All Wars Are Bankers’ Wars: Iran and the Bankers’ Endgame

By Ellen Brown

[This article by Ellen Brown was first published on Global Research. You can read it here.]

“The powers of financial capitalism had another far reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole.” —Prof. Caroll Quigley, Georgetown University, Tragedy and Hope (1966)

In February 2026, the United States and Israel launched surprise airstrikes on Iran. The officially proffered reasons — preventing Iran’s acquisition of a nuclear weapon and forestalling its aggression — have not held up under scrutiny. As James Corbett documented in recent Corbett Report episodes, the nuclear pretext appears to be recycled propaganda, and the scale and timing of the strikes raise deeper questions about motive.

The thesis that “All Wars Are Bankers’ Wars” was popularized by Michael Rivero in a 2013 documentary by that name. His accompanying article begins with a quote from Aristotle (384-322 BCE):

The most hated sort [of moneymaking], and with the greatest reason, is usury, which makes a gain out of money itself, and not from the natural use of it. For money was intended to be used in exchange, but not to increase at interest.

Rivero then traces how private banking interests have financed and profited from conflicts on both sides for centuries — from the founding of the Bank of England in 1694 to fund William III’s wars to modern regime-change wars.

Full-Spectrum Financial Dominance

Other commentators point to the report of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) titled “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” (September 2000), which called for “full-spectrum” U.S. military forces to achieve global preeminence. It postulated the need for a “catastrophic and catalyzing event — like a new Pearl Harbor” to accelerate the military transformation the authors envisioned.

This was followed by a 2007 Democracy Now interview in which Gen. Wesley Clark revealed that weeks after 9/11, he had been shown a classified Pentagon memo outlining plans to “take out seven countries in five years”: Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and finishing off with Iran. The first six have since been destabilized or regime-changed. Iran, considered the ultimate prize for Middle East dominance and oil control, remains the last one standing.

Why those seven, and why was Iran the ultimate prize? Greg Palast’s 2013 article titled “Larry Summers and the Secret ‘End-Game’ Memo” supplied the missing financial logic. In 1999, the world was opened to unregulated derivatives trading, so that sovereign bonds, oil flows, shipping routes, and war-risk policies could all be collateralized, rehypothecated (pledged multiple times over), and gambled upon. The lynchpin was the 1997 WTO Financial Services Agreement (the Fifth Protocol to GATS), which became operational in 1999.

None of the seven targeted countries joined the WTO, and they were also not members of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS). That left them outside the long regulatory arm of the central bankers’ central bank in Switzerland. Other countries that were later identified as “rogue states” were also not members of the BIS, including North Korea, Cuba, and Afghanistan.

As for Iran, it is not only the largest and strongest of the Islamic countries but operates the world’s only fully interest-free (riba-free) banking regime. This stands in direct contrast to the conventional Western model, which relies on interest as its primary revenue mechanism. “Money making money out of itself” underpins the global derivatives complex, which is built on rehypothecated, collateralized debt-at-interest.

The last piece in the financial control grid was detailed in David Rogers Webb’s 2024 book The Great Taking. The Everything Bubble, including what some commentators estimate to be more than a quadrillion dollars in derivative bets, is just waiting for a pin. When it bursts, it will trigger large institutional bankruptcies; and under the legal machinery Webb documents, the derivative players will take all.

The 2026 Hormuz insurance crisis triggered by Lloyd’s of London could be that pin. More on all that below.

The City of London and Lloyd’s Weaponize Chaos

For more than three centuries, the City of London – the “Square Mile” that is London’s financial center — has financed both sides of wars and sold insurance against the destruction that would follow. Lloyd’s of London is the insurance pillar of the City’s financial control grid. It is not actually an insurance company but is a corporate body that “operates as a partially-mutualized marketplace within which multiple financial backers, grouped in syndicates, come together to pool and spread risk.”

Lloyd’s has built its reputation on always performing, but it performs at a cost. In 1898, it formalized long-standing practice by introducing the “Free of Capture and Seizure” clause, stripping war risks from standard policies so it could charge extortionate premiums when conflict erupted. It exercised that clause in both world wars and is exercising it in 2026.

