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In the movie Casablanca, Humphrey Bog­art (play­ing the char­ac­ter Rick) is asked by one of Major Strasser’s Nazi asso­ciates “Can you pic­ture us in Lon­don?” More than fifty years after that movie was made, Werner Seifert (the head of the Frankfurt-based Deutsche Borse) echoed that ques­tion, say­ing that he could pic­ture him­self head­quar­tered in, and liv­ing in, London.

This broad­cast sets forth the facts con­cern­ing the pro­posed merger between the Lon­don Stock Exchange and the Deutsche Borse (the Ger­man stock exchange). Far from being a “merger,” the com­bined exchange (to be called “iX”) will be dom­i­nated by the large Ger­man banks that con­trol the Deutsche Borse.

Begin­ning with dis­cus­sion of the details con­cern­ing Ger­man dom­i­nance of the pro­posed merger (the share­hold­ers of the Lon­don Stock Exchange have yet to approve the merger), the pro­gram under­scores the pend­ing takeover as a par­tial real­iza­tion of the Pan-German the­o­ries of Friedrich List. Writ­ing in the 1840’s, List advo­cated that Ger­many should eco­nom­i­cally unite Europe under its con­trol, as a vehi­cle for replac­ing Great Britain as the dom­i­nant power on earth.

Although Britain is no longer the world’s fore­most colo­nial power, Lon­don had been the finan­cial cen­ter of Europe. The pro­posed merger would change that. Sig­nif­i­cantly, the pend­ing iX will have a link to NASDAQ, the Amer­i­can high-tech stock exchange, which it may ulti­mately absorb.

The sec­ond half of the pro­gram focuses on the con­trol of the Deutsche Borse by three big Ger­man com­mer­cial banks: the Deutsche Bank, the Dres­d­ner Bank and the Com­merzbank. In turn, the broad­cast sets forth the role of the above-named banks in the Third Reich and the Bor­mann Orga­ni­za­tion (the eco­nomic com­po­nent of a Third Reich gone underground).

In charge of the bank­ing activ­i­ties of the Third Reich, Mar­tin Bor­mann over­saw the inte­gra­tion of the finan­cial struc­tures of the coun­tries of occu­pied Europe into Germany’s. The “Big Three” Ger­man banks were the cen­tral vehi­cles for this incor­po­ra­tion, the Deutsche Bank in par­tic­u­lar. These banks then served as prin­ci­pal vehi­cles for the Bor­mann flight cap­i­tal pro­gram, through which the Bor­mann Orga­ni­za­tion was realized.

The pro­gram also dis­cusses the role of the Union Bank of Switzer­land (now UBS-Warburg) in both the Bor­mann group and the Deutsche Borse.

Pro­gram High­lights Include: the pend­ing sup­plant­ing of the LSE’s elec­tronic sys­tem with the Deutsche Borse’s Xetra sys­tem; the eclips­ing of the Lon­don Futures Exchange and the Chicago Board of Trade with Eurex (the Deutsche Borse’s futures exchange); a review of List’s for­mula for Ger­man eco­nomic and polit­i­cal con­trol of Europe; the role of the “Big Three” of Ger­man bank­ing in the Swiss and Turk­ish ele­ments of the Bor­mann flight cap­i­tal pro­gram; the Bor­mann group’s invest­ment in Amer­i­can blue chip cor­po­ra­tions; Mar­tin Bormann’s demand accounts in branches of major Amer­i­can com­mer­cial banks; the out­go­ing head of the Lon­don Exchange’s pro­jec­tion that the iX would even­tu­ally absorb NASDAQ. (Recorded on 5/20/2000 and 5/28/2000.)