A Time of Turbulence
Whilst ‘real life’ appears to be continuing for most of us across the UK ‘as normal’, almost a month on from Wednesday 2nd April 2025, when Trumps Tariffs were first announced, the reality remains that shock waves are reverberating around the world – even though the American President has now put the whole thing on ice for everyone – other than China.
What most of us know as the global economy is peaking and troughing throughout the global markets system with a level of fear and mistrust that hasn’t been seen for a very long time. However, the fact that the financial system hasn’t come to a grinding halt already is being taken by some to mean that whatever Trump has done and will do, it will work itself out. And very quickly too.
Many others – and in this sense I am talking about economists (whether qualified or self-styled) and those who comment, report and write about economics – are talking about turmoil, a crash and even a new great depression.
Nonetheless, the words, stories and narratives are typically loaded with suggestion that whatever impact Trump blowing up the global economy may have, the results will only be temporary, and everything will soon return to the way that it has always been.
If you believe that, you’ll believe anything
One of the key reasons economists and so many others, made credible only by the platforms they have, speak about the turbulent and challenging times that we are within as if ‘it’s just one of those things’, is because they are completely bought in to the way that the global economic system works.
Most of those who dismiss the truths that lie behind the turbulence we were already experiencing before Trump even mentioned Tariffs are tied to the mast of an economic ship that has long been doomed by the money sirens call.
Those committed to the global economic model believe that it is only with the continuance of the system as we know it – with money working in the way it does today, that they themselves can continue to win, and stay on top.
Everyone bought in to the mess that some believe Trump intended to address will continue their dedication to it and champion it, until the evidence against their position speaks for itself and becomes undeniable, even for them.
The Trump model of Free Trade isn’t Free Trade at all. Its aims are market dominance and no more
The Trade Tariffs that have existed across many international borders until now, that have been used as an excuse for the Trump moves, were all that remained of a myth of protectionism. One that has maintained the belief of many different populations, that countries such as the UK can still be taken seriously as ‘global players’.
This is now very much in doubt.
Although arguably wafer thin and sometimes even self-defeating, the Tariff structure that already existed has provided what many nations needed to stay afloat within a massively manipulated global marketplace that itself has never really been about freedom to trade at all.
That same myth that comes into play every time a UK politician bigs up our international trading credentials will not provide anything like what is necessary to stand up against anyone, anymore.
Regrettably, this is not something we can expect to hear from any Labour front bencher or the representatives of any of the political parties that we can vote for, anytime soon.
Yet any step towards accepting an open free-trade deal of the kind that Trump is effectively demanding with the threat of explosive Tariffs will become an admission, through action, in very much the same way.
The carefully constructed, economic and intergenerational money ‘con’
The strange (and what really should be troubling) truth is the way that our accepted form of economics work today (Neoliberalism, MMT, FIAT Money and globalism in very short terms), and how we have all come to believe that the way money works is ‘normal’.
The accepted form of economics that effectively runs money and finance around the world today is more dark witchcraft and wizardry than it is, ever will or ever could be about building a fair, balanced and just system of commerce, economics or the processes that underpin life beneficially for everyone. And that’s why it has increasingly be causing so much pain.
Yet the system we have has been in place for so long that many genuinely believe there is no alternative and no other way.
The United States was right at the heart of this system’s creation, and it is the chronology of events and the timescales that the process and changes that brought the world here that help make the realities that underpin the way that money, finance and economics work, so hard for people to believe. Not least because it involves multiple generations, world level events and a whole lot of ‘democratic’ decision making that make the real story very hard to believe.
Right now, Labour politicians in the UK are trying to shift blame for all of the problems they are facing away from the decisions that they have made that have just started to come into effect, to Trumps Tariffs, along with everything they inherited from the Conservatives before them and every government over at least a 50-year period before that. All as what Trump has done will now be the only thing in economics that really counts.
The government and establishment can only do this because of what is akin to the cultural amnesia that we all have about political history.
