Etienne Note: We are publishing this article as supplementary material to a more in-depth article on “The Great Taking” at
that includes the full transcript for the documentary we are syndicating across our channels and embedding in this article for additional information. We also have the links to download David Rogers Webb book: The Great Taking for free and Etienne’s thoughts and recommendations for how to fight back. Link Video
By Alex Newman
When the globalist World Economic Forum (WEF) predicted in 2015 that “you will own nothing and be happy” by 2030, people worldwide recoiled in horror at the thought, but almost nobody understood the mechanism by which it might take place. Now, thanks to brave whistleblowers and attorneys, the plan to seize virtually everything is plain to see. The real question at this point is: Can it be stopped before it’s too late?
If the WEF’s Great Reset is the marketing campaign for global “transformation,” what retired investment banker David Webb calls “The Great Taking” is the legal and financial machinery designed to make the transformation unavoidable. The plan involves ending private-property rights in securities — stocks, bonds, and other financial instruments — to allow mega-banks allied with governments to take everything when the next crisis hits.
In essence, you no longer own your securities; the deed has already been done. The stocks and bonds in your retirement and investment accounts may seem like they are yours. But thanks to little-noticed changes in state law going back decades, they are actually not. And when a major economic and financial cataclysm strikes, the Deep State establishment and the governments and megabanks it controls will take over everything from you.
Great Reset Reality
If the scheme is not stopped, the World Economic Forum’s prediction that “you will own nothing” could become a reality in the not-too-distant future. Imagine: Ownership and control of every publicly traded company in the hands of a tiny, megalomaniacal elite. And this plan is not just for the United States, but for the world.
Webb, who first blew the whistle on the scheme to steal all securities in recent years with a book and documentary that went viral, explains the operation in terms any non-finance person can understand. For centuries, stocks and bonds were treated as personal property, which insulated the public from failures inside the financial system.
“For hundreds of years … securities were your property,” he explained to this writer during a 2025 interview. “If the banker or the custodian failed … that was entirely their problem.” Historically, the investor could simply tell those holding the securities, “here’s where you send my stuff.” But that “bulletproof” protection is now gone, he warned.
“Security Entitlement”
In fact, even the direct record of ownership has been severed. Securities are now held in pooled form. And what investors possess is not ownership, but a legal abstraction. “You no longer have a property right — you have what’s called a security entitlement,” warned Webb.
Right now, that may not seem too important. After all, you can still call you broker, put in a sell order, and receive your cash. But when the next crisis hits — and many experts and economists believe it could be just around the corner — the significance of this change will be clear.
This concept was first embedded into American law through amendments adopted across the states beginning in 1994. In short, through seemingly minor changes to commercial and contract law adopted quietly nationwide, Americans were stripped of their property rights to their securities.
The practical consequence is stark: “If the intermediary fails, you have no right to take your property back,” Webb explained.
How It Works
Attorney Don Grande — founder of TruNorth Public Policy and one of the principal leaders working with state legislators to reverse the change — puts the mechanism in sharper legal terms. The foundation of the plan, he says, is state law, specifically Uniform Commercial Code (UCC) Article 8, which governs investment securities.
While UCC Article 8 is written to sound like ownership remains intact, Grande explains it contains “two exceptions that give banks priority in the event of insolvency of a broker or a custodian.” In calm times, the language reassures. In crisis, those exceptions control outcomes. The schemes have already been tested in court, too.
Grande describes the chain plainly: An individual buys stock through a broker and believes he owns it. But instead of genuine ownership, “they get a security entitlement,” he says, using the legal term now embedded in state law. That “security entitlement” entitles one to control over the security, until it doesn’t anymore.
The broker routes custody upward through layers until the asset sits at the apex of the system with a shadowy outfit called the “Depository Trust Company” (DTC) and its designated agent.
Too Big to Fail
If a broker, custodian, or clearing structure fails, priority shifts: “The first exception gives … banks that lend to brokers or custodians, priority over the investor,” warned Grande. “The second … gives [lenders] to clearing corporations … priority over the investor in the event of insolvency.”
