Permission Slips

Nobody has to take your money. They only have to stop saying yes.

Greetings, friends!

A few years ago I received a letter from my bank. Not a phone call, not a conversation, not a meeting with a man in a suit who could look me in the eye. A letter. It informed me that I was no longer a client and that I had thirty days to tell them where to send the cheque.

Nobody took anything. No court, no charge, no explanation, no appeal. The money was all there, every last unit of it. It had simply stopped being welcome anywhere I could spend it. And the educational part comes afterwards, because obtaining banking once you have been debanked is not the administrative formality you would assume. Doors open your entire adult life are suddenly...not.

I don’t mention it for sympathy. I mention it because there is a difference between owning a thing and having permission to use it, and almost everything most people count as their wealth sits firmly in the second category.

Nobody Needs to Take It

Start at the loud end. In February 2022 the Canadian government reached for the Emergencies Act and roughly 210 bank accounts were frozen, holding around C$7.8 million belonging to people who had done something the establishment found irritating. Note the verb. Not seized. Frozen. Your money, still yours, still on the statement, entirely out of reach on a timetable nobody would tell you.

You could argue those were blue-collar workers with no political weight. Fine. Look up the ladder. Nigel Farage was debanked by Coutts, and whether you like the man is completely beside the point. The point is that within days the chief executive of NatWest had resigned over it. Everybody involved knew exactly what had been done.

Then go all the way up. Something in the order of $280 billion to $300 billion of Russian sovereign reserves sits immobilised, roughly $200 billion of it at a single Belgian clearing house. And here is the part worth sitting with...they never actually seized it. They didn’t have to. They froze it and quietly spent the interest it threw off. A nuclear-armed state with a permanent seat at the Security Council, locked out of the plumbing by policy decision.

Blue collar, white collar, nuclear power. Same mechanism, three orders of magnitude apart. So the notion that you, little old Joe Bloggs, enjoy some meaningful layer of protection inside that same architecture is not a theory. It is a hope.

Everything Sold as Convenience

Banking is only the loud version. The quiet version has been running for decades.

You own the computer you are reading this on. But the machine is a paperweight without the software, and the software is increasingly a subscription renewed at somebody else’s discretion. The same is now true of the thing in your driveway. When Fisker went under in 2024, people who had fully paid for their cars had to reverse-engineer the vehicle’s own software just to keep them running. Not leases. Cars they owned outright. The eighties habit of fixing your own car in your own garage didn’t die of natural causes. It was engineered out.

Then the one almost nobody thinks about. Look at fruit, and at how much of it is now seedless. Marvellous, no pips in my mouth. Except that if you must go back to a particular party each season to obtain seed in order to grow anything at all, you are not a farmer. You are a subscriber. And that isn’t conjecture, it is settled law...the US Supreme Court held unanimously in 2013 that a farmer replanting patented seed saved from his own harvest was manufacturing somebody else’s invention without a licence. Control the farmer and you control everybody sitting underneath the farmer, which is all of us.

The whole thing arguably began with the thirty-year mortgage, sold as the great democratiser of property ownership. Shelter, right there near the base of Maslow’s pyramid, converted into a multi-decade relationship with an institution that can legally pull credit on you, and which can itself be leaned on by a regulator who ran the algorithms and decided this fellow says things on X we don’t much care for.

Every one of these arrived wearing the same costume. Convenience. Nobody ever marched in the streets over seedless grapes.

The Tell

Last month the European Parliament handed us the clearest statement of intent yet, in a manner so perfectly European it deserves framing. Rejecting chat control required an absolute majority of 360 votes. Three hundred and fourteen members voted to reject it. More members voted against the thing than for it...and because 314 is not 360, it stands until April 2028.

That is not a law. That is an architecture, and the distinction matters. A law tells you what is forbidden. An architecture tells you what you are permitted to do, then confirms continuously that it is you doing it.

What Diversification Actually Has to Solve

Which brings me to money. Every second industry figure has now discovered geographic diversification. Ray Dalio is out there arguing investors need far more of it, and he is right as far as it goes. I am not at all convinced he means what we mean.

Picture an Australian with a self-managed super fund. Inside it, a brokerage account. Inside that, a Greek bank, an Indonesian palm oil producer, a Brazilian miner. Textbook diversification, and I have no quarrel with it whatsoever...we do exactly this, globally. That is intelligent portfolio management.

But look at where that person is concentrated. Every one of those holdings sits inside one pension structure, in one jurisdiction, behind one custodian, reachable through one banking relationship. He has diversified the assets beautifully and left the failure point completely untouched. Add a trust, and if the trust is domiciled in the same country holding the same account with the same custodian, he has solved for precisely nothing.

So we went and did something about it with our own money, and I will tell you plainly it was a pain in the arse of a magnitude we had not anticipated. The answer we arrived at is the original meaning of private equity. Not buying another listed security through the same system, but founding and owning real operating businesses in jurisdictions suited to where the world is actually heading. Hard assets rather than financial claims sitting in a custody account in New York. Income-producing, not a story that might make money in a decade. Productive farmland. Producing wells. Rent.

Which is close to the opposite of what the word now means. Google private equity today and you get the large houses, whose model is to buy an already-profitable business, load it with debt so the return on invested capital flatters nicely, then offload it to a pension fund carrying risk it never had before. Those same firms are now gating their investors.

Here is the lesson that actually shook me, though. Building the structures, the banking, the legal architecture, taught us we are considerably further down this road than we had assumed. We used to write that capital controls were coming. They are not coming. For European investors in particular it is now close to impossible to participate in our deals at all. Not difficult. Close to impossible. That is not a forecast, it is a Tuesday.

The Only Thing Worth Building

Underneath all of it there is one idea, and everything else is scaffolding around it. It is the ability to say no.

And you cannot say no from inside. When the letter arrives, when the account is frozen and nobody can tell you when or whether the money comes back, you have no position to negotiate from. You have a phone call and a hold tone. Everyone who ends up on the wrong side of this discovers the same thing at the same moment, which is that the moment is far too late.

I am not sitting here telling you we have the right answers. What I know is that this is what we are doing, with a quantity of our own capital large enough that if we have it wrong I burn worse than anybody reading this. That is the arrangement. We are doers, so we are doing.

Nothing here is investment advice and none of it is a recommendation. Do your own research. Everything carries risk, and what suits us may be entirely unsuitable for you.

No is not something you say when the moment arrives. It is something you build, quietly, for years before it does.

If you want the machinery rather than the shape of it.

What you have just read is the outline. The current issue of the Insider Newsletter takes it apart piece by piece, and it does not make for comfortable reading.

Inside it:

1. The EU’s internet passport, and the carve-out written into the design specifying that it cannot be bypassed by VPN. Which is the entire point. They published that themselves.

2. The World Economic Forum’s own roadmap for personal carbon allowances. Three levers, named in their own words, on their own website.

3. A court ruling out of Europe attaching criminal liability to the relaying of information, where the accuracy of that information is explicitly not a defence.

4. Australia’s four and a half trillion dollars of superannuation, described by its own Prime Minister, on the record, as a “national asset.”

5. The Big Five, which this month is six. An entire consumer sector down 60% in three years, several names at ten-year lows, one of them 80% off its high.

Free readers get the argument. Paid subscribers get the evidence, the charts, the numbers and the names.

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