The Podcast is called “Hyperland”.  It aims to take over where GolemXIV left off with a  mixture of finance, politics and science. So far we have an introductory first episode and then episodes on the renewed financial idiocy of 2023, on Bird Flu,  on Covid, and on The Ugly sisters of Bank failures, insurers and pensions.

The first link is to the first episode of the podcast.  The second link is to Substack where I have set up links to each episode and a place where people who wish to, can leave comments so we can start a conversation again.

https://shows.acast.com/hyperland/episodes/introduction-pod-z

https://davidmalone.substack.com/

If any of you have the time or inclination to listen I’d be glad to hear from you again.

Yours,

David

The film is released by Universal and is available on various VoD and streaming services including iTunes and on Amazon Prime. The trailer is more sensational about AI than the film.

I have just heard from someone trying to see the trailer that they were unable to access it. I suspect the link is tied to geography. I know the film is released today in UK and Europe but is scheduled for later in the US. So it could be that the trailer is not viewable if you are linking from the U.S. I’m sorry about that. All I can suggest is if you can use a proxy. Apologies.

Release dates are:

International (excluding the USA, Australia & NZ) — April 20th
The United States — May 18th
Australia and New Zealand — August 5th

A couple of clips from the film for you.

For many of us death is something we think we risk only if we bring it upon ourselves. Death has to be invited by doing something stupid, like driving drunk. Otherwise it is something we only come face to face with in the last few months of our own life and the lives of those we are close to.

Illness has, for most of us, for most of our lives, been separated from death. Illness is an inconvenience to be ‘treated’ rather than a frightening herald of death itself.  We have grown flippant about death. We like to laugh at it.  Death in ‘The Seventh Seal’ was solemn and commanding. Bill and Ted reduced death to a clown.

In place of death we talk now of immunity thinking  that we all can and should be.

But all this is very recent.

In the not so distant past our culture had a place for death. Death appeared in plays and stories.  Death walked onto the stage. It spoke and we listened and thought. Death had a presence in our culture that allowed us to think about mortality and the value of life.

Death was even there in nursery rimes, because children had to mourn dying parents and parents mourn dying children.  “Atishoo, atishoo we all fall down” came from the plague. It reminded us that death is a reality we do not yet have dominion over.

But we have forgotten.  Forgotten that death can come and get us. Forgotten how to talk about it.

Maybe it is time for us to start to talk again about death. Maybe we would do ourselves some good to consider and talk about our own mortality and remind ourselves that we do not and cannot control everything all the time. That a certain humility is not a sign of weakness, surrender, or primitive fatalism but is a recognition that life cannot be hoarded and death not commanded.

When my kids were little we used to play a silly game. I taught them what Carpe diem (seize the day) meant. I would call out “‘Carpe diem’ boys” and they would reply, “because ‘tempus fugit’ dad!” (Time flies).  We still do it when we see each other.  It was silly then but less so now.

Now they are home from university slightly worried about their elder brother who has not made it home and about me and their mum and our elderly neighbour, Min.  The very small worries of the affluent and safe.

On the news and in the papers we talk about the world changing but in reality it is only the world for a very few of us that is changing. For most of humanity, death never went away. The value of human life is not different in different countries, only its fragility. Perhaps  remembering how fragile life can be will be a humbling lesson amongst all the grief.

We know that despite alarm being expressed by other African nations Ethiopia has continued to keep open its air link to China via Bole International airport. The Ethiopian authorities have justified their decision by quoting the WHO president’s ‘expert advice’ that travel bans were not going to stop the virus and therefore were not recommended. As reported by Global Research,

… he made the inexplicable statement that other countries were not warranted to ban air travel to China as precaution. He declared,” It’s not a time for judgment… This is a time for solidarity, not stigma,” refusing to recommend any international restrictions on travel or trade with China.

This seems very odd and ill-advised ‘expert advice’ when at the same time the official line is that while we may not be able to stop the spread of the virus we should strive to slow it down to give us as much time as possible to look for treatments and a vaccine.

What else do we know? Well we can see from recent events in Italy that the virus spreads very fast before anyone is likely to show any symptoms. We also know how easy it is for over-worked doctors to not pay enough attention to symptoms which on their own  are not all that serious to begin with and could be the result of the common cold or ordinary strains of flu.  The Corona virus does not present with the kind of dramatic symptoms that make it easy to spot.

We also know that the two things about this virus which makes it very dangerous and almost impossible to stop. The first is the very  long, unusually long, suspiciously long latency period when someone can carry the virus and be highly infectious without showing any symptoms at all. The second is that Covid19 is easily transmitted and very highly infectious.

Despite having all the advantages of wealth and warning none of the best prepared, best off countries have been able to stop its spread. Is it believable that the Coronavirus is not already spreading in African countries?

If Coronavirus is spreading in Africa then everyday we hear no reports of it, is another day it is spreading unreported and untreated. Is this alarmist?  I certainly hope so but common sense tells me its just tragically very likely.

The latency period before someone shows symptoms means that it is quite possible for someone to be carrying the virus but show no signs whatever when they arrive at the airport and are screened. If they did have the virus then given its infectivity it is highly probable that other passengers being in close contact in a sealed environment like a jet for many hours are going to be infected. None of them will show any symptoms when screened. How many of them will travel on to other airports, other cities other towns where there are fewer if any facilities for testing?

Could this scenario happen? Well  we already have the case of a Chinese worker to flew into Kenya, who was not stopped or quarantined at the airport and travelled on to a road construction site in Kitui county outside Nairobi. Why was he not stopped? Well for the perfectly good reason that he was not showing any symptoms.  The case came to light because when the man arrived at the construction site,

…road workers contracted by Sinohydro Corporation reported a case of a visibly sick Chinese national in their construction camp.

The Kenyan article went on to say that his colleagues were told to isolate him and observe him but not to come into contact with him.

The case made the papers in Kenya because when local police arrived at the camp they were denied admission by the Chinese company Sinohydro Corporation. It was also reported in the Kenyan press that a local medical team were also denied access.

Medics denied entry to Sinohydro Mutomo camp

Kitui County Chief Officer for Health Richard Muthoka confirmed that his medical team was also denied entry to the camp.

“Our medical team wasn’t allowed to access the Chinese camp in Mutomo but we have taken the necessary measures to swiftly establish what is happening and ensure all people working and mingling with the foreigners are safe,” Dr Muthoka stated.

Its interesting and important to note that an article in the ChinaDaily refuted the story the very same day. According to the Chinese article the man was not sick and his quarantine was routine. Which may well be true.

