The Bank of England: A Criminal Enterprise - Part 2

By Anton Chaitkin; Copyright Anton Chaitkin

The Bank of England, a Criminal Enterprise - Part 2

By Anton Chaitkin

Copyright Anton Chaitkin

Part 1 was published on Monday, Jan. 22, 2024, on Anton’s Substack.

[I wrote this article in 2016-2017. It conveys my discoveries regarding the history of the imperial power misruling global society. Though it thus has universal significance, it was intended in some respects for a British audience, e.g. certain British spelling conventions, or referring to the regulation of British commercial banks. Note that the capitalized term City, or City of London, means the special self-governing financial district within the regular London city limits. Also, some trivial aspects of the article are out of date — for example Part 2 mentions “Prince Charles” — today he is called “King Charles III.”

But I am posting it here, unchanged, hoping to give readers substantial food for thought about how leading Western institutions are sharply antagonistic to Western interests and ideals.

Part 1, published January 22, 2024, concerns the Bank of England as the prime sponsor of world fascism, and its post-World War II transition to creating the casino economy. Part 2, published January 29, 2024, follows the Bank’s organization of the offshore financial system that is dedicated to criminal activity, to crimes against humanity.

- - - Anton Chaitkin]

The Accountants as an Army of Desolation 

The humiliating forced-withdrawal of Britain’s invading forces from Egypt in the 1956 Suez crisis induced Montagu Norman’s successors to move faster towards a new-modelled empire.

The Caribbean Sea held some of the few remaining imperial possessions; it beckoned as the base for unrestricted pirate finance. George Bolton took advantage of Bank of England connections there, to place himself “offshore” and yet boost his power to influence the City’s future.

It seems that Bolton’s fellow Bank of England director Hugh Kindersley (2^nd Baron Kindersley) was both chairman of Lazard Brothers in the UK and a longtime director of the Bank of London and South America (BOLSA). It was announced in 1956 that George Bolton would join Kindersley on the BOLSA board, while remaining a Bank of England director.

Bolton was stepping into a trans-Atlantic arena in which great strategic interests and black operations were in play. Hugh’s father Robert, (1^st Baron Kindersley) had been chairman of Lazards, Governor of the Hudson’s Bay Company, and a sponsor of the Canadian Bronfman family and their organized crime interests.

BOLSA itself was majority-owned by Lloyds bank; Lloyds’s chairman at that time was the Privy Council strategist, Sir Oliver Franks, the former ambassador to the U.S. who had helped corral the Truman Administration into the Cold War.

Fidel Castro’s movement was closing in on Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista, threatening to shut down neo-colonial plantation interests and close the blatant Mafia enterprises in Havana.

We shall now step above the action, so to speak, to see it unfolding in Cuba and in the Bahamas, the British colony immediately to the south.

After only one year at BOLSA, Bolton was appointed that bank’s chairman in 1957, while remaining a Bank of England director.

In 1958, Bolton brought the Bank of Montreal – the financier and depositary for the Bronfman family – into a joint project with his BOLSA. The new entity was the Bank of London and Montreal (BOLAM), based in the Bahamas. Bolton transferred the old BOLSA branches in the Caribbean and northern South American into the jurisdiction of the new joint BOLAM.

On New Year’s Day, 1959, Havana gambling casinos of U.S. mafia overlord Meyer Lansky were looted and destroyed by the triumphant Cuban Revolution. Lansky fled Cuba for the safety of the nearby British colony, the Bahamas.

Fidel Castro entered Havana on January 8 and took power.

On January 12, the New York Times reported that Henry Tiarks of London’s Schroder merchant bank was made a director of Bolton’s Bahamas bank, BOLAM. (We recall Tiarks from the Bank of England’s July, 1933 meeting to push through the alliance of the City of London with Nazi Germany. Tiarks was in fact close to Kindersley and Bolton as a BOLSA director.)

On April 3, the Times reported from Nassau, capital of the Bahamas, that George Bolton himself was made chairman of BOLAM.

From 1959 to 1961, Meyer Lansky set up in the Bahamas a new mob-run casino complex; and the Bahamas began to serve as Lansky’s preferred money-laundering post. Nassau, the operational headquarters for Bank of England Director Sir George Bolton, was very convenient to Meyer Lansky’s Miami home base.

It should be noted that, with these momentous events, the Bank of Montreal in 1962 added the name of Sam Bronfman* to its board of directors – four decades after the Kindersley family had helped him rise into the liquor bootlegging racket, three decades after the Bronfmans and Meyer Lansky had used formed “Murder Incorporated” hit squads to take over U.S. organized crime.  [*Sam Bronfman was a Bank of Montreal director 1962-1966, his son Charles went on the Bank of Montreal board in 1966; appendix B of Canada’s First Bank, A History of the Bank of Montreal, Volume 2, published by the Bank of Montreal in 1967.]

 The Bahamas suddenly emerged as an international banking centre during the 1960s. The colony’s laws were changed to accommodate Mafia dirty money and Wall Street bankers’ flight capital, in the same “offshore” channel. * The City of London soon had a giant spider web of such Crown criminal finance outposts, including the Cayman Islands, the Isles of Jersey and Guernsey, and Hong Kong.

[*New York Times, May 22, 1962, page 56: “Nassau, Bahamas, May 21, (Canadian Press)-- The House of Assembly passed today a `Swiss-style” banking bill making it illegal for banks to give information about their clients’ business. The bill was designed to encourage investments and to make banking free from foreign tax investigations….”

New York Times, February 17 1965, page 18: “Hidden Money: Bahamas Called Way Station to Swiss Banks – Rackets Believed Using the Islands – Businessmen Also Placing Funds in Accounts There, U.S. Officials Think – …. A high American official is convinced that underworld money is funneling into secret bank accounts here….informed bankers and financiers [believe that]the Bahamas may very well become the main international financial centre for firms and individuals doing business overseas ….”]

Investigator Nicholas Shaxson’s brilliant expose of London’s offshore realm illuminates this project.

“The Bahamas would quickly become, through Lansky, the top secrecy jurisdiction for North and South American dirty money. This much is well-known. What is not widely publicized is the British authorities’ reactions to this burgeoning criminal activity on its territory. A troll of the archives reveals a curious pattern involving print periodic expressions of concern, followed by a seeming resolute lack of action. A quaint memo from a Mr. WG Hulland of the Colonial Office to a Bank of England official in 1961 . . . give us a flavor of such worries. `We feel that this lack of provision of an effective regulatory system might be a grave omission since it is notorious that this particular territory, in common with Bermuda attracts all sorts of financial wizards, some of whose activities we can well believe should be controlled in the public interest.’ London did nothing.” [*Nicholas Shaxson, Treasure Islands: Uncovering the Damage of Offshore Banking and Tax Havens; New York, St. Martin’s Griffin, 2011, p. 89]

Ordinary bankers, not wizards, jumped into the new unregulated offshore setup.

Shaxson reports on an employee at a major U.S. bank with the sarcastic sign, “Nassau,” on his desk, who booked U.S. trades as if they had occurred offshore, putting them out of regulators’ sight. When this ploy was discovered, they were booked correctly but also copied into a second set of books in the Bahamas, from which tax evasion could presumably be managed. Capital was also transferred out of the country by bookkeeping; later it was done electronically. [*Shaxson, p. 79]

Mere accountants could now erase borders and destroy a nation, as surely as if berserk invading warriors had bombed factories, flooded mines and buried cropland in salt. Any former Pittsburgh steel worker could explain it.   

This was the historical project of the Bank of England, of Cameron Cobbold and George Bolton. Cobbold left the Bank in 1961 to become Royal Chamberlain, running the household of the grateful Queen Elizabeth II. She had come to the throne in 1952 faced with the collapse of the Empire on its old basis – it was preeminently her project, and that of her Privy Council.

Siegmund Warburg was their main private-banker City ally. He had been on Montagu Norman’s team handling Hjalmar Schacht and had become very close to Bolton during the war. The S.G. Warburg firm and Bolton’s BOLSA are known as the two great pioneers of the Eurodollar market, the virtual abandonment of the pound sterling in favor of hot-money currency flows. Warburg also envisioned the new-modelled empire as including a European Union, for absolutely regulation-free money games.   

