I was being glib, because I find our monetary system so ridiculous I have to embrace absurdity or it's upsetting

Obviously the JFK conspiracy is light on evidence, but the entire situation is definitely a conspiracy - something happened, it could've been geopolitical or the people keeping tabs on Lee Harvey Oswald really messed up. His story alone is pretty crazy... But anyways, every time I dive into it I find myself leaning more towards it being related to his banking statements than the alternatives, but who knows.

The foreign interventions are mostly declassified though, they're an absurd read. It wasn't always the US, but it was always one of the 5 eyes who got involved when alternate systems started to gain traction.

The IMF/World bank piece wasn't even exaggerated though. Obviously they make it sound a lot more innocent, but I don't think I even exaggerated this - it's a legitimate conspiracy working out in the open. It's truly horrifying. I didn't even know how it worked until I took an install in a relatively rich Caribbean country (aka big tourist Island with a large "white" population).

It was a tiny contract - I took it to help someone out and see somewhere beautiful, couldn't have been more than $15k all together - literal hobbiest level gear. It's not working and I've only got a day left to make it work (at least it turns out it wasn't my fault), and this dude comes up with a big camera like he owns the place, says he's from the world bank, and starts "politely" asking me to pose for the camera and do an interview about how this will help the country. I have no idea how to answer, I'm sunburnt, this isn't really my field, and after seeing the computer center has all the computers on dirty blocks because it floods, I genuinely doubt this would be helpful in any situation... It's basically a backup for if their Internet goes down, but in that case the place is probably flooded anyways

Turns out, the country was getting a pretty big uptick in income from tourism, so the world bank "offered" to fund a bunch of (from my perspective at least) unhelpful infrastructure projects. They'd had decades of austerity before that, their roads were worn out, the power grid was janky, obviously there was seasonal flooding in important places, and although tourism was their main income they didn't have transportation or hotels... Just bed and breakfasts and a dude I could arrange to give me a ride in the mornings.

So instead of fixing anything critical, they had some plan to build a road straight across the mountain range, with some crazy long tunnel for an insane price and a multi-year time frame.

People were pissed. Their economy was basically government funding allocated by the IMF "recommendations", which come with the stick of "we'll pull out and downgrade your credit if you don't pass this", and people hanging around waiting for odd jobs from the people on the government payroll.

So the world bank was doing a bunch of little projects that changed nothing, and covering them like the staged rescue effort videos China loves so much.

This felt very weird to me. Google any 2-3 descriptions of the IMF (just read an and you'll notice they allude to a lot Investopedia, first result, just read the IMF part carefully, then hit Wikipedia if you want to go down the rabbit hole). It's pretty dark, it's stuff you'd think was from a century ago, but it's actively happening still.

So if anything, I think I undersold the reality of that real life conspiracy.

I'd be genuinely interested to know if I was actually wrong about any of this... I've found a lot of post-hock justifications why things are the way they are, but to me, monetary systems seem like layers of justifications for an organization too powerful to call them out on it when they cheat. Debt doesn't produce value when housing prices go through the roof, when you take on credit card/payday debt, or when you get stuck with medical bills... It seems to me like it only works when you take out a loan for a small business, something that used to be big, but now more and more it creates nothing, expands no capability. It just flows upwards endlessly