“The American banking oligarchy consists of six megabanks – Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo… They have assets equivalent to 60 percent of our gross national product. And to put this in perspective, in the mid-1990s, these six banks or their predecessors had less than 20 percent.”
“Six Banks Control 60% of Gross National Product: Is the U.S. at the Mercy of an Unstoppable Oligarchy?”
– James Kwak interviewed by Bill Moyers

“A huge chunk of international banking and related financial operations have been created solely to manage dirty money.”
– from the book “DOPE, INC.”

“A global financial cabal engineered a fraudulent housing and debt bubble [2008], illegally shifted vast amounts of capital out of the US; and used ‘privatization’ as a form of piracy – a pretext to move government assets to private investors at below-market prices and then shift private liabilities back to government at no cost to the private liability holder… Clearly, there was a global financial coup d’etat underway.”
– Catherine Austin Fitts

“The relationship between the banking system and the mafia started in the 1960s and ’70s. In the ’60s and ’70s, the mafia basically handled cash in large amounts, although not as large as today because international crime was much smaller. It was mostly Italian, North American, and with some other affiliations, but it was limited in size.”
– former UN Under-Secretary-General and Executive Director of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime Antonio Maria Costa, 2012

“The merger between banks and drug groups materialized as a result of two-way traffic. World-class banks seek out money globally and offer to drug lords the services in the form of whitewashing cash and investing it in legal sectors of the economy. The drug cartels, in turn, regard the banking sector as a priority investment niche.”
– Valentin Katasonov

“In Britain, the MI6 drug money is laundered through the Bank of England, Barclays Bank and other household name companies. The drug money is passed from account to account until its origins are lost in a huge web of transactions.”
– James Casbolt

“The British Crown Colony of Hong Kong, with the British Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation (HSBC) at the top, is considered the number-one money-laundering center for the heroin trade … Illegal drugs are the biggest business in the Far East-and close to being the biggest business in the world – but in Hong Kong, drugs do not merely dominate the economy: They are the economy.”
– from the book Dope, Inc.

“Our global banking system is a global cartel, a “super-entity” in which the world’s major banks all own each other and own the controlling shares in the world’s largest multinational corporations.
… This is the real ‘free market’, a highly profitable global banking cartel, functioning as a worldwide financial Mafia.”
– Andrew Gavin Marshall

“Goldman Sachs’ influence extends beyond the ability of its analysts and traders to drive stock or bond prices up and down, as they do daily with the reports they write and the decisions they make to buy or sell securities… It creates new financial instruments that shape the global marketplace, it can make or break the CEOs and government ministers who regularly pass through its doors looking for capital and for “buy” recommendations linked to their decisions, and it serves as the hub of an international network of deal makers.”
– David Rothkopf

“There is a special breed of international financiers whose success typically is built upon certain character traits. Those include cold objectivity, immunity to patriotism, and indifference to the human condition. That profile is the basis for proposing a theoretical strategy, called the Rothschild Formula, which motivates such men to propel governments into war for the profits they yield… As long as the mechanism of central banking exists, it will be to such men an irresistible temptation to convert debt into perpetual war and war into perpetual debt.”
– G Edward Griffin in his book The Creature from Jekyll Island

“The merger between banks and the drug-supplying groups began roughly four centuries ago. In Great Britain, the alliance comprised the British East India Company to which the government issued an exclusive license for opium trade in India and other British colonies and the first British banks including the Bank of England, Barings Bank, and the Rothschild London Bank.”
– Valentin Katasonov

“Weapons of financial mass destruction deployed by Central Bankers and Disaster-Capitalists, under the guise of protecting the markets and improving the efficiency of the system, vacuum the wealth of the nations – the work people produce – into ever fewer hands…
With all governments indebted to them and most ignorant of their existence, they foment chaos at will, incite or tranquillise populations as required, and maneuver legislation appropriate to their insatiable greed.”
– Niall Bradley

“The banks – hard to believe in a time when we’re facing a banking crisis that many of the banks created – are still the most powerful lobby on Capitol Hill. And they frankly own the place.”
– Senator Dick Durbin

“The United States has entered the ranks of the failed states. One of the most remarkable manifestations of a failed state is that the criminals are all inside the government operating against the people, whereas in a normal state, the criminals are on the outside of the government, operating against it. So, we now have every manifestation of being a failed state, with the government in the hands of a few Wall Street gangsters.”
– Paul Craig Roberts

“Bank CEOs represent their shareholders, they’re appointed by the board of directors to make money for their shareholders. And the way they think that they can best make money is to shape the regulatory rules around housing around derivatives,.. everything we used to have that kept the financial sector under control has all been washed away, one way or another, by their efforts. They make money in the boom. And when bad things happen, they shove all the downside onto the taxpayer.”
– Simon Johnson, former Chief Economist at the International Monetary Fund

“The financial and political crises which have rocked the United States and Europe since 2008 occurred because people with dangerous personality disorders were able to rise to positions of power within financial institutions and effectively bankrupt much of the western world…
Once in positions of authority, these individuals simply did what comes naturally to them. They pursued their own self-interest with no regard for the consequences of their actions.”
– Ian Hughes

“If you’re very bright, know how to dress well; you have, say, the gift of the gab; you’re raised in an affluent family background; [then] you don’t go in the bank and rob it, you get in the bank and become a director.”
– Robert Hare in his 1970 book Psychopath: Theory and Research

“Bank CEOs have no fear for the government … and they have no not an ounce of gratitude to the American people, who saved them, their jobs, and the way they run the world.”
– Simon Johnson, former Chief Economist at the International Monetary Fund

“There is a transnational ruling class, a “Superclass”, that agrees on establishing a world government. The middle class is targeted for elimination, because most of the world has no middle class, and to fully integrate and internationalize a middle class, would require industrialization and development in Africa, and certain places in Asia and Latin America. The goal of the Superclass is not to lose their wealth and power to a transnational middle class, but rather to extinguish the notion of a middle class, and transnationalize a lower, uneducated, labor oriented class, through which they will secure ultimate wealth and power.
The global economic crisis serves these ends, as whatever remaining wealth the middle class holds is in the process of being eliminated, and as the crisis progresses, the middle classes of the world will suffer, while a great percentage of lower classes of the world, poverty-stricken even prior to the crisis, will suffer the greatest, most probably leading to a massive reduction in population levels, particularly in the “underdeveloped” or “Third World” states.”
– Andrew Gavin Marshall