Ok... this is by now another one of those old stories, but as you know, we don't "do breaking news" here, but rather, comment on stories that we think have a deeper, longer significance, stories that are clues to deep institutional or cultural memes. This is one of them, and it involves the famous Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank Corporation, or HSBC, one of Asia's largest international banks. (And just as an aside, pay attention to that bank, HSBC, for you will encounter it again in my forthcoming book Covert Wars and Breakaway Civilizations). Anyway, to bring you up to speed, here are a couple of articles about the story:

Banks Are "Where the Money Is" In The Drug War

HSBC To Pay $1.9 Billion To Resolve Allegations The Bank Ignored Possible Money Laundering: Report

Now some background. In the past, in numerous interviews and even in comments on this website in members' vidchats and so on, I have advanced the hypothesis that there is tremendous factional infighting within the western oligarchy, along more or less traditional geopolitical fault lines. I have also advanced the idea that the western financial oligarchs are (1) in a defensive - and perhaps even "panic" posture - and (2) that they have to a certain extent lost control over their own hidden programs and agendas for "world domination" and global government and all the other things they are accused of being in favor of. In stating this second hypothesis, another way of restating it would be to say that they - by which I now mean the main central and prime banks of the west, and with them, to a certain extent their underlying banking family dynasties - have lost control over their own program and system of finance. They are, as I once told someone, dealing with captured programs.

This is not to say they no longer wield considerable influence, but merely that ultimate control has been wrested from them.

This is what intrigued me about the first article linked above, and I want to cite the exact statements that caught my attention:

“All financial crime has a money laundering component,” says Charles A. Intriago, president of the Miami-based Association of Certified Financial Crime Specialists. “… If you’re an individual, and get caught, you get hammered. “But if you’re a big bank, and you’re caught moving money for a terrorist or drug dealer, you don’t have to worry. You just fork over a monetary penalty, and then raise your fees to make up for it. “Until we see bankers walking off in handcuffs to face charges in these cases, nothing is going to change,” Intriago adds. “These monetary penalties are just a cost of doing business to them, like paying for a new corporate jet.” "Broken System "The world’s financial system is incredibly complex and capable of moving trillions of dollars in many directions, across multiple borders, with the push of a button in our digital age, making it difficult for banks to truly know their customers in all cases."

There is the rub: vast financial crimes - and criminals - can use prime or even central banks, given enough computer and financial savvy, without their senior management even knowing anything about it. At some level, however, it will require the complicity of someone in a position of authority, and usually that means high authority, within the said bank to pull it off...

...It is this very feature that, I contend, means that the financial banking elites may have lost final control over their own system of finance, and this loss of control may account for the mystification of their own financial experts and the confusion and "feel of panic" one oftentimes senses in recent years emanating from that quarter, for it means something very simple, and very shocking, and, if one considers the full implications, very disturbing.

It means, first, that ultimate financial control of the West's finances lies outside the traditional finance capital sector altogether. It means secondly that this control has to lie with those capable of organizing, on a global scale, vast money laundering schemes, which requires both computer and financial expertise, a connection to the criminal underworld, and long experience in fraud and deception.

...in short, my hypothesis has been, since the day I first wrote about the bearer bonds scandals here, that the real center of gravity in western finance has passed from the Bank of England and the Federal Reserve, to the intelligence agencies, and particularly those of the USA... and we know two, in particular, with this expertise...

...that said, there remain certain banking families with deep ties to intelligence...

See you on the flip side...