Illusions of a Multipolar World
When you apply for a mortgage, the bank checks you can repay.
It feels personal — someone sitting at a desk looking through your files. But the rules they use came from regulators, who received them from international groups: the Basel Committee, the Network for Greening the Financial System, and the International Sustainability Standards Board.
These standards now include climate risk, biodiversity exposure, and sustainability rules. A house near a flood plain costs more to insure and is harder to finance — not because your lender chose this, but because a computer model scored the risk against a limit set elsewhere, and changed your rate before you even sat down.
The Monetary Allocation Committee explains how this system was built. In 2013, a London think tank called the New Economics Foundation proposed a body to decide not how much money the Bank of England creates, but where it goes. They called it the Monetary Allocation Committee. It came back as the Green Finance Action Taskforce in 2021 and the Economic Policy Coordination Committee in 2023. The name changed each time, but the underlying structure didn’t.
What’s unusual is that the structure was built before any particular goal was attached to it. The green angle came later. The system accepts whatever goal it’s fed — climate targets, biodiversity metrics, pandemic preparedness, social equity — with equal efficiency. Whoever decides what counts as ‘productive’ or ‘sustainable’ decides where the money goes, and that call was made by a network no voters elected.
Who Built It
The New Economics Foundation names the institution that built the mechanism and placed its people in government.
NEF started in 1986 at a counter-summit to the G7. One co-founder, James Robertson, had worked in the Cabinet Office and run a research body for Britain’s major banks. What looked like an alternative economics movement was shaped from the start by establishment experience.
In 2000, Robertson published a plan for sovereign money reform — stripping commercial banks of their power to create money and giving that role to the state. A decade later, a group called Positive Money formed around the same idea, and the following year NEF published the textbook explaining the theory. Two years after that, NEF proposed the body that would decide where the newly created money went.
But NEF didn’t stop at the centralised model. It also produced the research behind every apparent alternative. In 1997 it published work on community banking — local finance aimed at social and environmental renewal. In 2012, funded by the European Union, it surveyed cooperative banks and credit unions across 65 countries. The decentralised model now championed by vocal critics of central bank digital currencies was mapped and academically justified by the same organisation that designed the centralised allocation body, barely a year before proposing it.
Sovereign money, community banking, alternative currencies, centralised allocation — each route was charted inside the same institution.
As the papers piled up, NEF’s researchers moved into jobs where proposals become policy. One alumnus co-directed the UN’s sustainable finance programme, advised the G20, joined the biodiversity disclosure taskforce, and sat on a council for ‘inclusive capitalism’ created by Lady Rothschild. Another devised the allocation mechanism at NEF, moved to University College London to turn the ideas into peer-reviewed papers, and now advises the UK government on housing and land. A third published across every layer of central bank reform — capital requirements, credit guidance, collateral rules, the coordination body itself — through NEF, Positive Money, UCL, and the Fabian Society, stitching the domestic programme together single-handedly.
NEF also built the measurement infrastructure that feeds the mechanism. It developed the UK’s first social audit method in 1993, pioneered the alternative economic indicators that political parties later adopted, co-developed the Living Planet Index with WWF, and contributed to the UN working group whose sustainability indicators evolved into the Sustainable Development Goals. The institution that built the allocation mechanism also built the yardsticks it runs on.
Who Configured the Paths
Mansion House looks at who sits above the think tanks, campaign groups, and university departments.
In May 2014, Prince Charles spoke at the Conference on Inclusive Capitalism at the Mansion House in the City of London. The City of London Corporation and E.L. Rothschild co-hosted it. He opened by thanking ‘Lady Rothschild and the City of London for managing to bring together such a remarkable group of people’. Mark Carney, Christine Lagarde, and Bill Clinton were among the speakers.
The essay traces fifteen members of the Rothschild family across five generations. None stood for election, ran an international body, or held military command. Each sat at the boundary between two worlds — banking and empire, science and legal designation, conservation and finance, disclosure and enforcement — and decided how one flowed into the other.
One funded an Oxford programme that developed the ‘stranded assets’ concept — the idea behind treating fossil fuel investments as financial risks. The same person hosted forums at his Buckinghamshire estate where the climate disclosure taskforce and the central bank supervisory network were outlined years before either was publicly announced. A Bank of England staff working paper later thanked those forums by name.
Another family member launched the Council for Inclusive Capitalism with the Vatican — the body that frames the whole programme in moral language. The person who built much of the UN sustainable finance architecture, starting from a desk at NEF, now sits on that council. His NEF affiliation appears on the council’s own website.
Jeffrey Epstein, in a 2016 email to Peter Thiel released by the US Department of Justice, stated his position plainly: ‘as you probably know I represent the Rothschilds’. Historians of the Rothschild Archive have described a long-standing model where intermediaries are stationed at the junctions between worlds but ‘never gained access to the decision-making circle of the family’. The agent confirmed the model in his own words.
The Prince lent the programme his moral authority from the Mansion House podium. The Pope lent his through the Vatican. Both were brought in by those who designed the system to provide what couldn’t be manufactured: the appearance of legitimacy.