All this was 10 days ago. There has been no update that I can find. But whether the man was carrying the virus and was sick or whether it was all routine precaution is not really the point. Given the long latency of the virus we know from what has happened in Italy that the man could have been carrying and spreading the virus. Even if he was not how likely is it that no one entering Africa has been?

If I am in any way right, and I fervently hope I am not right, then all the headlines telling us how China getting its epidemic under control will not really matter from a global point of view. Of course it will be a huge triumph for China and I hope they succeed. But because the world seems to be turning a  blind eye to what might be going on unreported in Africa,  we could soon find that we have merely substituted one huge reservoir of infection for another. And Africa, unlike China is not going to be able to contain it.

In South Africa which is considered one of the African countries better equipped to deal with the virus this was the headline in The South African.

Coronavirus in Africa: Scare in Namibia, as SA hospital ‘not ready’ for cases

Tembisa hospital has been designated as one of the facilities where Cornoa virus victims would be quarantined and treated. The only problem is as the paper reports,

 The 44-bed neo-natal unit is often overcrowded, and staff have previously complained about their working conditions, casting doubt over Tembisa’s ability to host coronavirus patients.

The report goes on,

Jack Bloom, the DA’s leader in Gauteng, is upset that this location was chosen as one of three Gauteng hospitals to house patients with the deadly disease:

“Tembisa Hospital has been identified as one of three hospitals in Gauteng that will treat coronavirus cases, but this hospital is severely overcrowded and is only just recovering from antibiotic-resistant klebsiella infections that caused the deaths of 10 babies.”

“Unlike the other two identified hospitals, Charlotte Maxeke Johannesburg and Steve Biko, there is simply no space at Tembisa Hospital to isolate coronavirus patients. It cannot be that Tembisa Hospital was chosen simply because it is near the OR Tambo airport where coronavirus-infected patients could enter the country.”

Meanwhile in Rwanda, 

Rwanda health minister fired

Rwanda’s president Paul Kagame on Sunday … who was speaking at the National Leaders’ Retreat…accused several of them [ministers] including the ex-health minister Diane Gashumba of lying… to him about the availability of kits to test individuals for the deadly Coronavirus, Covid-19.

“One morning, I called one of the leaders and the Prime Minister about the Coronavirus and asked that they examine each one of us ahead of the Leader’s Retreat. I told them to tell the minister of health to ensure this.’‘

“She responded that we have 3,500 kits, and that using 400 of them to test leaders would seriously deplete the number of kits we have. …

“Later we discovered that we do not have the kits as she said. We have kits for only 95 people and not 3,500.

If the world stands by and allows the virus to spread in Africa then Africa will be the reservoir for the virus from then on.  We will have a situation where every traveller, every migrant and refugee trying to enter Europe from Africa, arriving on beaches in Spain, Italy and Greece, will likely also be a carrier of the Corona virus. That is a situation that will turn very ugly very fast.

Ironic and horrible as it is to say, the only saving grace might be that the virus will have already become endemic in Europe before that happens.

So much for Africa and Europe. What of America? There too the virus is going to reveal ugly things that people don’t want to face up to.  It is just a fact that America has third world levels of poverty and neglect in almost every city. What will happen when the virus gets into those forgotten populations?  Will very crack head and meth tweeker self isolate for the public good? Or will they be driven by hunger and a desperate need for their fix to be out every day, sick or not, many turning tricks and all looking for a fix?  How is that going to work?

Will America lavish upon those people a level of medical care that they have never given them before?  Suddenly the people living in tents and under freeways, defecating on city streets because they have nowhere else, are they going to be given hospital beds and isolation units?

Lets suppose the FEMA camps are opened up. How is it going to work putting those people, the people we prefer to forget, in the same camp as your grandmother?  Social cohesion?

This virus is acting like an x-ray in all our countries and what its showing is not pretty.

If travel bans to and from the infected parts of China turn out to have been justified then one country in particular may be worth watching, Ethiopia.  Ethiopia’s Bole International airport is the main African gateway to and from China. On average 1500 passengers per day arrive from China every day.  Ethiopia scans them all for symptoms which essentially means taking their temperature.

Many of those passengers then fly on to other parts of Africa where Chinese companies are doing business. These are 2018 figures courtesy of Brookings.

The three main areas of Chinese business in Africa are transport, which generally means building airports and railways, energy which means building power stations and grids and metals which means mines.

One of the airports the Chinese funded and built is Bole International Airport in Ethiopia.

The flights from China arriving at Bole International come from Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Chengdu and Hong Kong.  Just yesterday the Chinese government added China’s 5th largest city Guangzhou to its list of locked down quarantined cities.  Which strikes me as news.  For Guangzhou to have been quarantined means it must already have a large number of cases.  Guangzhou is not near to Wuhan, the source of the Corona virus outbreak. It is near to Hong Kong.

It is linked to both by high speed rail and internal air travel. Guangzhou airport is in fact the  third busiest in China and the 13th busiest in the world handling over 65 million passengers per year.

So… the spread of the  Corona virus in Guangzhou has got so serious that the Chinese government has quarantined it. Yet till now flights from there to Ethiopia were running. Of course I have no idea how many passengers were actually on those flights nor where they might have originated from.  But the rail and air links from Wuhan and other cities to Guangzhou and the fact that Guangzhou is therefore the hub to which any workers going to Africa would have passed through, does raise a few questions. Remember, 1500 per day on average (meaning in ‘normal times’ which these are not) through Bole international from China alone.

The Ethiopian authorities have been scanning arrivals. But we know that one of the things which has made this virus difficult to contain is that people can carry it and spread it for up to 14 days before they show symptoms. This is one of the reasons the Chinese authorities, despite draconian measures, have failed to contain it. If the Chinese authorities have failed, how confident should we be the Ethiopian authorities and those in the other countries Chinese workers have travelled on to, will succeed?

I have no idea and frankly neither does any one else. Which is surely the relevant point.

Western Counties have so far contained the virus and I think it likely they will continue to do so, simply because if you catch a virus outbreak early, you can . Viruses multiply and spread roughly according to a sigmoid curve. This plots the number of infections. At the start of an outbreak the curve is shallow simply because the numbers involved are small.

Double from 2 to 4 or 4 to 8 and its not that many new cases. That’s the shallow part of the curve, the beginning of the outbreak. As the curve steepens its not that the virus is increasing its infection rate. The rate will not have changed at all. But the numbers involved grows. Still only doubling, but doubling from 8 to 16 to 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024, 2048, 4096, 8192, 16384…you see the problem. Its nothing more than the consequence of big numbers. That is what we are seeing in China in the quarantined cities.  The question is IF and it still is, thankfully, an IF, some of the Chinese workers have carried the virus to Ethiopia or the African countries they work in, will those countries be able to contain it while they can, while the numbers are small?

