Going Direct — How They Bypassed Democracy

The Document

In August 2019 — one month before the September repo rate spike — BlackRock Investment Institute published a paper titled Dealing with the Next Downturn: From Unconventional Monetary Policy to Unprecedented Policy Coordination.

The authors: Stanley Fischer (former Vice-Chair of the Federal Reserve), Philipp Hildebrand (former Chair of the Swiss National Bank), Jean Boivin (former Deputy Governor of the Bank of Canada), and Elga Bartsch.

The paper proposed that in the next downturn, central banks — having exhausted conventional monetary policy — should bypass the normal democratic circuit of government borrowing and parliamentary approval, and instead direct money creation straight into the economy through a “standing emergency fiscal facility” controlled by the central bank.

They called it Going Direct.

What It Proposed

The conventional circuit: central bank → government borrowing → parliamentary vote → public spending.

The Going Direct circuit: central bank → direct injection into economy, bypassing parliament.

The paper was explicit that this required “unprecedented coordination” between monetary and fiscal authorities — meaning the central bank would effectively direct government spending without democratic authorisation.

What Happened Next

  • August 2019: BlackRock publishes Going Direct
  • September 2019: Overnight repo rate spikes from 2% to 10%. Federal Reserve intervenes with $6.6 trillion in rolling repo operations
  • March 2020: COVID declared. Federal Reserve expands balance sheet by $3 trillion in weeks. The Going Direct playbook is executed in real time
  • August 2020: BlackRock is hired by the Federal Reserve, the Bank of Canada, and the European Central Bank to advise on bond-buying programmes

The firm that wrote the playbook was hired to run the play.

Why It Matters

Going Direct is the operational proof of Article VI of the Manifesto — that the bond markets are not a force of nature but a mechanism, and that monetary sovereignty belongs to the people, not to the institutions that administer the extraction.

If the central bank can create money and direct it into the economy without parliamentary authorisation when it serves the interests of the creditor class, it can do the same when it serves the interests of the people. The constraint is not technical. It is political.

The Jubilee Application

The same mechanism that was used to rescue the financial system in 2020 can be used to cancel the odious debt. The money does not need to be borrowed. It does not need to be taxed. It can be created — as the Bank of England confirmed in March 2014, as Beardsley Ruml demonstrated in 1946, and as BlackRock’s own paper confirmed in 2019.

The question is not whether it is possible. The question is whose interests it serves.

Sources

  • BlackRock Investment Institute (2019). Dealing with the Next Downturn: From Unconventional Monetary Policy to Unprecedented Policy Coordination. August 2019. Stanley Fischer, Philipp Hildebrand, Jean Boivin, Elga Bartsch.
  • Federal Reserve H.4.1 statistical release — balance sheet expansion data
  • Bank of England Quarterly Bulletin Q1 2014: “Money Creation in the Modern Economy”
  • Ruml, B. (1946). “Taxes for Revenue Are Obsolete.” American Affairs, Vol. VIII, No. 1.

CC BY-SA 4.0 — Every copy is a node. Every node is sovereign.

← Back