We are suffering from a form of encouraged forgetfulness that has evolved over years, decades and even centuries of time, where the shortened attention spans we have all developed tell us that blame for the decisions, monetary and public policies that cause us harm can only be attributed in the here and now or be relevant to the tenure of the politicians who are in power, today.
Today’s problems have been over a century in the making
The first step towards the economic system that we have today came with the creation of the US ‘Fed’ or Federal Reserve that was implemented as the Central Banking System of the United States in 1913. (Yes – that’s one hundred and twelve years ago!).
The second was the Bretton Woods Agreement in 1944, towards the end of the Second World War, which effectively put the world’s economy at the beck and call of the US (and therefore the Fed).
The third, and arguably the most pivotal was the ending of the Gold Standard in 1971, when the whole idea that money should be pegged to the fixed value of the amount of gold that any nation owned was finally dropped, primarily by then US President Richard Nixon – and then by pretty much everyone else.
It really was no accident that gold backed currencies were dropped at around the very same time that the use of all the magic tools that make today’s bogus economic system work, such as GDP were adopted. And leaps towards so called ‘free markets’ and bureaucratised world government were made, most notably for us in the UK across Europe through the Common Market which then evolved into being the EU, as if it was ‘just one of those things’.
The devil was always in the detail. But excuses built on complexity could never override the gut feelings that have told increasing numbers that something is very wrong
Whilst the ‘anti-European Union’* groups of the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s were quite deliberately caricatured as being lost on nostalgia, nationalism and many other unsavory attributes that have been carefully crafted as extreme and funneled towards the political ‘right’, the reality is that the mistrust of what was then just portrayed as being only about removing barriers to trade and the wish of many who believed in their national identity to stick to basic principles of sovereignty, has been proven to be correct many times over.
Everything that has happened was very carefully thought out, planned, coordinated and orchestrated, using a clear understanding of what it would take to create public buy-in of anything necessary within the public awareness, that could then be used to cover and in reality hide so much more that was not.
Public acquiescence, engineered by governments that were ‘democratically’ elected, using manipulative narratives and even the 1975 United Kingdom European Communities Membership Referendum – deliberately created political divides all the way along. However, the real damage to us was that they unknowingly gave a green light awarding power to unscrupulous politicians and bureaucrats to change everything and ultimately life as we know it.
All in ways presented to us, our parents and grandparents, that few would complain about. Because we have all been continually told it was about growth, wealth, prosperity – all under the guise of ‘trade’.
Whilst the US may not have been directly involved in the political sub-global system European experiment, that was little more than a trial franchise of the intended global model, they have nonetheless remained right at the core of globalisation’s march.
Indeed, the US has arguably benefited much more than it ever could have done by being an active part of what being tied into the EU project has meant for so many of us. Because of the way that post-war, international ‘settlement’ at Bretton Woods was made.
*What we know as the EU today, was previously known as the ‘European Community’, European Economic Community (EEC) and ‘The Common Market’. These evolutions of names were no accident.
This economic mess is the consequence of plans that were about furthering private interests and never about the Public Good
The Bretton Woods ‘settlement’, put the USA front and centre of what was always intended to be a ‘global economy’.
The processes behind the centralization of power that this system intended to create, have for most of the time since the second world war given the US the ability to wreak havoc wherever in the world that it believed there would be a benefit to them from doing so. Simply because of the power that having the US Dollar as the world’s reserve currency created.
The power the US held since long before the Bretton Woods deal was made, was however always intended to be handed to global bodies, the unelected bureaucrats that run them and therefore the private hands that control them ‘at the top of the tree’ whenever the time was finally right.
Just as democratic power was progressively transferred to Brussels under a growing spiders web of lies that began life with a narrative built on the foundations of having a common area of trade.
The whole process, which has been a textbook example of how to hide the theft of democratic power and control in plain sight, has been nothing less than the sell-out of entire populations, by successive governments that we have elected and trusted.
The aim for generations of politicians was that of ceding power and control of everything to an elite few and the useful idiots who unswervingly support them, using a money, financial and economic system that is no better than a game. One that has cleverly used our own greed against us whilst teaching us that it is normal to live in very unsustainable ways.