After the strikes on Iran, Lloyd’s Joint War Committee expanded its “high-risk” zone in the Middle East. Several of its underwriters issued 72-hour cancellation notices effective March 5, and war-risk premiums for Hormuz transits jumped from 0.25% to 1–5% of hull value. Lloyd’s has stressed that coverage remains available — at the right price. But for a $100 million oil tanker, that means an extra $1–5 million per voyage, a premium the owners are understandably reluctant to pay.

The Private Credit Spark

Meanwhile, other dark clouds are hovering over the market. Financial analyst Stephanie Pomboy warns that the $1.5-3 trillion private credit market is in lockdown, forcing fire sales of liquid assets; and the much larger $5 trillion BBB-rated corporate bond market is teetering. Downgrades will force mass selling, and pensions face a $4 trillion shortfall.

The Hormuz crisis supplies the perfect accelerant to this collateral crisis: higher oil prices create inflation, which raises bond yields (interest), collapsing the value of collateral and triggering margin calls across the derivatives game board. Margin calls then force private credit funds into fire sales.

This is one reason some commentators point to the City of London as the real architect of the Middle East chaos. The old war-insurance machine and the new derivatives machine operate together. One creates the chaos premium; the other harvests it through rehypothecation and legal seizure.

Palast and the End Game Memo: Making the World Safe for Derivatives

Guaranteeing against shipping loss is one type of insurance, but a much bigger insurance trap is the derivatives market. Sold as a form of insurance against market risk, derivatives are a speculative betting game that extracts rents from all major economic flows.

In his 2013 article, Greg Palast presented evidence of a secret 1997 memo to Deputy Treasury Secretary Larry Summers from Timothy Geithner (then U.S. Ambassador to the WTO acting for Summers) describing the “End-Game” of the WTO Financial Services negotiations. Geithner wrote to Summers,

“As we enter the end-game… I believe it would be a good idea for you to touch base with the CEOs ….”

The memo then listed the private phone numbers of Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, Bank of America, Citibank, and Chase Manhattan, numbers which Palast confirmed were real.

What was the end-game? Palast wrote:

US Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin was pushing hard to de-regulate banks. That required, first, repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act to dismantle the barrier between commercial banks and investment banks. It was like replacing bank vaults with roulette wheels.

Second, the banks wanted the right to play a new high-risk game: “derivatives trading.” … Deputy Treasury Secretary Summers (soon to replace Rubin as Secretary) body-blocked any attempt to control derivatives.

But what was the use of turning U.S. banks into derivatives casinos if money would flee to nations with safer banking laws?

The answer conceived by the Big Bank Five: eliminate controls on banks in every nation on the planet – in one single move.… The bankers’ and Summers’ game was to use the Financial Services Agreement, an abstruse and benign addendum to the international trade agreements policed by the World Trade Organization.

… The new rules of the game would force every nation to open their markets to Citibank, JP Morgan and their derivatives “products.”

And all 156 nations in the WTO would have to smash down their own Glass-Steagall divisions between commercial savings banks and the investment banks that gamble with derivatives.

The WTO Financial Services Agreement became the battering ram for opening global markets to this derivative play. Every member nation was forced to open its banking system or face sanctions. In 1999, the portion of Glass-Steagall separating investment banking from depository banking in the U.S. was repealed, leaving depositors’ money vulnerable to speculative risk. Derivatives then exploded. Sovereign bonds, oil contracts, shipping insurance policies, and war-risk premiums were all sliced into credit-default swaps, hedges, and other derivative products.

Derivatives trading has since become one of the most concentrated and profitable businesses on the planet, and it is almost entirely controlled by a handful of megabanks. According to data from the Bank for International Settlements and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the top five U.S. banks alone hold roughly 90% of all U.S. bank derivatives, with JPMorgan, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, and Morgan Stanley dominating the global over-the-counter market. These institutions capture the lion’s share of derivative profits, especially during periods of volatility when the “chaos premium” spikes.

“The Great Taking” — the Legal Trap Granting Derivatives Super-Priority in Bankruptcy

In The Great Taking, David Rogers Webb lays bare the final piece in this financial control grid: virtually every security today is dematerialized (digitized) and pooled in central depositories. Quiet changes to the Uniform Commercial Code and equivalent E.U. rules have turned ordinary investors into mere “entitlement holders” holding only a legal claim against their brokerages.