I hope so.

When I look around at the state of public discourse in ‘the West’  what strikes me is that everyone says they want to have a reasoned and rational debate but say that the reason it doesn’t happen is because the ‘other side’ is irrational and so they can’t be debated with. The ‘other side’, their opponents say, always avoids the debate, is never willing to just answer a reasonable question and generally just refuse to have the debate they claim to want.  Does this resonate with you?

I see impasse everywhere I look. In the UK between Brexit and Remain supporters and in the USA between Trump and Non-Trump supporters. I see it between Alt-right advocates and Progressives, and between all the various groups within and around identity politics and those they see as their enemies. I see it in every discussion of immigration. I see it between globalists and those they call populists or nativists.

How is this possible?  How can all sides in every debate want to have a reasoned and rational discussion and yet all claim the ‘other side’ is irrational and unwilling to discuss?

Here are some thoughts.

It seems to me that in every one of our contentious social and political debates each ‘side’ comes to the debate with a set of assumptions which they are absolutely sure are the correct and in fact only way of framing the debate. The problem with me suggesting this, is that the people I am talking about will read that sentence and nod happily, feeling quite certain that this is a correct and lamentably true description of people other than themselves. Their own assumptions, if they are aware of having them at all, seem to them to be so basic, so self evident, that it would be wrong to describe them as ‘assumptions’. Sure, other people may have deeply embedded assumptions, but what ‘we’ have is a clear-eyed and unbiased statement of reality.

Sometimes the assumptions which provide the framework for every other thought, statement and debate, are held, I think, almost unconsciously. If  you grow up in a fundamentalist religious culture then Allah, or Jehovah or Christ and his rules are unquestioned and held as unquestionable.

Such assumptions are then nearly always buttressed by an accompanying belief that questioning or denying these most unquestionable assumptions and the version of reality they describe, will lead to utter disaster. In the religious case because god will get peeved and visit some sort of divine anger upon the heads of the unbelievers and possibly even those around them who did nothing to stop the blaspheming.

So far so smug.

But the same logic is there in lots of more secular or ‘rational’ people. For some Capitalism and the workings of the Free Market are so basic, so much just a reflection into human affairs, of the basic nature of reality, that to go against them is ‘irrational’. On the other side there are those for whom a more communist view of human relations seems equally undeniable. Both sides usually claim their view is the only conclusion you can rationally come to if you start from an unbiased and scientific view of human nature. Both exaggerate.

An important part of the fierceness with which people defend their assumptions is often, I think, that they work through what their assumptions lead to and like what they see. But when they  look at what ‘the other side’ espouses and put those things into their own framework of assumptions they find it leads to all sorts of things they find deplorable.  The key thing is they always use their own framework of assumptions to evaluate what the other side’s beliefs ‘must lead to’. Never the assumptions the other side uses.  Each side says to the other – you believe this and that means you must also believe… or that you must be a… . Very often the word fascist comes in to the shouting match at this point.

My view is that everyone comes to the debate wearing mental glasses which show them what they take to be ‘reality’ but which is in fact, a construction, created by the glasses they may be unaware they are even wearing.

So what?

My view is that this means everyone comes to the debate with a framework which includes what they are absolutely sure the ‘other side’ must think.  Why? Well, if you have a framework of assumptions which tells you what the correct answer is then that same framework of assumptions will also tell you what the wrong answers are. It will tell you what the ‘other’ side, the wrong side of the debate thinks.   You will ‘know’ before they open their mouths what they are going to say – more or less – because you are a rational thinking person who has ‘thought it through’. The problem is, the ‘it’ you thought through, which you attribute to the ‘other side’, is what your set of assumptions say the other side must think.

You hear what the other side’s opinion is, find that opinion within the framework of your own thinking and then look at the train of thoughts that – if they were using your assumptions, they must have gone through to get to their conclusion. And you also look around at the other thoughts that – in your logic – would go along with or be a consequence of their expressed view. And you then accuse the other side of those further ideas.  Along the lines of – ‘Well if you say that then you must be in favour of…. You must be a ….!”

How many times in a contentious debate do both sides get really angry because they say – with some justification – that the other side is putting words in their mouth and are making  assumptions about what they think or believe?  Both sides claim the other is doing this and both get angry at the way the other side ‘distorts’ things and doesn’t listen. And both sides then reply, “No we’re not. We’re just showing anyone listening what you ‘really think’ but don’t like to say out loud.”

What I see, is both sides wanting to control how the debate is to be framed. And both sides feel this is legit because they ‘know’ their view is the rational and clear one. The other side is blinded by assumptions.

All sides say they want a rational and reasoned debate but both sides come to the debate assuming that their way of framing the debate, their set of assumptions, are the correct, rational and in fact the only legitimate ones.  Each side comes with its assumptions and expects, demands,  the other side to fit into them …not because they are bullies or irrrational – heaven forfend – but because their’s is the right framework. And to disagree is, by definition, to be irrational.

The only problem is the other side doesn’t see the world the same way. The two sides aren’t starting with an agreed set of assumptions. So each side sees the other as irrational and obstructive. Each side begins by asking a question or making a statement which seems to them to be the correct, legitimate and clear-eyed way of proceeding only to find the other side refusing to go along with the programme. Refusing to answer the questions or trying to avoid it by asking a totally different question. Each side sees the other being obstructive. And each side says of the other side, “Either they’re stupid or they’re doing this because they know they are wrong and would lose!”

And in truth both are correct. For good reason. If you do accept the starting assumptions of the other side in this sort of polarised debate, then by definition you will lose. The logic the other side come with, already contains your beliefs, but in their mental framework ‘your’ beliefs are connected to all sorts of awful ideas.  They can’t understand how you can’t see this. It’s so clear. Of course it is only clear because they are looking at it only from within the framework of their own assumptions.

Each side knows how easy it is to follow the logic which runs from their own assumptions to the ‘correct’ conclusion. And each side wonders how the other refuses to see this. It’s a short step from there to decide that perhaps the other side aren’t that stupid which means they must be malignly, knowingly, deplorably advocating a position they know is wrong.

The other side must be other irrational or evil. Or sometimes both. Et voila! Mutual hatred, intollerance and a strong sense of self-righteous superiority on all sides.

