The Financial Takeover of Globalism

How powerful banks, international regulators, and AI are reshaping economic freedom.

Analysis and Policy Recommendations

By: Drs. Robert Malone and Jill Glasspool Malone | Washington, DC | October 27, 2026

Audio Version:

For decades, Americans have watched economic power move away from their communities and increasingly into the hands of enormous multinational corporations, global banks, and international institutions. Small banks disappear, local businesses struggle under growing regulatory burdens, and decisions affecting American livelihoods are increasingly shaped by organizations that American voters never elected and cannot remove.

How did we get here? And who benefits?

Much of the debate about globalism focuses on ideology, politics, or the ambitions of international organizations such as the United Nations and the World Economic Forum. But there is another explanation that deserves far more attention: Globalism is, first and foremost, an economic project, and some of its most powerful beneficiaries are the world’s largest financial institutions.

Global banks, investment firms, and multinational corporations benefit when money, investments, and goods can move across national borders with minimal interference. Different national laws, banking regulations, and financial standards create costs and complications. Making those rules more uniform makes international business easier, faster, and often more profitable. It also gives the largest institutions advantages that smaller competitors cannot easily match.

Over the past fifty years, an international network of central bankers, financial regulators, and powerful commercial interests has steadily developed common financial standards. Much of this work takes place outside the ordinary democratic process. These standards are subsequently adopted and enforced by national regulators, including those in the United States, often without a direct vote by elected legislators. Congress may have little involvement in developing the rules that ultimately govern American banks and businesses.

The question is whether this system was built primarily to protect financial stability and facilitate trade, or whether it has also become a mechanism for concentrating economic power, weakening national sovereignty, and protecting the interests of the institutions that helped shape it.

To understand how this happened, we need to go back to 1974, when the collapse of a relatively obscure German bank helped set in motion a transformation of international finance.

A Bank Closes Early

Bankhaus Herstatt was a private currency-trading bank in Cologne. On June 26, 1974, German regulators shut it down at about 3:30 in the afternoon. Earlier that day, banks around the world had paid Herstatt in Deutsche marks, expecting US dollars in return through its account at Chase Manhattan in New York. When Germany closed the bank, it was only 10:30 in the morning in New York, and Chase stopped all dollar payments from Herstatt’s account. Banks that had paid in German marks never received their dollars.

Within months, central bankers from the major industrial nations met in Basel, Switzerland, and formed what became the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision. They concluded that differences in rules and business hours across borders create risk and cost. Over the next fifty years, their answer was to make banking rules the same everywhere.

Why Global Corporations Want One Set of Rules

Consider a round baler manufactured by John Deere in Iowa and sold to a farmer in Canada, Mexico, or Germany. Each international sale involves different currencies, banking systems, regulations, and legal requirements. These differences create additional costs, delays, and complications. Economists call these obstacles transactional friction.

For multinational corporations and international banks, reducing that friction is enormously valuable. The fewer differences between national financial systems, the easier it becomes to move money, finance investments, and conduct business across borders. International regulators call the process of making financial rules more consistent harmonization.

On the surface, this sounds reasonable. International trade becomes easier, financial transactions become more predictable, and businesses can operate more efficiently.

But there is another side to the story.

The largest multinational corporations and financial institutions have the resources to influence the development of international standards and absorb the costs of complying with them. Smaller banks and domestic businesses generally have far less influence and fewer resources. When complex international rules become the standard for everyone, compliance costs can disproportionately burden smaller competitors. In some markets, regulatory requirements and the costs of accessing international financial infrastructure can effectively exclude smaller institutions from transactions that remain accessible to their larger competitors.

This is how regulatory capture can operate on an international scale. The world’s largest financial institutions have the money, personnel, and political access to influence the rules governing their own industry. Regulations presented as necessary for financial stability, consumer protection, or international cooperation can also become barriers to competition. When compliance is prohibitively expensive or complicated, established corporations gain protection from smaller competitors, while entrepreneurs and innovative businesses may be prevented from entering the market altogether.

The central danger of regulatory capture is that government authority, intended to protect the public, can instead protect powerful corporations from competition. When this occurs internationally, the same regulatory barriers can spread across dozens of countries, making them even harder to challenge or escape. The question is whether these rules genuinely protect the public or primarily serve the institutions with the resources and influence to shape them.

How the U.S. Dollar Became the Center of Global Finance

The modern international financial system was built around the American dollar. Under the Bretton Woods agreement of 1944, other major currencies were tied to the dollar, while the dollar itself was convertible into gold. When President Richard Nixon ended this in 1971, the dollar remained the world’s dominant currency for international trade, investment, and financial transactions.

