Netflix's "Unsolved Mysteries" Reboots Mysterious 2006 Death Of Stansberry Research Employee

Zero Hedge:

Netflix has rebooted the once popular series Unsolved Mysteries, where various unexplained phenomena are highlighted and the show asks viewers for tips and information that could help lead to answers. The reboot has been a resounding success since it has been re-released, with internet sleuths flooding message boards and Reddit threads with their theories about each episode. 

Many of the cases revolve around murder mysteries, disappearances and occasionally the UFO or ghost story. In the streaming service's first episode of the reboot, now available on Netflix, well known stock newsletter tycoon Porter Stansberry, of Stansberry Research, is discussed extensively after the mysterious death of his former best friend and one of his former employees.

Episode one of the series highlights the case of a 32 year old newlywed named Rey Rivera, who picked up his life to move across the country to Baltimore and to work for his friend Porter Stansberry. Rivera was doing video editing for Stansberry's company at the time he died. 

Rivera was seen alive on May 16, 2006, but his body "was found six days later in an abandoned room in the second-story annex of the Belvedere Hotel in Baltimore," according to Radio Times.

The last phone call that he received, before rushing out of the house, "was tracked to the switchboard of Stansberry & Associates, though who it was from remains a mystery." The area Rivera was found dead was nearby to Stansberry's offices. 

A mysterious hole was found in the roof of the annex, suggesting that Rivera may have fallen through the roof. But his personal belongings, including his glasses and his cell phone seemed to be in good working order. Additionally, he had fractures in his shin bones and other areas that made it difficult for the medical examiner to pinpoint a cause of death. 

Ultimately, Baltimore Police ruled his death a suicide, despite the medical examiner calling it "inconclusive". As Netflix points out, he would have had to have jumped outward 45 feet from the nearest roof to land where he did. 

Thus, the mystery of the case is how Rivera wound up plunging through the roof, if he even did.

Rivera also left behind a mysterious sounding note that included language with ties to Freemasonry. At one point, it said: “brothers and sisters, around the world right now volcanoes are erupting, what an awesome sight,” a line with ties to Freemasonry.

Porter Stansberry didn't actively participate in the Netflix show and the documentary alleges he put his company under a gag order just hours after Rivera was found dead. That claim was disputed by Stansberry on July 3.

According to Esquire: 

The Netflix documentary claims that Porter Stansberry refused to speak to or cooperate with investigators or media following Rey Rivera’s disappearance and death, and gag ordered his company’s employees from doing so as well.

On July 3, a spokesperson for the company disputed claims made in the Netflix episode, denying that Stansberry’s employees had ever been barred from speaking about Rivera's case.

“There was no gag order or direction given to employees to not speak to the press, law enforcement or any other party," a spokesperson for Stansberry Research told the Baltimore Sun last week.

You can watch the trailer for the episode here:

The internet is replete with theories and analysis about this episode, like this video, as well. 

'People Are Going To Be Shocked': Bannon Claims Wuhan Lab Employees Have Defected, Are Working With FBI

From Zero Hedge:

One day after a report that a respected Chinese virologist fled Hong Kong to accuse Beijing of a COVID cover-up, former Trump strategist Steve Bannon told the Daily Mail that scientists from the Wuhan Institute of Virology and other labs have defected to the West and are "turning over evidence" against the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) for their role in the COVID-19 pandemic which has claimed over 560,000 lives worldwide since last December.

"People are going to be shocked," Bannon told the  Mail ("from a yacht off the East coast of America," the Mail would like us to know).

The 66-year-old then said that defectors are cooperating with intelligence agencies in America, Europe and the UK, which have been assembling evidence to challenge the CCP claim that the pandemic originated in a wet market - not in a lab home to scientists who have come under fire for manipulating bat coronavirus to be more transmissible to humans.

"I think that they [spy agencies] have electronic intelligence, and that they have done a full inventory of who has provided access to that lab. I think they have very compelling evidence. And there have also been defectors," he said. "People around these labs have been leaving China and Hong Kong since mid-February. [US intelligence] along with MI5 and MI6 are trying to build a very thorough legal case, which may take a long time. It’s not like James Bond."

Mr Bannon even suggested that the French government, which helped to build the institute, had left behind monitoring systems after Beijing shut them out of the project before it opened in 2017. -Daily Mail

"The thing was built with French help, so don’t think that there aren’t some monitoring devices in there. I think what you are going to find out is that these guys were doing experiments which they weren’t fully authorized [for] or knew what they were doing and that somehow, either through an inadvertent mistake, or on a lab technician, one of these things got out," Bannon continued. "It’s not that hard for these viruses to get out. That is why these labs are so dangerous."

"You essentially had a biological Chernobyl in Wuhan, but the center of gravity, the Ground Zero, was around the Wuhan lab, in terms of the casualty rates. And like Chernobyl, you also had the cover-up – the state apparatus reports to itself and just protects itself."

Mr Bannon, who has close links to Guo Wengui, an exiled Chinese billionaire, told this newspaper: ‘Regardless of whether it came out of the market or the Wuhan lab, the Chinese Communist party’s subsequent decisions hold them guilty of pre-meditated murder.

‘We know this because Taiwan formally informed the WHO on December 31 that there was some sort of epidemic coming out of Hubei province [where Wuhan is]. The CDC in Beijing was informed on January 2 or 3, and they decided to withhold that information and then sign a trade deal [with the US on January 15].

‘If they had been straightforward and truthful in the last week of December, 95 per cent of the lives lost and the economic carnage would have been contained. -Daily Mail

Bannon continues:

"That is the tragedy here. They used the time to scoop up all the world’s personal protective equipment. This is a murderous dictatorship. The blood is [also] on the hands of the world’s corporations – the investment banks, the hedge funds and the pension funds – and it is time to start calling it out before it leads to the destruction of the West," Bannon elaborated. "We are in the most extraordinary crisis in modern American history, more than Vietnam, the Cold War, even the Second World War. A global pandemic and an economic inferno. I have no faith in the WHO, the leadership should face criminal charges and be shut down."

One has to wonder if China will respond with whistleblowers from Ft. Detrick to support their narrative?

The Truth Behind The Mask

Swiss Mountain Vault Offers Wealthy Elites $500,000 Plots For Storing Valuables

From Zero Hedge:

With world trade collapsed, socio-economic chaos has unfolded across the Western world as central bank money printing and massive fiscal injections by governments might not be enough to ward off the next round of economic declines. 

The virus pandemic and social unrest in the US has shown just how fragile everything is - as wealthy elites flee metro areas for rural communities. We've shown those with economic mobility, considering the virus-induced recession has crushed tens of millions of folks into financial ruin - are buying underground bunkers so if Western economies plunge deeper into chaos -  they will be protected, from social unrest and or nuclear war with China. 

The wealthy have been the primary asset gathers in the last decade, thanks to central bank policies that has decimated the bottom 90% of Americans, stripped of assets, hence the record wealth inequality - and maybe another reason why people are protesting. 

Now, these wealthy folks have to figure out where they can safely store their post-war Ferraris, expensive artwork, rare wine collections, precious metals, and anything else of value. 

Bloomberg might have found that place, located in Switzerland, where a company is set to embark on a project to build deep underground vaults within a mountain. 

The Brünig Mega Safe Project, the firm heading up the project to build underground vaults in the Swiss Alps, said on its website, "Your treasure chamber in a solid rock massif," adding that, "The secure place for safekeeping your assets and sensitive data."

The vault is expected to be absolutely massive - equivalent to about ten soccer fields, according to board member Hugo Schittenhelm. He said the underground space could "multiply" if needed.

