Book Review: Revelation$

I actually read the german translation of Revelation$ and I haven’t found an english version. The book is about the inner workings of Clearstream, kind of the bank of banks, used for example for storeing stock certificates. I noticed Clearstream when I moved my portfolio from Deutsche Bank to Citibank and got mailings stating that X shares of stock Y are in Clearstream locker Z in New York or some other city. The book starts with a very nice quote from Kurt Marti (1981) which I will try to translate from the german version: _Where would we come, if everyone said, where would we come and nobody went, to take a look, where one would come if one went._. But on to the review of the book.

I have been interested in the financial markets for some time now and when I heard of “Revelation$” via a friend, I thought the book would fit my interest very well. This I still believe, it did fit. The problem is that it is written more like a complicated research report (which it is), lacking a really coherent story line.

You will learn something about how the clearing system behind Cedel-Clearstream works. You will find out that there is a little bit of similarity between the structure of Cedel and VISA in that ownership is kind of shares by lots of banks, bu you won’t finish the first part of the book with an AHA experience. The second part doesn’t really help either, as it just gives a lot closer information on different parts of the story as told by Ernest Backes, who was one of the early people at Clearstream, building the system.

The importance of this book lies in the details it gives in relation to the inner workings of Cedel and their Accounts System, including accounts onthe Cayment Islands of different banks and the growth of wealth of the Luxemburg royals.

Ernest Backes wants to do good with his revelations and shows that the Cedel System can be used for money laundry, but I can’t help but feel that the real problem comes from corrupt bankers that tunnel mafia money into the system in the first place. Cash has to be put in a bank at some point and that without turning up, which has nothing much to do with Cedel, which only does make it easer to transfer it arround, between banks and countries and hidden accounts.

With the help of unlisted Cedel Accounts, partly of unlisted Clients, that all turn up nowhere, you can pretty much transfer money into nowhere, at least unless somebody checks the Cedel accounts a lot deeper than done at the time of the writing of the book.

You also learn a little bit about the Loge P2, Bilderberg or the Freemasons or Nadhmi Auchi or Irving David Kott. All things you do not hear a lot about.

This is a book for those highly interested in this kind of material. It’s not easy to follow the story line and you need to be in an investigative mood, looking for small and juice details of the financial world.