Date: Tuesday, 13 October 2026
https://ericzuesse.substack.com/p/are-bilderberg-world-eonomic-forum
https://theduran.com/are-bilderberg-world-eonomic-forum-and-semafor
Are Bilderberg, World Economic Forum, and Semafor, dangerous? Why a repeat of the 2008 economic collapse is coming.
12 October 2026, by Eric Zuesse. (All of my recent articles can be seen here.)
All three provide to the billionaires from the U.S. empire, and their personal representatives, an opportunity to meet and discuss privately with each other, and thus facilitate — but do not prove — their conspiring together against not only the billionaires outside the empire, but governments over foreign lands they wish to acquire (add to the empire), and also against the workers and consumers in their own country. (Ultimately, this connects to the Government’s “Too Big To Fail” protection of the mega-rich, and more.)
Semafor is, among the general public, the least-discussed of the three, because it’s the newest, and it’s the only one of the three that’s additionally a news-medium. It is a superb one as a representative to a broader public, of “elite” or “C-suite” (top-level) corporate opinion in the imperial country itself, the Unites States. Semafor publishes both news and opinion that might be of special interest and useful to these individuals; but there is no such danger which might spring from that media-operation — and it has competitors in that field: the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Economist, Forbes, Bloomberg, etc. But none of those has also the elite private conference networking operation that Semafor does.
On October 12th, Semafor’s Business Editor, Liz Hoffman, headlined “Single point of failure”, and reported that the U.S. Government’s “Too Big To Fail” (pro-economic-concentration) policy that had led up to and caused the 2008 economic crash has since expanded so that it now includes more than just financial corporations:
“You want ‘too big to fail,’ here it is!” the small-screen version of Hank Paulson screams in HBO’s 2011 film as he stares down AIG’s failure. The plane that had shuttled him to an emergency meeting in New York had been leased from AIG. The construction he passed on his way to the New York Fed, financed by AIG. Eighty million retirement policies, insured by AIG.
In 2008, the fact that one company had become the entire economy’s single point of failure was obvious only when it was on the brink of collapse. At least this time we can see it on a blue-sky day: Nvidia is officially too big to fail.
More than $108 billion of data-center leases, guaranteed by Nvidia. Eight cents of every dollar wagered on the S&P 500, invested in Nvidia. Fifty billion dollars worth of stock in private companies, many of them its customers, and another $63 billion in listed companies, owned by Nvidia. It is an AI-rollup machine, with fresh reports over the weekend that it’s in talks to acquire or invest in both a customer, Reflection AI, and a competitor, d-Matrix.
Its balance sheet is strong enough for now, a message delivered with a buyback flex last month. But Nvidia has become AI’s bank and security blanket, a one-stop shop for financial and emotional reinforcement. Setting aside the numbers, a company is too big to fail when the answer to “would the government step in to save it?” is yes.
Big banks undergo annual exams to see how they would fare under different economic conditions — a spike in unemployment, a decline in home prices. What would be revealed by a stress test of Nvidia that contemplated a rise in the cost of AI-linked debt, a decline in venture-backed startup values, and a slowdown in data-center construction?
There’s a reason Paulson let Lehman Brothers fail but rescued AIG.
Of course, her argument for the necessity that the U.S. Government terminate its TBTF policy and replace it by a comprehensive regulatory policy to prevent any one company from being that powerful is flawless. But in the more immediate context, which is what these executives need, its message is that the next economic crash will be the biggest one ever, and that Nvidia is today’s AIG, not any sort of Lehman. Nvidia is TBTF, but the companies it is insuring (Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, Equinix, QTS, etc.) are not; so, any o them could be the next Lehman Brothers.
Here is how the 2008 collapse occurred:
Financial derivatives were approved by Bill Clinton at the end of his Administration and are designed and used instead of an insurance policy, in order to transfer financial risk to the public and government — to socialize the risks (the losses) while privatizing (to the financial corporations) the gains (the profits). A credit default swap is a financial derivative that substitutes for insurance against the default of a tranche (or group) of collateralized debt obligations. On September 16th of 2008, the Federal Reserve bailed out A.I.G. with an initial $85 billion loan collateralized by A.I.G.’s assets, and with warrants for an 80% federal stake in the company. A.I.G. had collapsed from credit default swap (CDS) securities issued from its London office, insuring $441 billion of other companies’ AAA collateralized debt obligation (CDO) bonds (mortgage-backed bonds), which had been over-rated by Moody’s and S&P. These bonds had been over-rated because the creditworthiness of the borrowers wasn’t being revealed to the bond-rating services. People who were trusting the credit-rating services were trusting basically lies. (The salespeople who had sold mortgages to these homebuyers were receiving their commissions based upon their sales-volume, and therefore had every incentive to close each deal regardless of a borrower’s ability to pay, and not to let such facts get in the way of culminating a deal. Those bond-rating lies helped the financial firms that created and marketed those Mortgage-Backed Securities or “MBS” loan-packages.) Another reason these CDO bonds that were produced for investors were over-rated by the credit-rating agencies is that the firms which were selling these CDO’s served as the paymasters to Moody’s and to S&P on their rating of these bonds, and consequently controlled the CDO bond-ratings. CDS (credit default swaps) were thus toxic investment derivatives which were essentially unbacked (or uncapitalized) bets that these CDO bonds wouldn’t go bust. But plunging home-values in the U.S. (due to these actually sub-prime mortgages) were lowering other property-values, and so the U.S. experienced a contagion of CDO bond defaults on even regular mortgages.
