Godfrey Bloom - Elite Financial Institutions: Controlling Our Lives from the Shadows

Show notes and Transcript

Godfrey Bloom is well known for his time as a UKIP MEP in the European Parliament where he served 3 terms, but he joins Hearts of Oak today to discuss all things finance. 
Godfrey's career was in the military, financial economics and he spent many years as an investment banker. 
He has written many books including 'The Magic Of Banking: The Coming Collapse'. 
Godfrey discusses how he has managed to fuse together a life in the army, in politics and in finance. 
He then then delves into the shadowy financial institutions which control all our lives and have pushed every government into a spiral of debt that will sooner or later collapse the global financial system. 
We finish by looking at gold and why Godfrey believes it is the perfect store of wealth.

Godfrey Bloom is a libertarian author with six books published on both military history & Austrian School Economics.
He worked in the City of London where he won an international prize for fund management (fixed interest) with Mercury Asset Management. Bloom finished his city career as General Manager of a life assurance company.
He represented Yorkshire & Lincolnshire in the European Parliament & was a staunch campaigner for Brexit for twenty five years.
During his term of office he attracted over sixty million views on his chamber speeches exposing State bank & tax malpractice on Facebook & You Tube. Thought to be an all time record. He brought experience if not influence to the mainly lay EU Parliamentary Monetary & Economic Affairs Committee, putting both members & European Central Bank President under unaccustomed pressure.
Godfrey Bloom passed out of Royal Military Academy Sandhurst in 1976 & served as logistics liaison officer to 4th Armed Division in Germany. He is an Associate Member of the Royal College of Defence Studies & has presented papers & lectures to The RCDS, Joint Services Staff College, National Defence University Washington & too many universities to list. His speciality is procurement & geo political military strategy.
Godfrey Bloom is holder of the Territorial Decoration & bar, Sovereign’s Medal, Armed Forces Parliamentary Medal & European Parliamentary silver medal. 

Connect with Godfrey...
WEBSITE:     https://godfreybloom.uk/
X:                  https://x.com/goddersbloom?s=20
SUBSTACK: https://godfreybloom.substack.com/

Interview recorded 19.9.23

*Special thanks to Bosch Fawstin for recording our intro/outro on this podcast.

Check out his art https://theboschfawstinstore.blogspot.com/ and follow him on GETTR https://gettr.com/user/BoschFawstin and Twitter https://twitter.com/TheBoschFawstin?s=20 

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Transcript

(Hearts of Oak)

Godfrey Bloom, it is wonderful to have you with us today. Thank you so much for your time.

(Godfrey Bloom)

A pleasure to be here. 

Great to have you and people can follow you @GoddersBloom on Twitter. Godfreybloom.uk is the website and godfreybloom.substack.com. On the website you can get about gold and your wealth, the great reset, climate and green energy, COVID, military, all topics that I know our viewers and listeners will be interested in. But for our viewers who may not have come across Godfrey Bloom, he has a long and varied career encompassing financial services, army, politics. It was the politics where I first came across you serving two terms, I think for UKIP in the European Parliament. And one of Godfrey's books, all available on the website, but is The Magic of Banking, the coming collapse paperback. Now Godfrey, how did you manage to fuse together finance, military and politics? It's an interesting mix.

