The Highwire with Del Bigtree - CATHERINE AUSTIN FITTS: “IT’S FINANCIAL WARFARE”

Episode Date: April 8, 2023

Investment banker and Economist, Catherine Austin-Fitts gives her insight into the current volatility in the global banking system she describes as, “Financial Warfare,” giving insight in the wake of the Silicon Valley and First Republic Banks federal bailouts.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-highwire-with-del-bigtree--3620606/support.

There's been a lot of predictions on this show. We've stretched out into a lot of different places. But let's talk about banking today because it's on everyone's mind. If you've watched the news or turned it on it all, this is what we're all worrying about. The Federal Reserve is expected to announce another round of interest rates hikes tomorrow. This comes amid growing calls for accountability after several banks collapsed earlier this month. What we saw over a week ago now was the Treasury, the Fed, and the FDIC stepping in to guarantee of Silicon Valley Bank, which had failed.

On Friday, the government regulator in charge, the FDIC, took control of Silicon Valley Bank's assets. And over the weekend, it took control of signature bank's assets. But analysts caution, we are not out of the woods yet, and that is because of San Francisco-based Regional Bank First Republic, which is now in focus. Its stock plunged more than 47% yesterday. S&P Global downgraded the company to junk status.

The nation's biggest biggest, banks made a dramatic move today to rescue a smaller bank and head off a potential crisis. Eleven of the top financial institutions, including Bank of America, J.P. Morgan Chase and Citibank will pump $30 billion into First Republic Bank to keep it from collapsing. We wanted to make sure that the problems at Silicon Valley Bank and signature bank didn't undermine confidence in the soundness of banks around the country. It's a great idea in theory, but the devil is truly in the details, and that's going to be the devil here. Who's going to pay the price?

I'm going to be honest with you. I'm very well read when it comes to vaccines and issues like this, but when I was driving the car today with my son, Ever, my daughter, Thaya in the car, we were heading to school, and they were talking about this issue on the radio. And I turned to my son, I said, you know, ever, this is something that I do not fully understand. And this whole economy thing, we were not well trained in school unless you took specific classes. So today I'm going to bring on somebody that really does know what's happening here was a part of it because she was formerly the assistant HUD secretary under George Bush. I'm talking about Catherine Austin Fitz. It's my honor and pleasure to be joined now. Catherine.

Hi, Del. Interesting times. They are interesting times. And what's really scary about it in a way is it feels like. And what I want to talk to you about, you've predicted a lot of this. You've been on our show and others, you know, really warning us that the financial systems of the world were not strong, that we were going to have issues. But is this, you know, this sort of started. It really came to light with this Silicon Valley Bank. What happened exactly?

What is this, you know, what happened there? and is it triggering something bigger, or is it just revealing what's really taking place? So there's things we know and there are things we don't know. What we know is you had a group of short sellers who could make money on driving the stock down, and the stock was susceptible to short selling because they had a very high percentage of uninsured deposits. So if you look at the average deposits, insured deposits that banks have, Silicon Valley was very, very low. Okay.

So they had low insured deposits. They had a loan portfolio that had been bubbled by the pump during the pandemic that the Fed did. So the Fed bubbles the economy. They do a whole bunch of loans that go into things like life sciences, biotech, tech, you know, building the smart grid things that you've talked about on the high wire. Yeah. And so you, but the last thing is the regulators have encouraged the banks to put their investment portfolios long. And of course, with rising interest rates, the investment portfolios go down. If you get a run on deposits, and remember, a run can start for financial reasons, but can also start dealt for political reasons.

And part of what we're looking at here is a political war, not just finance. So you get a run going. You have to sell, you know, treasury bonds or bills or fannies or Fridays from your investment portfolio because the portfolio is down because interest rates have been going up. You take a loss. That makes people skittish. We saw the rating agencies get skittish. Moody was, was, they were anticipating that Moody's might drop their ratings. And then so people start worrying about the loan portfolio because every bank in the world is, is got deposits that are

highly potentially liquid, especially if you have somebody moving a lot out fast, but you're putting it in investment portfolios that are liquid, but they can be down in price at any given time. And you're putting in the loan portfolios that are ill liquid. So that's why you don't want to, You can have a highly solvent, excellent bank, but it can be susceptible to runs. Now, what you had was a slowing down IPO, you know, sort of tech bubble. You had the long portfolios. And I would tell you, I think, you know, what we saw on SVP is very much encouraged by the bubbles that the Fed has flown and what's called the going direct reset. The going direct reset was a plan that the central bankers agreed to in the beginning in August of 2019.