"The Swiss vaults will range from 100 cubic meters (3,531 cubic feet) to 1,000 times that large with heights of up to 90 meters, according to the website. The rock walls ensure a constant relative humidity of 40% and a temperature of 12 degrees Celsius (53.6 degrees Fahrenheit). Prices start at $500,000 and go up from there," said Bloomberg. 

Brünig Mega Safe will be constructed by engineering and underground construction firm, Gasser Felstechnik AG. 

Already, the project has attracted potential clients, including family offices, corporations, art galleries, and high net worth individuals, said Schittenhelm. 

Bloomberg notes the project needs $7.5 million to begin construction, expecting work to start as early as next year - the first vaults are expected to be commercially available 18 months from construction start.

With no V-shaped recovery in the global economy this year - turmoil is expected to last for the next several years as social fabric unravelings will continue in many Western countries, more specifically, in the US - it now might make sense for wealthy folks to start storing valuables in rock valuts before the social-economic implosion worsens. 

Atheism And Luciferianism Dismantled

Chinese Banks Preparing For "Worst Case" Scenario: Being Cut Off From SWIFT, Hong Kong Bank Runs

From Zero Hedge:

In the latest escalation over China's de facto annexation of Hong Kong, Reuters reports that Chinese state lenders are "revamping contingency plans" in anticipation of the soon to be enacted U.S. legislation (just waiting for Trump's signature) that would penalize banks for serving officials who implement the new national security law for Hong Kong.

In a "worst-case scenario" under consideration by Chinese commercial megabanks Bank of China and Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC), the lenders are said to be looking at the possibility of being cut off from U.S. dollars or losing access to U.S. dollar settlements, two Reuters sources said.

The worst-case scenario also envisions what would happen in the event of a run on its branches in Hong Kong if customers feared that it would run out of U.S. currency, one of the sources said (this is the scenario discussed in "If 500,000 Rich Hong Kongers Leave The City, The HKD Peg Would Surely Collapse"). The scenario was also looking at the experience of banks in Iran, the same person said. Iranian banks have been hit from time to time by U.S. sanctions dating back to the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

"We are hoping for the best, but preparing for the worst. You never know how things will turn out," one of the sources said.

In a milder scenario being looked at by the Agricultural Bank of China (AgBank), lenders would need to find ways to address the problem of clients blacklisted by the United States, especially those who might face a sudden loss of liquidity.

As Reuters adds, the contingency planning has been initiated by the banks themselves, who have the most to lose should the US effectively trigger a massive dollar bank run.

As Reuters calculates, Bank of China, the country's most international lender, had the biggest exposure of the country's big four lenders to the greenback at the end of 2019, with about $433 billion in liabilities. China's top four banks, which also include ICBC, China Construction Bank and AgBank, had a combined 7.5 trillion yuan ($1 trillion) in U.S. dollar liabilities at the end of 2019, annual reports show.

According to the report, at least three state-run leasing firms, including an ICBC unit and CSIC Leasing, are also making contingency plans. Leasing firms are often heavily reliant on dollar borrowing to fund purchases of aircraft, machinery and facilities.

China's contingency plans are in response to the unanimous passage in the House and Senate of a bill last week which seeks to impose financial sanctions on Chinese banks in response to the National Security Law. It has yet to be signed into law by President Donald Trump. The bill calls for sanctions on Chinese officials and others who help violate Hong Kong's autonomy and on financial institutions that do business with them. But it does not spell out what the sanctions would look like.

"There are sanctions in this bill which could be interpreted to prevent a bank from clearing some dollar transactions via U.S. institutions, but unlike other congressional sanctions bills there are not specific provisions mandating it," said Nick Turner, a lawyer specialising in sanctions and anti-money laundering at Steptoe & Johnson in Hong Kong.