Well, of course, it's the only advantage of being very old is that you get lots of opportunities to do lots of stuff. So it's not because I'm particularly clever, it's because I'm particularly old. So just to bear in mind my background in the 1960s, I went into the city with a very prestigious Broking House in the 1960s, about 1966-67, in those days.
Now, in those days, if you were going to get anywhere in the city, it was, first of all, you had to wear a bowler hat. You had to have a bowler hat, and it seems a long time ago now, but you didn't have to wear it, you just had to make sure you had it on the hat stand. I still got it. And the other thing, a couple of things, all the senior directors were wartime officers. All the middle management were National Service officers. So you had to have some kind of military connection.
Shore Service Commission, Territorial Army Commission, perhaps with a prestigious regiment.
And so on and so forth, and you had to play rugger, as we called it in those days.
I ticked every box in a fairly modest kind of way.
That all fused together. As you go through life, something pops up.
My main life was an investment fund manager, a pension investment fund manager, specializing in fixed interest with a view to pension investment.
Dull, very un-prestigious. The equity boys were the glamour boys. It was a bit like the difference between a fighter pilot in the war and coastal command. I was more coastal command. So that's what you had to do. And then I was in a territorial regiment and I was then attached, I did a short service with regular back to the territorial army, so on and so forth.
Started in life armoured reconnaissance with 4th Armoured Division in Germany.
Where we had the sort of stuff that you see now in old black-and-white movies was actually state-of-the-art stuff when I was soldiering. It was all a very long time ago.
Then, when I worked for a very prestigious investment house in the city, I was asked to investigate the implications of becoming the common currency, as it was called then in the late 80s and early 90s, what did it entail, so on and so forth.
I had a very good team of statisticians and people. I looked at that and I saw the implications.
I dug deeper into the implications of our membership of the European Union.
And the deeper I dug, the smellier the whole thing got.
And that drew me into politics in 2004, where I resigned from the board of financial service companies and went into politics, which was an eye-opening experience.
So that's why I came to do all these things. You couldn't do that now, I don't think, because the world has changed and everything is really too focused on micromanagement and micro career patterns and so on and so forth.
So I was very lucky to be born when I was, you could have a really holistic kind of career pattern, which gave me my army and politics and business.
So I had all three. I don't think you could do that now. 

Very true. And I think that connection with the military and our politics public service has gone as well.
And I think that's a shame for our country.
But let me talk to you. Many people think they are free to vote for what they want.
They're free to go where they want.
They're free to use their money as they want.
But it's that financial freedom or maybe lack of it. I want to talk to you about.
There are financial institutions that can operate in the shadows that control our lives.
And I know you've written about this, you've done videos about this.
Do you want to kind of touch on that and maybe pull the veil slightly back on that?

Well, I think it was Jacob Rothschild who actually got it dead right, for better or for worse, and I would suggest worse.
And that was, he said, it doesn't matter who you vote for, it's who controls the money.
And of course it's been the Rothschilds being part of the cabal that controls money.
Since I don't know, probably 120, 130 years at least, not just in this country, in Europe as well.
So he who controls the money. And of course, as we become a more secular society, money becomes the primary goal. It is the religion.
It is the religion of Western Europe, it's the religion of North America. It's how much money.
In a secular society, of course, you lose any form of moral compass.
If indeed, perhaps there was any moral compass, I don't know, but I'm sure there was more moral compass in yesteryear than there is now.
So the deal is, and which means you can buy any journalist and you can buy any politician.
And almost every single journalist and every single politician is bought.
There are very few exceptions. It isn't always overt, but you've only got to look at certain responses from journalists.
And I'll give you one very easy example of that. In Syria, for example, when the CIA and the Washington neo-cons are trying to destabilize Syria in order to get their pipeline coming from Qatar, it's all about money, it's all about money and influence, and this is what was happening.
Then of course you would find the CIA would put out a press release saying Assad has dropped poison gas on his own people and he's a very bad guy.
That would be a CIA press release. Now, people like Andrew Neil on BBC TV would read that out within hours of it being circulated.
There was no possible question of us checking whether it was true or not.
And Andrew Neil, who was a sort of dwyan of supposedly independent broadcasting, joke, joke, would read that out with a straight face, which meant everybody watching BBC would believe that to be true.
And of course, subsequently, we find out that it wasn't true at all.
It was CIA propaganda. Or indeed, I have to say, sadly, MI6 or MI5 propaganda.
So you're getting a constant stream of lies from legacy broadcasting, and people believe that it was the same in the fake pandemic.
80% of people in this country will believe it if it's on the BBC, and psychologically, I did a course with the Smithsonian Institute on trying to get to the bottom of this psychologically.
80% of the people, I don't think it's just true of Britain, I think it's 80% of most of the Western industrialized countries, will believe anything they're told, and people do. The people who push back against it are kicked out or de-platformed. I mean I'm de-platformed. I used to be a regular speaker at Cambridge University and various other universities.
I can't get on now. I haven't been interviewed by the BBC now for years. Dissent is verboten.
So there's no concept of dissent. But if you do an audit trail of all of it and you if you go right back and find out why is this. You will find it's about money or political power.
There are no exceptions and there are no good guys left in politics.