As for bank depositors, they have for centuries been categorized as mere “creditors” of their banks. Once the money is deposited, legal title passes to the bank. The depositor holds only a contractual claim (a demand liability) that ranks as an unsecured creditor position in the event of insolvency.

In any insolvency, stocks, bonds, and deposits are legally collateral for the derivatives complex — collateral that has been rehypothecated multiple times over. And when the derivative collateral fails, the rehypothecated house of cards that has been built on it collapses. Margin calls cascade, super-priority is triggered, and the Great Taking begins. (For more on this quite complicated subject, see Webb’s book and my earlier article here.)

Iran’s Interest-Free Islamic Banking: The Structural Obstacle

So what did it matter if Iran and a handful of other countries declined to join in this lucrative bankers’ game? The risk was that when depositors and shareholders realized that they did not actually own their funds, they would move their assets to those safe zones. The holdout countries were also safe from the sort of sanctions imposed by Western governments (and enforced by Western banks and clearing houses) on Russian central bank assets after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Leading this band of holdouts was Iran, which since its 1983 Law for Usury-Free Banking Operations has run the world’s only fully interest-free (riba-free) banking regime. Its banks use Sharia-compliant contracts — profit-sharing (musharakah), cost-plus financing (murabaha), and leasing (ijara) — instead of charging or paying interest. This banking model stands in direct contrast to the conventional Western model, which relies on interest as its primary revenue stream and underpins the global derivatives complex with collateralized, rehypothecated debt.

Iran’s system was designed to eliminate usury and align finance with real economic activity and risk-sharing rather than speculative debt. It has long been viewed as structurally incompatible with the interest-based, collateral-heavy architecture of City of London and Wall Street finance — an architecture that requires perpetual debt servicing and easily rehypothecated assets to feed the derivatives machine.

By rejecting interest at the national level, Iran has thus insulated itself and its financial partners from the control grid that has made the global “Great Taking” possible.

The Insurance Chaos Has Softened but the “Black Swan” Still Hovers

The Strait of Hormuz is not fully closed, but traffic remains severely reduced under Iran’s selective, permission-based transit regime. Only vessels from “friendly” or non-hostile nations are being cleared after prior coordination with Iranian authorities. Significant backlogs persist, with more than 1,000 vessels reported waiting or diverted and over 34,000 shipping routes rerouted in the first four weeks of disruption.

President Trump’s $20 billion reinsurance facility announced on March 6 is now operational and has been doubled to $40 billion. Additional major U.S. insurers have joined, while Lloyd’s of London has engaged in related discussions. The facility remains centered on American carriers with U.S. government backing. But analysts doubt it will restart widespread commercial traffic without broader liability protection and safer conditions.

In short, the “insurance chaos” trigger has eased but has not vanished. Premiums remain elevated, uncertainty lingers, and the collateral and derivatives pressures Webb described are still in play.

Conclusions and Resolutions

The 2007-08 Global Financial Crisis (GFC) is now widely regarded as having been triggered by the unchecked explosion of unregulated derivatives — especially credit default swaps and collateralized debt obligations — which turned subprime mortgages into a systemic time bomb. The damage was not confined to the United States: developing countries suffered heavily as well.

Today the risk of a crash is even greater than during the GFC. The global OTC derivatives market has officially ballooned to a notional value of $846 trillion, more than seven times the size of the entire world economy.

Long-range political solutions are possible. Congress could restore Glass-Steagall and impose a financial transaction tax. State governments could withdraw their approval of relevant portions of the UCC and form public banks that can protect against local bank bankruptcies. (See my earlier articles here and here.)

But the immediate need in the current context is to settle the conflict with Iran, and settle it fast, before another black-swan shock ignites the derivatives daisy chain and activates the final Great Taking on a global scale.

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Ellen Brown is an attorney, founder of the Public Banking Institute, and author of thirteen books including Web of Debt, The Public Bank Solution, and Banking on the People: Democratizing Money in the Digital Age. Her 400+ blog articles are posted at EllenBrown.com.

She is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).