and the pandemic and all the lockdowns was clearly a part of that plan. And so what we're looking is in an effort to consolidate control in the economy. First you take out the small business, then you take out the small banks. So, you know, there's definitely an effort to consolidate. It's financial warfare. And I will tell you you can understand this now because you understand politics. And what we're watching is much more politics and using the federal credit. and our money to pick winners and losers that has nothing to do with creating productivity in the

in the fundamental economy. You know, I have a quote from Janet Yellen. Let's take a look at this because I think it's part of what you're talking about now. Let's take a look at this. Will the deposits in every community bank in Oklahoma, regardless of their size, be fully insured now? Are they fully recovered every bank, every community bank in Oklahoma, regardless of the size of the deposit? Will they get the same treatment that SVE? BBP just got or signature bank just got. A bank only gets that treatment if a majority of the FDIC board, a super majority, a super majority of the Fed board,

and I, in consultation with the president, determine that the failure to protect uninsured depositors would create systemic risk and significant economic and financial consequences. I mean, this is what you're saying, right? A lot of people are concerned that this is the government picking and choosing who survives and who does not. Right.

Well, not just who survives and not, but if we look at the rumors of who started the run, you know, we're talking about the people who own and control the New York Fed triggering runs that advantage their deposit base and help them consolidate. So, you know, I, we know, we know Dell that. for many decades, we've dealt with increasing lawlessness by the New York Fed and the government. We are in significant violations of the federal financial management laws on both the New York Fed side and the U.S. government treasury. And so now we see Langford in the Senate rightly nailing Yellen, who's not only been, who's

not only Secretary of Treasury, she has been the chairman of the Fed and she has been the president of the San Francisco Fed, you know, that was, remember the seat. CEO of SVB was on the board of the San Francisco Fed and found himself dumped off the board on the day they took SVB down. So, you know, this, the chickens are coming home to roost. When you engage in a financial coup run by the Treasury Department and the New York Fed for 20 or 30 years, then you're going to get these kinds of consolidations. And it's exactly what we saw during the pandemic. You saw large companies being advantaged by the government to steal market share and assets from the smaller businesses, and we're seeing the same thing today.

And the problem with Adele at the root is you're helping the unproductive cannibalize the productive. And that's what Senator Langford was so upset about, and he's dead on right, and he nailed her. Good job. Wow. Now, there's some video coming out of France. I want to take a look at this and see if it's connected at all. This is a lot of the riots that are taking place over a change in the pension plans there.

Let's take a look at this footage. I mean, not a lot of coverage here in America, but it appears that once again Paris is burning. And my understanding is that this is about just increasing the age of retirement or, you know, access to pensions by two years. It seems like a pretty strong reaction to something like that. Is that what this is all about? And how important is this pension issue in sort of the debt crisis that we're looking at here in American around the world? It's a very important issue because since the mid-90s, both in Europe and the United States.

People have been made retirement promises, but the finances have been managed in a way where they were purposely knowing. They were setting the situation up so those promises could never be taken care of. So in the United States, we see $21 trillion disappearing from the U.S. government. It's basically a financial coup.

Similar things have happened in Europe, and including kicking the cans. So when somebody goes to work and says, I'll take a reduced payment in exchange for a good pension fund where I can retire at an early age. You know, they did the work. Now you're switching the rules. And you're switching. You're extending the retirement age at the very time, Dell, that the government is instituting health care policies which are lowering life expectancy.

So what you're doing is you're balancing the books on the retirement plan by changing the rules and lowering the, you know, of the average life that the beneficiaries are going to get. Now, what the French would say is, you know, we have one of the lowest retirement ages in Europe, and that's true and lower than the United States. But the reality is they got all those people to work based on that promise. So you're switching the deal after the work is done. The other thing, which is part of what brought people out in the streets, you know, Macron passed that without going to the General Assembly and getting their

agreement and you know he played some clever tricks and what this is is taxation without representation. So you're destroying any kind of democratic process in the in the process of doing this. Is France alone in these efforts? I mean when we look at these pensions, do you think we're going to see similar actions by other European countries or even here in America? Do we have a similar issue with our pensions? So you're going to see similar actions. We've seen similar actions. We've seen the same action in Russia. You've seen it in France. Again, France has one of the lowest retirement ages, so they're more likely. But, you know, again, I would focus, it's not just raising the retirement rate, it's lowering life expectancy. And you watch, you know, the pandemic,

tremendous, tremendous lowering of life expectancy in many different places. And that's part of sort of balancing the books. There are two ways you can balance the books. You can save more, or you can raise the retirement age and you can lower life expectancy. That's the formula. Wow. When, you know, look at these bailouts and we look at what's happening in the world, where are we at finance? Should we be alarmed at what we're seeing?