Well obviously in finance we've seen, I mean Nigel Farage just talked about his issues with banking, it's happened to many many others and it seems as though banks can punish people for whatever reason and I think that's a world away from the traditional view of the bank being someone who kind of looks after your money, it's safe, it's cared for, it's maybe invested well, and I think what we've seen in the last few months has been a completely different side from the banks.

Yes, but of course the banks have been politicized as well, have they not?
You're looking at concepts of ESG, so your ratings for stock holdings by BlackRock and Vanguard, who are the biggest investors in the world, together they own the world, basically.
They actually own each other, but that's another long story.
So you have Larry Fink and people of this Vanguard, of course, and people you don't even know who voted, because it's not publicly quoted, so you don't even quite know who really owns it. So, it's highly politicized.
And, of course, the situation with Nigel Farage was interesting, because NatWest and Coutts are 38% owned by the government.
So, you couldn't get more to be more of a political bank than NatWest.
It is a government bank.
And the chief executive was put there because she was a government appointee.
She has no knowledge of anything, finance, whatever. I mean, laughable. I mean, when I was the director of a main investment bank years ago, I wouldn't have employed her to clean the cars. She's utterly hopeless. She's a political agitator with a clean, squeaky-clean record, common purpose, WEF, the whole tutti-frutti. Of course.
Expertise went out, and so did discretion and confidentiality. She had to go because she broke confidentiality, which is at the basis of banking, and Coutts in particular, where I also used to be a client when I had enough money to be a client of Coutts Bank. So you have all these problems.
Of course, it's interesting enough, she's gone. She went with £2.3 million payoff.
And I bet you anything you like, in two or three months, she'll pop up somewhere else in a very senior, very highly paid appointment. That's how the game plan works, all right?
So, it's all about money and so on and so forth, but of course, I have to say...
This has been going for some time. They did the same thing to Tommy Robinson, they did the same thing to Britain First, they did the same thing with the political platform of For Britain.
They were debanked, which means it's very difficult to function in modern society if you have no form of bank. You can't collect subscriptions, you can't do anything.
Interesting though, I have to say, this has been going on for some time.
But when it happened to Nigel? That's a different game, is it? Oh, that's a much different game. It happened to Nigel. Nigel wasn't bothered about this until it happened to him. It's the old theory, isn't it, of Winston Churchill.
You placate the crocodile on the basis that you hope he will eat you last.

No, it's true. I thought exactly the same, although I was thankful for a high-profile figure to highlight the injustice. But you're right, it's happened to most individuals don't have the ability to have a nationally out program or a newspaper column to talk about this injustice.
So at least it is being aired. But as you pointed out, the madness of a bank being partially government owned and the government said, it's not our fault.
And you wonder, well, whose fault is this? And they were blaming past regulation.
You mentioned some of those companies, BlackRock and Vanguard, and these are shadowy companies.
They own parts of many companies. They're very large shareholders of many institutions.
Kind of how has it got to that? Should that worry people? Is this just how financing capitalism works or is there a darker side to this?

