Of pandemics and totalitarianism
Key Markets report for Wednesday, 27 May 2026
Pandemics are still a thing and they’re not going away soon. This month (seems like forever ago) has seen a renewed escalation of pandemic narratives, first with the frightening outbreak of Hantavirus and then even more frightening outbreak of Ebola virus – again. The Hantavirus story seems to have dissipated, but it may not be over; it could be making a comeback in mid-June. Today’s article condenses a more detailed report I’ll publish today on my personal Substack, with video (probably in two parts).
Perhaps the most important question to answer is: where is all this coming from, and why? I tried to answer that key question is an article I wrote in August of 2020. Its title was, “Covid 19: the banking cartel is driving the agenda.” It may seem strange that bankers of all people would be weighing in on matters of public health and infectious diseases, but they did, and by today much evidence emerged that the bankers are the ultimate instigators of pandemic fearmongering.
Incoherent and tyrannical
In 2020, Covid 19 was a colossal train wreck and the measures implemented by the public health authorities around the world seemed calculated to inflict harm. The official narrative was utterly incoherent, but as the situation deteriorated, the authorities turned increasingly tyrannical. The media were relentlessly inciting fear and for many months, it was all Covid all the time, with nonstop case count announcements and calls for compliance with ever sillier “measures” that were unscientific and ineffective.
For example, more than four months into the “pandemic,” 71 nations issued nearly identical mandates for people to wear masks in public spaces, even though there was strictly no scientific evidence that this served any purpose. In my article I asked: “Has everyone worldwide gone insane? If it is not science and logic that’s informing the public health measures, then what is it? And then it hit me… A few weeks earlier I noted that Belarus’ president Alexander Lukashenko publicly snubbed a $940 million line of credit from the International Monetary Fund.
Lukashenko rejected the loan because the IMF conditioned it on Belarus imposing a strict Covid 19 lockdown policy and a curfew. At the time I thought it was very strange that the IMF would offer a large loan to a nation while setting conditions that would wreck that nation’s economy and severely impair her ability to repay it. Significantly, Lukashenko mentioned on several occasions that the IMF negotiators wanted Belarus to do “like in Italy.” The only reason why we know about the IMF’s strange loan terms is that Lukashenko spoke publicly about them. Many other countries (in fact, at least 85 of them) took IMF loans but kept mum about the terms.
Pandemics and banking crises
It may not be a coincidence that the COVID 19 pandemic came on the back of a gathering collapse in the banking sector. In September 2019, the Federal Reserve was forced to step into the REPO markets as the lender of last resort, the first such intervention since the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. When central banks step into the repo markets, that’s a sure sign that the system is on the verge of collapse.
In 2021 the Fed set up a Standing Repo Facility which has been on standby since the pandemic with nearly zero transactions until September 2025 when it saw a sharp rise in activity. The Bank of England has been active in British repo markets since the summer of 2024 and the ECB has followed suit. Last November, the ECB issued a stark warning that Euro zone banks must prepare for unprecedented shocks causing severe disruptions with far-reaching consequences for the financial system.
Why bankers love pandemics
Even if the financial crisis is imminent, how does a pandemic help? Well, there’s a lot you can do behind the smokescreen an emergency that you couldn’t do in normal conditions, especially if those emergencies suspend the ordinary functioning of society. For example, you could lock people down and impose curfews to contain the risk of disruptive uprisings of uppity serfs.
You can also grant yourself massive bailout funds under the pretense of saving the economy. You could withdraw cash to stop the contagion and impose central bank digital currencies and other forms of draconian controls under the guise of keeping everyone safe. Some of those systems of control have already been developed. In 2023, the WHO, in Partnership with the European Commission launched the Global Digital Health Certification Network (GDHCN) based on EU’s Digital Certification System, the COVID-era vaccine passports scheme.
GDHCN represents the infrastructure for a permanent, digital ID and health passport system to track and restrict individuals’ movements, access to services, travel, employment, or public spaces based on compliance. Its purpose is to transition the society toward a technocratic tyranny under a one-world government, a permission-based society enabling a centralized global governance, linking individuals’ health data with digital IDs, central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) and social credit scoring, where all our basic rights and activities would be subject to permissions and arbitrary restrictions. Creating this kind of infrastructure is a large, long-term investment, reflecting the ruling establishment’s ambition to use it.
Lock Step
The bankers’ fingerprints on such plans can be found in a number of documents produced by the World Economic Forum under their Great Reset agenda. An earlier version of this plan was articulated in a document titled “Scenarios for the Future of Technology and International Development,” published by the Rockefeller Foundation in 2010.
On page 18, titled “Lock Step,” the document described their vision of the future as “A world of top-down government control and more authoritarian leadership, with limited innovation and growing citizen pushback.” The way they envisioned ushering this New Normal was a “pandemic the world had been anticipating for years…” Sure enough, we did get that “pandemic,” in 2020 along with the world of top-down government control and more authoritarian leadership.
The remarkable correlation
It is very important to appreciate that the coincidence of pandemics and authoritarian rule has an extensive historical track record. An important study, published in the Public Library of Science (PLOS) journal in 2013, examined 90 cultural populations for which empirical data were available for two key variables: (a) authoritarian governance and (b) historical prevalence of infectious disease. The article’s title was, “Pathogens and Politics: Further Evidence That Parasite Prevalece Predicts Authoritarianism“
The researchers found that the correlation between infectious diseases and authoritarian governance was as high as 73%. For social sciences, this is an astonishingly high and extremely rarely encountered correlation – it is higher than the correlation between IQ and test scores. What it says bears repeating: authoritarian rule tends to go hand in hand with outbreaks of infectious diseases. It follows that if someone wanted to introduce a totalitarian rule over the whole world, a global pandemic would be the perfect means to facilitate that agenda.
Are data centers part of the plan?
In Monday’s report, I mentioned the recent interview with Tucker Carlson, economist Richard Werner who proposed that the mad frenzy to build thousands of large data centers around the world would serve exactly that purpose: “… to micromanage the world’s population through the New Financial World Order. We’re heading towards digital control systems where we have no more control over our liquid assets. It will be programmable, permission-based, so only what the central planners allow you to use your money for, at what time and place and location will be permitted. … It is the totalitarian dictator’s dream come true.”
Yes, it’s a conspiracy
Clearly, to coordinate all this - to make sure it all comes together and serves a desired purpose entails a conspiracy. Sure, well educated men (and women) know not to ascribe to malice what can be ascribed to incompetence, but the reality could be exactly the opposite: we shouldn’t dismiss malice, nor assume that incompetence could be furthering Orwellian plans. Abraham Lincoln, who knew a little about the schemes of his enemies, tried to explain the reality of conspiracies in common sense, intuitive terms:
“When we see a lot of framed timbers, different portions of which we know have been gotten out at different times and places, and by different workmen… And when we see those timbers jointed together, and see they exactly make the frame of a house or a mill… In such a case we find it impossible not to believe that … all understood one another from the beginning, and all worked upon a common plan, drawn up before the first blow was struck.”
The pandemic fear mongering, development of injectable “safe and effectives,” the vaccine passports and the infrastructure to administer the whole permitting system, along with the requisite data centers all figuratively represent those framed timbers which someone is working to joint together. Likely, this is the same "monolithic and ruthless conspiracy" that John F. Kennedy tried to warn us about. Thankfully, it appears that after the Covid trainwreck, more people are now alert to the nonsense which could hopefully derail the conspiracists’ plans.
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Today’s trading signals
With yesterday’s closing prices we have the following changes for the Key Markets portfolio:
