The most powerful private financial interests in the world, under
the cover of COP26, have developed a plan to transform the global
financial system by fusing with institutions like the World Bank and
using them to further erode national sovereignty in the developing
world.
November 5, 2021
9 minute read
Upon its creation, GFANZ stated that it would “provide a forum for
strategic coordination among the leadership of finance institutions from
across the finance sector to accelerate the transition to a net zero
economy” and “mobilize the trillions of dollars necessary” to accomplish
the group’s zero emissions goals. At the time of the alliance’s launch,
UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson described GFANZ as “uniting the world’s
banks and financial institutions behind the global transition to net
zero” while John Kerry noted that “the largest financial players in the
world recognize energy transition represents a vast commercial
opportunity.” In analyzing those two statements together, it seems clear
that GFANZ has united the world’s most powerful private banks and
financial institutions behind what they see as, first and foremost, “a
vast commercial opportunity”, their exploitation of which they are
marketing as a “planetary imperative.”
GFANZ is composed of several “subsector alliances”, including the Net Zero Asset Managers Initiative (
NZAM), the Net Zero Asset Owner Alliance (
NZAOA), and the Net Zero Banking Alliance (
NZBA).
Together, they command a formidable part of global private banking and
finance interests, with the NZBA alone currently representing
43% of all global banking assets. However, the “largest financial players” who
dominate GFANZ include
the CEOs of BlackRock, Citi, Bank of America, Banco Santander and HSBC,
as well as David Schwimmer, CEO of the London Stock Exchange Group and
Nili Gilbert, Chair of the Investment Committee of the David Rockefeller
Fund.
Notably, another Rockefeller-connected entity, the Rockefeller Foundation, recently played a pivotal role in
the creation of Natural Asset Corporations (NACs) in September. These
NACs seek to create a new asset class that would put the natural world,
as well as the ecological processes that underpin all life, up for
sale under the guise of “protecting” them. Principals of GFANZ,
including BlackRock’s Larry Fink, have long been enthusiastic about the
prospects of NACs and other related efforts to financialize the natural
world and he has also played a key role in marketing said
financialization as necessary to combat climate change.
As part of COP26, GFANZ – a key group at that conference – is
publishing a plan aimed at scaling “private capital flows to emerging
and developing economies.” Per the alliance’s press release,
this plan focuses on “the development of country platforms to connect
the now enormous private capital committed to net zero with country
projects, scaling blended finance through MDBs [multilateral development
banks] and developing high integrity, credible global carbon markets.”
The press release notes that this “enormous private capital” is money
that alliance members seek to invest in emerging and developing
countries, estimated at over $130 trillion, and that – in order to
deploy these trillions in invest – “the global financial system is being
transformed” by this very alliance in coordination with the group that
convened them, the United Nations.
Proposing a Takeover
Details of GFANZ’s plan to deploy trillions of member investments
into emerging markets and developing countries was published in the
alliance’s inaugural “Progress Report”,
the release of which was timed to coincide with the COP26 conference.
The report details the alliance’s “near-term work plan and ambitions,”
which the alliance succinctly summarizes as a “program of work to transform the financial system.”
The report notes that the alliance has moved from the “commitment”
stage to the “engagement” stage, with the main focus of the engagement
stage being the “mobilization of private capital into emerging markets
and developing countries through private-sector leadership and
public-private collaboration.” In doing so, per the report, GFANZ seeks
to create “an international financial architecture” that will increase
levels of private investment from alliance members in those economies.
Their main objectives in this regard revolve around the creation of
“ambitious country platforms” and increased collaboration between MDBs
and the private financial sector.
Per GFANZ, a “country platform” is
defined as a
mechanism that convenes and aligns “stakeholders”, i.e. a mechanism for
public-private partnership/stakeholder capitalism, “around a specific
issue or geography”. Examples offered include Mike Bloomberg’s
Climate Finance Leadership Initiative (CFLI),
which is partnered with Goldman Sachs and HSBC, among other
private-sector institutions. While framed as being driven by
“stakeholders,” existing examples of “country platforms” offered by the
GFANZ are either private-sector led initiatives, like the CFLI, or
public-private partnerships that are dominated by powerful multinational
corporations and billionaires. As
recently explained by journalist
and researcher Iain Davis, these “stakeholder capitalism” mechanism
models – despite being presented as offering a “more responsible” form
of capitalism – instead allow corporations and private entities to
participate in forming the regulations that govern their own markets and
giving them a greatly increased role in political decision-making by
placing them on equal footing with national governments. It is
essentially a creative way of marketing “corporatism,” the definition of
fascism infamously supplied by Italian dictator Benito Mussolini.
In addition to the creation of “corporatist” “country platforms” that
focus on specific areas and/or issues in the developing world, GFANZ
aims to also further “corporatize” multilateral development banks (MDBs)
and development finance institutions (DFIs) in order to better fulfill
the investment goals of alliance members. Per the alliance, this is
described as increasing “MBD-private sector collaboration.” The GFANZ report notes that “MDBs play a critical role in helping to grow investment flows” in the developing world. MDBs, like the World Bank, have long been criticized for
accomplishing this task by trapping developing nations in debt and then
using that debt to force those nations to deregulate markets
(specifically financial markets), privatize state assets and implement
unpopular austerity policies. The GFANZ report makes
it clear that the alliance now seeks to use these same, controversial
tactics of MDBs by forcing even greater deregulation on developing
countries to facilitate “green” investments from alliance members.