No, one has to just remind everybody, certainly the younger generation, the difference between mercantilism and capitalism.
Capitalism is laissez-faire. It means that you invest, you pretty well do what you damn well like, and the only demonstration of true capitalism post-war, of course, was Hong Kong under John Cooperthwaite, where his view was, it's my job to make sure the drains work and the police aren't corrupt, nothing else is my business. That's capitalism and of course that produced one of the most successful territories on the face of the planet in a very short period of time with no natural resources. Hong Kong has no natural resources. What we have now is mercantilism, which is sometimes referred to as crony capitalism, but it's got nothing to do with capitalism.
Now, in a nutshell, how these sort of things work, I used to work for a company called Mercury Asset Management, which was part of the Warburg Empire.
It was the biggest pension fund manager in Europe.
I was the representative of the National Association of Pension Funds, the institution there, as well as being a fund manager.
I wasn't on the main board, incidentally. I was on a junior board, but believe me, I knew how the game worked.
Now, when you're doing that, Merck Asset Management then owned 4% of the European stock market.
That's a very significant number. It doesn't sound like much, but 4% of the stock market is big.
Then they were acquired by Merrill Lynch, a big American investment house, and then Merrill Lynch were acquired by BlackRock, and so it goes on, and so it gets bigger and bigger, almost like a sort of an astrophysicist would talk to you about a black hole.
It becomes bigger and bigger, and the gravity pull is beyond human imagination.
And then of course the oligarchs are part of that, and they're rich beyond most of our dreams. I mean the George Soros's of this world, the Bill Gates of this world, the Mark Zuckerberg's of this world, all these people are wealthy beyond imagination. And so you'd have to go back to the Rockefellers, to find people who were that rich in comparison.
And what is interesting then, they would produce organizations, institutions, like the Bill and Melinda Gates and so on and so forth, and the Rockefeller Foundation.
And these also get hijacked politically, and you can go back to the Quaker side in this country, to Roundtrees, for example.
Quaker, and they were very good to their employees, and they had an ethos, a Quaker ethos.
And now there's a very wealthy Roundtree Foundation, which is hijacked, politically, completely.
It's woke.
The National Trust is woke. Everything has become woke. And woke is really just part of the World Economic Forum's game plan. And this grows and grows in power.
So you end up now with a prime minister who is World Economic Forum, no shame about it. No conspiracy theory yet. You know, somebody's always conspiring. That's absolute nonsense. Look at their website. It's perfectly up front. They boast about this.
The Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the leader of the opposition, Starmer, when asked, do you think Parliament or Davos, which was the most important, he said, Davos. The King who gives royal assent to our laws now is World Economic Forum agent.
In fact, as far as I understand, he could be the top man. I'm never quite sure whether Klaus Schwab reports to him or vice versa but the principle is the same.
So now, of course, they control everything, and Bill Gates is the biggest farmer in the United States.
He owns more land in the United States than anybody else.
It's very difficult for ordinary people to fight against this, and they certainly can't fight against it with a vote.
Vote is totally meaningless, and so you have these huge power blocs, and our elected politicians, are simply stooges. Penny Mordaunt, for example, is a stooge to Bill Gates. He wrote a forward for her book. She's an advocate of Bill Gates. All these people are paid, and we have a CIA, who, with a huge budget, an unaudited budget, they could pay you to interview certain people or not interview certain people in a Swiss bank account. Very significant amount of money.
And most people have a price.
Most people can be bought.
And those who can't be bought are people like Neil Oliver, on a much smaller scale, me.
You can't buy me, but I'm few. I'm one of the very few, and you can't buy me because money is not my God.
I don't know whether you could buy me with other things. I can't imagine what they would be.
So some people are incorruptible, but that's a tiny minority, and that certainly doesn't work in politics.

How have you seen, looking back at the industry, how finance works, kind of, how have you seen a change?
Has part of it been more scrutiny? Has part of it been the internet opens up the ability to question, with the public going direct?
I mean, Neil Oliver, obviously on GB News, but having a huge reach on social media.
Kind of, how have you seen a change? and how has social media affected the people's awareness of maybe what is happening?