Everyone sincerely believes their assumptions are the correct starting point for any debate and insist the other side fit into the role which the starting assumptions have laid down for them. Which conveniently mean they – the other side – will soon see the error of their ways, lose the debate and come to see how stupid or misguided they have been. Not surprisingly people quickly sense this is what is in store for them if they continue to allow the debate to be framed by the other side’s assumptions.  And so at some point, usually fairly early on, people start to not allow the other side to dictate the framework of the debate. At which point both sides then feel frustrated that the other side is ‘irrationally’ sabotaging the debate by avoiding perfectly good questions and insisting of other irrelevant, unconnected, distracting questions.

Sorry this is a lot of words to say what might be blazingly evident.

But I think we are going to have to begin to admit we have deeply held assumptions and and step back from them far enough to talk about them.  I believe the debate we need at this point has to be about our assumptions and the debate has to happen at this deeper level.  We are going to have to be willing to listen to why other people have different assumptions. And not rule them as somehow illegitimate or unspeakable or deplorable. We need to do this so we can follow the logic of the other side to understand how they get to where they are, why they think that they think. Why they have the fears they do. We need to do this for their assumptions and for our own. And we need to allow them to do the same.

It is the opposite of de-platforming. It’s the other path from using emotive labels to shut people down.

I think there are people who really do not want others to debate and discuss. They don’t want people to come to a better understanding of each other. They want, instead, to keep very tight control over what can and can’t be said and can and can’t be debated. They want people to be angry at each other and to distrust each other. They want to divide people against each other while claiming to be ardent opponents of divisiveness.  It’s a clever ploy. But a dangerous and I think an evil one.

Such people don’t want to ever be accused of shutting down debate. They want to be seen as the champions of debate – rational debate, but all the while managing to prevent it. And the way they do it is by insisting they do not have assumptions. Only the ‘other’ side does. The ‘good’ side has science or evidence or just the moral high ground as their platform.  This is a profound danger. Everyone has assumptions. The essential thing is to admit it, and be willing to discuss them.

There are plenty of people who hold views I find deeply distasteful. But rather than refuse to debate or try to insist that any debate happen within assumptions I have laid down, I prefer to try to get at what logic has led them to their views. What assumptions do they start with and why? What are the fears or the hopes which their assumptions seem to them to provide good answers to?

This may seem unlikely but I think we are all so used to regime change happening far away, in the Middle East, in Africa or South America, that we have been tempted to imagine it couldn’t happen here. But I suggest it could. In fact I think if Brexit were to happen and it was followed by the election of Corbyn government intent on some quite radical changes, then we could well see regime change being played out in the UK. But before I can persuade you of that we need to be clear what regime change involves and how it’s done.

Regime Change – How to do it.

Regime Change is like asymmetric warfare but where ‘we’ in the West win! It’s fun for the whole family of three-letter agencies, secret services, special forces, private security companies and soft-power-projecting quangos and ‘endowments’.

In the past we used to have ‘ police actions’ (where you bomb the shit out of ‘them’ but don’t actually declare war), proxy wars (so messy – so difficult finding reliable help these days),  or if you’re Israel you just call it ‘a limited incursion’ and hope to be home for tea. Regime change, as a concept at least, is better and cleaner all round. No one asks ‘is it a war or isn’t it?’, because it’s Regime Change! It’s defined by the outcome rather than the means and isn’t it just so much more modern to talk about ‘outcomes’? It avoids all that ‘is it done yet?” uncertainty. It’s done when the regime has changed.  What could be clearer?  It isn’t even ‘mission critical’ what sort of mess is left behind. The regime has been changed  – ‘job done’, ‘mission accomplished’ Everyone knew what the aim was from the start, without having to have given all sorts of hideous hostages to fortune about what kind of regime the new one might be or even if it would be better than the old one. No one says anything of that sort, it’s just about hanging the regime – sorry – missed out a ‘c’ there – changing the regime… changing.

So let’s do a quick run down of what Regime Change typically involves.  This, by the way is from the Grand Daddy of Regime Change specialists’ play-book, the NED, the National Endowment for Democracy.

So, first find your regime. One you don’t like  – obviously. It’s important there be something, preferably several things about the regime that you can point to that are genuinely nasty or at least not as good as they should be and not like they are at home. This is important.  You have to be able to frame your actions as morally justified and that what you are aiming at is ‘better’.  Especially if the regime you want changed happens to be sitting on valuable resources, have markets they weren’t letting your corporations in to, or were just generally ideologically ‘dangerous and wrong’.  Having actual ‘bad stuff’ to point at is vital for keeping the whole story feeling and looking positive.

Remember much of the critical action in regime change happens at home not ‘over there’. You have to have widespread and vocal support at home. If you don’t have it home-grown opposition will drag you down into a tedious and very often dangerous discussion of facts.

However, if you have that positive story and it does its job of generating support at home, you can do what is needed over there. Regime change is about public perception at home – public outrage at home and public sanctimony and self-righteousness at home.  It’s the people at home who have to feel good, not the people over there. Over there, they can be reduced to starving, freezing and dying in endless fratricidal civil wars as long as at home people feel what they did had the virtuous intent of getting rid of a terrible regime. Even if it all goes to shit over there, people at home have to continue to feel good about themselves. They have to feel that what was done was done for the right and noble reasons even if those it was done for turned out to be too stupid or backward to be able to take advantage of what you did for them.

So, you have your regime with it’s wrong-doings and short-comings sufficient to feed to ambitious journos at both ‘respected’ and ‘alternative’ aligned media as well as to  experts of your political stripe, and think-tanks ready to lend ‘independent’ weight to your views.

That’s home dealt with for now. Let’s turn to the target regime. You must now find dissenters and if possible ‘the persecuted’.  There will always be dissenters. It’s human nature and no country is perfect – hell there are dissenters at home. We’ll talk about how to deal with them later. As for the persecuted, someone’s tribe is always being excluded from lucrative contracts.  Someones’ beliefs are always being called in to question or belittled. There will always be some racist somewhere. Someone’s rights are always being ignored. There will always be genuine bigotry and genuine hardship. You just have to find the ones that you can weaponise to your advantage.

As long as someone is being prevented from expressing some opinion – even if later they and their opinion turns out to be every bit as loathsome and brutal as those of their oppressors  – it does’t matter. For your purposes they can be portrayed as champions of free speech.

Once you have found them you must then find thinkers and organisations who will write about the noble aspect of your dissenters and your persecuted.  It can be as simple as the fact they are being persecuted. You must then fund protests. This isn’t hard. All protests need funds. The important thing is to fund them without being seen to fund them. This too isn’t difficult. There are any number of NGOs, foundations or even private donors to whom you can funnel cash, who can be relied upon to forward your largess.  You can even use organs of your own state as long as they have the right name and can claim to be disinterested champions of some noble cause – The National Endowment for Democracy is a perfect case in point. They are an organ of the US state but their very name insists that they are non–partisan, not really anything to do with US government, but are instead champions of nothing more than Democracy itself.

