Why Banks Suck, The Great Taking & How To Prepare | Mel Mattison

so all these Global Central Bankers they get together at the bank for international settlements in bosel and they they decide exactly what they want to be doing and then they go out and they they sprinkle the the jaw boning and the fairy dust and they they act in coordinated ways welcome to bankless where we explore the frontier of Internet money and internet Finance this is Ryan Sean Adams and uh David's at a conference so I'm not here with David Hoffman just me today and I'm here to help you become more bankless the question today a

Timeless bankless question why do banks suck I think banks suck is kind of the reason we started this Bank list thing and it's never been because we hate Banks it's just we feel like they need to be disrupted and crypto is the technology that's going to disrupt the existing banking system the current state is Banks take too much and they give too little but we've never done a podcast focusing directly on the question of of why Banks suck until today our guest uh is pretty clear on

the reason that Banks suck he thinks they've become far too centralized that they're unbalanced that they're shortsighted that they're corrupt and getting more corrupt by the year he thinks that power is tilted away from the people and into the hands of this Central Banking cabal as he calls it he thinks the relationship between Sovereign governments and private banks that is governments and Banks is an Unholy Alliance that needs to be Unwound and further and most importantly he thinks the incentives at play right now

mean that we're headed for what he calls a great reset that's going to happen very soon few things we talk about on today's episode number one the history of banks why Jefferson said banking establishments are in quotes more dangerous than standing armies number two we talk about the bis that is the bank for international settlements this is a bank for the central banks and it forms the existing banking cabal number three we talk about the big reset and the great taking and finally we conclude

with how to prepare and how to invest why it makes sense to have an exit plan I got to say my conclusion at the end of this episode buy crypto while you can make sure you're holding your private Keys it's going to be a bumpy decade let's get right to the episode with Mel Madison but first we want to tell you about the sponsors that made this possible bankless nation very excited to introduce you to Mel Madison he is a writer he's a founder he's a former Wall Street asset manager he spent a lot of his career in trafi which is very interesting and more recently he

published a book called quas This is includes uh some characters like Ai and corrupt Bankers uh and uh blockchain I don't know if blockchain is kind of in cryptocurrency is a protagonist but they feature prominently in the book as well and Mel is probably the perfect person to tell us all the reasons we should go Bank list cuz he's got a lot of context for the history of banks that we're going to cover today Mel welcome to bankless oh thanks for having me Ryan I appreciate it so I I called your book uh

quas fiction but it also seems heavily inspired by the knowledge uh you have and the way you see the world and the way you see the current economic world let's say so how much of that book is based in reality yeah so I tried to number one actually write a good story it is a novel and so you know first principle on it is is I want people to enjoy the narrative but the second principle uh behind it really was to embed within it uh some factual information that's interesting and I

think very relevant to our times with what is going on with uh our monetary history uh as a country and also globally and what some of the trends are pointing to so as you mentioned there's kind of a cabal of corrupt Central Bankers they're trying to put in kind of a backdoor Global Central Bank digital currency um our protagonist is a guy who used to be in kind of traditional finance and he's since kind of left that world and is a crypto Trader living on the shores of San Juan Puerto Rico um

who has to come in and essentially uh save the world from a financial armor getd in so I tried to make it relevant interesting um a good read uh the title quas is kind of a play on Quantum Oz there's a there's an area in the bank for international settlements um where this AI supercomputer is located that has like a green glob to it but I also wanted to make a little bit of a homage to The Wizard of Oz which is you know one of my favorite books and and is uh you may be aware or maybe not it it's

it's really looked at by a lot of people as a monetary allegory um you know in the book itself Dorothy doesn't wear ruby slippers that was something done because the movie was being done in color and they wanted a bright red color uh she wears silver shoes in the book and it's and it's really talking about the yellow brick road and the silver shoe new you know she picks up along the way The Agrarian workers the Scarecrow the factory workers the Tin Man the Cowardly Lion kind of the the the military kind of enlisted guy type

Soldier and they make their way to the Emerald City which is really emblematic of the dollar the green back and you know the the Wizard ofos himself in a sense is like a fraudulent uh Central Banker behind the curtain and it's it's kind of revealed to be what it is and and a lot of people don't realize that this was really relevant at the time because of the debate going on in the country of whether or not to allow a silver to be part of the the monetary system oh interesting okay i' I'd

forgotten that I I feel like I had been told that I've never actually read the the Wizard of Oz book I I'm sure like a lot of people listening uh they're more familiar with kind of like the the movie presentation of that or you know like something on on Broadway um but this this book was about you it's written in I was just looking this up um uh 19 00 so the year 1900 and the economic monetary um I I guess backdrop at the day of the Day in the US was there was a debate over the gold standard versus the silver standard to back the US dollar

