Magnum Opus

Abstract: Financial Weapons of Mass Destruction

Finance is a piece of knowledge about power, and how the world really operates. The possible impending collapse of Greece and the EU, the dissolvement of the Soviet Union, the trigger of Arab Spring 2011, and the majority of failed states scattered across the globe can all be arguably rooted to a single source: the terrifying, yet fascinating, amount of financial power possessed by a single regime.

In almost in a heartbeat, without any physical aggression, this regime can drove Latin American countries into their Lost Decade, can practically kill off the growth of then-second richest country in the world, and can flipped the booming economies of the Asian Tigers into oblivion, using only financial weapons from afar. Some got extremely wealthy along the way. Some became powerful. But for the vast majority of the world’s population it’s repression, without really knowing why.

This is a story of the current ruling empire. It is a story of economic changes and tale of the market within 400 years of timeframe. It is a story of trials and errors, greed and manipulation, tariffs wars, the battle of idealism and vested interests. It is a story of how these financial weapons come into being.

But first and foremost this is a story of plunder. It is a tale of transfer of wealth, where income re-distribution is creating an alarming rate of inequality, where huge sums of money can vanish in the balance sheet of a bunch of countries only to resurfaced at some Caribbean Island. It is a story where corporations (particularly Western corporations), just like the Catholic Church and the monarchy before them, have become the dominant institution of our modern lives, with their hands reaching out even the remotest areas in this globalised world, for better and for worse.

Countries boom and bust, world leaders can rise and fall under their influence, people can get rich and get poor almost in a blink of an eye, and we can make sense of it all by first looking at what really happened in South East Asia. This is Financial Weapons of Mass Destruction:

Part 1: New world order and the men who create market crashes

Part 2: Masters of the universe and the Japanese butterfly effect

Part 3: Plutocrats’s Paradise