Next have your tame media prepped and eager to cover the protests.  If the protests are small spice them up with counter protests which are also not hard to arrange should none be forthcoming.  The same arm’s length funding will be even more necessary when funding both sides. Counter protests are of course good for injecting a little photogenic violence against your oppressed and dissenting.  Don’t agonise over this. The counter protests will voice genuine opinion held in your target country. All you are doing is encouraging its expression.

This may take a while so be patient but not idle. With careful cultivation of local leaders and their opposing hot-heads you will generate a growing feeling of unrest. Ukraine is a wonderful recent example.

Your media need to talk about the size of the protests. A large number – 60 000 for example sounds good and can look good. No one needs to mention that even a few hundred thousand in a nation of millions is hardly a majority or even a sizeable minority. This is where your experts and think-tanks come in handy. They need to seize the rhetorical initiative. They need to present your narrative and armour it in academic respectability.

A vital part of their narrative will be to parade ‘the exiled’. These need not be real exiles but if they are then so much the better. If your target hasn’t actually exiled anyone, they may for example have free speech, don’t let this discourage you. The Exiled can simply be thinkers and leaders who have chosen self-exile because of their deep sadness at what has happened to their home and their respect for your country and a desire to make their home more like yours. This will please your home support.

Once you have this ticking over be at pains to give any opposition within your own country as little space as possible.  Of course be seen to welcome free speech and debate but make sure it is actually carefully controlled. Friendly network interviewers should be cultivated to keep the debate shallow and tipped well in your favour.

To this end encourage the media outlets to describe the worst aspects of the regime you want rid of. Even relatively small-scale stuff will play well if you can find a human story of pain, loss, or just unfairness. Find the worst of their regime’s supporters. The ignorant and  violent are always around. If they aren’t awful enough find others who are and if necessary pay them.  Agents Provocateur are worth their weight in hospital bills.  In an emergency put your own  people in but remember this is a dangerous last resort which can have difficult repercussion if it goes wrong. So use locals whenever possible.

Now you need to run three ‘projects’ both in your own press and theirs. Project Fear – what apocalyptic disasters will befall them if the country is forced  to continue on its present disastrous course. Project Salvation – what will happen if they escape their present tyranny and follow a course much closer to your own common sense way of doing things. And Project Oppression – what foolishness or perhaps even outright evil is being done by the stupid, the ignorant and, dare I say it, the Deplorable, as a result of them being manipulated by cynical, greedy and self-serving populists and extremists.

A general note here. You cannot change a regime in a nation where everyone more or less is happy. Many nations think they are happy. Your job is always to find the sometimes hidden or dormant fault lines and make them active.   Find them and you can begin to whisper that someone stupid is being manipulated by someone evil.  A malevolent hidden hand is always a good story.

As your experts and exiles begin to spin out their stories and construct the narrative it is wise to prefer facts to outright lies. Of course if you do have to lie then the old maxim holds true, make sure you repeat your lie over and over and over. But facts are always safer. Just single out those facts which on their own without complicating context can be made to support your narrative, and ignore, suppress or cast doubt upon those which don’t.  This is where seizing the rhetorical initiative is important. The more your narrative is the one which frames the debate the harder it will be for you opponents to make their argument sound convincing. Control the framework and the language in which the debate takes place and you will win. Do not ever use terms coined by the opposition. Use your media outlets to force your opponents to use your terms and make them play on your field. This is how you deal with dissenters at home. Let them talk.  But keep them marginalised and make them use your terms on your media.

Back to the target country. You must gain a thorough knowledge of the organisations which support the incumbent regime. You must then create your own version of as many of them as you can. If there is a student organisation which supports the regime, create one that opposes it. If there is a women’s organisation in support of the regime create one that isn’t.  The same for any kind of NGO or charity. Even Unions can be created which are more ‘friendly’. Make sure all these organisations are better funded than the originals . The cost is a fraction of what a ‘police action’ or ‘proxy war’ would cost. Make sure they are not only better funded  but also that they have better access to your friendly media. Make sure your friendly version of every kind of NGO and citizen’s group is the one heard back home. Put them in contact with your experts and exiles. Have them interviewed and quoted. There will be journalists, writers, politicians and activists, even in the target country, who see things your way; use them. Have them help your pro-change organisations to run your three projects.  If your target regime is silly enough to try to interfere with your propaganda programme portray their attempts to shut down your friendly organisations as censorship and an attack on freedom of speech. They will appear to be exactly as you have portrayed them.  It always plays well.

As all this takes shape, what had been a country with the usual differences of opinion coexisting within a general feeling of mutual respect or at lest mutual tolerance, will begin to fragment into a nation overcome by increasingly bitter distrust and dislike. Intolerant and aggressive language will grow all on its own.

If you do all the above properly, you will create a feedback loop that will turn reasoned and polite disagreement into increasingly bitter, angry and eventually sectarian, distrust and hate. A corrosive fracturing, that as it takes hold, will develop its own momentum and spread of its own accord. At which point other nations and their media will report what they see, a nation riven with deep divisions whose cause will appear to be the present regime. All you need to do then is apply what economic pressure you can and wait for those who have money and power to lose if it all goes badly, to come to you with offers of help in return for advice and protection. It’s never rats who leave a sinking ship but those with the most to lose. Those at the top not those at the bottom.

So that is a quick and dirty look at how to precipitate regime change. Could it really be done in  Great Britain? I think it could. I’m not saying it will, just that there’s no reason I can think of why what we allow our leaders to do so readily to ‘others’ couldn’t be done to us, if our leaders thought it would benefit them and the system that protects their wealth and power.

In Part Two I’ll suggest why I think Britain might become a target of regime change and how the general rules would be applied to Britain if Brexit happened and a left-wing Corbyn government was elected.

I am sure the German authorities will claim its not a rescue its a merger. Yeah right!  It’s a rescue. Deutsche Bank’s shares have fallen 48% in just the last 12 months – the same time the management said they were going to have the bank turned around. The bank’s shares are now worth no more than they were nearly 40 years ago. Which is not such good news.