Is it revealing something? Or is this all in your mind just a part of a process? It looks scary, but we're going to get through it. So we're in a political process where the people who run the financials system have engineered a financial coup. We should have gotten concerned 20 or 30 years ago, but we've been kicking the can. And now their way of dealing with letting us down,

sort of managing our expectations, is to cancel currency and go to a financial system with complete control. So they want to be able to control. They want to be able to turn your money off and on, which they can do in an all digital system. And what we're now seeing at the state level is real pushback.

by consumers, by citizens, by state legislators saying, we don't want to be controlled by an all-digital system. There's a huge push to continue to make sure to preserve cash. You know, not just in the United States, but in Europe, because an all-digital system gives ultimately the people who control the central banks and the banking system an ability to literally turn on and off your money if you don't do exactly what they say. And exactly what you say includes taxation,

without representation, health care mandates, and literally taking away your kids. You're talking, of course, I think about CBDCs, the central banking digital currency concept that's starting to really float around. Something that you warned about some time ago, talking about Bitcoin, that they were watching this, maybe even designed it to test the markets and see if they could get us used to the idea. Do you still see, you know, those original cryptocurrencies as test grounds? Or are they, are they playing? places people should be, you know, protecting your assets in? So I believe Bitcoin and crypto were encouraged to prototype CBDCs.

The danger of any digital system, Dell, is it can be centrally controlled. So, you know, so Bitcoin ultimately on the in and out, the liquidity can be destroyed or hampered in a way that's going to affect your price. So what you want to do, I love digital systems, but you want to have a balance of healthy digital systems, but healthy analog systems. And the reason we focused on salari at cash every day and making sure that cash can happen is so you have transaction freedom. Our goal is financial transaction freedom and a healthy, healthy financial system has both

healthy digital and healthy analog. The challenge for all of us is how are we going to absolutely prevent the central bankers from instituting complete financial controls, whether they do it through their payment systems, whether they do it. it through CBDCs. They have other methods. If they ensure all the banking deposits in the country, it's only but a few steps until they have complete central control. So this is what needs to be prevented, and it's going to take the citizens and the state legislatures to help us do it. If you go to Salary, I have an article called, I want to stop CBDCs. What can I do? And it's a list of great

items that everybody can do. It's the top link in the slide you just put up. I have a great one on how to find a great local bank. There are wonderful local banks and credit unions which are well governed, well managed. They have a high percentage of insured deposits. They have a strong investment portfolio. They have a good sound, basic loan portfolio. You know, you can find a well-governed bank in this environment. You know, after the last time you came on, many people called in but I went and my wife and I and we worked to move all of our accounts into a smaller bank here in Texas. We've been very happy with that move. When I try to think about this, as I said, I'm not, you know, I think with a lot of people, we just, it just seems so overwhelming.

But is the issue is, are governments controlling banks, or is this really that the banks are controlling the government? Are they really, do they, are they holding our government's hostage somehow to get what they want? Or when you say it's political, are these, you are our leaders working with them happily to move in this sort of centralized control system? So that's an excellent question. And if you look at the way our system was set up, both in Europe and the United States, we had the people represented by the Congress and the bankers represented by the central bank. So the Treasury, you know, basically was overseen by Congress. And the New York Fed and the Fed was essentially run by the central bank. the Fed system is 12 banks owned by their members, so private. So you had this balance of power between the bankers and the people's representatives. And what has happened in a variety of ways, but particularly starting in the 90s with the financial coup,

the bankers decided to lever up the governments, put them in a debt trap, and basically take over. And what you are now watching is a move by the bankers into run and control, run and control the, basically the governments. Now, for hundreds of years, we've had something called the central banking warfare model. And so the power equation is you have people who can print money out of thin air on one side, and you have, on the other side, you have the people who have the biggest guns. So we still have the central banks who print money, and we still have the military, and that's the power equation. But there is no doubt, if you look at sort of the squeeze in the debt trap, that now what's happening is they're moving forward to basically

squeeze out the people. So you've stolen all the money and now you're going to squeeze out the people and change the deal and the advantage of getting central digital control is you can put everybody in a digital concentration camp and they have to do what they say. So the way you're going to inform them that you've shifted all the money and you're changing the rules is with complete transaction control and they can't do anything. If you were, Janet, at Yellen and you know I find that we we tend to judge politicians and the issues that are going on and officials you know from our armchair you know that position but these are very scary things there are real concerns that you could start seeing this run on banks collapsing of a banking system