How It Stays Hidden
Nothing in these essays is secret. The documents are public, the authors are credited, and the funders are disclosed.
What stops the picture coming together is compartmentalisation. An economist reads the monetary reform literature. A central banker works with risk models. A lawyer reads the coordination body proposal. A conservation professional studies the biodiversity framework. A fund manager reviews sustainable investment criteria. Each stays in their own domain, and the boundaries between domains are rarely crossed — because crossing them isn’t anyone’s professional responsibility.
The researcher who wrote the collateral framework paper doesn’t need to know about the private forums for the European Central Bank to adopt his recommendations. The UN programme director doesn’t need to know about that researcher for the sustainable finance architecture to cohere. The King doesn’t need to understand the clearing function for his accounting initiative to feed the global disclosure standard. The Pope doesn’t need to follow central bank supervision for his endorsement of Inclusive Capitalism to lend it the ethical weight it requires.
Each remains in their own compartment. The overall layout is visible only to someone who reads across all the compartments at once — and by design, that’s nobody’s assignment.
How the Standards Become Enforceable
Standards on paper don’t change anything. The architecture works because those standards have been baked into the financial system at three levels: what loses funding, what receives it, and how money moves.
What is defunded. Between 2014 and 2018, private forums at Waddesdon Manor — a Rothschild estate in Buckinghamshire — brought together central bankers, asset managers, and academics from an Oxford programme backed by the Rothschild Foundation. Those gatherings produced the ‘stranded assets’ concept: the argument that fossil fuel reserves, carbon-heavy infrastructure, and industries that don’t comply should be treated as financial risks — not because they’ve stopped making money today, but because future policy will erode those returns tomorrow. Once that reclassification enters the risk models banks and insurers use, lending costs rise, insurance premiums climb, and investors start to leave. Nothing’s confiscated; everything’s repriced into decline.
Within two years of those forums calling for a disclosure taskforce and a central bank network, both were up and running.
What is funded. At the Rockefeller Foundation’s conference centre in Bellagio, Italy, a parallel system took shape for steering capital toward approved purposes. Impact investing — the idea that investments should deliver measurable social and environmental returns alongside financial ones — looks voluntary. But when the metrics defining ‘impact’ come from the same network that designed the allocation body, and meeting those metrics becomes a condition for accessing capital, tax breaks, or regulatory clearance, the voluntary label falls away.
Department of Justice correspondence shows Jeffrey Epstein co-developing this apparatus with JP Morgan in 2011, and listing UK social impact bonds and government-backed investment vehicles in a 2013 memo.
How money moves. The endgame’s programmable money. The Bank for International Settlements has proposed a ‘unified ledger’ — a single platform carrying central bank money, commercial bank deposits, and tokenised assets together. On such a platform, every transaction can be conditional. A payment might be approved or blocked based on the carbon score of the product, the sustainability rating of the counterparty, or whether the buyer has met disclosure obligations.
The debate over central bank digital currencies isn’t really about digitisation — money’s already digital — it’s about conditionality: whether money should carry rules about how it can be spent. A unified ledger makes those rules automatic.
Taken together, the stranded assets framework pulls capital from what the standards reject, impact investing pushes capital toward what the standards endorse, and programmable money automates enforcement of both.
The standards themselves are synthesised from the ethic — the SDGs become indicators, the indicators become benchmarks, the benchmarks become risk weights, and the risk weights become your lending conditions. Three layers, one architecture — no parliamentary vote required
The Ethical Wrapper
None of this is sold as a power grab. It’s sold as doing the right thing.
Every layer of the architecture comes dressed up in responsible language. Climate disclosure is ‘transparency’. Repricing carbon-heavy assets is ‘aligning finance with planetary boundaries’. The coordination body is ‘joined-up policy for the common good’. Programmable money is ‘financial inclusion’.
The ethic in play is the Sustainable Development Goals — seventeen UN targets adopted in 2015, covering poverty, health, education, climate, biodiversity, gender, clean water, and more. They’re designed to be impossible to argue with: nobody’s against clean oceans, zero hunger, quality education, or feeding children. That’s exactly why they’re useful. Goals no reasonable person can oppose become the benchmarks for compliance — and falling short is what triggers exclusion from the financial system built to enforce them.
The indicators tracking progress toward those goals were shaped with input from the same network that designed the allocation mechanism. The benchmarks deciding whether a country, company, or loan qualifies were developed inside the same institution whose graduates now staff the enforcement architecture.
The logic was stated openly in 1991. Michael Jacobs, who would later co-design the Economic Policy Coordination Committee for the Fabian Society, wrote in The Green Economy:
Environmental-economic policy making can be thought of as a two-stage process. The first stage is to set targets for the key environmental indicators... The second stage is then to influence economic activity in such a way that it does not exceed these targets. Various instruments must be used (such as taxes, regulations and government expenditure) which constrain the behaviour of individual firms and households.
Set the indicators, then constrain behaviour. The person who wrote that in 1991 co-designed the body that would implement it in 2023.
But the indicators don’t just measure the present — they feed scenario models that project the future. The NGFS climate scenarios, hosted on servers at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria, produce risk projections that central banks use to set capital requirements today based on what the model predicts for 2050.
