After the implosion of the FTX crypto exchange run by Sam Bankman Fried, questions of due diligence and competency immediately arose, suggesting that perhaps the company mishandled assets “accidentally” and that Fried was naive and “in over his head.” Numerous central bank officials and globalist organizations jumped into the debate almost immediately, arguing that FTX was a perfect example of why centralized regulation of crypto and digital currencies was necessary. They claimed that without oversight by banking elites, disaster was inevitable.
Of course, what they did not mention was that FTX and Sam Fried already had extensive connections with globalist groups including the World Economic Forum. In fact, the very basis of Fried’s business model was the WEF’s “Stakeholder Capitalism” theory, which he often referred to as “Effective Altruism.”
Stakeholder Capitalism is essentially the opposite of free markets – It is a socialist/globalist framework which uses corporations as a kind of economic enforcement tool. Corporations are already highly socialistic in their operations, and their existence is completely dependent on their special relationship with government. Corporations are created through government charter, enjoy special protections under “corporate personhood” laws and avoid direct consequences for criminal activities through limited liability.
Many corporations are not even allowed to fail because governments backstop their operations. That’s socialism, not free markets. However, “stakeholder capitalism” expands on this dynamic a hundred-fold.
Where free markets assert that businesses must make profit their primary objective for the overall economy to function, the WEF asserts that companies including banking institutions have a social obligation that goes beyond making money. To the typical leftist this probably sounds like a Utopian vision filled with promise, but to anyone that actually understands economics it sounds like a recipe for the collapse of civilization.
The WEF paints stakeholder capitalism an effort to reign in the power of the corporate system in favor of social causes. In reality, it’s a way to give corporations ultimate power over everything, including ultimate influence over public behavior.
We have seen extensive evidence of this through widespread corporate ESG investment programs implemented in the past several years. It is no coincidence that the invasion of woke ideology into the mainstream happened at the exact same time that ESG-based lending accelerated.
The institutions lending to various companies were able to set social rules for access to credit, and these rules required businesses to adopt far-left politics in their marketing and policies as a result. Stakeholder capitalism is about homogenizing all business into a single ideological entity – Instead of competing with each other for market share through innovation, companies have been abandoning merit based competition and are colluding to saturate the mainstream with social justice cultism, climate change propaganda and globalist rhetoric.
By making corporate elites “responsible” for society, we give them the power to engineer society.
However, the WEF’s model of false altruism is turning out to be a disaster for corporate survival. I have to wonder now if this was the intent all along – To create a kind of ESG fueled woke financial bubble that was always intended to come crashing down, leaving the western world in ruins.
Ever since the fall of FTX, the WEF has been quietly erasing all traces of their involvement with the company and with Fried from their website and YouTube channel. However, the WEF’s influence is widely evident in the operations of FTX and Fried’s philosophy.
There were multiple reasons for FTX capital losses, from plunging crypto prices to embezzlement. That said, the root cause was stakeholder capitalism ideology and it’s reliance on cheap liquidity to support ESG policies. And, we are seeing the exact same dynamic within other institutions like Silicon Valley Bank.
Surprisingly, even the International Monetary Fund (like many of us in the alternative economic media) warned about the potential frailty of ESG related lending in an environment where central banks are tightening liquidity and raising interest rates. The IMF stated in 2022:
“Financial stability risks include the different investor base relative to more traditional investors and a potentially higher sensitivity to global financial conditions, given the technology-heavy composition of many ESG indices. That’s an important consideration in the current policy environment, with central banks in advanced economies raising interest rates and reducing policy accommodation put in place during the pandemic—a development that is starting to tighten financial conditions around the world.”
Looking into SVB’s operational history, the company was a woke nightmare. Take a gander at their 66 page ESG report compiled in 2021 to get a sense of how far to the extreme political left the bank was. SVB is the pinnacle example of why “Get Woke, Go Broke” is more than a mantra, it’s a rule.
Digging even deeper we then find that SVB’s leadership was highly involved in the WEF and their Stakeholder Capitalism Metrics (SCM), along with corporate governance. SVB was not only implementing every single policy the WEF outlines in its agenda, they were reporting back to the WEF on their progress.
SVB’s capital exposure was heavily tied up in securities, but also venture capital for woke tech startups, climate change related projects and leftist activist groups which qualified for ESG loans; everything from BLM to Buzzfeed. In other words, they were investing aggressively into money-pit projects that devoured cash and gave nothing back. The real question is, how many US banks are involved in ESG and WEF operations at the same level as SVB? Dozens? Hundreds?
As I have noted in recent articles, the Federal Reserve’s rate hikes have made ESG liquidity untenable. It is much too expensive now for banks to lend (or borrow) to finance losing ventures such as woke tech companies and climate change non-profits. All “too big to fail banks” are involved, this is well known, but do they have the capital and the protection to stay afloat despite the central bank’s liquidity noose? Clearly, mid-tier banks like SVB are highly vulnerable.
Was the main goal of ESG lending NOT to lure corporations into promoting woke causes, but to trick them into ignoring competent profit models and innovation, making them weak and easy to topple?
The woke invasion within the US business world is starting to die anyway. You can already see the shift back to a search for profits and an abandonment of social justice virtue signaling. Peak woke happened over the course of the covid lockdowns, and now it is fading. It was never going to have staying power because it is far too unhinged and cultish to be widely accepted in American society.
Beyond that, the WEF’s “Great Reset” concept will require a substantial economic crisis in order to be achieved. There’s no way they will ever get Americans to embrace stakeholder capitalism or the “I own nothing and I’m happy” sharing economy under normal economic conditions. So, they need a crisis event to create desperation within the populace.
Look at it this way: In order for globalists to get the total corporate governance they want, they might be using woke ESG to destroy the existing system, so that they can then replace it with an even more pervasive woke structure. All while blaming free market capitalism in the meantime. It’s a very similar idea to the globalist strategy of blaming “nationalism” for the very geopolitical crisis events that globalism is triggering.
Given the sheer scale of woke saturation within the current corporate world, I can’t help but wonder if the entire economy is utterly rotted from within due to ESG and WEF related financial cancers, and is simply waiting to crumble just like SVB did.
By Brandon Smith