That dominance was reinforced by the widespread use of dollars to price oil and other commodities, and by the development of international banking networks. In 1973, major banks established SWIFT, a Belgium-based cooperative that standardized how financial institutions communicate payment instructions across national borders. Although SWIFT does not actually transfer money, it became an essential part of international banking.

During the financial crises of 2008 and 2020, the Federal Reserve went even further, providing dollars to foreign central banks through arrangements known as currency swap lines. These arrangements helped foreign banks meet their dollar obligations and prevented disruptions from spreading through international financial markets. Congress did not separately approve each of these arrangements, although the Federal Reserve operates under authority established by federal law.

Together, these developments helped create a financial system in which the American dollar became indispensable to international commerce. This arrangement has delivered enormous benefits to the United States. Global demand for dollars and U.S. Treasury securities helps finance American government borrowing, supports the dollar’s purchasing power, and gives American businesses and consumers advantages that citizens of many other nations do not enjoy. The dollar’s position as the world’s primary reserve currency is one of America’s greatest economic and strategic assets.

Make no mistake: The United States and its citizens benefit substantially from this arrangement. Preserving the dollar’s international dominance is a legitimate national interest, and weakening it would carry serious economic consequences.

But there is an important distinction between maintaining American financial leadership and allowing an increasingly concentrated network of international financial institutions to shape the rules governing the global economy. The benefits of dollar dominance do not automatically justify every regulatory structure built around it, nor do they mean that the interests of multinational banks always coincide with those of American citizens, small businesses, or independent community banks.

The question is not whether America should surrender its financial advantages. It is whether those advantages serve the American people broadly, or do they increasingly serve the interests of the largest financial institutions operating across national borders.

Who Writes the Rules for American Banks?

Most Americans assume the rules governing American banks are written in Washington. But some of the most influential banking standards originate in Basel, Switzerland, at the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), an institution owned by central banks.

Founded in 1930, the BIS survived a controversial history involving financial dealings with Nazi Germany. Delegates at the 1944 Bretton Woods conference voted to liquidate it, but the institution survived. Today, it hosts the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, where central bankers and regulators develop international banking standards.

These standards determine, among other things, how much capital banks must maintain to protect against losses. The first Basel Accord was adopted in 1988, followed by Basel II in 2004 and Basel III after the 2008 financial crisis.

Here is the critical point: These agreements are not treaties, and the Senate never votes to ratify them. Instead, American representatives from the Federal Reserve, FDIC, and Office of the Comptroller of the Currency help develop international banking standards in Basel. These same federal agencies can then incorporate those standards into binding U.S. regulations under authority delegated by Congress, without Congress separately voting to approve the international agreements.

Similar international standard-setting systems influence anti-money-laundering policies and financial reporting.

Although American regulators retain the legal authority to accept, modify, or reject these standards, the process raises a fundamental question: Why should international committees have such substantial influence over American banking regulations without direct congressional approval of the standards they develop?

Who Benefits?

International banking regulations impose costs that fall disproportionately on smaller institutions. A bank must employ compliance officers, lawyers, and risk specialists whether it holds $3 trillion in assets or $300 million. Large banks spread these expenses across enormous operations. Community banks serving farmers, small businesses, and rural communities cannot.

In 1984, America had 14,483 FDIC-insured commercial banks. By 2023, only 4,027 remained, a decline of 72 percent. Mergers, interstate banking reforms, and financial crises contributed to this consolidation. Regulatory compliance costs also favor larger institutions, although international standards alone cannot explain the decline.

Meanwhile, the largest financial institutions exercise extraordinary economic influence. BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street collectively managed more than $33 trillion in assets in 2026. These firms manage investments on behalf of clients, but their enormous scale gives them substantial influence through shareholder voting, corporate engagement, and participation in financial policy discussions.

They operate alongside international institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank, Bank for International Settlements (BIS), and Financial Stability Board. These organizations have different responsibilities, but collectively they influence financial regulation, lending conditions, and economic policies across national borders.

The IMF and World Bank can require borrowing countries to adopt economic reforms as conditions of financial assistance. International banking committees establish standards that national regulators may subsequently implement. Meanwhile, major financial corporations have the resources, expertise, and political access to influence the development of these policies.

The result is a system in which public regulatory authority and concentrated private financial power increasingly intersect. The largest institutions can influence the rules, absorb the costs of compliance, and benefit from international markets that smaller competitors struggle to enter.

This is what we mean by globalized corporatism: a relationship between governments, international institutions, and major corporations in which economic rules have come to increasingly favor established financial interests over independent competitors.

The warning is not new. In their 1974 book Global Reach, Richard Barnet and Ronald Müller argued that multinational corporations were acquiring the ability to operate beyond the effective control of individual national governments. Fifty years later, the scale of global financial institutions makes their warning particularly relevant.

When One Rule Fails Everywhere at Once

When international regulators get the rules wrong, the consequences can spread across the entire financial system. In 1988, the first Basel Accord established common international banking capital standards, including a zero risk weight for certain government bonds issued by industrialized countries, including Greece. This meant banks generally needed no capital to cover the credit risk of those bonds. European regulations continued to give favorable treatment to government debt, encouraging banks to treat investments that carried real financial risks as exceptionally safe.

When Greece’s debt crisis erupted in 2010, European banks faced substantial exposure to sovereign debt, contributing to a broader financial crisis.

Before the 2008 financial collapse, American banking regulations gave favorable capital treatment to highly rated mortgage-backed securities, including those issued or guaranteed by government-sponsored enterprises such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Banks were encouraged to hold securities that appeared safer than they actually were. When the housing market collapsed, losses spread across major financial institutions.

Economist Friedrich Hayek warned about the underlying problem in 1945. Economic knowledge is dispersed among millions of individuals who understand local circumstances that distant planners cannot fully appreciate. When centralized regulators impose the same flawed assumptions across an entire financial system, individual mistakes can become systemic crises.

Artificial intelligence could dramatically accelerate this problem. As banks, investment firms, and regulators increasingly use AI to assess risk, approve loans, monitor transactions, and enforce compliance, financial decisions will become more standardized across national borders. Institutions relying on similar algorithms, shared data, and dominant technology providers may begin making the same decisions, identifying the same risks, and excluding the same customers.

What once required decades of international regulatory coordination could increasingly be reinforced through shared technology and automated decision-making. Smaller institutions may become dependent on systems controlled by a handful of powerful financial and technology corporations. When widely adopted AI models make the same mistakes, the consequences could spread rapidly across international markets.

AI also offers opportunities to reduce compliance costs and help smaller banks compete. But those benefits could be undermined if control over the underlying technology becomes concentrated.

The danger with artificial intelligence is that financial globalization, regulatory capture, and centralized technological control will reinforce one another, concentrating economic power in fewer hands while making the entire financial system more vulnerable to shared mistakes.

When Access to Banking Becomes a Tool of Control

The international financial system does more than facilitate commerce. It also gives governments and financial institutions considerable power over who can participate.

In 2012, the international banking network SWIFT disconnected sanctioned Iranian banks under European Union restrictions. In 2022, major Russian banks were similarly excluded following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. These actions demonstrated how access to international financial services can be restricted as an instrument of foreign policy.

But similar concerns arise when financial institutions deny services to lawful businesses and individuals because of their political views, religious beliefs, or perceived reputational risks.

In July 2023, JPMorgan Chase closed business accounts associated with Dr. Joseph Mercola, a prominent critic of COVID-19 vaccination, along with personal accounts belonging to several executives and family members. The bank did not publicly provide a detailed explanation.

That same summer, Britain’s Coutts bank closed politician Nigel Farage’s accounts. Internal documents revealed that his political views had been considered incompatible with the bank’s values.

Canada provided another example of government-directed financial restrictions. In February 2022, during the trucker protests against COVID-19 mandates, the government invoked the Emergencies Act, allowing financial institutions to freeze accounts associated with the protests without first obtaining individual court orders. Approximately 200 accounts were frozen. We later met a Canadian farmer who told us his accounts had been frozen after he supported the trucker movement by hosting a pig roast for truckers and their families.

In August 2025, President Trump issued an executive order directing federal regulators to address politically motivated debanking and remove reputation risk as a basis for certain supervisory actions.

The emergence of central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) raises additional questions about financial privacy and government authority. Depending on their design, CBDCs could give governments greater visibility into financial transactions and potentially expand their ability to restrict payments. In July 2026, legislation prohibited the Federal Reserve from issuing a CBDC through 2030.

The central concern is that access to banking is essential to participation in modern economic life. When governments or dominant financial institutions can restrict that access without transparency, due process, or meaningful avenues of appeal, financial infrastructure becomes a potential instrument of political and economic control.

Artificial intelligence could make that control far more powerful, systematic, and difficult to challenge. Banks already use automated systems to monitor transactions and assess risk. As AI becomes more sophisticated, individuals and businesses could be flagged, denied services, or financially excluded by opaque algorithms, with little human oversight and no meaningful opportunity to appeal.

China’s social credit system offers a warning. Through government blacklists, surveillance, and restrictions on economic activity, Chinese authorities have demonstrated how financial access and personal behavior can become interconnected. A Western version would not necessarily require an official social credit score. It could emerge through interconnected banking databases, digital identity systems, automated compliance requirements, and AI algorithms that determine who is considered an acceptable participant in the economy.