Policy is made to comply with a projected future, not an observed present. This is anticipatory governance — constraint based on forecast, enforced before the forecast is tested. And should the forecast prove wrong, the constraint has already reshaped the economy, and precautionarily stranded the assets.
But while the ethic is temporary, the mechanism isn’t. The SDGs may be replaced in a decade by some successor agenda — planetary health, regenerative economics, or a term not yet invented.
The architecture built to enforce compliance with today’s goals will enforce compliance with tomorrow’s just as efficiently, because the architecture doesn’t depend on what any given ethic says.
But the ethic is what makes the permissions feel fair and the exclusion reasonable.
Why the Multipolar Transition Helps Them
Most people assume America’s decline and a multipolar world — power spread across the US, China, Russia, India, and others — weakens the Western establishment. Nothing could be further from the truth.
A single superpower sets rules by force and doesn’t need consensus forums or shared technical standards. That was the American century. But when no single power can impose its will, you need a different tool: common rules that everyone agrees to follow.
Whoever writes those rules gains more lasting influence than any superpower managed alone, because the rules bind everyone at once, work through technical compliance rather than force, and each country adopts them believing it chose freely.
That’s why the Council on Foreign Relations in New York and Chatham House in London — the two most influential global think tanks — champion what they call the ‘rules-based international order’. Their support doesn’t conflict with multipolarity; it depends on it. The more spread out the power, the greater the demand for shared standards — and the greater the leverage of those who write them.
China uses the same sustainability disclosure frameworks. BRICS members apply the same ESG benchmarks. Russia is fully signed up to the Sustainable Development Goals. Belt and Road projects run on standards shaped at forums in Buckinghamshire and funded by Western foundations. The supposed alternative to Western leadership runs on standards Western-aligned networks designed, published through the United Nations, and adopted as if they emerged from open multilateral negotiation.
Almost all central banks participate in the Bank for International Settlements — the institution that hosts the NGFS secretariat, coordinates the Basel capital standards, and proposed the unified ledger. You can reject American foreign policy, but you cannot reject the BIS and remain part of the international financial system.
The forums at Waddesdon, Bellagio, and Sir Bani Yas don’t just set domestic policy for one country. They set global benchmarks that every country — aligned or not — must meet to take part in the international financial system. The goal isn’t to control one state. It’s to write the standards that all states adopt willingly.
You can oppose a superpower. You can’t oppose standards that every party accepted voluntarily — because each party thinks they’re impartial. They’re not. They were drafted by hand-picked participants in private settings, then published as international norms that bind everyone.
What It Means
The destination already has a name: Inclusive Capitalism.
The word ‘inclusive’ suggests wider access, but in practice it means the opposite. Inclusion is conditional — you must satisfy the metrics, indicators, audit methods and ethical vocabulary that one network devised, another introduced, and a council provides. The financial system is being restructured around an ethic — and the ethic was turned into an enforceable standard by the people who developed the system. Today’s ethic is the Sustainable Development Goals. That ethic will eventually be replaced, but the permission structure won’t.
Access to the financial system is quietly becoming a privilege rather than a right, extended to those who satisfy the criteria and withheld from those who don’t — all administered through technical standards that operate below the threshold of public debate.
The forums that draft these standards only admit participants who already agree. What emerges isn’t consensus through deliberation, but prior agreement among a hand-picked group, recorded and published as a benchmark that applies to everyone — including the vast majority who were never consulted.
And if you decline to comply, Inclusive Capitalism will decline to include you.
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Illusions, indeed. Since "money creation" is an epistemic illusion concealing "credit creation" (the ontologic reality of commercial bank "lending"), I'd like you to do one of your fantastic “deep dives” on how it is legal for a bank to create the illusion of "lending its own liability"; the credit balance that the customer’s deposited “promise” creates.
In a bank, “you [do not] apply for a mortgage”; you “create one” by signing a document prepared by the bank. But that document also contains your “promise-to-pay”, and your signature on it creates a security, the financial value of which the bank records as a new bank asset [the debit balance]. It is the financial value of your “promise-to-pay” alone that enables the bank to create the “loan” [the matching credit balance] in its liability account, and it’s impossible to justify “lending” someone the value of what they just deposited.
Forensic examination of real bank "loan" account statements, sent to real customers, shows a bank can't lend the “credit balance” it creates in its liability account without “lying through its teeth” about what caused the matching debit balance in its asset account. For example, would you believe that ANZ Bank calls the customer’s deposited promise a “Loan Drawdown” from its empty asset account, and describes the Credit balance as “Proceeds of [that] Drawdown”?? It also labels the Debit [left-hand] column of its empty asset account “Withdrawals”. To my mind, that warrants a criminal investigation, since there is no justification for such systemic, false and misleading “mistakes”.
Prof. Perry Mehrling almost got it right when he described the “bank lending” process as a “Swap of IOUs”; he just mistook the two naked promises being swapped for IOUs (which DO incur a debt).
A great report! You wake up finding yourself, the world, wrapped in this web of deceit and control and there is no escape. The system is operating as designed. The designers are laughing all the way to the bank.