I'm actually not super famili familiar and I I'd like to get more educated on that era of us monetary history but I understand like the 18 late 1800s and early 1900s there was some questioning over which standard we should adopt and there were gold proponents and silver proponents uh fill in some of the historical details for me if you know them Mel yeah well I I think really what was happening was the discovery of large silver deposits in the Western United

States um and silver which historically was part of the US monetary system so when we started out you know Hamilton um put in place a bi metallic standard so gold and silver were both the monetary medals um initially at a ratio of 15 to1 it was later changed to 16 to1 but silver was always legal currency um you know for most of the beginning of American History we actually use the the Spanish dollar that's why we call our

currency the dollar there was a Spanish coin silver coin called the dollar that um wound up being like 80% of uh you know currency in in early America uh you could always take silver to the mint the US Mint would freely melt down and and and and mint your silver into US coins but most Americans you know silver is silver gold is gold they didn't care if it was Spanish or whatever um there are details with that I don't want to get too much into the weeds but it's it's kind of fascinating gresham's law type stuff and how we wound up almost

entirely in circulation in the early Americas with fractional Spanish silver coins because of slight differences in the gold content and silver content of of us minted coins and Spanish coins but to get to get to your your point is is in 1873 there was a law passed uh the the coinage act of 73 which became known as the crime of 73 and it essentially took silver out of the monetary system and again the the

addition of silver was kind of a threat especially to the European banking establishment which was based upon gold and we had these silver deposits in the Western United States and you know essentially they were pulling in a monetary Supply that the Europeans you know were were not keen on and and the US eventually kind of came over to the to the European side of things as they often did uh due to International Financial influence um and took away

this and and this was a major issue in the United States and there was these people called Silver Rights it was the free silver movement um right in 1896 William Jennings Bryant did a speech or on um the gold speech yeah do not crucify us on this Cross of gold which was basically saying look the people's money is silver and you're trying to take that away from us and you know you want it to all be gold which is essentially a European medal and um and so there there's been monetary issues

monetary crisis you know going back to the revolution um when we we we went from printing uh you know uh2 million Fiat dollars in 1775 to fund the Revolution these were called Continentals by the end of the war we printed over 160 million Fiat Continentals and um eventually they were Redeemed by the treasury at uh one Continental to one penny so it was devalued by 100 times by the end of the war the original currency

of the Continental uh Congress so you know these types of things monetary collapses Fiat money printing um influence of European banking establishment uh really go back to the founding of our country and we've constantly been in these battles these monetary battles and sometimes they're at the Forefront of things like they were in the late 1800s um they came back kind of a little bit into the picture in the 70s when Nixon took us off the the convertibility of gold um but you know now they're coming back again and and so I think

we're in another one of these moments where the average American is starting to wake up to the importance of the monetary system again that's right okay now you you're um giving me some Flash backs to my um US History classes and and the cross of gold speech and um Williams Jennings uh Brian and all of those details what's interesting I think we'll pull this up often as we go through this podcast talking about Banks and you know where they are today and where they're going in the future is these monetary

decisions have always been political haven't they and they've always been about control of you know they're they're winners and losers in these types of monetary decisions and they also always exist in kind of this geopolitical game theory of course um the reason we don't talk about silver today is because in you know the the 1900s gold basically won didn't it I I I seem to recall it was like maybe China was a hold out for for a while on some

sort of silver based standard um but they were like Europe had kind of the gold standard uh the US it sounds like was was sort of playing with maybe a silver uh standard being like the people's money and like push back against the the Europeans and and the Elites in the US Society but they eventually lost um the European gold standard kind of one out in China I I believe they they also had to relent at some point in time so there's also this geopolitical game theoretic um you know monetary dominance type of aspect to all

of these decisions as well and so a society like the United States can't just make monetary decisions in a vacuum anyway those are some themes I think we we continue to tug on but do you have any Reflections on that Mill yeah yeah I mean it it's fascinating I mean China dominated the world really in the 1500s I think most people would consider the Emperor of China at that time the most powerful man on the planet and I think it was in 1591 he demanded that all taxes be paid in silver so China has a long connection