But there’s worse. While, and perhaps in part because(?) Deutsche Bank’s share price has been in free-fall,  Deutsche Bank has been money laundering around the world. That corruption is now beginning to catch up with the bottom line that it had been pumping cash into for so long. Deutsche Bank is being investigated after the Panama papers revealed its roll in industrial scale tax avoidance and money laundering. No sooner had the ink dried on that headline when the revelations about Deutsche Bank’s central role in laundering money through Danske bank drew yet more investigators to its HQ like flies to a fresh and steaming turd.

Now don’t get me wrong I’m not saying this makes Deutsche Bank special among big banks except in the category of being caught. There, they have certainly wrestled the crown from Citi and Wachovia.

What I am saying is that that much laundering in that many localities is going to mean the usual bankers defence of ‘one bad apple’, ‘one corrupt employee’, ‘one weakness in our otherwise impeccable rules which are now being updated etc etc’ is not going to wash (sorry I couldn’t resist) so easily.  Deutsche Bank is a dirty bank. But does this mean Deutsche Bank could be brought up on corporate criminal charges? Not a chance. To do that could mean it would lose its banking license and that would be “Deutsche-it”. And “Deutsche-it” would be far more dangerous to the EU as a whole than Brexit. Deutsche Bank is a filthy, systemically dirty bank but a bank which the German state is going to save. Using tax payers money. But how?

Of course every nation has such a bank, we certainly do here in the UK. But it is full of irony that the self-proclaimed capital of fiscal prudence is going to be intervening to save its flag-carrying bank and not just save it but do so in a way that makes a mockery of all the fine words about lessening systemic risk and tackling the problem of Too Big To Fail Banks.  Surely we all now have to admit that all that fine talk was just so much political smoke blown up our collective rear ends?

By merging Deutsche Bank with Commerzbank, which is itself one of the global Banking-Dead, being still part owned by the German tax payer – much like our own moaning, shuffling, dribbling RBS, the German ‘regulator’ will be creating an even larger corpse.  Of course old habits are hard to kick and the German answer to every failing bank it has ever had, has been to merge it with another. They did it way back in the 90’s when they  created HVB from two failing Bavarian banks and again with Hypo and Depfa  just before the crash. It never works for them but they keep on trying. To be fair, so does every other financial regulator in every other country. Maybe they are all related?

Anyway, it will surely happen and what it will create does make political if not economic sense. At the moment Deutsche Bank is a G-SIFI, A Globally – Systemically Important Financial Institution. Every self respecting nation wants to have one. Deutsche Bank is Germany’s.  The other, unofficial name for G-SIFI’s is TBTF. Except, and here’s the rub, there is and always has been a little gap between those two concepts, that has niggled away at bankers and their political friends all these long years of the wonderful recovery we have been having.

And that gap is that being a G-SIFI, being on the official G-SIFI list, actually, legally means you can fail but are so important you have to fail in a special way. You have to have a special ‘Last Will and Testament’ in case of your untimely demise. It means there are special rules you are bound by concerning your capital holdings and how you are supposedly going to be – should you fail – wound up in a special way that protects the rest of us from your implosion.  It doesn’t mean you are Too Big To Fail.

The idea was that our wonderful and prudent rulers and regulators would create new rules to prevent banks failing (which sounds a little like TBTF, but isn’t) but IF they did fail then they would be wound up in a way that protected the rest of us. The problem is that’s not what the bankers want at all and certainly not what the countries who house those banks want. What nation wants its largest bank to fail, ever? What would happen to Italy if UniCredit imploded? What would happen to Spain if Santander died? Or the UK if HSBC was ever really caught out like Deutsche bank has been?

The answer is no one knows and no one is prepared to find out. The G-SIFI bank wind-up rules are there because in the teeth of the political fall-out from the bank crisis our rulers had to be seen to do something. But no G-SIFI bank and no nation housing one is ever really going to allow a G-SIFI to go down. ‘G-SIFI’ is what we have officially but unofficially what the world of finance is sticking to is TBTF. Just, Too Big to Ever, Ever be allowed to Fail …no matter what. The question is how to be TBTF while officially merely being G-SIFI? And the answer, straightforwardly I suppose, is to make G-SIFI’s bigger. So big that failing really isn’t a viable, survivable event – at least no politically.  Which means merge Deutsche Bank with Commerzbank, either of which could just conceivably be wound up,  and create something so sprawlingly immense that it just is TBTF.

That makes sense doesn’t it? Could Germany ever allow Deutsche Bank and Commerzbank to fail at the same time? No, of course not.

Personally I don’t think the German state was ever going to allow Deutsche Bank to go down. The flag carrying bank is a very different animal to the flag carrying airline. One can go the other can’t. Combining Deutsche Bank with Commerzbank closes that risky gap between being systemically important and being truly too big to fail.

Brexit can conceivably happen – though if it does and a general election returns a Corbyn government afterwards, then I think we will see engineered ‘regime change’ of the kind that we are used to allowing our rulers to impose upon Ukrainians, Iraqis, Libyans and Syrians, being imported into the heart of the Industrial North. Brexit and then Regime Change in the UK? Yes.  But Deutsche-it? No, not a possibility.

If I’m right then expect other nations to follow suit and when the next crisis hits we’ll see the creation of the truly TBTF mega banks.

Today GE issued a profit warning and cut its dividend to share holders from 12 cents to 1 cent. It is only the third time since the Great Depression that GE has reduced its dividend in this way. It told its share holders it would be taking a $22 Billion charge because one of its units, its power unit, is in deep trouble. GE has about $116 billion in debt.

In 2007 the banks had flooded the global market with sub-prime loans. The banks were also holding many of those same loans themselves or had transferred them to Special Purpose Vehicles (SPVs) they had set up, staffed and lent money to.

Today it is not the banking world which stands at the centre of the storm but the corporate world. In the last years they have flooded the market with junk rated bonds. At the same time they are also burdened with high yielding, leveraged and covenant- lite loans. Taken together they are about $2.4 Trillion of debt.

2007 sub prime loans. 2018 corporate junk bonds and leveraged loans. 2007 banks and SPVs funded by the banks. 2018?

Where is this sub-prime corporate debt sitting today?

Nearly half sits in Insurance Companies and Pension funds.

Given the close ties between insurance and pensions this is not a happy picture.

Along side the pension and insurance industry who are sitting on a mountain of high risk/high return junk there is the liquidity trigger of bond backed, fixed income and high yield ETF’s. They are admittedly still small compared to the still larger mutual funds but they are a choke and panic point. The ETF market is broad in its consumer appeal but very narrow where it counts – in who makes and provides the heavy lifting for the market. There are about 5 main companies who ‘Sponsor’, which means run and control ETF’s globally. They are BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street, Invesco and Charles Schwab.  According to Forbes in 2017,

Five Largest ETF Providers Manage Almost 90% Of The $3 Trillion U.S. ETF Industry

Of those 5,

…the top 3 ETF providers dominate the market with a combined market share of 82% …  the top-three players also account for more than 70% of all ETF assets globally.

