“Follow the money,” said the informant in the Watergate affair.

Similarly, if you really want to make sense of the complex web of banking, finance and commerce that makes up our global system of economy in the 21st century, just “follow the money.”

There are a number of major institutions that control and influence monetary policy throughout the world. Apart from the World Bank (also incorporating the Bank for Reconstruction and Development) and the International Monetary Fund headquartered in Washington, d.c., the institutions that are currently most influencing monetary policy are based on the continent of Europe.

Most influential among these European-headquartered institutions are the Bank for International Settlements (bis), based in Switzerland, and the European Central Bank, in Germany. A recent addition to these, and destined to probably become the most powerful, is the global regulatory authority termed the Financial Stability Board (fsb), cloned from a German initiative by the G-7 nations, within which the EU is the dominant force.

Why should you be concerned about this?

Note this electrifying Mail Online report from May 9: “The paper is aged and fragile, the typewritten letters slowly fading. But U.S. Military Intelligence report EW-Pa 128 is as chilling now as the day it was written in November 1944.

“The document, also known as the Red House Report, is a detailed account of a secret meeting at the Maison Rouge Hotel in Strasbourg on Aug. 10, 1944. There, Nazi officials ordered an elite group of German industrialists to plan for Germany’s postwar recovery, prepare for the Nazis’ return to power and work for a ‘strong German empire.’ In other words: the Fourth Reich.” (This intelligence report is reprinted in full in our free booklet The Rising Beast.)

This plan for a Nazi comeback was to be funded by cash and bullion, channeled through the Swiss National Bank and the Nazi-controlled Bank for International Settlements in exchange for a 5 percent commission.

Why are both these banks, to this very day, still at the heart of the international banking system? Why do they wield such clout in determining money flows, interest and exchange rates internationally? The real answer is astounding! As Adam LeBor reflects, “[T]hese three typewritten pages are a reminder that today’s drive towards a European federal state is inexorably tangled up with the plans of the SS and German industrialists for a Fourth Reich …” (ibid.).

Power of the Central Banks

The distribution of wealth internationally is vested in the nations’ central banks. Of these, the most powerful is the Bank for International Settlements.

The bis, based in Basel, Switzerland, was originally established after World War i to collect and distribute Germany’s war reparation payments. It soon became the “bank for central banks,” supplying safe haven for the European central banks’ gold stocks. Its sole depositors are, in fact, the central banks. A treaty signed in 1930 at The Hague guarantees the bis immunity from government intervention and from paying taxes on the profits it makes on all transactions.

Secrecy is a vital ingredient to the operations of the bis. As Edward Epstein reported in 1983 for Harper’s Magazine, “[T]he central banks themselves have highly competent staff capable of investing their deposits. The German Bundesbank, for example, has a superb international trading department and 15,000 employees—at least 20 times as many as the bis staff. Why then do the Bundesbank and the other central banks transfer some $40 billion of deposits to the bis and thereby permit it to make such a profit?

“One answer is, of course, secrecy. By committing part of their reserves in what amounts to a gigantic mutual fund of short-term investments, the central banks create a convenient screen behind which they can hide their own deposits and withdrawals in financial centers around the world. For example, if the bis places funds in Hungary, the individual central banks do not have to answer to their governments for investing in a Communist country. And the central banks are apparently willing to pay a high fee to use the cloak of thebis“ (emphasis mine throughout).

Since its creation as the institution through which German war reparations were supposed to be channeled, the bis has become the most powerful banking institution in the world—in reality, the world’s central bank.

Epstein described the regular treks of central bankers to the bis as follows: “Ten times a year—once a month except in August and October—a small group of well-dressed men arrives in Basel, Switzerland. Carrying overnight bags and attaché cases, they discreetly check into the Euler Hotel, across from the railroad station. They have come to this sleepy city from places as disparate as Tokyo, London and Washington, d.c., for the regular meeting of the most exclusive, secretive and powerful supranational club in the world.”

In general, Epstein’s description of the power and influence of the bis remains accurate to this day. “The membership of this club is restricted to a handful of powerful men who determine daily the interest rate, the availability of credit, and the money supply of the banks in their own countries. They include the governors of the U.S. Federal Reserve, the Bank of England, the Bank of Japan, the Swiss National Bank, and the German Bundesbank.

