The unveiling on June 3rd
by the World Economic Forum of ‘The Great Reset‘ agenda appears on the surface to be a
newly devised concept created directly in response to Covid-19. As it turns out
the first soundings of a ‘reset‘ were actually made as far back as
2014.
To appreciate the significance of the WEF’s intervention, it is
important first to recognise the years leading up to 2020 and how they laid the
foundations for where we are today.
2014
Each January the WEF host their annual meeting in Davos,
Switzerland. In 2014, Christine Lagarde, who was then the managing director of
the IMF, called for a ‘reset‘ of monetary policy, the
financial sector regulatory environment and structural reforms of global
economies.
Lagarde was adamant that a reset was required ‘in the
way in which the economy grows around the world‘.
Fleshing this out, Lagarde cited the dangers to financial stability due to ‘bubbles
developing here and there‘, the over 200 million globally
who were unemployed and economic growth being too slow.
Despite these concerns, Lagarde’s view was that fiscal
consolidation within national economies was still necessary in order to control
spending and ensure the post 2008 ‘recovery‘.
In January 2019 I posted an article that went into detail about
the monetary policy aspect of the ‘reset‘
promoted by Lagarde (Monetary Policy ‘Reset’: From
Rhetoric to Actuality). I raised how at the time of Lagarde’s
intervention the Federal Reserve were tapering their asset purchasing scheme
(quantitative easing), introduced in the aftermath of the collapse of Lehman
Brothers that triggered the 2008 financial crisis.
Come
the end of 2014, the Fed had called a halt entirely to QE. A year later in
December 2015, they began to raise interest rates for the first time in over a
decade and would later go on to introduce an asset reduction programme where
the central bank began to roll off assets from its balance sheet.
For Lagarde, international cooperation would be essential for a
reset to succeed. Without nations cooperating, it would likely be fraught with
instability and market turbulence. In
an interview with Bloomberg at the time of the WEF meeting, Lagarde
stressed the importance of the ‘medium term‘
when it came to achieving the reset:
The short term collides with the medium term but the question is
to bring the medium term into the personal, political and corporate equation.
And that’s the job of the IMF.
2015
Looking
back, 2015 was a highly significant year that saw global planners state quite
openly their ambitions for a New World Order to be implemented over the next
decade and a half.
First came the unveiling of the United Nation’s derived Agenda 2030 in September, and
with it seventeen main objectives known as the Sustainable Development Goals.
Agenda 2030 was adopted by the 193 members of the UN, with adoption coinciding
with the 70th anniversary of the institution’s existence.
Chief
amongst the seventeen goals were to end poverty by 2030 and for there to be
zero hunger. Action on climate change was also needed, as was the creation of
sustainable cities and communities and good health and wellbeing (which the UN
directly associate with vaccinating families).
Agenda 2030 replaced the Millennium Development Goals, which
were introduced in 2000 and encompassed a series of targets to be completed by
2015. According to the UN, ‘enormous
progress‘ had been made ‘but more needs to be done‘.
To get a sense of what the UN means by ‘more‘,
when the Sustainable Development Goals were signed off Claire Melamed, who in
2015 was Director of the global think tank Overseas Development
Institute, told the BBC:
If they’re going to be met we’re going to have to see huge amounts
of money. We’re going to have see governments behaving in a completely
different way. We’re going to have to see companies totally changing their
business practices. It can be done, but the real question is whether we want to
do it enough.
Melamed
is now the Chief Executive Officer of Global Partnership for Sustainable
Development Data. Amongst the organisation’s funding partner’s are the Bill and
Melinda Gates Foundation, which is a prominent organisation in the drive for a
vaccine to immunise people against Covid-19.
In
December 2015, three months after the announcement of Agenda 2030, came the
founding of the Paris Climate Agreement at the COP21 conference. The agreement
ties directly into the United Nations and operates within the bounds of the
UN’s Framework Convention on Climate Change, and was the first ever universal
and legally binding agreement adopted on the subject.
To achieve the goals of the agreement, one of which
is limiting global warming to below two degrees, ‘appropriate
financial flows, a new technology framework and an enhanced capacity building
framework will be put in place, thus supporting action by developing countries
and the most vulnerable countries, in line with their own national objectives.’
So
far, 189 countries have ratified the agreement out of 197 that were present at
the Paris conference. In October 2016, the required threshold was reached for
the accord to enter into force.
2016
With Agenda 2030 and the Paris Climate Agreement now set in
motion, the World Economic Forum (which fully endorses the United Nation’s
Sustainable Development Goals) ran with the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR)
as the theme for it’s annual meeting. I wrote about this in 2018 (Fourth Industrial Revolution: Mission Creep towards a New
World Order – Part One) and picked up on how the
executive chairman of the WEF, Klaus Schwab, described the impact that the
Fourth Industrial Revolution would have on the world.