with silver and China doesn't have large silver deposits and at one point uh gold and silver traded one for one in in China and what really happened was the Europeans once they discovered the new world they they set up this global trade Loop of you know mining Silver in the Americas taking it to China getting Chinese Goods spices tapestries silks and then bringing it back eventually they got tired of bringing silver to China and they they literally like got together and said we need to start

giving China something other than silver what do they want and the Chinese Emperors are like we don't I don't need we don't need anything um and so they the the westerners eventually got them hooked on uh you know opium and and so this was the start of the Opium Wars and it was really the British uh East India Company who came up with this idea of if we can get uh the Chinese population hooked on opium we'll be able to instead of having to give them silver we'll be able to give them drugs basically and um

it was a huge thing it started what eventually became known in Chinese history as the century of humiliation where they were dominated by foreign powers in a way that they'd never been and in some sense I think the Chinese um that's still relevant to them and they still um you know remember it and it it wouldn't surprise me if there's people who are like hey if people are using our chemicals in Mexico to make fentanyl well you know what it's what's good for the goose is good for the gander they did it to us for a long time pumping

drugs into our society if drugs wind up going into the United States um Manufacturing in Mexico with uh you know input products coming from China you know so be it do you know the story by by the way to tie that thread off of of why China had to sort of um like how long they were on the the silver standard and why they had to kind of capitulate to to something else and move off of it did did they capitulate to gold or do they you know Skip that step and go directly to kind of a Fiat system I'm just not familiar with the history here yeah I I'm not a massive expert on

like what I would consider a 20th century Chinese monetary policy which is when this would have had to happened obviously there was a big you know Revolution there and uh I can say this which is kind of also interesting just you know their system um has always been you know kind of monetary focused and the pboc The People's Bank of China is an interesting Central Bank in my opinion it's a central bank that that plays in the global central bank system they they're members of the bank for international settlements um you know

they they go and they meet every two months Jerome Paul Christin in the guard um the head of the pboc and like 60 other central banks um but at the same time the pboc is different in that it is not in any way independent it's directly answerable to the party and they do a lot more than just setting like an interest like a Fed funds rate like the Federal Reserve does they're able to set actual rates in the market they're able to set uh like the prime rate the mortgage rates so it's done by you know

Fiat where you know the central bank decides this is what the mortgage rate is going to be whether or not that makes sense for market conditions so there's a def slightly different monetary system in China it's obviously much more centralized uh controlled but definitely gold um has been building on their balance sheets and a lot of people do not realize that in 2007 China uh surpassed South Africa as the world's largest gold producer they do not allow for the export of domestically mined gold and many people believe that the

the Chinese hold a lot more gold than they publicly release they they State they hold around 2,000 some metric tons um you know if you look at America we we claim we we have 8,000 metric tons or so um some people believe that the Chinese Holdings of gold could actually be over 30,000 metric tons and that they're accumulating it essentially under the radar um as they incorporate uh gold more into their uh Reserve asset basket

um in in other central banks outside of the West began increasing the the gold Holdings on central bank balance sheets Luke ran was recently on our podcast and he he was just talking about and this is even with the public data uh you know just kind of the record of of China accumulating gold and and how that has accelerated in recent years but s since since he Ed the B- word Banks um let's turn our Focus to them so we've got kind of we we've talked a little bit about um money systems uh across the last few

hundred years and you know the US itself was born on a you know like a bu monetary metal system of of gold and and silver backed in kind of the early days for for its Fiat system but um we skipped forward and we talked about the The People's Bank of China the pboc right and that brings into the the conversation this this new entity on the Block in the last 500 years or so um the bank and the manifestation of that when you max power of the the banking establishment you get a central bank like the People's Bank of