The sponsors in turn rely for the heavy financial lifting – to buy and sell the assets that go into an ETF – on what are called the Authorised Participants. Who are they? The main ones are … the big banks like Merrill Lynch, Fortis bank, Morgan Stanley, HSBC, Barclays, Citi etc. Some companies are both sponsor and authorised participant.

And some of those banks are also the people who have extended the leveraged loans and revolving credit lines to GE and others. Something its banks may come to regret. Because as of today GE is now shut out of what is called the Commercial paper market which is essentially very short duration bonds. This means GE is now reliant for much of the cash flow it needs for day to day operations upon revolving credit from its banks.  The same banks who also buy GE bonds to put into their ETFs.

What could possibly go wrong?

Well… the Fed is trying to ‘normalise its balance sheet by withdrawing some of its liquidity. It is also trying to let interest rates rise. Taken together this is the Fed trying to bring to a much postponed end, the temporary and extraordinary measures brought in to deal with the little 2008 sub prime blip.  The ECB is also planning to end in December its vast 2.4 trillion euro bond buying stimulus package of the last three years.  Though it has said it will not raise interest rates till late next year. While over in China the central bank has, as far as I can see, lost control and is now more reactive than proactive.  It has again and again tried tho reduce official lending and hold back the flood of shadow bank lending that fuels the property speculation market that is the centre of all regional ‘development’ and social stability in China.

Corporates are floundering in a river of debt of their own creation. They are the ones who have taken on loans they will not be able to pay if interest rates increase even a little. The banks have packaged up and sold on that leveraged loan debt and those junk bonds and they have been gobbled up by pensions and insurance companies desperate for yield after a decade of ‘temporary’ low interest rates.

In place of zombie banks we now have zombie corporations kept alive by low interest rates and bond buying QE. Those low interest rates have created a dysfunctional market. Zombie corporations are kept alive because they can sell their sub-prime bonds and get sub prime loans in a market where the buyers of those bonds and securitised loans, the insurers and pension funds and fund managers, are so desperate for yield that they gobble up ‘high yield’ which is just a euphemism for sub prime.

This time it will not be the banks that trigger another financial collapse. Not HSBC or Countrywide this time but GE or Caterpillar. The companies who have been propping up their share prices with endless buy backs funded by… low interest rate loans and junk bond issues. Or perhaps it will be the corporates who are merging and acquiring.

Last time the top of the market was marked by and to some extent triggered by a wave of vast and disastrous bank mergers. HSBC was early when in 2003 it bought one of the largest subprime lenders in america, Household International for $15 billion. Bank of America bought Merrill Lynch. RBS bought ABM Amro. Hypo bought Depfa.  Every one of them saddled the purchaser with unmanageable debt and most ended in massive bail outs.

Today it is the turn of the corporates. 2016 – Bayer bought Monsanto. Funded with $15 billion in bond sales. 2017 – CVS, a retail pharmacy and health care company bought Aetna which is a health insurer for $70 billion 40 billion of which was funded by a bond issue. 2018 – American health provider and insurer, Cigna bought Express Scripts. Funded by a $20 billion bond issue.  2015 – AT&T bought DirectTV. Funded by debt. 2018 – AT&T bought Time Warner. Funded by debt. AT&T’s total debt is now around $180 billion which is a larger debt than many countries. Just yesterday IBM bought RedHat for $34 billion of which about $20 billion will be backed by new debt.

Buy backs supporting share prices, while huge acquisitions attempt to capture market share or buy growth that the parent can’t generate themselves and all funded by debt.

Of course you could say that issuing bonds insulates the corporates because the interest on those bonds is fixed. Quite so. The question I would ask is who bought those bonds and what with? Was it debt?

The Banks That Helped Danske Bank Estonia Launder Russian Money

In it she made the simple but essential point that  while Danske Bank, through its Estonian branch, had laundered $234 billion,

…Danske Bank Estonia couldn’t do this by itself. Much of the money was paid in U.S. dollars, and for that, it needed help from other banks. Banks that had access to Fedwire, the Federal Reserve’s electronic settlement system. Big banks, in other words.

Coppola then named the banks involved.

J.P. Morgan, Bank of America and Deutsche Bank AG all made dollar transfers on behalf of the Estonian branch’s non-resident customers. And according to the Wall Street Journal, Citigroup’s Moscow branch may have been involved in some financial transfers in and out of Danske Bank Estonia.  (bold emphasis added by me)

So, Bank of America, Deutsche Bank and J.P. Morgan moved money OUT of Danske and in to dollar denominated accounts elsewhere, (see section 19 of Danske’s internal investigation). but that is only half the story. It leaves the huge unanswered question,

who moved the money in to Danske Bank’s Estonian branch in the first place?  

The accounts through which the money was laundered are non-resident accounts.  Non-resident simply means the people or entities which hold the accounts do not live in Estonia. So how did these non residents deposit their money in Danske’s Estonia branch?  Either they physically transported $234 billion dollar’s worth of their local currencies in trunks and suitcases from their own country, in to Estonia and to the bank, or it had to have been deposited electronically. Which would mean some other banks, in addition to those mentioned by Forbes, were involved.

So are there more banks than just the four listed in the Forbes article who had and perhaps still have relationships with Danske bank and who therefore could have (I’m not accusing anyone),  wittingly or unwittingly moved the money into Danske’s Estonian branch?

Ah, the joys of the internet.  Here is the list of Danske Bank ‘s Correspondent banks as of today.  (A note for all the lawyers, I am certainly NOT suggesting any of these banks laundered money. I am merely noting that it isn’t just the four banks mentioned in the Forbes article that routinely helped Danske move money around.)

For those who might not know, a correspondent bank is simply a bank that your bank has a working relationship with. So J.P.Morgan was Danske’s correspondent bank in the US. The relationship is often a bigger more international bank, which is licensed  in many countries, providing services to a smaller more regional or local bank.  But its important not to see this Correspondent relationship as being all one way.  By having a relationship the larger bank not only gets a fee for its help but becomes the international conduit for the money that its owner wishes  to move out of the small bank and its country of origin into the wider global market.

The lists of Danske’s correspondent banks shows 16 countries and territories:  Australia/New Zealand, Belarus, Canada, Switzerland, The Czech Republic, Europe, Great Britain, Hong Kong, Hungary, Japan, Norway, Poland, Russia, Sweden, Singapore, and the USA .    Bear in mind that some of these countries might be where the laundered money was coming from and some might be where that money was hoping to get to.