Well, social media is a wonderful thing. You know, it's a wonderful thing that you can get a significant footprint on that. But again, most people, it's still sadly legacy TV. It's still the BBC or ITV or whatever it happens to be that calls the shots. People who follow social media of course are the most informed but then if you look at my whole, just let's take me, my whole footprint is probably, I probably in total have overall something like 160,000 subscribers.
That really isn't very many. Obviously, Neil Oliver is much bigger, and I'm glad of that because he's, in my view, a great man, a great historian, and a great leader of thought.
So I'm a huge supporter of his. But there's still most people, most people go with the flow, they half watch BBC, they half watch ITV, doing something else, putting a shelf up, doing the ironing, whatever it is.
So most people accept what they're told.
Most people, of course, when it comes to things like pandemics or so-called pandemics, listen to their doctor. People have this divine faith in the National Health Service, which is, of course, ludicrous if you dig down into it, but most people do.
 Again, it's a legacy thing, and it goes back to people being brought up on Doctor in the House, black and white, Ealing movies, funny enough, where you are now. Wonderful things when it worked and when it was incorrupt.
Now, of course, that's all gone.
The Bank of England, central banks are now political appointees.
You have your head of your central bank, Carney is a classic example, brought in as a Canadian, ex-Goldman Sachs, most of them are ex-Goldman Sachs, which is known as the vampire squid in the city.
Even hard-nosed investment bankers like mine used to regard them as beyond the pale.
These are the sort of Vlad the Impaler of the investment banking world, but they're all political appointees, so Carney was a political appointee.
So that this nonsense of the Bank of England being independent.
So it doesn't work like that and they go on to other political appointments with the UN or the International Monetary Fund or the Bank of International Settlements which of course nobody ever told us about, which is the most powerful institution in the world.
So all these things come together to thwart the ordinary guy.
In my experience in Britain, and I don't know what your experience is Peter, but my experience is the true guy who questions anything of this nature is what we used to call the artisan class.
You're sparky, you're bricky, you're joiner. People who actually do real stuff for a living, they actually put kitchens in, shelves in, drive a cab.
People who actually do a real job for a living are very much more highly critical and much better informed.
So for example, my window cleaner is simply miles more informed than my friends who read history or law at Oxford.
You know, the dinner party set, your English middle class are so gullible and naive.
It's unbelievable. A working man having a pint in the pub who's a sparky or a chippy, he's not so gullible because he does a real job and sees stuff every day.
So the divide, you have this divide. And people make a big mistake if they think, and people do, that the divide is somehow between class, particularly, or skin colour, or wealth.
Well, it isn't. I can tell you. And 10 years in politics showed me this campaigning for Brexit, for example.
The people who really understood these matters were the artisan class, but your divide in society is between those in the wealth-creating sector and those in the public sector.
Your public sector, your civil servant, your man at the town hall, anybody who works for the government is protected.
They have index-linked pension funds, which have long since gone from the private sector.
These people are virtually unsackable, the Quangos.
All these people are entitled and have the arrogance of office.
There's your divide. It's not old or young or black and white.
It's who works for the government in some form and who doesn't.
There's your divide.
Of course, in the last five years, we've seen over 100,000 new civil servants.
One might imagine that they won't be happy until everyone is a civil servant and therefore everybody can be controlled.

If only we had a conservative government, but I see the same difference in conversations with friends, with colleagues, and I echo what you said.
Everything we knew about finance seems to have gone out the window, gone out of fashion. I mean, saving money, don't spend more than you earn, invest wisely, make sure your repayments are manageable, have cash in hand for a rainy day.
Now every government worldwide seems to be in a rush to see who can run the biggest deficit, who can get the biggest debt. And governments, maybe at one time, would have been common sense.
It's this rush to spend much more than any other government. What are your thoughts on kind of how we have got to that state of financial madness?