China uh and of course the FED is all powerful um there various uh banks in the European Union um that that are very powerful as well can you give us the context and the history of uh Banks and and maybe we could start with a u a Thomas Jefferson quote I don't know if this is apocryphal or you he said this in a documented uh letter at all but I know it's one that you are a fan of which is um he said this Thomas Jefferson banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies uh

what do you think Jefferson meant and then tell us uh like pointing out the danger of Banks and then give us some history of Banks and how we came to be uh in the system that that we presently are in so that is it's not apocryphal it's from a letter he wrote I think it was in 1812 or 1816 to John Taylor and um it it it's there there was obviously big debates around Central Banking in in the formation of our country Jefferson was adamantly opposed um to a central bank uh as were most of what were then

called the Republicans this was a different party than what became what we now know as the Republicans but essentially the first two parties were relatively known as the Republicans these were jeffersonians and and the Federalists people like John Adams Alexander Hamilton who were more globalist um in nature but I think that really what's happening and what he's talking about there was he understood and I think it was actually broadly understood at the time um the influence That central banks have and how they um

essentially manipulate the system in order to siphon wealth from the people into government hands and allow for the government to do things such as fund Foreign Wars or or other uh activities and this goes back to the beginning of Central Banking which was the original purpose of it so I think there was a there was a shift that took place kind of um 15 1600s where you had essentially total dominance of political social

economic power in the aristocracy in the Kings and the Dukes and they didn't need to hide things if they didn't like what a village was doing they could send in the Army and you know burn down the town and take the grain they they could act unilaterally and what began to happen is that the sovereigns began running into money problems so they weren't obviously printing Fiat at the time they they you know money was gold and silver at that moment and so William III he was the the

king of England that put in place the bank of England the the Forerunner of all modern central banks um in the late 1690s he had wanted to continue a war with France the treasury was dry uh he had essentially over taxed his people already he knew that if you continue to raise taxes there would be revolts he also had uh borrowed heavily from from wealthy londoners and bankers and had defaulted he wasn't able to pay them back and so he his credit was no good he he had no way to get money and and he he

talked to the to the banking class and he said look I need gold and silver to manufacture ships and pay soldiers who will only accept you know uh coin and the bankers basically said well look we're not going to give you our money but give us the exclusive right to print paper notes make it illegal not to accept these notes for transactions enforce that and you know Charter us a bank and this was the the bank of England was chartered it was owned by private bankers and what they did was they went out they essentially uh forced

the people to uh turn in their gold and silver to get these paper notes pass the the gold and silver to the to the king and then collected interest and so the bankers were able to instead of putting up their own money which is what they had been doing in the past they found a better way they could put up the people's money and collect interest on it and that is what our our Central Bank you know still does to this day you know people put their money into a bank you're you're loaning money to the bank and and the bank is especially if

they're a big Bank like a JP Morgan they're giving you almost zero interest they're taking that money and they're either putting it with the Federal Reserve where they get paid interest on reserves of five plus percent right now or they're loaning it out for more risky Enterprises um that should those risks go bad they know that people will come bail that out so it's essentially um you know a uh heads they win Tails they win situation and that is that is what banks do they they they they take in people's money they loan it out and they collect

interest and it's it hasn't changed since 1694 interesting so so your lens on banks in particular central banks is that it's a it's an Unholy alliance between sovereigns and governments and kind of like the the private banking industry it's it's sort of interesting that um you Banks weren't really started by governments at least you like there there was a market need for private Banks right these institutions that would grow up these kind of money lenders who would uh you like provide

you a loan if you needed a loan to to do something or a way to store your your wealth in a vault where it's where it's protected uh and that was kind of the the private Market Force that that started the institution of banks but you're saying very early on there came to be this Unholy alliance between sovereigns and governments and and private Bankers that went a little bit like this where the sovereigns and the governments were like hey we need more tax money to fund our things maybe it's a war some sort of uh crisis moment and

they go over and they look at the banks and they say well you've got a lot of the money present uh of of the population perhaps we can strike a deal and and the private Bankers are like yeah that sounds good we want to um you know create an alliance with the state become sort of a quasi Sovereign entity give us special rights special access uh and um in return we will kind of uh you know allow you to control elements of of society and that that was sort of the

Unholy Alliance that happened early not at the the moment private Banks were were born but early in its uh childhood I suppose and and you're saying that that relationship the private bankers get wealthy uh Central bankers get more ability to tax and control you're saying that relationship still exists today and you're going even further you're saying that that's kind of the point that's some was the Genesis of this entire system yeah it's the raison Detra it's it's the reason for their existence it's it's what it's what their fundamental

purpose is everything else is ancillary um and and it goes back to the beginning I mean you can go back to 1066 to William the Conqueror when he um unified England there was one area of England that he was unable to subdue and it it's what is now known as the city of London the the Wall Street of London and he he was unable to essentially take that over and I think part of it was he didn't want to take it over and you've seen this throughout history you saw it in