Warburg biographer Niall Ferguson depicts the 1960s escalation of the new-modelled-empire project:   

“Already in 1960 the authorities had permitted Warburgs to arrange share listings for two continental companies in London . . . That said, the Bank still needed to be handled with care, and it was with some trepidation that George Bolton broached the subject with the recently appointed Governor, Lord Cromer, in June 1962 . . .`I spoke to you last week’, wrote Bolton warily, `about a certain exchange of ideas that is currently taking place regarding the opening of the London market to a wide variety of borrowers for loans denominated in foreign currencies.’ The exchange of ideas had involved representatives not only of Warburgs, but also of Barings and Samuel Montagu; Hambros became involved the following month. However, no one wished to `proceed more actively unless the ideas have the general blessing of the authorities.’ The aim, as Bolton explained, was simply to help `restore London’s function as a capital market.’|”

Section 3. Towards the New Order in the UK

Rowland Baring (3^rd Earl of Cromer) succeeded Cameron Cobbold as Bank of England Governor in 1961. Just previously, from 1959 to 1961, Baring had been Economics Minister in the UK embassy in Washington during the political/financial revolution of the Caribbean. So, when he got back to England, he continued the Cobbold-Bolton revolution at the helm of the Bank. He had been a City of London insider since he had joined his family’s Baring Bank back in 1938.

Labour Party leader Harold Wilson became Prime Minister in 1964. With George Bolton still by his side in the Court of directors, Governor Cromer went to war against Wilson. He said the City of London wanted him to severely cut government spending, push wages down, and repudiate Labour’s campaign promise of full employment. Cromer had been encouraging speculative attacks on the currency, and he threatened Wilson with the collapse of the pound and the markets unless he surrendered to the City.

Wilson denounced Cromer directly and said his threats were an attack on democracy. At a low point in Wilson’s up and down struggle, some in the Labour Party ridiculed the Prime Minister as “Cromer’s poodle.”

Leslie O’Brien succeeded Cromer as Governor in 1966, having spent his whole adult life working for Montagu Norman and Cameron Cobbold at the Bank of England.

On February 9, 1968, with director George Bolton still looming large at his side, Governor O’Brien created a permanent Committee on Invisible Exports, referring to the “export” of financial “services.” (For example, taking a fee from a foreigner onto London books for having hidden his hot money offshore, as opposed to physical objects that are actually bought and sold.) This became the British Invisible Exports Council, and the leaders in this field – who had come to dominate British policymaking -- were known more simply as “the invisibles.” The Council itself would change its name officially to British Invisibles in 1990, to International Financial Services London in 2001, and to TheCityUK in 2010. It remains today the policy-propaganda organ officially representing the Government of the United Kingdom and the city of London Corporation.

Director George Bolton’s term at the Bank of England expired later that month (February 29), and he disappeared into the mist.

[*www.bankofengland.co.uk/archive/Documents/historicpubs/ar/1968report.pdf]

Leslie O’Brien, retiring in 1973, was created a life peer as “Baron O'Brien of Lothbury, of the City of London.”

Gordon Richardson succeeded O’Brien. Richardson had risen to prominence in Henry Tiarks’ firm, Schroders, and was its chairman when he became the Governor.

Increasing London-controlled offshore cash flows had finally forced U.S. President Nixon to take the dollar off the fixed exchange-rate regimen, effectively breaking up the post-world War II Bretton Woods system that had sustained higher living standards. Inside the UK, a New Dark Ages revolution was now ready to roll.

            The Unthinkable Margaret Thatcher

In an era of rotting industries, consumer price inflation came with shrinking production and falling real wages. Prime Minister Edward Heath’s Conservative Party lost the February 28 1974 general election to Harold Wilson’s Labour Party. Labour’s manifesto promised

“a fundamental and irreversible shift in the balance of power and wealth in favour of working people and their families.”

The Centre for Political Studies was set immediately after the election as a tool to help the neo-liberals grab the Conservative party away from Heath the loser, the mere compromising politician. It had three founders.

Sir Keith Joseph, an admirer of the IEA and an alderman of the City of London, whose inherited wealth and Baronetcy came from his father, the Lord Mayor.

Alfred Sherman was a former Communist, now turned radical rightist – a strong believer in the necessity of unpleasant measures.  

Margaret Thatcher was a trained chemist, Conservative Party activist and follower of Friedrich von Hayek.