Well, the problem we've had is Keynesianism. That's from the 1930s, where personal savings were regarded as a bad thing.
Public spending and private spending and consumption was regarded as a good thing, and debt doesn't matter. This is your Keynesian theory which has been taught now to generations of people in universities and schools and they don't teach alternatives, they don't teach Austrian school economics, they don't mention some of the great names of yesteryear like you know some of the great French economic philosophers.
So they don't talk about this. Debt doesn't matter.
They can print money. Of course, in 1971 when America came off the gold standard, the dollar came off the gold standard, which was the reserve currency in 1971, Nixon closed the gold window, which was the technicality of the problem.
You see the spending power of the United States dollar from 1971.
That 1971dollar now would buy you six cents worth of services and goods, a complete collapse of paper currency.
And of course, sterling's worse, and so on and so forth. So it's the degradation of money and it's the unseen tax inflation.
So who does inflation hurt?
It holds people on fixed income, old-age pensioners. Mainstream society suffers from inflation, but not your public sector.
For example, if you're in the public sector, and certainly if you're a pensioner, I have a small pension for the Ministry of Justice, because I worked for them for a while.
I won't go into the details there.
It's very small.
But last year I got an 8.5 percent increase, and I'll get another 8.5 percent, so I'm protected.
I live in a small village, but we have retired civil servants in the village, totally protected.
Always got new cars, expensive holidays, and extensions to their cottages or houses.
Money is no object to them because they're protected. But if you're on fixed income, you're stuck.
And it gets back to what I say, there's this divide in society, some people who are affected by inflation and some who are not.
So when you consider debt doesn't matter, and of course, to keep up, try and give a modern veneer to it, they've taken away the term Keynesianism by calling it modern monetary theory.
There's nothing modern about it. And that somehow, and this is the great key, and I tried to explain this to undergraduates when I was allowed to speak at universities.
And the faculties who don't understand it, believe me, the faculties at universities have absolutely no more idea about the economic supply to the moon.
So they have these thoughts that debt doesn't matter, that somehow an individual like you or me or a small businessman.
Debt doesn't matter.
Debt matters. You can't get into debt because debt will catch up with you and your business will go out or you'll go bankrupt.
They'll come and take away your furniture, etc.
That's for us.
Somehow a government doesn't have this problem. Apparently, governments go on spending and spending more money, and borrowing and printing more money with no great effect. It really doesn't matter.
Of course, it does matter as we're beginning to see because actually now in the United States, servicing the national debt is exactly the same amount of money as their military budget, which is $1 trillion a year.
They're spending $2 trillion in the United States a year, to no purpose, $2 trillion.
And then mainstream media, which of course is bought and paid for by the state, the BBC in particular, if you don't pay the BBC you go to prison and that's a government-sponsored idea.
Nobody challenges it. For example, you get to the chancellor of the exchequer interviewed.
We now have the highest tax regime that we've had basically since the war.
Nobody ever suggests, in either political party or in mainstream media, nobody ever suggests that they cut government spending.
It never happens. Nobody stands on the platform of cutting government spending.
So you have high-speed rail, 100 billion.
You have OECD, which incidentally is unaudited, 1 billion pounds a month.
Five billion pounds to the Ukraine.
God alone knows where that goes.
And so on and so forth. So we spend quangos, probably 600 or 700 billion pounds a year in all these things.
They could halve income tax. They could standardize income tax.
They could halve VAT if they stopped spending.
But stopping spending doesn't happen. It doesn't occur to them to stop spending.
So when they say, oh, more money for the national health, we need more money for the national health because it's crumbling and breaking down. They don't need any more money. The national health system is rolling in money. Their problem is that out of the 1.2 million employees that they have, half of those aren't medics of any sort. They're not radiographers, physiotherapists, nurses, doctors, surgeons. Goodness knows what they all do. Yes, you need some administrators, you need some sparkies, you need bits and pieces, but do you need 600,000? Procurement.
Procurement. My sister used to work for the Norwich Infirmary.
She said, I can buy mattresses online, exactly the same, for a third of the price that we spend on them, because nobody's in charge of procurement.
Nobody cares about public money, because it's not their money.
We have waste on an unprecedented scale.
The concept has gone of the public purse. If you went back to before the Great War, if you were a councillor, first of all, you'd be unpaid, there'd be no expenses, and there was a very serious concern about the public purse, taken very seriously from a moral dynamic.
Nobody cares about the public purse now. Nobody cares.
Does debt matter? Well, yes, it does matter, and we are going to see in the next few years, we're going to see a collapse of the banking system, and we're going to see a collapse of fiat currency. It's paper. It's intrinsically worthless. Then the people who survive that will be the people who have the foresight to buy gold, gold coins. 

Well, I want to finish off on gold, but let me just pick up on the move away from fiat, the restrictions on using cash, often in shops and businesses. It's coming more and more, closing of ATMs, closing of bank branches, and this move towards central bank digital currencies, this move towards a new government control. I mean, how have you viewed this? Give us a little bit more of your thoughts on where it's going.

Well, the key, of course, to central bank digitalization, which we have to an extent already, of course, nobody, De La Rue do not print notes anymore. It's created electronically. And, of course, I explain this in my book. If you go in and want to borrow £60,000 for an extension, or you want to buy 20,000 pounds of gold, the bank clerk, if you're a good customer, and they know you, they will simply create that electronically by tapping it out and crediting your account. That's digital money. That's electronic money. It doesn't really exist.
Of course, then you send it to somewhere else, the person who's sending you a car, so on and so forth. If you look at the international regulation Basel III, for example, and you have to keep 10% reserves.
If you put your money, if you put 100,000 pounds into the bank, they only have to keep.

