With a Wall Street pedigree at Goldman and Bear Stearns, how did this skilled and articulate money manager become one of central banking’s fiercest critics? Nomi Prins is the author of seven books drawing on her background in finance, as a former financial managing director. Her latest book is Collu- sion: How Central Bankers Rigged the World (Nation Books, 2018).

In Collusion, Prins exposes how unelected central bankers influence policy in our so- called democracies. Prins provides tools to help us understand something that felt so wrong, to so many: the bailout of the banks in the financial meltdown of 2007-2008. Much was kept hidden. Little was understood. But the people knew something was wrong. Prins takes aim at central bankers in Mexico, the BRICS, Japan and Europe. She shows how the US Federal Reserve and its international clones march in lockstep to serve the financial elite, and each other, not the people.

New York Megaphone is pleased to feature these two excerpts from Collusion for our readers, reprinted with the author’s permis- sion. Collusion is fittingly “Dedicated to the citizens of the world.”

From Collusion, page 1:

The 2007-2008 US financial crisis was
the consequence of a loosely regulated banking system in which power was concentrated in the hands of too limited a cast of speculators. Since the crisis, G7 central banks have pumped money into private banks through an unconventional monetary policy process called quantitative easing (QE). QE is an overtly complex term that entails a central bank manufacturing electronic money and then injecting

it into banks and financial markets in return for purchasing bonds or securities (or stocks). The result of this maneuver is to lift the money supply within the financial system, reduce interest rates (or the cost of borrowing money, disproportionally in favor of the bigger banks and corporations),

and boost the value of those securities. The whole codependent cycle is what I call a “conjured- money” scheme, wherein the cost of money is rendered abnormally cheap.

...

The danger with having a system rely on so much conjured capital is that when central bankers stop manifesting it, it could go into shock; markets could plunge, credit seize, and a new crisis emerge. That’s why central banks are walking the tightrope between al- tering their policies and doing nothing to alter them, thereby continuing them by default, with no exit plan.”

From Collusion, page 249:

“ Another byproduct of the financial crisis and central bank collusion was the rise in eco- nomic anxiety that spawned a swing towards nationalism, from Brazil to Great Britain to the United States. The shock of Brexit in the United Kingdom reverberated around
the world as voters turned away from the incumbent leadership and its failed economic policies. In the United States. The election victory of Donald Trump, the billionaire “anti establishment” president, was another mani- festation of this trend. These landmark votes were not caused by central banking policy directly but were the effects.”