With speeches often written by Alfred Sherman, Keith Joseph toured the country demanding Heath’s removal. It was widely expected that Joseph himself would be the new party leader. Heath lost another general election on October 10, and soon afterwards Keith Joseph let it all hang out.

As the Conservative Party Spokesman on Home Affairs, Sir Keith spoke in Birmingham on 19 October 1974. He claimed that an increasing number of children were being born to the “unfit.” He warned,

“The balance of our population, our human stock is threatened.”

They are born to mothers “in social classes 4 and 5” who “are now producing a third of all births.” Sir Keith declared that because of these wrongful births, “the nation moves towards degeneration.” Caring for the unfit, which he labeled “out semi-socialism,” drives the better sort of people to emigrate, because it uses up resources and “deprives them [the talented ones] of adequate opportunities.” To reduce its unfit classes in society, Britain should “extend birth-control facilities to these classes of people.” [*Sir Keith Joseph Speech at Edgbaston (“our human stock is threatened”); www.margaretthatcher.org/document/101830] 

The popular revulsion to that speech made Keith Joseph an impossible candidate, and instead Margaret Thatcher was elected party leader in 1975.

Years later, Eugenics Society member Lord Harris of Highcross spoke candidly on the embarrassment they had all suffered when Keith Joseph had publicly aired their private views:

“[He] decided to go on the rampage at universities. He deliberately chose topics like "Up with Inequality" -- we need more millionaires, he would argue…. [Alfred Sherman, who wrote many of those speeches], was a very important influence…. I've been present when Sherman, who's a rough character, would upbraid Keith. "You've got no backbone, Keith; that's the trouble" …and that was because Sherman had the idea that you should go further and bring in issues like immigration or eugenics. Keith lost the leadership over Sherman.” [Lord Harris interview 17 July, 2000,

[*www.pbs.org/wgbh/commandingheights/shared/minitext/int_ralphharris.html]

Guided by Harris and Hayek, and by Sherman and Joseph at the Centre for Policy Studies, Margaret Thatcher led the radicalized Conservative Party to power in 1979. 

Prime Minister Thatcher chose Robin Leigh-Pemberton to succeed Gordon Richardson as Bank of England Governor in 1983. He had been chairman of National Westminster Bank, and chaired the Committee of London Clearing Banks.

But Leigh-Pemberton was an aristocratic royal servant, and great favorite of the Monarchy, more than a City of London creature. Since the 1840s, his family had been managers of the Duchy of Cornwall, one of the estates and a source of income to the royal family. [*The Duchy is the property of the Prince of Wales, currently Prince Charles.]

As the Bank’s Governor, such a hierarch could thus easily represent the high interests, beyond the City itself, for whom Thatcher put through the 1986 “Big Bang.” It stripped off the old rules restricting international action and hot money in the City of London.

Backed by the Bank, Thatcher bought about that ugly confrontation with labour and the vulnerable classes which the neo-liberals had long worked towards; polite society called it “austerity.”

In 1984, the National Union of Miners went on strike against Thatcher’s plan to destroy the coal mining industry and crush the union. The Prime Minister stockpiled coal and employed police and ministry hardliners to crush the miners.   

Triumphant, Thatcher and her backers subsequently closed down almost all of Britain’s coal mines. Under Free Trade, cheap coal was imported from cheap-labor countries. Thatcherism dictated that when the USSR collapsed, the City of London and Wall Street sent criminals to loot the stricken East, rather than welcoming Russia into a new partnership with the West. From then until now, British power plants have burned coal imported from Russia by Thatcher’s Russian oligarchs.

She spoke to the Royal Society in 1988, explaining what it was all about. The enemy was mankind itself, the desire for children, the ambition for a better life.

Thatcher warned,

“For generations, we have assumed that the efforts of mankind would leave the fundamental equilibrium of the world's systems and atmosphere stable. But it is possible that with all these enormous changes (population, agricultural, use of fossil fuels) concentrated into such a short period of time, we have unwittingly begun a massive experiment with the system of this planet itself.” [*Speech to the Royal Society, 27 September 1988; www.margaretthatcher.org/document/107346]

It was in this speech, dedicated to ending the “experiment” of society’s progress, that Thatcher first brought into the British government the Green agenda against Global Warming. The speech was prepared with the help of radical population reduction advocate Crispin Tickell, a member of the Huxley family, the eugenics pioneers.

