The most important principle in the world of finance is secrecy. Information about certain decisions, about specific operations, about the plans of financial institutions, about their situation is hidden not only from ordinary citizens, but also from state institutions endowed with control rights. The world of finance is a second reality, a parallel world that is increasingly influencing our daily life, the first reality. And the stricter the secrecy, the greater the effectiveness of this influence.
Economics textbooks usually name only two international centers that carry out global management of world finances - the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Bank for International Settlements (BIS). Quite a lot is known about the first of them. As for the BIS, this organization is much more closed. It is usually called the "club of central banks" or "Central bank of central banks". This organization was founded in 1930. During the Second World War, she actively cooperated with Nazi Germany. At the end of the war, the victorious countries made a decision to liquidate it, but the decision failed. Today, the BIS members are 60 central banks, including the Bank of Russia.
However, the IMF and the BIS are not all. There are other (global) centers of global finance management. They are rarely spoken about. I have already written about the informal organization of the G-30 (Group of Thirty), which is one of the supranational centers of governance of the global financial system.
There is another supranational organization in the world of finance that even many professionals do not know about; information about it leaks into open sources in homeopathic doses. This is G-10, or Group of Ten (Group). Soviet textbooks said that the G-10 is a dozen IMF member states (Belgium, Canada, France, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, Great Britain, USA, Sweden, Germany), which signed the General Agreement on Loans in Paris in 1962 (General Agreements to Borrow - GAB). Then the "ten" poured into the amount of IMF loans of $ 6 billion. After 1962, meetings of the "ten" began to be held regularly. Switzerland joined the Group in 1964, but the name of the G-10 was not changed. The Bank for International Settlements, the European Commission,IMF and Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Some experts believe that it was the Ten who prepared the plan to dismantle the Bretton Woods monetary and financial system and replace it with the Jamaican system in 1976.
Now the "top ten" has almost ceased to be remembered. They often recall her brainchild - the General Agreement on Loans, which still exists in a modified form. As of the middle of last year, the amount of loans under the General Agreement amounted to $ 26 billion.
At the meetings of the top ten, decisions on key rates are coordinated, agreements on currency swaps are signed between central banks, and permissible ranges of currency fluctuations are determined. The Ten is primarily a cartel of central banks.
Some of the meetings of the top ten members are held under the roof of the BIS. I will say more: the Group of Ten not only meets in Basel, it actually manages the Bank for International Settlements. The information on the BIS website that the Group holds its meetings once a year on the sidelines of the IMF-WB summit looks funny. And there is not a word about the fact that the heads of the central banks of the Group regularly meet at the BIS headquarters in Basel.
The work of Edward Epstein ("Managing the World of Money"), Ellen Brown ("The Tower of Basel: Secret Plans to Issue a Global Currency"), Adam Leborah ("The Tower of Basel: The Hazy History of a Secret Bank that rules the world "). Most interesting is the work of the last author, a British journalist, published in 2013.
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The BIS organizes a large number of meetings with the participation of leaders and senior officials of central banks and financial regulators of member countries. According to the latest BIS annual report for 2017/18, during the reporting (annual) period, 278 meetings were held, with 9,514 participants. Including in the central office of the BIS in Basel, 187 meetings (6213 participants) were held.
There are three types of regular meetings that are held at the Bank for International Settlements every two months with the participation of the heads of the central banks-members of the BIS. These are the Global Economy Meeting, the Economic Consultative Committee and the All Governors' Meeting. All these meetings take place one after the other within two to three days.
The Group of Ten is hiding under the guise of the Economic Advisory Committee (EKC). Sometimes up to fifteen central banks participate in the EKC meetings, but the core of the eleven original members of the “ten” has remained unchanged to this day. The EKC advises and reviews applications for membership in the BIS. The Economic Advisory Committee also oversees the work of the three BIS committees that deal with the global financial system, payment systems and international markets. The EKC is also preparing proposals for the Global Economy Meeting and the General Meeting of Central Bank Governors.
The cycle of two-month meetings in Basel begins with a meeting of the EKC, followed by a Meeting on the Global Economy, and the final phase is the General Meeting of Central Bank Governors. This is how Adam Lebord describes holding a meeting of the Economic Advisory Committee, which he calls "the most exclusive club in the world":
In his book, Adam Lebord lists the composition of the Economic Advisory Committee as of 2013: Ben Bernanke, Chairman of the US Federal Reserve; Sir Mervyn King, Governor of the Bank of England; Mario Draghi from the European Central Bank; Zhou Xiaochuan from the Bank of China; as well as central bank governors in Germany, France, Italy, Sweden, Canada, India and Brazil. They are joined by Jaime Caruana, former Governor of the Bank of Spain and CEO of the BIS.
The latest annual report of the BIS also mentions the Economic Advisory Committee and states that it has 18 members. This is still the same "ten" (more precisely, a group of 11 central banks), to which the European Central Bank (ECB), the central banks of China, India, Japan, Brazil, Mexico were added.
All members of the EKK "by a strange coincidence" are on the board of directors of the BIS. In addition to the 18 mentioned EKC members, there are three other members of the Board, including Jens Weidmann, who chairs the BIS Board of Directors and is chairman of the General Meeting of Central Bank Governors. Weidmann is President of the German Federal Bank and Member of the Board of the ECB.
The Economic Advisory Committee is currently chaired by Mark Carney, an experienced banker. This is a man from Goldman Sachs Bank. Carney worked for 13 years at the bank's London, New York, Toronto and Tokyo branches, focusing on sovereign risk, emerging market debt capital markets and banking investment. In 2008-2013. he headed the Bank of Canada. Since 2013 - Governor of the Bank of England (replaced Mervyn King). At the BIS, Mark Carney is also the Chair of the Meeting on the Global Economy. So, at the moment, a Goldman Sachs man is leading the Group, which is still commonly called the G-10. And one more detail: Carney is a member of the G-30. By the way, some other members of the modernized G-30 are taking part in the work of the G-30. For example, Mario Draghi,who is also a Goldman Sachs bank man.
The limited size of the article does not allow to reveal all the threads that connect the G-30 and G-10. As for the extended top ten, its activities are focused today on the management of the Bank for International Settlements.