The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse Who Most Threaten American Democracy

Who could these four be?

In the Bible, the four horsemen of the apocalypse are four figures who are to bring about the end times. They are seen as personifications of war, famine, plague, and death.

If I were to ask you who the four horsemen of the apocalypse who most threaten U.S. democracy in contemporary times are, you might say they are Donald Trump, Steve Bannon, Rupert Murdoch, and Leonard Leo.

But while you can make a case for the above four, I would beg to differ.

Here’s who I consider the four horsemen to be:

***Jamie Dimon—CEO of JP Morgan Chase

***David Solomon—CEO of Goldman Sachs

***Brian Moynihan—CEO of Bank of America

***Jane Fraser—CEO of Citigroup

Why, you may wonder, do I identify these four bankers as the four horsemen of the apocalypse who most threaten American democracy?

Yes, Donald Trump, with his America First nationalist platform; Steve Bannon, with his self-proclaimed “war on the globalists” (while he rips off his followers); Rupert Murdoch, who makes a glob of money peddling misinformation via his right-wing media empire; and Leonard Leo, who is responsible for the supermajority on the Supreme Court, have surely done irreparable harm to democracy.

But they have nothing on the true four horsemen: the four bankers of the apocalypse.

You see, these four bankers have more money at their disposal than God, and there’s only one thing they use the money for: to make more money.

Let’s drill down: as of December 2023, there were 4,587 federally insured banks in the U.S., and these 4,587 banks held $192.46 trillion in derivatives. Of that amount, the four bankers of the apocalypse and their banks held $168.26 trillion in derivatives, which amounts to 87 percent of all derivatives held by banks in the U.S.

$168 trillion? That’s a lot of moolah, dinero, greenbacks, simoleons, dough, loot, lucre, bread, chicken feed, wampum, shekels—I think you get my drift.

Now, you may ask, what is a derivative? A derivative is a financial instrument whose value is derived from an underlying asset, commodity, or index.

A light was shed on derivatives after the financial crash of 2008, when it turned out banks were trading in mortgage derivatives, packaged with collateral debt obligations. Because they had no regulators looking over their shoulders, banks got themselves in a whole heap of trouble with their trading.

Greed was the underlying factor as to why they traded the derivatives obsessively and excessively, and they didn’t stop until they crashed the entire world economy.

Banks have the power to digitally create money at a magnitude of ten times the amount of money they have in reserve. Banks can take that money and create derivatives that they buy and sell all over the world. These derivatives are designed in such a way that they never lose money.

After the financial crash of 2008, when the commodities were mortgages, once the housing market collapsed, so did the derivatives, taking the big banks with them.

The crash made the banks smarter, and after getting massively bailed out by the government, now the derivatives are more abstract, as opposed to containing concrete commodities like mortgages or food.

The derivatives now are mostly containers of money, trading at a dollar volume of $4 to $5 trillion a day in indexes on central trading platforms all over the world. They are based on interest rates and exchange rates of currency around the world.

Of the $168.26 trillion in derivatives that the four bankers of the apocalypse hold, $123.55 trillion, or 73 percent, are interest rate and exchange rate derivatives.

One popular derivative of interest and exchange rates is a volatility index called the VIX, which is known as the fear index. It is the square root of an index of theoretical expectations of volatility based on all the options taken on the S&P 500. And if you want more, there’s even a daily double VIX and an inverse VIX.

I probably lost you on that, because it’s so surreal and abstract. The banks are happy that you don’t understand what I just said—they like it that way. This allows them to go on their merry way, watch the money pore in, and not have to answer to anyone.

They reside in a different universe than you or I, one in which money continually flows to them and those at the top, while the rest of us are left to fight over the crumbs.

When they choose not to gamble in the worldwide derivatives markets, they funnel money to their friends, those who own private equity and hedge fund firms. The private equity and hedge fund companies use the money to buy up businesses, for one express purpose: to strip them down and extract profits from the carcasses of these companies. In the process of doing this, they lay off large numbers of workers—this is just seen as collateral damage and the cost of doing business.