The Bank, the Banks, and the Strategy of Terror

In April, 1985, a month after the end of the miners’ strike, Mrs. Thatcher arranged a strategic replacement for British coal. She met with Saudi King Fahd to seal the al Yamamah arms deal, procuring a permanent flow of Saudi oil in exchange for British warplanes. But this was far more than just an energy-supply arrangement.

Saudi oil shipments were to be sold “off the books” to build up a mammoth Saudi-British covert-operations capability, supporting radical Islamists who would attack Russian, selected Islamic and eventually Western targets in ways thought to be useful to the British Great Game in Southwest Asia and the Middle East.

The Bank of England was in charge of overseeing this financial-political sphere.

By the end of Leigh-Pemberton’s Governorship, London would be the headquarters for all the most serious crime on earth. The City was laundering money for terrorists, drug cartels, insurrections, dictatorships, and for the British secret services managing this mess.  

The filth came spilling out on July 5, 1991, when

“police raided the offices of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), a Luxembourg-registered, London-based and Bank of England-supervised gaggle of fraudsters, racketeers, money-launderers and arms dealers masquerading as a financial institution. The BoE [Bank of England] was sued for £1 billion in a lawsuit that ended only in 2005.

“The BoE, charged with BCCI’s supervision, could not have acted more incompetently. The depth and breadth of BCCI’s unlawful activities…were so extensive that the EU was forced to issue the Second Banking Directive (the so-called ‘post-BCCI’ Directive); Luxembourg was compelled to reform its “bank secrecy” legislation...and US Congress was forced to act, introducing the US Bank Bill Amendments of 1992–93.” [* “Bank of England Governor: Sorry about the financial crisis”; article published May 3, 2012, in The Conversation, an independent, not-for-profit media outlet, online at http://theconversation.com/bank-of-england-governor-sorry-about-the-financial-crisis-6835]

Bank Governor Robin Leigh-Pemberton, assisted by his bank-regulation expert Paul Tucker *, were responsible for the Sloan Street, London-based activities of BCCI, then the world’s fastest-growing bank.

[*Tucker, later notorious in the 2008 rate-fixing scandal (see below), ran the B of E’s Banking Supervision Division; he was Principal Private Secretary and speech-writer to the Governor from 1989 to 1992, during which Tucker was head of the Bank’s input to the BCCI inquiry—i.e., Leigh-Pemberton and Tucker inquiring into their own guilt-- www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/Documents/news/2008/paultuckercv.pdf]

The Los Angeles Times explained the matter after the police raid:

“Bank audit reports provided to the Bank of England…link 42 BCCI accounts in various British branches to arms merchants and terrorists…. BCCI financed the export of terrorism to South America, facilitating millions of dollars in transactions between Abu Nidal and leftist guerrillas in Peru.

“ . . . BCCI was shut down in July by bank regulators [i.e. The Bank of England] after its auditors uncovered evidence of widespread fraud and losses of $5 billion or more.

“ . . . Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates…. feel very vulnerable…. they pay for protection….[making] regular monthly or annual payments to [terror leader] Abu Nidal. Sometimes the money was…cash, delivered in suitcases…. But the bulk of the money came through the BCCI account here.

“ . . . Wealthy Arab businessmen and members of royal families were regular customers of the BCCI branch in the fashionable Knightsbridge shopping district.”

“ . . . BCCI . . . offered a unique blend of secrecy and a far-flung branch network that appealed to a vast array of clients--including terrorists, drug cartels, dictators and spies. Not only did Syrian agents move money through BCCI, so did CIA and British intelligence operatives.

“There was also a shipment of riot guns and ammunition…financed with a BCCI letter of credit . . . According to a spokesman for weapons-maker Royal Ordnance, owned by the British government at the time, the company `waved goodbye at the docks’ after signing over the shipment…. the arms were diverted via Amsterdam to [Communist-ruled] East Germany state police and Abu Nidal divided the shipment.”