Aside from its contingency planning, China has said it would "launch a counterattack against US hegemony" if Trump was to block access of Chinese banks to dollar funding and the SWIFT payment system

SGH Macro have noted that countermeasures from China could include a speeding up of the use of the Renminbi for China’s own parallel Cross-border Interbank Payment System (CIPS), a surge in issuance of RMB denominated loans to Belt and Road Initiative countries, a push for greater RMB use through the Shanghai International Energy Exchange (INE) crude oil futures, and an acceleration of the implementation of China’s Digital Currency Electronics Payment (DCEP), the first digital currency issued by a central bank. 

BIS Innovation Hub: The Gradual March To Central Bank Digital Currency Continues To Advance

Authored by Steven Guinness,

This time last year when the Bank for International Settlements released their Annual Economic Report, it combined with the announcement of a new initiative called the ‘BIS Innovation Hub‘ (also known as ‘Innovation BIS 2025‘). The BIS refer to the Innovation Hub as a medium term project that comprises three main elements:

• Identify and develop in-depth insights into critical trends in technology affecting central banking
• Develop public goods in the technology space geared towards improving the functioning of the global financial system
• Serve as a focal point for a network of central bank experts on innovation

As you can see, technological innovation is at the core of the Hub’s remit.

The initial phase of the project saw Hub’s opened up in Switzerland, Hong Kong and Singapore. An operational agreement was signed with the Hong Kong Monetary Authority in September 2019, followed by an agreement with the Swiss National Bank in October. The Hub in Singapore began operations in November. 

With phase one completed, the BIS have now moved into the second phase which they warned was going to happen when the Hub first launched. Accompanying the release of this year’s Annual Economic Report, the institution announced that the Hub is expanding to new locations in both Europe and North America.

Over the next two years, the Bank of England will be opening a centre, along with the Bank of Canada, the European Central Bank and four Nordic central banks (Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Iceland). A ‘strategic partnership‘ will also be formed with the Federal Reserve System.

East and West may appear divided in the geopolitical sphere, but in the world of central banking they are very much united behind the common goal of the Hub.

As the BIS outlined in a press release, the expansion will ‘allow Innovation Hub to spur central bank work across multiple fintech pillars‘. General Manager Agustin Carstens confirmed that the ‘new centres will expand our reach significantly and help create a global force for fintech innovation‘.

Most pointedly, however, the expansion, according to the Head of the Innovation Hub Benoit Coeure, will mean that it is ‘well placed to advance work on a broad range of issues of importance to the central banking community, including digital currency and digital payments‘. Coeure also cited distributed ledger technology as a key aspect of the Hub’s work.

In October 2019 I posted an article about the Hub (Innovation BIS 2025: A Stepping Stone Towards an Economic ‘New World Order’) and argued how the introduction of it tied directly into the agenda for implementing a network of central bank digital currencies over the next few years. I followed up this article with another which offered more detail on the Innovation Hub (BIS Announce New Appointments and Launch Singapore Hub Centre).

To add more weight to the idea that the Hub exists to help facilitate a CBDC future, Agustin Carstens mentioned on presenting the BIS Annual Economic Report that ‘if CBDCs are to fulfil their potential and promise as a new means of payment, their design and implications deserve close study and consideration. The BIS will continue supporting central banks in their CBDC research and design efforts, through the new BIS Innovation Hub, its committees, and broader analytical work.’

This comment followed what Carstens said in the BIS’ quarterly review:

As the Hub gathers experience, a home-grown agenda will quickly be developed. A key question informing the BIS Innovation Hub’s work is whether money itself needs to be reinvented for a changing environment, or whether the emphasis should be on improving the way it is provided and used.

As I have written about previously, central banks have now begun to outline specific technical details on how a CBDC could be built (A Look at CBDC Developments at the Bank of England – Part One). This comes as global payment systems are being reformed so as to be compatible with blockchain and distributed ledger technology – a process that is earmarked for completion around 2024.

