All of you remember Lord James of Blackheath, don't you? Well, in case you've forgotten who he is, he was the British peer who, a few years ago, stood in the House of Lords and gave a most peculiar speech that cited unusual amounts of gold in the world. I wrote about his speech - which was causing something of a minor fuss on the internet at that time - in my book Covert Wars and Breakaway Civilizations. In fact, I cited much of his remarks, as Hansard reported them, in that book. The upshot of Lord Blackheath's remarks was that he was trying to get to the bottom of how much gold there was in the world, and as a result, contacted acquaintances in the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street (the Bank of England), and was given answers that amounted to approximately 1500 tons. There was, of course, much more to Lord Blackheath's remarks than just that, but that was one of the things that grabbed my attention, for at around the same time, the calls within Germany by Germans to audit their country's gold reserves had reached such a pitch that the Bundesbank decided to begin the process of repratriation of Germany's gold deposits from London, Paris, and most importantly, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Of course, I don't for a moment assume these pressures were the only reason Germany decided to do this. If anything, they were convenient pressures, when the real reasons were probably geopolitical, and growing mistrust between Berlin on the one hand, and London and Washington on the other.

In any case, the amounts being cited by Lord Blackheath were far below even the reported amounts of just German gold allegedly on deposit in New York. And of course, Lord Blackheath himself expressed no considerable mystification at the time at not being able to get any rational approximation from his contacts.

Well, Mr. J.R. found this article and passed it along, and I regard it as so significant in terms of my "high octane speculations" about hidden systems of finance, that I absolutely have to comment on it. Here's the article:

Lord James of Blackheath: I Helped Smuggle Children Used For Slavery And Sex

Now, much as I'd like to belabor the moral myopia of helping to smuggle children out of the United Kingdom when one suspects "something might be going on but I did it anyway," I suspect the article itself does a decent enough job of that.

So I will pass on to my high octane speculation of the day by way of a bit more background: my friend and colleague, former Assistant Secretary of Housing and Urban development Catherine Austin Fitts has expressed the opinion - during an interview with Daniel Liszt, a.k.a. the "Dark Journalist" - that the western elites have always admired slavery as a system of economic privilege and control. The problem, she averred, was that the capital could not be "perfected," after all, slaves ran away to pursue a life of freedom and their own economic self interest. Now, however, the means of "perfecting the capital" are available, as the following article suggests:

Wisconsin Company to Implant Microchips in Employees

Most of us, I'm quite certain, who read the second article will have a "John of Patmos moment" contemplating the dire implications of that development.

But if one is running covert human trafficking rings - whether for child sex slavery, adult sex slavery, or other forms of slavery - such technology does allow one to "keep track of the cargo," i.e., to perfect the "capital."

Which brings me chin-to-chin with my...

...High Octane Speculation of the day: For years, in several books, blogs, and interviews, I've maintained that there is in existence a hidden system of finance, whose basic "mechanics" is the trade in bearer securities backed by "gold", and hence, for me, I am of the opinion that the various "bearer bond scandals" are not, in spite of all official protestations to the contrary, easily dismissible as "simple counterfeiting scams." We are assured - at one time even by President Obama himself - that the "securities" recovered during these scandals are completely fake, and that there is absolutely nothing to it. Yet, the same scam is run repeatedly, over and over. As I've observed several times: "one does not counterfeit a seven dollar bill." In other words, even if the "securities" recovered during these scandals are fakes, no counterfeiter would attempt to run the same scam over and over again, unless there was an element of truth lurking somewhere in the center of it. The fact that many of these "securities" are "gold-backed" bearer bonds, takes us back once again to lord Blackheath's mystification a few years ago on the floor of the House of Lords, as recorded in Hansard's. My argument then was, in order to make a hidden system of finance work, and remain off the books, one key mechanism was the physical movement of such "securities."

Further research, however, revealed something else, namely, that the term "gold" often functioned as a codename for drugs, and given the overwhelming size of the underground drug economy as a proportion of the financial system, I also concluded that the "gold" backing these "securities" may not have been exclusively actual bullion, but drugs.

In recent years, however, we've seen an increase of stories about human trafficking and sex-slavery rings, involving every demographic from little children to Siamese women. The extent of these stories has touched every continent, implying that there are world-wide networks involved in this "business," which, given its vast extent, must also comprise an underground economy of considerable size. The Taken series of movies with Irish actor Liam Neeson explores this brutal system in fictional guise. The political purpose of such networks is, of course, rather obvious, for it entangles the rich and politically powerful in compromising activity, which create what Catherine Fitts has described as "control files" to blackmail compliance. With this possibility, one is looking at the implication that such rings are deeply and intimately entangled with the "deep state" and various intelligence agencies, and thus, with my hypothesized hidden system of finance.

Which brings me back to Lord Blackheath, and a final, new, speculation. What if "gold" is code not only for "drugs," but for human "cargo" and "capital", as part of this enormous network? In other words, what if slavery itself is a crucial component of this hidden system of finance? Need laborers to help build all those underground secret installations? If that sounds far-fetched, don't forget that there's precedent: the Nazis did it, and incidentally, they did it within an economic empire being run by the SS, where every unfortunate victim was tagged, tattooed, and numbered as the "capital assets" of the system.

Such a speculation goes a long way, for example, to explain the difficulties facing Vatican bank reform attempts, for if my speculation be true, then that bank would be intimately connected to these "financial activities," and hence, attempts to deal with clergy scandal abuses and Vatican financial reform are not two separate issues, but intimately connected. Just recently, George

Cardinal Pell, who was tasked by Pope Francis to oversee the Vatican budget, has returned to Australia to answer sexual abuse charges.

However, if what I am proposing is true, then the extent of this human trafficking-finance ring will not be confined solely or exclusively to the Vatican: it will be intimately entwined with other large financial institutions. The Vatican might just end up being the (convenient) patsy. The hypothesis might even go a long way to explain one possible reason behind all the mysterious banker deaths and "suicides" of the past few years.

See you on the flip side...