Europe in the 1940s where whether a country had declared itself as neutral or not Hitler was going to go in and take it over the one country he didn't go into was Switzerland um Switzerland home of bank for international settlements um this was the the conduit um of of Western money uh feeding the Third Reich uh these things are documented I'm you know we can get into the details on how this actually occurred but basically there's always been this this Unholy Alliance and to this day the city of London um is

the only the within London there's different neighborhoods of the of the city of London but there's two what are called cities there's the city of London which is a one square mile area where all the banks are headquarters where the bank of England is headquartered and then there's the city of Westminster which is where the government is headquartered and both of those cities within London have different rules and regulations than anywhere else in the country there in the city of London believe it or not that it's not people that that elect the mayor of the city of London there's there's this guy called

the Lord of of of of London he's Lord mayor of London and this is just for the one square mile Financial District and is actually elected by the corporations to this day so the banks vote in the political power it's not an individual that that lives there and and they have different rights and legal things there's still a annual parade I think it's on November 11th which is an important day for the city of London uh where the Lord mayor goes around in the Old English stuff and he's got these statues of Gog and mega dog being

paraded and there's all kinds of weird like you know um paganistic type rituals around it and and this stuff is in in the law and and you're like are you serious and I'm like yes I am I am serious that these Central Bankers are almost an Unholy Alliance and um I think almost is not actually necessary I think it kind of is okay so you take nowel a very dim view of of banks maybe maybe even uh more more dim than David and myself on the bank list podcast this

this podcast is literally called Bank list because um we we think it's important to restore some of power back to the people and we see crypto as a way to sort of do this but your dim view of banks uh is there anything you would concede that they do well like they must be providing some value right there's liquidity there's credit they're able to help us move money faster I think if you uh you know asked a banker why they exist they would extol the the virtues of of why they exist would you seed any ground to them on this like do they do

anything well or is it you know completely a corrupt institution that's that's preying on the populace for uh for control and um like just taking a cut yeah no I mean they definitely do things well and it's analogous to meth you know it keeps you up it gives you energy you know I mean these things that are dangerous always do something well uh they they make you feel like you're on top of the world you're you're the king so so there's there's there's good aspects to things like uh methamphetamines but there's also

downsides and there's good aspects to the banking culture and banking Society but at the end of the day I think my as you call it dim view uh is a dim view but it's not a view without precedent and it's not a view that was not that was actually common for a long time I think that there's a long history of people with this it's a view that Thomas Jefferson shared it sounds like in in the quote that we open this banking establish ments he said are more dangerous than standing armies that's effectively what you're saying here yes

exact what my argument is if you really get to the base premise is that money is the ultimate control mechanism of our society so much so that we almost have a difficult time imagining a soety a society where money is not in this Central role it's almost like a fish trying to imagine a world without water um to try to imagine a world that's not centered around money and the system in which we have money you know operating today as a governmen issued type of

currency with interest rates like this this this is so fundamental to to our society and the truth of the matter is is when you really go back through history you start to understand that this is a form of enslavement and what it what it really is fundamentally is it's it's set up as a way to enrich the wealthy banking Elite Class as well as a way to fund the government in a covert method and this this was done in the United States in the very beginning where um you know the Constitution did

not allow for an income tax that didn't come in until 1913 not coincidentally the same year that the Federal Reserve came into existence um but basically what occurred was the uh Hamilton who had restructured all of this debt Hamilton had you know done assumption which was taking the state debt and and he wanted to assume the the state debt because he knew if the states had to pay back their debt then they would also have to tax and Hamilton did not want States to become large taxers he wanted

the federal government to become the taxers so the federal government could could essentially rope in that power and he restructured the debt he he made it such that only interest payments were made um there was a lot of shady stuff where debt that was issued During the Revolution most people thought it was never going to be repaid um by some estimates over 80% of the US public debt at the end of the Revolution was bought up by around 300 families mostly in New York and and Philadelphia that some of

whom were also agents for European banking Clans that had bought up the US debt at 1020 cents on the dollar um but eventually were fully repaid that debt and in indeed Hamilton um allowed people with us debt to exchange that debt for shares in the United States First Central Bank the uh the First Bank of the United States which was our Our First Central Bank in existence from 1791 to 1911 which as soon as we got rid of it you know Britain had basically and