The four bankers of the apocalypse may even be somewhat socially liberal, for all I know. One of the four, Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JP Morgan Chase, writes a letter every year to JP Morgan’s shareholders, and in them he decries the country’s problems. In recent letters he has written, “A big chunk of Americans have been left behind,” “40 percent make less than $15 an hour,” “income inequality has gotten worse,” and “40 percent can’t afford a $400 bill.”

Earlier this year Dimon praised Donald Trump, praising his record while Trump was president. He did so because, if Trump gets elected president in 2024, he wants to stay on Trump’s good side.

Dimon, and the other three members of the four bankers of the apocalypse, are the ones who have all the power. Imagine having more money than the U.S. Treasury and more money than God, and yet the only thing you do with it is use it to make more money?

Especially when people are economically struggling and suffering? But to redirect that money would be seen as redistribution, and you know what redistribution is seen as: socialism! And we can’t have that, God forbid!

The reason democracy is under assault in the U.S. is because of the amount of people struggling economically. The cost of living is a burden for so many people, and wages don’t keep up with what it costs to live.

Currently, 70 percent of Americans say they live with constant economic anxiety.

The vast majority live paycheck to paycheck. If a person has a medical emergency, it could put them over the edge—indeed, the number one cause of bankruptcies in the U.S. are for medical bills that can’t be afforded or paid.

Yes, Trump, Bannon, Murdoch, and Leo represent existential threats to democracy with their threats to civil liberties, to truth, to equality and fairness, and to pushing an agenda that empowers a tyranny of the minority.

Yet the dystopia they promise is nothing compared to the dystopia that the four bankers of the apocalypse have wrought. As the four bankers continue to accrue money to themselves and their monolithic banking empires, it empowers the corporate monster that is devouring America, and in the process, is putting a wrecking ball not only to the lives of Americans, but to democracy.

In 1976, a brilliant and iconoclastic movie came along that pulled the curtain away from this shell game. It was the film Network, written by the great Paddy Chayefsky. Toward the end of the film, in a messianic speech given to the wayward news anchor, Howard Beale, by Arthur Jensen, the corporate owner of the conglomerate that owns Beale’s television station, it’s all spelled out.

Howard Beale had told his tens of millions of live television viewers the truth about the corrupt core of capitalism, and Jensen called Beale into his boardroom to admonish and intimidate him for doing so.

Jensen lashed out, yelling at Beale, “You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Beale, and I won't have it!! Is that clear?!”

Jensen continued:

“You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no third worlds. There is no West. There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multinational dominion of dollars. Petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars, reichmarks, rins, rubles, pounds, and shekels.

“It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today. That is the atomic and subatomic and galactic structure of things today! And YOU have meddled with the primal forces of nature, and YOU WILL ATONE!

"Am I getting through to you, Mr. Beale?

“You get up on your little twenty-one inch screen and howl about America and democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and ITT and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today.”

There can be democracy in America. But to save it, the Four Bankers/Horsemen of the Apocalypse must be vanquished.

On October 31, 1936, three days before the presidential election, Franklin Delano Roosevelt gave a speech at Madison Square Garden in New York City. In the speech, Roosevelt spoke about his New Deal policies and the importance of his being reelected, so that he could continue those policies.

FDR’s New Deal programs were helping to dig the nation out from the Great Depression, which was caused by the unregulated psychopathic behavior of bankers.

In his speech that day, FDR criticized those who, in his view, were putting personal gain and politics over national economic recovery from the Great Depression.

He described forces which he labeled “the old enemies of peace: business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering.” He went on to claim that these forces were united against his candidacy; that “They are unanimous in their hate for me — and I welcome their hatred.”

FDR reined in the bankers, and thanks to his reforms, the U.S. went on to have four decades of economic prosperity, allowing for the growth of a stable middle class, and with it—even with the many ups and downs along the way—a stable democracy.

We don’t have to start from scratch in order to rein in the banks and the four bankers of the apocalypse—we can learn from FDR’s example in order to do it again.

In doing so, the bankers will be unanimous in their hatred of us—and we can welcome their hatred.

As we rein them in and reform the financial system, we then will have the opportunity to aspire to the true promise of democracy: a society that works for all.