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Thursday, January 2, 2014

THE VATICAN BANK AND TRANSPARENCY: THE CURRENTS RUN DEEP


We begin 2014 with a leftover bang from 2013, namely, the Vatican bank, courtesy of an article shared with us by “K”:
Vatican Bank Scandal JP Morgan HSBC cease doing business with Vatican
There’s so much going on here one does not really know where to begin.
You’ll recall that we ran blogs last year about how Ernst and Young, the auditors of record both for Lloyd’s of London and for the Bank of International Settlements were brought in as auditors for the Vatican bank. The move itself was unprecedented, since the Vatican’s financial dealings have been shrouded in secrecy since at least the pontificate of Leo XIII, who, according to the late Malachi Martin (in his “fact as fiction” novel Vatican) struck a “bargain” with the high financial powers of Europe to allow the Vatican into the international banking game. If so, then this article signals that, for whatever reason, the terms of that Bargain are now being renegotiated.
The bank, as the article makes clear, makes few loans, but mostly functions as a deposit and transfer bank, a clearing bank, on the international stage, for religious and other depositors. 

But what’s intriguing here are the interfaces between the Vatican Bank and behemoths like HSBC(Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation…remember Baron Blackheath anyone?), JP Morgan Chase and Goldman Sachs…
Now for the high octane speculation. The article presents the concerns of these banks with the lack of transparency at the Vatican Bank. But this coming from banks that are up to their fat bonuses in their own brand of corruption – think of derivatives and credit default swaps – that one’s antennae can only pulse with suspicion, for those derivatives run  into the quadrillions of dollars (at last count), meaning that these behemoth banks are badly over-leveraged. Yet, another major player, the Vatican bank, would appear not to be, and to be the black hole of banking. Yet, the call is going out for Vatican bank transparency(notice how no one is, as yet, calling for similar transparency from the Federal reserve or the Bank of England or the BIS).
I strongly suspect, folks, that there is a much bigger story going on here, that we as yet do not know all the hidden players in the shenanigans surrounding the Vatican bank, and no, the Mafia isn’t the big hidden player here. And I also strongly suspect that the “transparency” of that bank will go only so far; centuries of secrecy in the world’s oldest funcitoning political chancery will not disappear in a pirouette of public spiritedness simply because Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase demand it. In fact, I suspect that what may really be going on is a kind of theater, to distract from something else…
…that something else may be that the Vatican bank is the interface of choice between the prime banks, and a very hidden system of finance. After all, you cannot implement a global currency, or even “reset,” if, being true to form, one ignores the traditional and centuries’ old association of finance and religion…
However one slices it, there’s more here than meets the eye, and this is one to watch…

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