The treasonous act of passing power to third parties, that was never any politicians to give away, is something that only those who have lost touch with respect for the sovereignty of other human beings, as part of their own relationship with power and influence, could ever explain.
However, for any ‘world leader’, whose ego is bigger than the appetite for a payoff, this kind of surrender to a form of power and control that would require them to be little more than a puppet, is not something they could easily accept.
That’s where Trump, his contra-reset and the Tariffs walk in.
Trumps Reset ‘Takeover’ and a strange parallel with the tenure of UK PM Liz Truss
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the Trumpian roadblock against what might be better framed as the WEF derived Great Reset, that was otherwise already underway across the West – and that the Democrats in the US appear to have strongly embraced – is that Trump, his ‘power’ and what he currently ‘controls’ – are all much too big for the machine that the Globalists actually control to deal with directly.
They cannot yet refocus sufficiently enough that either Trump and what he represents can easily be pushed out – in no small part because of how ridiculous and unworkable much of what they are doing has already become.
There is no question that Trump has changed the game, and the known Western sphere alternative may only be able to respond by embracing paths they previously didn’t intend:
Many in the UK laugh at the ridiculously short prime ministerial tenure of Liz Truss.
The accepted narrative is that her economic intervention was a disaster in the making for all of us.
Yet the disaster that was feared by the establishment was nothing to do with what was good or bad for anyone beyond those tied into and benefitting from the actions of the establishment itself.
What Liz Truss did in just a brief moment, was like putting the establishment approach to money, economics and finance on steroids. It had to be stopped immediately, and the risk of it happening again quickly removed.
It is a measure of what ‘money’ and ‘the markets’ were able to do on behalf of the establishment to destabilise Truss so quickly, that give an invaluable insight into just how rigged, planned and controlled the whole system has been.
However, it’s also a clear indication of how desperate things have become that those in power are now applying hindsight to suggest that what Truss did may have had some merit after all.
Trump really is the piper playing the tune, right now. But that isn’t because what he is doing has longevity or value in terms of rescuing an economic system that was already collapsing under the weight of its own nefarious plans.
Trump’s ‘reset’ is arguably little more than a brazen attempt to take the world back to the post war era on 21st century terms. Aiming to put the USA back at the heart of everything economic, whilst leaving Trump to be what he may well believe to be Emperor of the World.
Are we now experiencing the death of the global economic system in real time?
With capitalism dead in the form that we have known it, because the world is waking up to the reality that the deck was always stacked and the result for the poor and those working hard to become wealthy alike, is that the whole thing is inherently unfair – Trump will only have as long as no workable alternatives to saying yes to him exist, before his reset will collapse. And in all likelihood with it, the world economic system will fall like dominoes, starting with the USA.
What many cannot see right now is there isn’t any way back for the rest of the ‘western system’ countries and the WEF puppet governments either. Because the only responses possible mean torching what is left of that which is already broken – just to keep up, or by working towards what could quickly be seen as a multipolar world order that by its very nature cannot and will not offer world control – even if the cracks can be temporarily painted over once again.
Although I wrote about the 3 competing Resets that have been building just a couple of weeks ago, before the Trump Plan was announced, it remains likely that the BRICS nations and what they have been working on together will come into play.
Even though anyone in any government who has any sense will soon begin to realise that the US has just proven how foolish it is to once again place all your eggs in any one basket this way.
The difference in just this short time is that rather than awaiting what some might call a reasoned attempt at switching the polar world from western dominated to eastern dominated control, BRICS will instead increasingly look like an emergency tool for survival and replacement trading. For all the countries that have signed up to it as well as most of those who are on the most drastic end of the Tariffs that are about to unfold.
Will desperation lead the EU-centric/WEF led countries to do similar or the same?
Trump: Catalyst, Cataclysm or both
Whilst many will understand and perhaps even sympathise with the Trumpian ‘Make America Great Again’ rhetoric, few outside of the United States will find value or appeal in the idea that Making America Great Again means everyone else must bow down and become beholden – economically, metaphorically and in every other possible sense, to Trumps USA.
Whereas The Bretton Woods System (which originally kicked everything off internationally) was arguably unavoidable, given the massive role that the USA had come to play, once it had joined the Second World War, it is likely that its acceptance was a begrudging one, and only considered an acceptable choice given the alternative and what so many countries had just been through.
The open subservience to the US required and whatever it might have ushered behind it was a price that many nations across the world accepted they would simply have to pay.
However, Trump doesn’t have that same hand of cards as Roosevelt had to play in 1944. And there’s nothing he can do to recreate them 80 years on. Not least of all because US hegemony has been abused by those who hide behind and have controlled it in so many open (and many more hidden) ways, during that time.
The biggest difference between the Spring of 2025 and the Summer of 1944 is the desperation of weak leaders around the world today is all about their own survival and what happens to them next.
Whereas at the end of the Second World War, those leaders who were left with any kind of seat at the table worth having were being practical about saving war-weary nations from what those able to visualise a fear-led future interpreted as being a very bleak time of peace.
Bretton Woods may have seemed necessary. But necessity wouldn’t either remove nor excuse the use of manipulation and abuse – no matter the ‘opportunity’.
Yes, the global economic model is finished. But no expert will tell you that
So, it very much looks like Trump is harking back to the glory days of this dreadful economic system. Where the abuses that made the abusers fantastically rich, whilst nobody else really noticed, were there, open and available to everyone who pushed their way in.
Regrettably for us all, what has changed since then is everything that had real value – and that means infrastructure, industries, communities and everything that goes with that paradigm – has been stripped, bought or taken over employing created money that would never have been available to the money men without this system being in place and accepted as being legitimate.
All these varied financial and business interests have bought or taken control of using this contemporary form of dark magic have been moved, changed or broken up.
Whatever often nationally recognisable industries used to produce, manufacture or supply has been outsourced to someone and somewhere that it can be done more cheaply. Or added to some other elaborate supply chain where many more opportunities to ‘create wealth’ for the already wealthy ‘friends’ have been added in.
Trump probably sees this much from his experience with the way that money has been working. That is arguably why he is so keen to bring production and manufacturing back to the USA. Because sovereignty over supply chains is power over them in every form.
So, Trump knows that protectionism can be a practical way to uphold sovereignty, security and appropriate power.
But what Trump doesn’t appear to appreciate is that protectionism can also backfire spectacularly and have massive consequences if it is abused, used overbearingly or used as a weapon in any other way.
A New World dawns
There is no way to turn the clock back. The United States that Trump appears to want to lead existed at least 80 years ago.
The damage – and the part that the US has played in it, alongside all of the western powers who have acquiesced – is already done.
The global economic system as we know it is already beyond repair.
However, the experts won’t suggest that there is another ending to one where money remains king. Because most of them have by now been taught, indoctrinated or conditioned by a system that we are all now victims of to believe that there simply is no other way.
Regrettably, what we must remind ourselves of is that experts know a lot about a little, and that knowledge is then itself typically applied in very subjective ways.
On the other hand, real leaders know enough about lots. But they are objective enough to bring many different experts together. So that the very best decisions can be made.
The problem that we all have with politicians, is that they aren’t really leaders in the sense of what it takes to be good national or international leaders at all.
Trump almost certainly sees himself as being an expert – in this case, in business. And it appears that he has fallen into the trap, like so many others do, of believing that economics and the economy are all about business. Rather than being about people and life – as some very greedy and power-hungry people have always intended and worked tirelessly to make truth.
This is where one of the biggest mistakes and injustices in human history has been made.
The harsh reality that we are all now in the process of awakening to is that not even Trump can reset a system that was designed to be so unfair, so unbalanced and so unjust, that it has finally broken and began revealing its secrets under the weight of its own intentional greed and the harm upon humanity that it inflicts.
Adam Tugwell 