“The club controls a bank with a … kitty in cash, government securities and gold that constitutes about one tenth of the world’s available foreign exchange. The profits earned just from renting out its hoard of gold (second only to that of Fort Knox in value) are more than sufficient to pay for the expenses of the entire organization. And the unabashed purpose of its elite monthly meetings is to coordinate and, if possible, to control all monetary activities in the industrialized world.”

Then there’s the leading customer of the bis, the powerful European Central Bank (ecb).

Underpinning the European Monetary Union (emu), the ecb operates from Frankfurt, Germany. It sets monetary policy for the emu completely independent from the influence of any of the national governments or anyone else. The ecb combines with the central banks of all of the states in the European Union to form the European System of Central Banks, which implements the monetary policy of the ecb.

The Financial Stability Board

At a meeting in Bonn on Feb. 20, 1999, Dr. Hans Tietmeyer, president of the Deutsche Bundesbank, recommended to the finance ministers and the governors of the central banks of the G-7 nations (Germany, Italy, France, Japan, the United Kingdom, Canada and the U.S.) the establishment of a Financial Stability Forum (fsf). The G-7 accepted the proposal.

Ten years later, at the G-20 meeting in London in April, the world’s 20 richest countries agreed to accept regulation of their economies by the fsf under its new name, the Financial Stability Board.

The final communiqué to which all G-20 nations agreed commits each of those nations to action as follows: “In particular we agree:

With four of the G-7 nations plus Spain being EU member nations, added to which is the European Commission, it is obvious that the most influential bloc under fsb regulation will be the European Union.

Pending Chaos

When the powers of the bis and the ecb are aligned with that of the new Financial Stability Board—especially given the current global economic and financial crisis—a certain vision of the future, prophesied in your Bible, suddenly leaps into perspective. It is a vision that was prophesied decades ago by Herbert Armstrong.

During the 1980s, bank failures in the United States broke all records in the wake of the savings-and-loans crisis. In 1982, Herbert Armstrong could see the writing on the wall. With the long-term effects of financial irresponsibility in mind, speaking from Vienna in a message to his supporters, he declared that the failure of any major bank in the U.S. “will affect the banks in Britain, in Paris, in Tokyo, and in the capitals of the world. And the heads of the governments in those countries know it.

“The banking system is so interlocked between nations, that if one goes under they will all go under and that’s going to mean chaos, economic chaos all over the world for many nations and millions and billions of people.”

It was German philosopher Freidrich Nietzsche who declared, “The German soul has its passageways and inter-passageways; there are caves, hideouts and dungeons in it; its disorder has a good deal of the attraction of the mysterious; the German is expert on secret paths to chaos.”

Sigrid Schultz, who reported for the Chicago Tribune from within Germany after World War i through the early years of World War ii, wrote, “[T]he Germans have brought chaos and agony to every country within their long reach. They will cry chaos again, and still again … at the first sign of weakness on our part, they’ll try it again” (Germany Will Try It Again).

Schultz described how the Nazi organization was set up as far back as 1940 to continue to pursue the Nazi dream of world conquest underground in the event of German defeat in World War ii. “The broad outline of the campaign aims at a ‘scientifically provoked and directed chaos,’ with which they feel certain to win ultimate victory,” Schultz wrote.

Most integral to the ultimate fulfillment of the Nazi vision was control of the global banking system!

German Influence

Schultz tracked the effort to infiltrate and exert influence and ultimate control of the global banking system back to as early as Germany’s defeat in World War i in 1918. She pointed to the initiatives of German Gen. Erich Ludendorff, who initiated a covert interwar enterprise comprised of nationalist Germans “with wide knowledge of human beings and the world … to serve their common cause—German world supremacy. … Since then its membership has quietly directed the creation of world encompassing political and financial structures.” Following the 1918 armistice, “the most trusted secret staff members who held positions in the Reichsbank [predecessor of today’s Bundesbank], the Finance Ministry, and, naturally, the War Office, took care to keep their jobs.”

This is no conspiracy theorist in action. This is a steely-minded journalist who was personally acquainted with Hitler, Goering and Himmler, who lived and worked in Germany between 1918 and 1943, who had a deep perception of the orientation of the German elites and their dream to revive the old Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation!