The European Union provides another warning about the potential reach of centralized digital regulation. Under its Digital Services Act, regulators can impose fines of up to 6 percent of a company’s worldwide annual turnover. In December 2025, the European Commission fined Elon Musk’s X €120 million for alleged transparency violations, while pursuing broader investigations involving content moderation. Critics warn that such financial penalties can pressure companies to restrict lawful speech rather than risk regulatory punishment.

Now consider the consequences if comparable enforcement pressures become intertwined with AI-driven financial surveillance, digital identity systems, and a digital euro. The power to regulate speech and the power to restrict financial participation could become mutually reinforcing instruments of control.

The greatest danger is that financial censorship could operate above national governments, without any elected official issuing an order. As international banks, payment networks, and technology companies adopt shared algorithms and compliance standards, a person or business classified as politically controversial or a reputational risk could face exclusion across multiple institutions and countries. No court finding, legislative vote, or direct government intervention would necessarily be required.

Financial censorship could become embedded in the infrastructure of global commerce itself, enforced automatically by institutions and algorithms that ordinary citizens cannot inspect, challenge, or hold accountable.

Challenging the Petrodollar and America’s Financial Dominance

America’s ability to restrict access to dollar-based financial networks has encouraged countries such as China and Russia to develop alternatives. The same financial infrastructure that gives the United States considerable international influence also creates incentives for other nations to reduce their dependence on it.

The challenge extends to the petrodollar system, under which international oil transactions have traditionally been priced and settled predominantly in U.S. dollars. China and Russia have increasingly pursued energy transactions in their own currencies, while other major energy exporters have explored alternatives to dollar settlement. Although these developments have not displaced the dollar’s dominance in global oil markets, they represent another effort to reduce dependence on American financial infrastructure.

In 2021, the Bank for International Settlements helped launch Project mBridge, working with central banks in China, Hong Kong, Thailand, and the United Arab Emirates to develop a system for settling international payments directly in digital currencies without relying on the dollar. The BIS withdrew in October 2024, while Russia and other BRICS nations continued exploring alternative payment networks.

Meanwhile, the dollar’s share of global foreign exchange reserves has declined from approximately 71 percent in 2000 to 56.7 percent in mid-2026. Although the dollar remains the world’s dominant reserve currency, its declining share illustrates the gradual diversification of international reserves.

The irony is that the financial system built around American economic dominance may be encouraging rival powers to construct competing systems. If these alternatives expand, the United States could eventually lose some of the economic advantages and geopolitical influence that come from the dollar’s central role in global finance.

The Benefits of International Financial Cooperation

International financial cooperation has produced genuine benefits. Since 2002, international settlement systems have substantially reduced the risk that one bank will pay for a currency transaction without receiving the money it is owed, the very problem exposed by the Herstatt failure in 1974.

Stronger bank capital requirements introduced after the 2008 financial crisis also helped major financial institutions withstand the economic disruption of the 2020 pandemic, alongside substantial central bank and government interventions.

These accomplishments matter. International financial cooperation can strengthen economic stability, protect depositors, and benefit American businesses and consumers. The problem arises when cooperation becomes centralized control, and when regulations intended to protect the financial system also protect its largest institutions from competition.

The Real Danger of Globalized Financial Power

For over fifty years, governments, central bankers, international regulators, and the world’s largest financial institutions have constructed a system that increasingly concentrates economic power beyond the reach of national voters. Much of it began with legitimate objectives, and America has benefited enormously from the dollar’s global dominance. But the interests of the American people and those of multinational financial corporations are not always the same.

What began as international financial cooperation has also created opportunities for regulatory capture on a global scale. Rules intended to protect financial stability can instead protect established corporations from competition, making it increasingly difficult for smaller banks, independent businesses, and entrepreneurs to survive, much less challenge the institutions already in power.

Artificial intelligence raises the stakes dramatically. The prospect of a Western social credit system, enforced through interconnected financial networks and automated algorithms, threatens to move economic control beyond the reach of elected governments. No grand conspiracy or single central authority would be necessary. Regulatory capture, shared technology, and aligned financial interests could produce a system of economic exclusion that operates across national borders, without meaningful democratic accountability.

The answer is not to abandon international cooperation or surrender America’s financial advantages. Congress must reclaim oversight of international banking standards, protect competition, establish enforceable safeguards against unjustified debanking, and prevent unaccountable AI-driven financial exclusion.

America should defend the dollar, preserve its financial leadership, and welcome international commerce. But it must never confuse the interests of global financial corporations with the interests of the American people.

A free society cannot remain free if access to banking, commerce, and economic opportunity ultimately depends on the approval of institutions and algorithms that no citizen can hold accountable.

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