[“BCCI's Arms Transactions for Arab Terrorist Revealed,” Los Angeles Times, 30 September 1991; http://articles.latimes.com/1991-09-30/news/mn-2213_1_abu-nidal]

Bank of England Governor Robin Leigh-Pemberton briefed American bankers in 1992 on the global neo-liberal revolution that was then nearly complete. He said,

“far-reaching changes are under way in the legal and regulatory framework of financial markets in Europe. By the end of 1992…. capital movements, already largely free, will by then be entirely so.”

He was giddy:

“The scale of the changes will be so great that in an American context it would almost be as if nationwide interstate banking and the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act were to be effected at the same time.”

[* Franklin Roosevelt’s Glass-Steagall Act prevented government-insured banks from speculating; Leigh-Pemberton’s speech is at www.kansascityfed.org/publicat/sympos/1989/s89pembe.pdf]

Just before stepping down as Governor, Leigh-Pemberton defended the new London created by Thatcherite deregulation, and implemented smoothly by the Bank of England.

“He dismissed suggestions that deregulation of the banking system was an appalling mistake which should be reversed, insisting that the process was inevitable, irreversible and, in any case, desirable.”[*Herald of Scotland, 18 January 1993; www.heraldscotland.com/news/12626064.Upbeat_Leigh_Pemberton_defends_deregulation/]

            Section 4. Criminal London Unbound  

            Blair, the Bank and their FSA

Tony Blair became Prime minister in 1997 with a New Labour commitment to advance this manic, neo-liberalist engine of destruction, the financial deregulation and the permanent war agenda brought in by Margaret Thatcher.

Blair immediately granted to the Bank of England “independence,” meaning the power to set UK interest rates, and manage control credit flows, without consulting elected government.

Blair also created the Financial Services Authority (FSE). The new agency was nominally in charge of regulating private banks; and the FSA was nominally independent of the Bank of England, previously the official regulator.

As bank crimes and insane speculation proliferated, leading to the 2007-2008 collapse, Blair’s actual mandate to the FSA became obvious: the agency was told to “regulate with a light touch.”

The FSA was a spectacular sham.

FSA chief executives and board members were chosen from the very banks that the agency was to oversee, many of them active speculators personally dedicated to preventing outside interference in banks’ freedom to do what the common people could not understand.

Four men are known to have been chiefs of private banks while serving on the FSA board tasked with regulating them: 

Keith Whitson was the global chief executive of HSBC while serving on the FSA board member from December 1998 to May 2003.

Tom de Swaan was Chief Financial Officer and Managing Board Member at ABN AMRO Bank while he was on the FSA board from 2001 to 2007.

 James Crosby was Group Chief Executive of HBOS during his first two years at FSA (2004-2006) and on the European Advisory Board of Bridgepoint Capital for his next three years at FSA, becoming during that time FSA Deputy Chairman in 2007-2009.

Peter Fisher was head of the Fixed Income Portfolio Management Group for the giant global hedge fund Black Rock during his entire 2007-2012 FSA board membership.

More interestingly, the FSA was not separate from the Bank of England.

In the protocol Blair issued in 1997, the Bank of England’s Deputy Governor for Financial Stability was always to be a member of the board of the FSA; from that perch, he could see right away any tendency to “overregulate” and act to get FSA back on track. And the FSA’s chairman was always to be a member of the Bank of England Court of Directors, where he might be ground to powder by the City grandees there if his agency interfered with their revolution.

Four Deputy Governors were successively on the FSA managing board during the agency’s entire life, from 1997 to 2012. We will mention only two here:

David Clementi (1998-2002) of Kleinwort Benson, who had privatised the UK electrical industry for Thatcher, and whose family were a leading power within the City of London Corporation, in the Mercers Livery Company.

And Paul Tucker (2009-2012), who had helped run the global cover-up of the BCCI money-laundering/terror network as Governor Leigh Pemberton’s secretary. Tucker was only the Deputy and not the Governor, due to his being caught in the 2008 LIBOR rate-fixing scandal. In 2015, the UK Serious Fraud Office began investigating the role of Tucker and his Bank of England colleagues in the rigging of emergency auctions of bank assets during the 2008 crisis. It should be understood that among City of London insiders, Paul Tucker is considered one of the few true heroes.

Exporting the Revolution

With Blair as Prime Minister, the Bank of England and its partners moved swiftly to fulfill the implicit promise Governor Leigh-Pemberton had made in 1992 to his Wall Street friends.

