Who Benefits From the Growing Global Chaos?

From the Epstein pipeline to the BIS ledger, the architecture of disorder has a beneficiary, and it is not you.

Dr. Mathew Maavak

From the battlefields of Ukraine and Gaza to the debt crises of the Global South, from El Niño-fuelled disasters to state-sponsored disinformation and sabotage, the world is being reshaped by overlapping chaos. But as these crises compound, a crucial question emerges: who is actually benefiting?

While multiple crises intensify across the world, they do not impact everyone evenly. They deepen existing inequalities, concentrating hardship on ordinary citizens while insulating the wealthiest. The question, then, is not whether chaos has costs, which it clearly does, but who collects the profits. This essay argues that a narrow class of actors, particularly Western financial institutions in London and New York, acts as a sponge for capital fleeing states reeling from engineered internal instability, turning global disorder into private gain.

The Banking Rot Within

Much has been written about compromised politicians, particularly in the West, who merely act as rubber stampers to the runaway wealth looting across the world. While they ostensibly helm the highest offices of their respective nations, in reality they constitute the middle rungs of the Epstein Class where the power dynamics are shaped by blackmail and oligarchic control. The primary agency that greases this machinery is the Western banking system.

This system is more akin to a spider web than to the transparent ledger it pretends to be. It is self-repairing, invisible until you are already caught, and shaped to drain what it ensnares.

The productive economy on which Western banking was built, including manufacturing, small-business lending, and household credit, has been hollowed out by deindustrialisation, wage stagnation, and household debt saturation. Rising unemployment and falling purchasing power mean fewer creditworthy borrowers. Every small business that closes removes a client, a deposit base, and a lending relationship. Banks therefore cannot grow by lending to a population with nothing left to borrow against, nor by servicing factories that no longer exist.

When the productive base fails, the state is summoned to socialise the losses through bailouts, guarantees, and quantitative easing, while the gains remain private. So the business model has shifted. It now favours extracting wealth over financing production. Profits now come from fees, trading spreads, wealth management, private banking, and advisory work for the ultra-rich, including the oligarch, the sanctioned billionaire, and the corrupt official seeking a haven. The bank that once grew by lending to Main Street now grows by managing the fortunes of those who abandoned it. In this model, chaos is not a threat to the bottom line. It is the product.

Capital Flight and Luxury Malls

Sanctions form one tool of economic warfare that directly impacts ordinary citizens instead of the oligarchy and deep states which prop up targeted governments.

When Switzerland tightened its stance on Russian clients after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, UBS launched a major “cleaning operation” of its Russian client base. Russian assets at UBS dropped from roughly CHF 50 billion to about CHF 20 billion, with only CHF 2 billion actually frozen by sanctions. The rest did not vanish. According to Tamedia investigative reporting, large Russian clients “expelled” from UBS found refuge in major banks based in New York, London, and Paris. Yes, you read that right! While the Western mainstream media whips up a frenzy against the Kremlin, they rarely report on the financial protection offered by their banking systems to the Kremlin network.

The mechanics here are revealing. Israeli citizens acquired nearly 4,000 properties in Cyprus between 2021 and 2024, with 1,154 located in Limassol, second only to Russian buyers who snapped up 2,561 in the same district. Can we assume that many of these Israelis were dual citizens of Russia?

As for Russia, ownership chains routed through Cyprus, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the British Virgin Islands rose from 15.3% to 31.61% after 2022. VTB Capital PLC in the UK alone connects the Russian state-owned VTB group to 1,650 direct and indirect subsidiaries with combined revenues near €90.7 billion. After public exposure, this arrangement did not disappear. Instead, it became more decentralised, more dependent on intermediary jurisdictions that separate ownership from control.

This is not the first time Israeli and Russian deep state and oligarchic interests have converged. Read on, as there is a dedicated section on Jeffrey Epstein.

For the time being, let me provide an anecdote. When I was invited to a conference in Moscow in 2025, I was surprised by the volume of luxury goods stocked in a mall adjacent to my hotel. The chauffeur who drove me from the airport was driving a luxury Mercedes-Benz model I had never seen before. Moscow certainly did not look like a sanctioned capital. The only reminder that a sanction was in place was the visitor’s inability to use Mastercard and Visa.