The report explicitly states that
MDBs should be used to prompt developing nations “to create the right
high-level, cross-cutting enabling environments” for alliance members’
investments in those nations. The significantly greater levels of
private capital investment, which are needed to reach Net-Zero per
GFANZ, require that MDBs are used to prompt developing nations to
“establish investment-friendly business environments; a replicable
framework for deploying private capital investments; and pipelines of
bankable investment opportunities.” GFANZ then notes that “private
capital and investment will flow to these projects if governments and
policymakers create the appropriate conditions”, i.e. enabling
environments for private-sector investments.
In other words, through the proposed increase in private-sector
involvement in MDBs, like the World Bank and regional development banks,
alliance members seek to use MDBs to globally impose massive and
extensive deregulation on developing countries by using the
decarbonization push as justification. No longer must MDBs entrap
developing nations in debt to force policies that benefit foreign and
multinational private-sector entities, as climate change-related
justifications can now be used for the same ends.
BlackRock CEO and GFANZ Principal Larry Fink talks to CNBC during COP26; Source: CNBC
This new modality for MDBs, along with
their fusion with the private sector, is ultimately what GFANZ proposes
in terms of “reimagining” these institutions. GFANZ principal and
BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, during
a COP26 panel that took place on November 2
nd,
explicitly referred to the plan to overhaul these institutions when he
said that: “If we’re going to be serious about climate change in the
emerging world, we’re going to have to really focus on the reimagination
of the World Bank and the IMF.”
Fink continued:
“They are the senior lender,
and not enough private capital’s coming into the emerging world today
because of the risks associated with the political risk, investing in
brownfield investments — if we are serious about elevating investment
capital in the emerging world … I’m urging the owners of those
institutions, the equity owners, to focus on how we reimagine these
institutions and rethink their charter.”
GFANZ’s proposed plans to reimagine MDBs are particularly alarming
given how leaked US military documents openly admit that such banks are
essentially “financial weapons”
that have been used as “Financial Instruments and Diplomatic
Instruments of US National Power” as well as Instruments of what those
same documents refer to as the “current global governance system” that
are used to force developing countries to adopt policies they otherwise
would not.
In addition, given Fink’s statements, it should not be surprising
that the GFANZ report notes that their effort to establish “country
platforms” and alter the functioning and charters of MDBs is a key
component of implementing pre-planned recommendations aimed at “seizing
the New Bretton Woods moment” and remaking the “global financial
governance” system so that is “promote[s] economic stability and
sustainable growth.”
As noted in other GFANZ documents and on their website, the goal of
the alliance is the transformation of the global financial system and it
is quite obvious from member statements and alliance documents that the
goal of that transformation is to facilitate the investment goals of
alliance members beyond what is currently possible by using climate
change-related dictates, as opposed to debt, as the means to that end.
The UN and the “Quiet Revolution”
In light of GFANZ’s membership and their ambitions, some may wonder
why the United Nations would back such a predatory initiative. Doesn’t
the United Nations, after all, chiefly work with national governments as
opposed to private-sector interests?
Though that is certainly the prevailing public perception of the UN,
the organization has – for decades – been following a “stakeholder
capitalist” model that privileges the private sector and billionaire
“philanthropists” over national governments, with the latter merely
being tasked with creating “enabling environments” for the policies
created by and for the benefit of the former.
Speaking to the World Economic Forum in 1998, then-UN Secretary General Kofi Annan made this shift explicit:
“The United Nations has been
transformed since we last met here in Davos. The Organization has
undergone a complete overhaul that I have described as a ‘quiet
revolution’…A fundamental shift has occurred. The United Nations once
dealt only with governments. By now we know that peace and prosperity
cannot be achieved without partnerships involving governments,
international organizations, the business community and civil
society…The business of the United Nations involves the businesses of
the world.”
With the UN now essentially a vehicle for the promotion of
stakeholder capitalism, it is only fitting that it would “convene” and
support the efforts of a group like GFANZ to extend that stakeholder
capitalist model to other institutions involved in global governance,
specifically global financial governance. Allowing GFANZ members, i.e.
many of the largest private banks and financial institutions in the
world, to fuse with MDBs, remake the “global financial governance
system” and gain increased control over political decisions in the
emerging world is a banker’s dream come true. To get this far, all they
have needed is to convince enough of the world’s population that such
shifts are necessary due to the perceived urgency of climate change and
the need to rapidly decarbonize the economy. Yet, if put into practice,
what will result is hardly a “greener” world, but a world dominated by a
small financial and technocratic elite who are free to profit and
pillage from both “natural capital” and “human capital” as they see
fit.
Today, MDBs are used as “instruments of power” that utilize debt to
force developing nations to implement policies that benefit foreign
interests, not their national interests. If GFANZ gets their way, the
MDBs of tomorrow will be used to essentially eliminate national
sovereignty, privatize the “natural assets” (e.g.
ecosystems, ecological processes) of the developing world and force
increasingly technocratic policies designed by global governance
institutions and think tanks on ever more disenfranchised populations.
Though GFANZ has cloaked itself in lofty rhetoric of “saving the
planet,” their plans ultimately amount to a corporate-led coup that will
make the global financial system even more corrupt and predatory and
further reduce the sovereignty of national governments in the developing
world.
GFANZ Leadership; Source: GFANZ
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