Bilderberg To Discuss Capital Controls on Consumers While HSBC Pays $40 Million Money Laundering Fine

The powerful Bilderberg Group will discuss imposing more capital controls on average citizens while HSBC, whose Group Chairman will attend the conference, is set to pay more than $40 million dollars for illegal money laundering involving arms dealers and helping the wealthy avoid taxes.

It’s very much a case of do as we say, not as we do.

Douglas Flint, Group Chairman of HSBC Holdings, will attend the elitist confab in Telfs-Buchen, Austria this week along with Stuart Levey, HSBC’s Chief Legal Officer and Rona Fairhead, an HSBC director and Chairwoman of the BBC Trust.

The transnational bank was just ordered by Geneva authorities to pay 40 million Swiss france (around $43 million dollars) for its Swiss subsidiary’s involvement in illegal money laundering activities during which, “HSBC’s Swiss arm banked the proceeds of political corruption and accepted deposits from arms dealers while helping wealthy people evade taxes,” reports the London Guardian.

In 2012, HSBC agreed to pay U.S. authorities $1.9 billion dollars after a Senate investigation found the bank had been a conduit for “drug kingpins and rogue nations.”

Ironic therefore it is that HSBC representatives will be party to discussions at Bilderberg centered around moving towards the abolition of cash and the imposition of capital controls on ordinary citizens in the name of stopping tax fraud and allowing more state control over people’s finances.

During the conference, Bilderberg will set the consensus for green lighting economic restrictions under the justification of stopping financing for terror groups like ISIS. Bilderberg will also discuss new controls on the sale of precious metals throughout Europe.

Numerous influential voices have recently called for eliminating physical currency altogether, giving central banks and governments the power to directly control your finances under the justification of preventing an economic collapse and bank runs.

At its most authoritarian extreme, this means having to obtain government permission every time you withdraw or spend a moderately large sum of money.

France is already set to introduce laws in September which will restrict French citizens from making cash payments over €1,000 euros. France’s Special Adviser on Financial and Economic Affairs to the President Laurence Boone will attend Bilderberg 2015.

Former Bank of England economist Jim Leaviss, penned an article for the London Telegraph last month in which he said a cashless society would only be achieved by “forcing everyone to spend only by electronic means from an account held at a government-run bank,” which would be, “monitored, or even directly controlled by the government.”

Banks in the United States and United Kingdom have also intensified policies that treat the deposit and withdrawal of relatively large amounts of cash as a suspicious activity.

Citigroup Chief Economist Willem Buiter recently advocated abolishing cash altogether in order to “solve the world’s central banks’ problem with negative interest rates.”

Last year, Harvard University’s Kenneth Rogoff also called for “abolishing physical currency” in order to stop “tax evasion and illegal activity” as well as preventing people from withdrawing money when interest rates are close to zero. Harvard Professor of Economics Martin Feldstein is on the official attendee list for this year’s Bilderberg conference.

Buiter and Rogoff recently gave presentations at a secret meeting in London during which they advocated, “the elimination of all cash to bring to fruition the day when you cannot buy or sell anything without government approval,” according to economist Martin Armstrong.