In 1997, Barclays chairman Andrew Buxton was brought into the Court of Directors of the Bank of England, and he was clothed with sufficient powers to command a geopolitical army waging war on what remained of the Franklin Roosevelt policy.

Buxton was simultaneously made chairman of the British Bankers Association; and he was chairman of the Confederation of British Industry’s influential Economic Affairs Committee; and chairman of the Overseas Projects Board in the UK government’s Department of Trade and Industry.

Buxton ran the Financial Leaders Group (which he had created), bringing into it his City colleagues and neo-liberals from JP Morgan and other U.S. firms. He also took over, from the inside, the British Invisibles group organized earlier by George Bolton.

Thus armed, Buxton and his groups, assisted by European Union Commissioner Leon Britain, negotiated with the United States government to seal the global 1997 Financial Services Agreement. The Fifth Protocol of this pact required the USA and other nations to take down all barriers to trade in financial services.

The British negotiators’ demand for the U.S. to sign the deal was communicated to the Bill Clinton administration by Timothy Geithner, then an aide in the International Affairs section of the U.S. Treasury Department. This pact led directly to the repeal of the Glass Steagall Act in 1999, while Geithner was Under Secretary of the Treasury for International Affairs.

[*On Geithner’s role, see Greg Palast, “The Confidential Memo at the Heart of the Global Financial Crisis”, 22 August 2013, online at www.vice.com/en_uk/read/larry-summers-and-the-secret-end-game-memo.

For Buxton and the Financial Leaders Group, see Erik Wesselius, “Liberalisation Of Trade in Services: Corporate Power at Work,” online at www.gatswatch.org/LOTIS/LOTIS.html.

On the British role in repealing Glass Steagall, see “WTO 2000: THE NEXT ROUND”:  transcript of November 4, 1999, hearings of the House of Representatives, Committee on Commerce, Subcommittee on Telecommunications, Trade, and Consumer Protection at /www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CHRG-106hhrg61042/html/CHRG-106hhrg61042.htm]

              The Bank of England and the Failure of the Present System

Tim Geithner was subsequently infamous as the Barack Obama Treasury Secretary who bailed out the failed Wall Street (and British) banks.

Geithner’s operational counterpart in the UK was James Leigh-Pemberton – the son of former Bank of England Governor Robin Leigh Pemberton. James was trained for finance by Sir Siegmund Warburg, as a young financier at SG Warburg and Co.

In the financial crisis, James was chosen to direct the British bank bailout on the grounds that he was at that time the UK CEO of a foreign firm, Credit Swiss, and so he would not have the conflict of interest that a domestic City of London man would have. And, he was “the respected banker and adviser to Prince Charles.” [*“Britain's £500bn banking bail-out: The inside story of a dramatic week,” Telegraph, 18 October2008; www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/financialcrisis/3224819/Britains-500bn-banking-bail-out-The-inside-story-of-a-dramatic-week.html]

James Leigh-Pemberton is the Receiver-General for the Duchy of Cornwall. He serves as Executive Chairman of UK Financial Investments, running all the banking interests the government took over in the financial crisis brought on by the neo-liberal revolution of his father.

The 2007-2008 global financial wreck taught the City of London a serious lesson: they could get away with breaking the world economy and might double down on the methods that led to the disaster.

Prime Minister David Cameron brought in Mark Carney as Bank of England Governor in 2013. Carney was a leading strategist for the Goldman Sachs, the Wall Street-London mega-speculator known as the worst bankrupter of world finances leading to the blowout.

 Prior to Carney’s appointment, the government also ended the disgraced FSA, which had done nothing to head off the orgy of crimes committed by the major UK banks (the subject of the report which follows).

The power was turned back to those who caused the crisis.

Regulation of British private banks now resides in a structure of joint responsibility, run by the Bank of England itself (the Prudential Regulation Authority); and a private agency (the Financial Conduct Authority) with input from the Bank of England and City of London financial leaders.

As the present bankrupt system lurches to its inevitable collapse, Bank of England leaders are hoping to use in Britain a version of the “bail-in” scheme imposed on Greece, where depositors’ life savings were confiscated to pay for the banks’ failure. James Leigh-Pemberton is among the most prominent spokesmen for this approach. 

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