No political leader or force in the United States or Europe is any longer challenging the biggest banks in the world, which have been unbelievably enriched during this pandemic by the central banks, while millions have died and hundreds of millions have lost their work and their subsistence. President Trump called their CEOs “Wall Street geniuses.” The European Union has the likes of Morgan and BlackRock plan its alleged “recovery programs.” The World Economic Forum club of finance billionaires, who gather with the British royals at Davos, have put themselves in charge of the supposedly all-important global “Green New Deal” and have been seizing control of government spending policies from governments. In the U.S. Congress, the erstwhile anti-megabank champions like Sen. Elizabeth Warren no longer dare to mention the Glass-Steagall principle of bank separation when the biggest banksters sit in hearings before them.
“At our upcoming conference it is very, very urgent that we resume the fight for Glass-Steagall Act. There are clear signs of a hyperinflationary blowout,” declared Schiller Institute President Helga Zepp-LaRouche today in discussion with activists all over the United States and Canada. It is those banks, bulked up to incredible size by the Federal Reserve during this economic and human crisis, who are driving that hyperinflation now threatening us. The four largest U.S. banks—JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Citigroup—now have half of all deposits in the banking system: $7.5 trillion of $15 trillion—but have made only $4 trillion in loans! The seven biggest have three-quarters of all the assets, $13 trillion out of $17.5 trillion. These are giant engines of speculation. Since 1999 when Glass-Steagall was eliminated they can speculate on anything from oil tankers to stock and bond indices; and their speculation with the Fed’s flood of money printing—while no productive employment or investments are created—is driving the rising tide of inflation.
The worst danger is the power these banks now wield, above all in imposing the global technological great leap backward of the Green New Deal. It will send advanced economies into chaos and subject developing countries to genocidal population reduction by denying electric power, mechanized agriculture, modern medical delivery. But it promises a huge new bubble of “green finance” to those banks by the looting power of high energy prices and carbon taxes. We already have seen BlackRock and associated Wall Street and City of London investment firms forcing the shutdown of coal and oil power, from the United States to South Africa to the Philippines, by cutting off investment. Only today another consortium of six of the biggest global banks combined to force “decarbonization” on the steel industry. The OECD’s think-tank on “green transformations” projects world steel production to drop by more than half over this century.
Helga Zepp-LaRouche has named the only sane response. These giant banks must be thoroughly broken up, both to choke off the fuel for the engines of speculation and to break their immense political power. How can we allow new classes of deca-billionaires to accumulate hundreds of thousands of times more wealth than working homeowners, and millions of times more than the couple of billion people in the world who have no regular work or healthcare after a year of pandemic?
Glass-Steagall must be brought back, only one of what Lyndon LaRouche called the “Four new Laws To Save the Nation” when he laid them down on June 8, 2014. National banks for productive credit are necessary in every country; and the productivity investments of that credit should be paced by science-driver programs of space exploration and fusion power/plasma technology development. The Schiller Institute’s June 26-27 international conference, featuring experts on both economic and physical sciences, will be a turning point in getting the world back to economic development.