At the risk of insulting people when I look for the countries where the money might have been coming from I see the Czech Republic, Belarus, Russia and maybe Poland.

In the Czech Republic Danske’s correspondent bank is Obchodni Bank.  It is the largest bank in the republic but is actually majority owned by KBC Bank, part of KBC Banking and Insurance Group which  is one of Europe’s largest financial houses and it’s Belgian.  So perhaps the Belgian authorities should be concerned?

In Belarus the Correspondent bank is Priorbank JSC. This is a billion and a half euro bank, with 760 000 customers. It is in fact 87.74%  owned by Raiffeisen Bank of Austria. Now Raiffeisen and I have form, so I have to be careful here.  The link is to an article about money laundering which I wrote called “How to make the truth illegal’. What I can say is that not only does Raiffeisen’s name come up in the Magnitsky laundering case, it also comes up centrally in the infamous money laundering scandal  in which $1.2 billion was looted and laundered from Kyrgyzstan.  The best investigation of this affair I know of concluded,

…the suspicious transactions went through many banks around the world, with the largest amounts passing through Citibank in New York, the UK’s Standard Chartered and Austria’s Raiffeisen Zentralbank. These banks continued their relationship,… (My emphasis)

So perhaps the Austrian authorities should take a little look too?

In Poland Danske has its own banking network.

In Russia, where it has been assumed that most of the dirty money came from, Danske’s correspondent bank is Russia’s Central Bank.  Although things do get awfully wiggly in Russia I still think the Central Bank is an unlikely accomplice.

Danske does have its own presence in Russia. So it could have taken the dirty money directly into its own Russian subsidiary and moved it to Estonia all by itself.  But according to its web site it has only  60 employees in all of Russia so they would have been terribly busy and even they MIGHT have noticed something was odd about $234 billion coming in and going straight back out.  I also doubt every crook lined up at the same teller window week after week.

This seems to leave us with the four banks mentioned by Forbes. If so, then all the money that was laundered from Russia would have had to have been transferred into Danske by Deutsche and CITI. The other two banks which the Forbes article mentions, J.P.Morgan and Bank of America, only moved the money out, not in.  Now while I think this is entirely possible, given the feats of laundering that both Deutsche and CITI have achieved before, that they could have done it all themselves, it seems naive not to at least look to see if there were other banks involved in Russia.  So I did.

And what I found is that there is a second, larger list of correspondent banks. You get to it through the part of Danske’s web site that deals with Transaction Banking. For those of you aware of trends in Money Laundering the mention of ‘Transaction Banking’ might have started a red light flashing. Transaction or Electronic Laundering, uses fake on-line sales and is the fastest growing method of laundering.  One recent estimated is that $200 billion a year of transaction laundering occurs in the US alone.

Here is the link to the larger list.

It’s laborious to use but it reveals that several other large European banks have ties to Danske and help it to move money.

It turns out there are other banks in Russia that Danske does business with, namely Alfa Bank and Zao Unicredit Bank.

Alfa is a strange one. On the one hand Global Finance Magazine has repeatedly called it Russia’s Best Bank. On the other it has had a strategic alliance with GazProm.  America sees Gazprom as the Dark Lord Putin’s One Ring, binding European countries to its Gas supply.  Alfa has also been at the centre of the whole Trump/Russian dossier storm. And as if that wasn’t enough in December 2017, Alfa Bank’s wholly owned Dutch subsidiary, Amsterdam Trade Bank, was raided in connection with an investigation into possible money-laundering.

Zao Unicredit Bank is part of the sprawling trillion euro Italian Bank Unicredit. So this brings Italian Banking  in to our story. But it is worth remembering, however, that Zao used to be part of Bank Austria.  It was renamed when Unicredit bought Bank Austria. A purchase which, I have been told by one who worked in UniCreidt, pissed off Austrian bankers something rotten.

UniCredit still owns Bank Austria which means an Italian Bank, owns the third largest bank in Austria.  So Zao not only brings Italian banking in to the picture but links a second Austrian bank to Danske.

Danske also has partner banks in Serbia. One is Erste Bank AD Novi Sud, which is  part of Bank Erste – which is the largest bank in … Austria.   Another is RaiffeisenBank Ad Beograd. So now we have all three of Austria’s largest banks tied to Danske.  No other country has all three of its biggest banks all tied to Danske.  Might we being to wonder if there is something about Austria?

Not to be outdone The Italians are there too. Banc Intesa AD Beograd is one of the largest banks in Serbia but is 93% owned by another huge and ailing Italian bank Intesa Sanpaolo.  And UniCredit Bank Serbia works with Danske.  But again Unicredit Bank Serbia was part of Bank Austria. So is this an Italian or another Austrian connection?

Ukraine is on the list too.  Another country that routinely crops up in Money Laundering and political/banking corruption stories. In Ukraine we have Raiffeisen Bank Aval and UniCredit Bank LLC Kiev. And once again the UniCredit subsidiary used to be Bank of Austria. Hmm.

In Croatia we find among others, RaiffeisenBank Austria and  Erste & Steiermärkische Bank. While Societe General makes an appearance for the French.

In Bosnia we again have, one again, Raiffeisen and Unicredit.

While in Kazakhstan we have HSBC flying the flag for British Money Laundering banks. (Not that I’m suggesting AT ALL that HSBC might ever do anything shady in Kazakhstan).

And if we look for Middle East connections there is Banque Saudi Fransi which is Credit Agricole and Saudi British Bank which is 40% HSBC.

All of which amounts to what?  There is nothing criminal or even unusual in various banks having relations with Danske. All banks have relations with each other. But is there a pattern? There is a close connection between Dankse and all three of Austria’s largest banks and both of Italy’s largest , in countries that we might not wholly unfairly suspect of being a possible source of dirty money Is this something regulators might think important?

Russia, Bosnia, Belarus, Croatia, Serbia and Ukraine, all linked to Danske by the same Italian and Austrian banks.  And it is certainly fair to say that Austria has been a favourite place for Ukranian Oligarchs to park their billions.

Absolutely nothing I have said here is evidence of any wrong doing. But if you have a bank, Danske Bank in Estonia, which is at the centre of a vast laundering scheme surely you don’t just look at the banks that moved the money out of Estonia into dollar accounts? That is only the back half of the laundering.  Surely you should look for any banks that could have begun the laundering. And surely a reasonable pace to start, if only to rule them out, is the list of banks which Danske itself says are the banks it has close money-moving ties to?