With the events of the past few months, it is impossible to discuss CBDC’s without factoring in the impact of Covid-19. This appears increasingly to be the major international crisis that global planners hope will catalyse the move into a fully digital economic system. And the BIS Innovation Hub is ideally placed to respond.

In remarks made in April, Benoit Coeure asked whether the pandemic would ‘accelerate the shift towards virtual banking‘. Musing on his own question, Coeure stated that ‘in the next months and years, the BIS Innovation Hub will remain busy scanning technological trends in finance and their consequences for central banks and financial regulators‘.

The importance of the Hub to the CBDC agenda is there to see, particularly with the onset of Covid-19. A line in the BIS Annual Economic Report supports what Coeure had to say:

The Covid-19 crisis, and the attendant rise of electronic payments, are likely to boost CBDC development across the globe.

IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva recently told Italy’s National Consultation that ‘digital is a big winner in this crisis‘ and that the pandemic may have ‘accelerated the digital transformation by two or three years‘.

The BIS insist, however, that research on CBDC’s is ‘still in its early stages, and development efforts will take some time‘.

From my perspective, by 2025 CBDC’s will begin to be introduced, initially in conjunction with cash. But the long term objective is for the abolition of all tangible financial assets to be replaced with intangible wealth. The BIS attempted to convey in their annual report that a CBDC would prove as a ‘digital complement to physical cash‘. Perhaps to begin with, but nobody should deceive themselves into believing that cash has any sustainable future if and when CBDC’s are offered to the general public.

To reinforce this notion, this is what Agustin Carstens stated during a speech at the Central Bank of Ireland in March 2019:

Like cash, a CBDC could and would be available 24/7, 365 days a year. At first glance, not much changes for someone, say, stopping off at the supermarket on the way home from work. He or she would no longer have the option of paying cash. All purchases would be electronic.

What central banks (in line with state legislatures) are not going to do is simply outlaw cash when CBDC’s become available. I believe what they want is for banknotes to dwindle to a level where they can make the argument that the servicing costs of maintaining the cash infrastructure outweigh the amount of cash still in circulation and being used for payment.

An Access to Cash report published in the UK last year warned that because of bank branch closures and the decline of ATM’s, Britain’s cash network was at real risk of collapsing. Introduce a CBDC into the equation and you can see how cash will soon be deemed nonviable. Those who might opt to use cash over a digital currency would eventually have no other option than to transfer their money into a CBDC.

One of the main goals of global planners is to target what they call the ‘unbanked‘ or the ‘underbanked‘. In other words, those who exist largely outside of the financial system and trade anonymously. The BIS Annual Report declared that 1.7 billion adults and hundreds of millions of firms ‘are tied to cash as their only means of payment‘. That is one fifth of the world’s population that central banks are seeking to bring into their world – a digital only construct in which the only alternative is a life of destitution.

Essentially, the central banking fraternity will want to be able to pinpoint the abolition of cash on the advancement of technology and the changing payment habits of the consumer, thereby taking the emphasis off themselves.

With regards to changing consumer behaviour, the unproven fear perpetuated throughout the media that cash could transmit Covid-19 has successfully managed to undermine cash to the point where a large swathe of people have stopped using it. The latest statistics from Link show that in the UK transaction volume is down 47% on this time last year.

Over time, central banks will be able to use a sustained reduction in demand for cash to their advantage. As Yves Mersch of the European Central Bank mentioned in May, ‘if our customers, the people of Europe signalled a change in payments behaviour, we would want to preserve their direct link to the ultimate owner of our currency by maintaining their access to central bank liabilities‘.

The owner being the central bank, the liabilities being a CBDC.

The ideological agenda of central banks to digitise the entirety of the world’s financial system and to maintain their power base is being spearheaded by the Bank for International Settlements through their Innovation Hub. Unless people begin to recognise where the manipulation and growth in the CBDC narrative is coming from, and how there is a targeted agenda to guide the world into a cashless society, global planners will in the years to come get their way.