heat of a crisis no-one was going to debate what was effectively the launching of a new monetary system, and with the floating system they now would have the tool they required for “managed integration.” A “managed integration” towards what? A League of Nations.

The transcript of the discussion can be read here.

You can view the video version of our discussion below:

Beyond the Narrative: Deconstructing International Fascism and Anglo-American Geopolitics

Dive into a rigorously researched and intellectually provocative discussion between host Jeff J Brown and historian Cynthia Chung, author of The Empire on which the Black Sun Never Set. This essential dialogue provides a radical re-contextualization of 20th and 21st-century geopolitics, arguing that the true origins of modern totalitarianism lie not in purely nationalistic movements, but in the enduring, top-down structures of Anglo-American social imperialism and oligarchic control.

This is not a conventional history lesson; it is an academic deep dive that performs a forensic analysis of how global power has been covertly managed for over a century.

Key Themes of the Discussion

• The Big Lie of Controlled Opposition: The discussion exposes how the Western “system of quote democracy” [05:12] employs staged political conflicts and “controlled opposition” to foster the illusion of debate, maintaining a status quo beholden to imperialistic finance.

• Fascism’s Imperialist Roots: Chung details how the British brand of fascism, or social imperialism [15:23], appropriated and corrupted socialist language—coining “National Socialism” [02:04:15]—to justify a global system of exploitation and perpetual empire, ultimately tracing its intellectual and financial origins to powerful British figures and institutions.

• The Shadow of the League of Nations: The conversation reveals how the League of Nations and the Pan-Europe concept [35:07] served as the initial blueprint for a world government system, carefully structured to preserve Britain’s special status at its head, and how this strategy continues to undermine true national sovereignty across the continent, including the European Union.

• Operation Gladio and State Subversion: Uncover the terrifying continuity of this structure through NATO’s “stay behind” units and Operation Gladio [52:25], which used false flag terrorism and political interference to sabotage post-WWII European democratic processes and enforce the rule of the corporate state [26:42].

• The Fight for Sovereignty: Examine the historical pattern of assassinations and attempted overthrows against leaders—from Lincoln and Tsar Alexander II to Kennedy and Charles de Gaulle [42:12]—who attempted to implement an independent economic system and industrial policy against the destructive power of the Anglo-American financial and intelligence apparatus.

This discussion with Cynthia Chung challenges viewers to look past simplistic political labels and recognize the consistent, ancient ideology of Empire that has successfully subverted modern nation-states from within. It is an indispensable resource for students of history, political science, and international relations seeking to grasp the true, often hidden forces shaping the modern world.

Cynthia Chung is the President of the Rising Tide Foundation and author of the book “The Empire on Which the Black Sun Never Set,” and “The Shaping of a World Religion,” consider supporting her work by making a donation and subscribing to her substack page Through A Glass Darkly.

Also watch our RTF and CP films and documentaries here.

Through A Glass Darkly

On matters of geopolitics, counterintelligence, revisionist history and cultural warfare.

By Cynthia Chung

Matt Ehret speaks to RTF president Cynthia Chung about her new series 'The Real Agenda Behind Venezuela Iran & Greenland' covering the battle for the new world system, and the revival of Teddy Roosevelt's imperial paradigm under MAGA 2.0.

In this presentation, Cynthia outlines the lies behind the USA's kidnapping of Maduro, the absurd plans behind America's global economic war against China, and the push for controlling Arctic shipping, missile systems and resources.

Also discussed: Why is Europe being set up to suffer the greatest energy crisis in history, what is going on with Taiwan and Pacific US military plans, how is China encouraging a classical renaissance and how can we know if Trump's Tariff's are genuinely based on the American System or merely an imperial revenue tariff?

Follow the RTF substack here:

Rising Tide Foundation

Dedicated to the enhancement of cross-cultural understanding and dialogue between east and west.

If you'd like to find the Chinese shows referenced in this episode, we hope the following links help:

The Story of the Pearl Girl (available on Netflix)
https://reelgood.com/show/the-story-o...

The Double (available on Netflix)
https://www.indiatoday.in/entertainme...

Escaping Calypso's Island series:

Cynthia Chung is the President of the Rising Tide Foundation and author of the books “The Shaping of a World Religion” & “The Empire on Which the Black Sun Never Set,” consider supporting her work by making a donation and subscribing to her substack page Through A Glass Darkly.

Through A Glass Darkly

On matters of geopolitics, counterintelligence, revisionist history and cultural warfare.

By Cynthia Chung

You can also watch our discussion on The Duran’s youtube page:

Cynthia Chung is the President of the Rising Tide Foundation and author of the books “The Shaping of a World Religion” & “The Empire on Which the Black Sun Never Set,” consider supporting her work by making a donation and subscribing to her substack page Through A Glass Darkly.

Watch our other RTF and CP films and documentaries here.

Through A Glass Darkly

On matters of geopolitics, counterintelligence, revisionist history and cultural warfare.

By Cynthia Chung