no one in America wants this do you think if you were in that position did this bank need to be bailed out starting with the SBBP bank the Silicon Valley is that how you would have handled this So I don't know because there's clearly a food fight going on over the documents and in the portfolio. So I would want to know what's in that portfolio. What funny business was going on in that portfolio in the deposits before I answer that question? I have a lot of unanswered questions about what was the relationship between what was happening in the Ukraine and the money coming back through FDX and what was going on in the pandemic and what were some of the life sciences and biotech and smart grid stuff in that. portfolio. So, you know, that's a whole other show. But so I don't know how they handled it. I think what Chairman Powell was trying to do is put a corral around the U.S. banking system

that was trading way down against the European and Asian financial systems. And by doing what he did with the investment portfolies, insured deposits, make sure that our status internationally was, and the U.S. banking system in that case was protected. His eye is on protecting the dollar is reserve currency, which means if he, takes those moves, it gives them the flexibility to keep raising interest rates, and that's what we saw him do. We saw him bump another 25 basis points this week. So I think he's playing an international game. And, you know, unfortunately, Yellen, the problem is the reality and the official reality, as you know, Dell, have become so far apart that no public official like Yellen can come up with a rational story that explains what's really going on. So, yeah, I mean, you know, I was surprised at how poor her answer was.

Here's the thing. When you are in a system which has extraordinary unfairness, I mean, make no mistake about it, they have created at the top a banking system which is above the law and is not subject to the laws. You know, the BIS has sovereign immunity and is now extending through the systemically important banks, an immunity or the equivalent to these banks. And so they are above the law. And you have an economy that is deeply financially dependent on organized crime flows. Now, I don't know, I don't know if you remember my Red Button story, but I explain in about three minutes why most Americans have supported living in an economy that is full of organized crime and dirty money and war and

everything else. The reality is, as a society, we have to come clean because you can't grow the corruption anymore without destroying the productive. The thing to fear is not fear what's happening with the banks right now. The thing to fear is two things. We have a society that is now destroying wealth rather than building it, and it's destroying productivity. That's number one. And in the process, it's centralizing control, and it's moving to complete and utter tyranny. And you know, and this is the most important thing. No one can build a healthy economy without building healthy children.

And that comes back to what you and children's health defense and all the people who have been in the leadership position on the pandemic, no, we cannot have a future if we poison our children and put them in debt. There's no future.

So this comes down to things your grandmother understood. Are we going to have a productive economy or are we going to have an oligarchy run by the society? central banks and all of us are in digital prisons. And I have to tell you, do not fear what these guys can do for you know to you because if we refuse to comply now and we fight for financial transaction freedom now, we work with our state legislators to fight for financial transaction

freedom, whatever happens, it's better than what's going to happen if we go along. I couldn't agree more. Catherine Austin Fitz, the Solari Report. You know, obviously you're big on using cash wherever we can get into small banks. Is there any other words of advice for those of us that feel like this thing is bigger? But as you and I both know, we've watched Great Awakening taking place. People are realizing we have the power. We are starting to stand up for things. So where's the hope in the future here?

So the hope is, here's the little secret sauce in the whole game. You know, you destroy wealth when you centralize the economy. But the opportunity, if we can come up with a bottom-up building wealth economy, there's tremendous new technology makes it possible to build tremendous wealth. If you look at all the things we've been doing to shrink wealth, tyranny is unbelievably expensive. If we can move back to freedom, the wealth potential is absolutely incredible. There's only one other thing I want to tell you about. You ready?

Yeah. I need a number from you. and that is we just finished having our orange hats made that say make cash great again. Okay. And I want to send caps down to you and your staff. So I've had great, you have great staff. I just want to know how many hats do I send and where do I send them? All right.

We did a thousand hats. I plan on expanding. We'll work with you on the side. I don't want to give away to our detectors, how big we are here. No, no, we know. Just tell me, just tell me how many folks on your team want hats and we'd be delighted to send them down. We'd love about 50 hats. It'd be perfect.

Okay. Okay, you got them. Austin Fitz, we love you. Thank you for being out there. Thank you for the reasoning and the hope and the joy and the beauty. And by the way, I was just saying you have like, we Skype in so many people. I don't know who helps you with that shop. You have one of the best looking shots of everyone.

Can you talk to every one of our guests and say, here's your one of our guests and say, here. how you get a decent looking shot on the high wire. Well, you know something I have, I'm in the Netherlands and my Dutch partners run the studio and all the audio video and they're fantastic. They are fantastic. So all I can tell you is Salary Europa in the Netherlands. Okay. All right, take care. We look forward to in the future you keeping us abreast of everything that's taking place. It's really great information. Thank you, Del. Thank you for everything. Bye. All right, bye.