First,
it would be all encompassing and involve all stakeholders of the global polity,
meaning full engagement with the public and private sectors, academia and civil
society. Some aspects to the revolution include disruption to jobs and skills,
business disruption, innovation and productivity, agile governance and security
and conflict.
Second,
connecting through these areas are a whole raft of concerns which comprise the
rise of blockchain technology, global governance, the future of enterprise,
workforce and employment, the future of government, the future of production,
sustainable development and social protection systems.
The revolution is dubbed as a digital revolution, one where the
‘fusion of technologies‘ embodying the physical,
digital and biological spheres come together. Artificial intelligence,
robotics, nano and bio technology are all part of the vision for 4IR.
Schwab made it very plain that the world can expect the
revolution to be a ‘symbiosis between micro-organisms, the human
body, the products people consume and the buildings we inhabit.’
One consequence of this is that human beings will no longer just be users of
technology, rather they will start to converge with both the digital and
biological worlds to become part of it. A second consequence is that every
industry on the planet will be subjected to a degree of ‘disruption‘ as
the 4IR advances, resulting in the systems of production, management and
governance being transformed.
It does not stop there. Outside of jobs, human identity,
privacy, notions of ownership, consumption patterns, the time devoted to work
and leisure, how we develop as individuals and how we meet people and nurture
relationships will all have to change to accommodate 4IR. Since the onset of
Covid-19, many of these things have already undergone significant ‘disruption‘
Soon
after the 2016 WEF meeting, the world experienced substantial geopolitical
ructions with the UK voting to leave the European Union and Donald Trump being
elected as the United States’ 45th President.
2019
Three years after they signalled major technological, political
and societal change was coming, the World Economic Forum were back with a new
theme – ‘Globalization 4.0: Shaping a New Architecture in the Age of the
Fourth Industrial Revolution‘. It was a subject I covered
in an article published around the time (Why Dismissing Globalist
Warnings as ‘Project Fear’ May Prove a Mistake).
Executive chairman Klaus Schwab was at it again, reiterating
that ‘our systems of health, transportation, communication, production,
distribution, and energy – just to name a few – will be completely transformed.’ Included
in the breadth of transformation would be blockchain and distributed ledger
technology, two fundamental components in the drive towards a global digital
currency network.
In talking about ‘Globalization 4.0‘, Schwab
described the present day as an ‘era of widespread insecurity
and frustration‘, and went on to blame this environment for a rise in populism.
What
Schwab did not make direct mention of is how a resurgence of protectionist
tendencies was assisting the WEF in being able to push the argument for 4IR.
The greater the level of global disunity, the more opportunity that groups like
the WEF have in being able to cultivate the concept of a New World Order and
convince people of its necessity. Globalization 4.0 is a facet of 4IR, a vision
that Schwab is unreservedly committed to:
Globalization 4.0 has only just begun, but we are already vastly
underprepared for it. Clinging to an outdated mindset and tinkering with our
existing processes and institutions will not do. Rather, we need to redesign
them from the ground up, so that we can capitalize on the new opportunities
that await us, while avoiding the kind of disruptions that we are witnessing
today.
‘Ready or not‘, Schwab warned, ‘a new
world is upon us‘.
Five months on from the WEF meeting, the Bank for International
Settlements introduced a new concept called the ‘BIS
Innovation Hub‘, also known as ‘Innovation BIS 2025‘.
This is a topic I have also written about previously (Innovation BIS 2025: A Stepping Stone Towards an Economic
‘New World Order’).
The
BIS described the Hub as a medium term strategy consisting of three main elements:
·
Identify and develop in-depth insights into
critical trends in technology affecting central banking
·
Develop public goods in the technology space
geared towards improving the functioning of the global financial system
·
Serve as a focal point for a network of
central bank experts on innovation
When launching the hub, BIS General Manager Agustin Carstens
spoke of ‘reshaping the financial landscape‘
following ‘the scars left by the financial crisis‘.
According to Carstens, now was the time to set about reforming the way that the
central banking community operates.
When digging down into the BIS Innovation
Hub, it becomes clear that at the core of the project is the creation of
central bank digital currency (CBDC). In practice, this would mean the abolition
of tangible assets such as banknotes and coins and see the creation of a new
form of digital money issued by central banks.
Global payment systems are in
the process of being reformed to accommodate the use of blockchain and
distributed ledger technology, and central banks are now beginning to
disseminate technological detail for how a CBDC could be issued.
As it stands, a volatile geopolitical climate, exacerbated by
Covid-19 and the unproven fear that handling physical money could transmit the
virus, is assisting the BIS in their ambitions for completely resetting how the
general public will interact with central bank money over the coming years.
In a follow up article we will look specifically at what the World
Economic Forum have termed ‘The Great Reset‘ and what exactly global planners
are seeking to achieve.