10,000 pounds of that back as a reserve. They can lend it on.
Of course, it doesn't matter to whom they lend it. This is one of the problems that we have.
It isn't good lending.
It's not sound lending. For example, the Euro bond buying process, when I was there and I was trying to look at what they were actually buying, oh, well, it's Asset Bank.
Sell them. No, Mr. Bloom, these are asset-backed bonds.
Well, they're not. You get BMW or VW Finance, for example. What you're actually buying is a bond and the asset is an aging BMW or Volkswagen.
It's not asset-backed at all.
We found this out in 2007, did we not, where people thought they were buying a mortgage from a doctor in Washington with a nice big house at Springpool in Arlington.
They weren't, they're buying trailer trash in South Chicago.
I didn't fall for it.
I was in the game at the time, but I knew what I was doing, because I'm an old man.
The children that run the city and run pension funds in some of these councils, they fell for it because they simply didn't do their homework.
You can't avoid homework.
You have all this degradation of everything, bonds, stocks, deposits, not backed, not guaranteed.
You have all these problems. The only way it can go is to destroy itself, to collapse.
We saw this in 2007 and 2008, but did we change anything?
We didn't change anything. Nothing changed.
It's the same thing. They've just printed more and more money and borrowed and spent more and more money.
Now we're in a situation where it simply must collapse. They want digital currencies so they can control it.
They can program it, and for those of subscribers who aren't familiar with the concept, I'm sure they are, otherwise they wouldn't be watching this program, but let's just take it from there.
It's programmable. The World Economic Forum, in line with the International Monetary Fund and the Bank of International Settlement will not want you to spend money on travel or petrol or meat.
Are all these things that they think are bad under the cover of saving the planet, which of course we all know is absolute nonsense, its fake, its fake science. But they've got to frighten people to comply with it. The planet will boil if you don't do this. And of course most people don't have the benefit of traditional education. So they're being conned by people because a, they can't be bothered to do the homework, and b, they've probably in the main gone to a state school, this generation or the generation before, where they haven't really had an education at all. They're not educated at all. I mean, I speak at universities. Nice kids.
Like a beer, play rugby, play cricket. I love going there. Educated? They're not educated at all. They don't even pretend to be. So these are the problems. You have an uneducated workforce.
Programmable. So when you go in and it's programmable and the state can control it, the bank can control it, they will say you've had your ration of petrol this month. Just like the war, you've had your ration of meat this month. You've had your holiday, Mr. Bloom. You've had your holiday. You can't go on another holiday. Think of the planet, you nasty man. Of course, you look around and you see the King flying around in his private jet, the Royal Air, and all of them, Candy, all these people, Soros, Bill Gates... 

Sadiq Khan, who's just done a transatlantic flight with his entourage to talk about climate change. 

Exactly, so, everybody sees this, the question is what can you do? Now in London they reap what they sow.
I have very little sympathy for Londoners. It's the second time this man's been elected.
So whose fault is it? Well, did you vote against him? The answer is, you clearly didn't.
That's why he's there, it's the same as Mark Drakeford, isn't it?
In Wales, beautiful country, just got back there, hosted walking. I love Wales.
Wales is a wonderful, wonderful country and they've got an idiot running.
Well, why is he there?
Who put him there? Well, the Welsh voted for him, didn't they?
So it's as simple as that. And they've got a Muppet in Scotland.
And who voted for him? The Scots voted for him. So stop whinging.
Voting doesn't do much good, but it might because you can make more of an effort for whom you vote.
And so it's programmable and we know it's going to be programmable, don't we?
Because that's the whole point of it. And if you look at the World Economic Forum's spokesman on banking, they say it will be programmable. We'll know exactly how you spend it and what you can and cannot spend it on and they'll cancel it so you can't save because they are modern monetary theorists they will want for you to consume they will want you to consume so if you've got a hundred thousand pounds worth of savings or fifty thousand they say if you don't spend it by the end of the year it will disappear so that will encourage spending which they think is a good thing not saving but if you look at countries with the most successful systems over the years and over generations. It's savings. We built the biggest empire the world's ever seen and led the industrial revolution from about 1815 to 1913. The British led it, but it was based on sound money.
And savings and interest rates, which outpaced inflation, although there wasn't hardly any inflation in those days. Savings made a point. Saving money made a point. There's no point in you saving money now. There's no point in you saving money in the traditional sense of saving money because you know if you were saving money for a car, which costs £30,000 today, it'll be £40,000 next year. You might as well buy it now. That, of course, degrades your entire financial system. 

I want to finish off on gold. On your website, one of your tabs is gold. People can find it forward slash gold on godfreybloom.uk. It's intriguing, the more control that is being pushed upon us, the more people have talked about gold, also about crypto looking forward, but gold looking at that traditional store of wealth. Tell us why you believe that gold is an important store of wealth and why people should be taking advantage of that personally.

