Despite all the commotion outside, I met up with my colleague, and we dove immediately into a conversation about international banking and the state of the global financial system. As a senior executive of a large international bank, he is the ultimate insider. And I was floored by what he told me.
He openly acknowledged, for example, that banks are frauds. Most banks, particularly in the developed west, only hold a tiny fraction of their customer’s deposits in cash. The rest is gambled away on whatever the popular toxic security du jour happens to be.
This entire system rests upon a very thin layer of confidence, reinforced by the occasional taxpayer bailout. Yet it struck him as incredible that people still had confidence in banks, especially given that most of the investment products promoted to their customers are “crap”.
He told me how destructive central bankers are, creating untold amounts of inflation that only serves to make people poorer, while enabling governments to go deeper into debt.
Most of all, he told me that very few of the banking sector’s underlying deficiencies have been addressed since the 2008 meltdown. Many western banks are still insolvent, with the key difference that their governments are now also insolvent.