A similar perception was held by Bernard Connolly, who formerly worked in the monetary policy area within the EU. He noted the “plans for a German-dominated European Economic Community that had been detailed during 1941 in a compendium of papers presented to the president of the Reichsbank”—and a number of leading bankers, industrialists and economists within the Third Reich. “That blueprint bore a startling resemblance to the eec [European Economic Community] of the Treaty of Rome” (The Rotten Heart of Europe).

Connolly went on to note that the Nazi professor who synthesized this “compendium of papers” specifically emphasized that the economic policy of a united Europe should not reflect “the old structural laws of the Anglo-Saxon world economy,” but rather “must be shaped in accordance with the new [Nazi] political criteria and will consequently appear different from the economic structures of the past.”

That very system is currently imposed on 27 nations in Europe.

Then, suddenly, in the wake of April’s G-20 conference in London, we find that a very German idea, having initially gained acceptance as the Financial Stability Forum by the EU-dominated G-7 nations, has become, under a new name, the regulatory authority for the global economy! The Financial Stability Board’s authority is not based on those “old structural laws of the Anglo-Saxon world economy,” but on “new political criteria … different from the economic structures of the past”!

As Dick Morris commented in an observation much keener than most observers, “Literally from April 2 of this year … it’s a whole new world of financial regulation in which, essentially, all of the U.S. regulatory bodies and all U.S. companies are put under international regulation, international supervision. It really amounts to a global economic government” (Fox News, April 2).

How could the leaders of the G-20 nations have been so fooled?

Dick Morris laid his finger on the reason. “I’ve had a long experience in dealing with the European Union, and this is how they operate. All the [G-20] focus was on how much will there be in the stimulus package, $1.1 trillion. And did Obama win? Did Sarkozy win? And in the meantime, they slip this in under the radar, which is absolutely creating an international economic union.”

Follow the Money

It is in monetary policy that the innate drive toward centralizing Teutonic corporatism has found its greenest pastures.

Since 1979, when the European Council adopted the European Monetary System—consummating in the establishment of the ecb and subsequent launching of the single European currency, the euro, in 1999—the European central banking system has evolved into a powerful source of financial regulation and control.

When EU monetary policy is linked with the EU drive for global financial regulatory power, the agenda of the EU elites is revealed at its most sinister, anti-Anglo-Saxon, anti-free-enterprise level. This becomes of even greater concern when objective historical research reveals that, in Europe, “there is a certain overlap between two currents of thought—Nazi and modern pro-Europeanism—whose … antecedents reach back in European intellectual and geopolitical history to well before the outbreak of the Second World War …” (John Laughlin, The Tainted Source).

Perhaps nowhere is that old Nazi vision as prevalent as in the European central banking system.

A consistent thread that runs from the European Commission headquarters in Brussels, via Basel, through Frankfurt, to Berlin, and on to Rome, has woven its web of covert banking intrigue. It began in the post-World War i process of German reparations in 1918, and has led to the most recent establishment of the new global finance and banking regulator, the fsb, in April. This thread ties together the bis, the imf, the ecg, the powerful Bundesbank, and the Vatican Bank with the fsb.

If you want to make sense of the massive changes that have taken place in the global order since the Berlin Wall fell, then simply “follow the money.” It will lead you to Brussels, via Basel, to Frankfurt, to Berlin, and ultimately to Rome!

Recently, there has been no more powerful witness to the accuracy of the biblical prophecies publicized for over 50 years by Herbert Armstrong and for the past 20 years by Gerald Flurry than this latest startling development in the global economy.

As Herbert Armstrong declared, “I believe that some event is going to happen suddenly, just like out of a blue sky, that is going to shock the whole world, and is going to cause the nations in Europe to realize they must unite! … I think I can see what may be the very event that is going to trigger it, and that is the economic situation in the world” (public address, July 7, 1984).

Mr. Armstrong pointed to massive bank failures as causing “chaos, economic chaos all over the world for many nations and millions and billions of people.”

Watch for the coming chaos that will soon set in across the world in the wake of these huge changes to the global financial system, creating great disruption in the global economy. And as you watch, see this chaos transmute the current unwieldy 27-nation EU into a tightly knit combine under 10 leaders, all giving their allegiance to one who will promise to bring order out of that chaos.

Watch for the rise of that prophesied “king of the north” that will create, for a brief moment in time, a “new world order” out of that chaos—an order most reminiscent of that ancient order that has historically wreaked so much chaos in the world: the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation!

For further study, order a free copy of Germany and the Holy Roman Empire.