Well, gold is a store of wealth. It's not an investment and it's not get rich quick.
And as I always say to my undergraduates at universities, I always hold up a sovereign coin. The date on it is 1905. The date isn't really relevant, but it happens to be 1905.
I explained that a gold sovereign in 1905 would buy you bed and breakfast in quite a good hotel in Paris, London, New York, or Berlin. It will today, because a sovereign is worth just under 400 pounds, so it will today, and it will in 100 years' time.
Then we went back on to the gold standard after the Napoleonic Wars in 1860 and 1817. The Gold Sovereign became money. That was money. That was a preservation of wealth. That was a medium of exchange, which is what money is. I say, I try to explain money in the book. Most people don't know what money really is. They think they do, but they don't.
Now let's just take your staple commodity in the 19th century. Let's go from 1816 or 1817 to 1913, a loaf of bread was the same price in 1817 as it was in 1913.
You can't have inflation because if politicians and bankers can't print money, you can't print gold.
That's the beauty of gold, but it's not an investment, it's not get-rich-quick.
It's where you protect your wealth and you have to squirrel it away to protect your family because nobody can bugger it for you. They can't degrade it. Cryptocurrency like Bitcoin has some of the same attributes. It's significantly more volatile and there are all sorts of, situations where that might not do what you want it to do. But I'm not going to go down that route because there are bigger experts than me on Bitcoin, but gold, it's free of VAT.
There's no capital gains tax on it because it's coin of the realm.
If, let's say, for example, you are 60 years old, you're retired, you're coming up to retirement, something like that, you've worked hard all your life. Let's say you've got about £100,000 worth of saving or £50,000 worth of saving. It doesn't quite matter what it is.
You don't need it at the moment. You've got a bit of a pension. You've got a bit of this, you've got a bit of that. You're perfectly okay. What you're worried about is what happens when you get to my age and you're dribbling down your cardigan and you can't recognize your in-laws and you're deaf as a post and all the rest of it, you've got all these things, then you're going to need care, you're going to need private medical care, you can't drive anymore so you're going to need a cab if you're going to go anywhere, so on and so forth. What you want with that £100,000 or £50,000 when you're 60 is the same purchasing power when you're 75. Only gold will do that for you. Only gold, and it's been proven to do that for you, for 5,000 years. If you dig up a Roman gold coin today, or a Saxon gold coin today, it'll buy you just what it bought when it was buried in the ground or sank in the boat. That's your key. And that's where gold comes in, as it has done for 5,000. There really isn't anything else, to be brutally frank. Some people argue for silver, but it's an industrial metal, some for Bitcoin if you can cope with the volatility, so on and so forth. But that's why I'm a gold bug and I've been a gold bug since Gordon Brown sold our gold at something like 270 pounds an ounce to buy Euros. He's still sometimes brought on TV as an elder statement. The man is a buffoon. He's a buffoon. It's £1,600 an ounce now. And he got rid of our reserves. That's your reserves and my reserves. And anybody watching this clip who's British.
That was our gold.
So, he got rid of it and, of course, now if you look across the world, BRICS nations, Russia and China, are beginning to view perhaps gold as being the medium of exchange for countries and trade.
Not buying a newspaper, not buying a pound of sausages, you'll use whatever the currency of the day is for that, of course, that will continue.
For us in smaller gauge, it used to be coppers, copper pennies, silver pennies, all that.
Yeah, that won't change.
But for big deals, for big deals, for individuals, an exchange of trade and goods, it will be done in gold because that's the way it's been done for 5,000 years and nothing's going to change that.
Certainly not Muppets like Jeremy Hunt.

There's no bigger Muppet than Hunt. We will end on that.
Godfrey, I appreciate you coming on and people can follow you on Twitter godfreybloom.uk on the website and godfreybloom.substack.com Are those the best places to find you?

Yeah, absolutely. Yes, you can find me and I just, if I may just put a word in quickly here.
It is a not-for-profit website. Everything I do is not-for-profit.
I do not turn a buck on anything that I do recommending.
Even my books are virtually at cost because I don't need to make any money.
Now another advantage perhaps of being an old knacker is that I've got nothing to spend my money on except beer at the rugby club.

Well thank you, I've looked at the website and your Twitter and thoroughly enjoy them both for the information they provide. So thanks so much for coming on and sharing your thoughts on finance.

Great, Peter. Thank you for inviting me.