But while the Russian oligarchy has access to capital that buys and sells across the global markets, particularly through intermediaries, ordinary Russian citizens cannot whip out their credit cards to purchase books or even subscribe to a newsletter. But sanctions did have a trickle-on effect. When I visited Moscow again in April/May 2026, the same mall had noticeably fewer patrons, and many of the luxury brands I saw a year earlier were no longer available. Even the conference buffet, which was generous a year earlier, was now stripped to tidbits. There was just not enough taxpayer money. While the oligarchs are digging in, it is the ordinary citizens who pay the ultimate price, including international attendees invited to a state-funded event.

And speaking of malls, the largest one in the world is the Iran Mall, set in the most sanctioned country on earth. How on earth did Tehran manage to pull this off?

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/8MRBAnHVQQ8?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0

Correspondent Banking

Iran accesses the US financial system through the same architecture as Russia. Billions of dollars in Iranian funds flow through clearing accounts at American banks each year via correspondent banking. This is a system where foreign banks maintain dollar accounts with US institutions to process transactions. The US Treasury identified approximately $9 billion in Iranian funds moving through American banks in 2024 alone, and this is probably the tip of an iceberg worth trillions.

The Emirati branch of Egypt’s state-owned Banque Misr accessed US correspondent accounts and routed as much as $1.8 billion for companies that were potentially part of Iranian shadow-banking networks. The Treasury said Misr UAE had dollar accounts with three US banks while Banque Misr’s website lists JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup as correspondent institutions.

A notable court case alleged that Kuveyt Turk, a Turkish bank, used HSBC, Standard Chartered, JPMorgan Chase, Citibank, and Bank of New York Mellon as correspondent banks to process dollar transactions for Iranian-linked entities. One $5.7 million transaction allegedly involved the National Iranian Oil Company. The Telegraph promotes the line that these banks had “unwittingly” engaged in sanctions-evading chicanery.

Sanctions simply cannot work within the Transnational Capital Class, now more popularly known as the Epstein Class. There is too much blackmail material and various forms of leverage to ensure these transactions and deposits are protected, beyond a symbolic slap on the wrist. Bankers know better than to double-cross a client beyond the price of a token penalty. These are not entities and individuals one trifles with.

Failure of ‘Sanctions’

Research on US-sanctioned networks from 1980 to 2023 finds that for Iranian and Russian actors alone, the dominant adaptive strategy has been centralised relocation. This works by shifting activity from one top-tier financial centre to another, rather than dispersing to the periphery. Sanctioned networks “pushed out of London” routinely re-establish themselves in offshore and international financial centres that “retain strong relational and institutional ties and congruences with London,” centred on a Dubai-Hong Kong axis.

Sanctions merely change the form and channels of capital flows. The funds themselves remain largely untouched. Ownership becomes more layered, jurisdictions more opaque, and intermediaries more essential. Under this arrangement, the foundational plumbing of global finance, anchored in dollar clearing and London-based legal structures, remains intact.

The latest figures from the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) and major bank reports paint a stark picture. Global cross-border bank claims reached $45 trillion by Q3 2025, with a quarterly expansion of $832 billion. The overwhelming majority of capital flowed into the United States and other advanced economies rather than emerging markets.

Why is capital flowing to a fading superpower saddled with more than $40 trillion in national debt, with infrastructure deteriorating to Third World levels, and where 40 percent of citizens cannot cover a $400 emergency?

Is it because forever wars and global chaos benefit only a tiny fraction of “national investors” comprising the Epstein Class, including officially-sanctioned billionaires? Is this the only “growth model” left for the puppet masters of the American Empire? Has this capital flight into the United States benefitted the American worker?

Source: https://drmathewmaavak.substack.com/p/who-benefits-from-the-growing-global?publication_id=1272657&post_id=217737895&isFreemail=true&r=q32pq&triedRedirect=true