An April 2023 U.N. study, “REDUCING THE COST OF FINANCE FOR AFRICA: The Role of Sovereign Credit Ratings”, reported (page 41) that systematically under-rating by America’s S&P, Moody’s, and Fitch, of the creditworthiness of the nations in Africa causes them to overpay, because of the resultant unrealistically higher interest rates, $74.5 billion in excessive borrowing costs, per year. All of this is part of an imperialistic system, the U.S. empire, which benefits America’s billionaires enormously.
Furthermore, Bush’s U.S. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson (former head of Goldman Sachs) placed Goldman Sachs on the committee he set up to advise him on what to do with AIG, and Goldman was owed a ton of money by AIG. That alone should have sent the former Paulson to prison. Bailing out AIG ultimately cost U.S. taxpayers far more than did the entire 1980’s S&L bailout. On 9 August 2009, Gretchen Morgenson and Don Van Natta Jr. headlined in The New York Times, “Paulson’s Calls to Goldman Tested Ethics”, and they revealed that Paulson had recognized that his communications with Goldman in this AIG matter violated ethics rules and that he therefore requested waivers of those rules; and, “On Sept 17, the day Mr. Paulson secured his waivers, he and Mr. Blankfein [Goldman’s chief] spoke five times. Two of the calls occurred before Mr. Paulson’s waivers were granted.” Moreover, “During the week of the A.I.G. bailout alone, Mr. Paulson and Mr. Blankfein spoke two dozen times, ... far more frequently than Mr. Paulson did with other Wall Street executives.” (After all, Paulson was receiving his retirement checks from Goldman, not from any of those other firms.) Furthermore: “Goldman not only received $13 billion in taxpayer money as a result of the A.I.G. bailout, but also was given permission at the height of the crisis to convert from an investment firm to a national bank, giving it easier access to federal financing. ... Goldman also won federal debt guarantees and received $10 billion under the Troubled Asset Relief Program. It benefited further when the Securities and Exchange Commission suddenly changed its rules governing stock trading, barring investors from being able to bet against Goldman’s shares by selling them short.” The Times’s reporters requested to speak with Mr. Paulson, but he declined, and the reporters spoke instead with his aide Michele Davis, who made several allegations the reporters found to be false, such as that no waiver from the Treasury Department was even legally required, and that Paulson had no authority over the decision whether or not to rescue AIG. Blankfein’s reputation plummeted to its lowest point in 2010 after revelations that Goldman Sachs packaged and sold mortgage securities that appeared designed to fail, and then shorted the bonds, making a killing for the firm while its customers lost money. JPMorganChase did likewise, but its chief Jamie Dimon suffered no such blame, perhaps because he was especially a friend of President Obama.
I asked ChatGPT: “Paulson let Lehman collapse but not AIG. If Nvidia is today's AIG, what might be today's Lehman?” It answered (and then explained why): “My leading candidate is CoreWeave. My second is Oracle. But if your analogy concerns which institution Washington might deliberately allow to fail while rescuing Nvidia, CoreWeave is the more revealing possibility. The distinction is between a company that is financially vulnerable and one whose failure could threaten the entire financial system.” In other words: Oracle is too powerful for the Government not to bail it out in a crash.
This is useful information for the mega-rich, but not for individuals whose net worth consists mainly in their personal abodes. Semafor aims to serve the former; so, informing them about the riskiness of Nvidia might help that clientele.
In September 2020, the RAND Corporation — the think tank that (as was buried halfway down a long report by another think tank) received during 2019-2023 sixteen times as much funding from its top donor the Pentagon (perhaps the federal Department that helps billionaires the most) as did all of the other 9 among the top ten think-tank recipients of Pentagon funding put together; and so it clearly is the Pentagon’s think tank — issued nonetheless a study, “Trends in Income From 1975 to 2018”, by Carter C. Price and Kathryn A. Edwards, which reported that: “From 1975 to 2018, the difference between the aggregate taxable income for those below the 90th percentile and the equitable growth counterfactual totals $47 trillion,” which means that during those 43 years, the richest 10% received $47 trillion more than if America’s income distribution had remained the same as it had been in 1975 (which was about the same income distribution as had been in place ever since 1947, the first measured year). Furthermore, it showed that the top 10% share of taxable income increased from 33% in 1975 to 50% in 2018. Their “Figure 1” showed that ever since 1980 (that’s President Reagan), income-inequality soared in America. (Also see their follow-up: https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_briefs/RBA516-1.html). Making the result specific to normal Americans, the report said on page 10: “For example, the median income for all adults with nonzero income, was $26,000 in 1975, [and] grew to $36,000 by 2018. Had income for this percentile grown at the same pace as the economy [or the pre-existing income-distribution been maintained], it would have reached $57,000,” or 58% higher than it had been in 1975. So, the average American income-recipient was receiving in 2018 only 36,000/57,000 or 63% as much income as would have been the case had the 1947-1975 income distribution remained stable instead of soaring only for the richest 10%. Moreover, “due to significant increases in the dispersion of incomes within the 99th percentile, the average income growth for the top one percent was substantially higher, at more than 300 percent of the real per capita GDP rate.” The wealth-growth for the richest 1% dwarfed that for even the rest of the top 10%. So, was there something wrong with the previous income-distribution, or is there something wrong with the current income-distribution? Maybe invitation-only conferences of and for only billionaires and their representatives are a part of that trend, of more and more wealth being transferred to the super-rich, from everyone else. It’s done not merely by individuals, but, above all, by the system, the societal machinery. And organizations such as Bilderberg, WEF, and Semafor, facilitate (oil) that machinery.
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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.