In other words, the public stands behind secured creditors in line when it matters most.
This does not seem like a big deal as long as the economy is dealing with routine market gains and losses. But in the event of systemic failure and a cascade of insolvencies, those seemingly obscure rules governing legal priority are triggered — and saving the government-backed megabanks takes priority over your retirement.
Webb summarizes the reality bluntly: The investor is “always vulnerable to insolvency of the intermediary and has no right to take back their property.”
Grande calls it “essentially a too-big-to-fail law,” engineered for collapse. The intent was explicit: The drafter of the provision called it “Armageddon Planning for the Financial Sector.”
An interesting twist to this story of Deep State subversion goes back to a key figure in laying the groundwork for it all. The DTC, which selected its agent “Cede & Co.” to serve as the registered “owner” of almost all U.S. securities (yes, really), was literally created and run by former CIA operative William Dentzer. Dentzer also served as architect of the disgraced “foreign aid” agency USAID, long considered a CIA front.
The Big Guys Benefit
The beneficiaries are predictable: The Deep State money men and the institutions they own and control. As Grande explained to this writer during an episode of Conversations That Matter for The New American, “the banks that own Depository Trust Company, which is JPMorgan Chase and all the too-big-to-fails … are the ones that are going to be able to … hoover up all the securities of the individuals” when the next crisis hits. The public is left with claims on leftovers — if anything remains.
To cut through the complex legal and financial jargon, South Dakota Representative Julie Auch (R), the first lawmaker to file a bill to fix this mess in any state, offered an analogy during an interview with this writer on Conversations That Matter. Imagine you take your car to a mechanic; the mechanic secretly uses your car as collateral; the mechanic goes broke; creditors seize what you thought was your car.
Webb agrees that the analogy fits. But the reality is even worse because it is global and hidden. It is a pawn operation you never agreed to enter: “Your property is being pawned…. You haven’t given permission.… Someone else is taking your property and pawning it.”
Political Power
Webb insists the Great Taking is not merely financial, but political. “This is not just about your IRA…. This is about subjugation … a geopolitical strategy … essentially a hybrid war,” he said. The objective is not that the cartel needs your savings; it is that you cannot retain independent resources.
Grande also put it plainly: “They don’t need my 401k or my IRA…. They just can’t let me have it,” he said. “They want to take property … so that we are essentially slaves.” Strip the middle class of savings and collateral, and the “solution” becomes irresistible. Webb names the endpoint too: “Central bank digital currency and total control.”
Imagine a financial panic, similar in some ways to the hysteria over Covid manufactured by bureaucrats, governments, and international organizations. With everybody terrified about their money, political leaders and media talking heads might come on TV to “reassure” the public amid a bank holiday.
“Everything is under control,” they might say. “To avoid a bigger economic crisis, banks will be on holiday for a while. But for now, you can download an app that will have some central bank digital currency on it so you can continue shopping for needed essentials. Trust the government, everything will be fine.” Meanwhile, by the time the dust settles, all securities will be seized to prop up the system.
Fixing the System
You might think fixing this would be simple. But the reaction when lawmakers attempt to restore basic property rights exposes the stakes. Grande describes facing what he calls “the Twin Towers of Mordor”: “the bank lobby and the Uniform Law Commission.” Both outfits have dismissed concerns publicly while exerting pressure privately. Committee rooms fill with lobbyists; vague warnings of “negative consequences” appear; specifics evaporate when challenged.
In an interview with Representative Auch for The New American, she described how her bill — crafted to protect investors’ property rights from the Great Taking — was deliberately sent to a committee to die. After educating colleagues on the mechanics of the scheme and finding broad support, she said powerful forces worked behind the scenes to halt the effort.
The pattern matched what Webb and Grande shared with this writer: When the merits could not be defeated, procedure and pressure were used to kill reform quietly. Multiple lawmakers across multiple states have described similar scenarios in their own states as they sought to restore property ownership over securities.
That response should tell Americans everything they need to know. Legitimate, constitutional systems, statutes, and structures do not require silence, threats, or procedural burial to survive. Schemes built for looting and subjugating the public do. The incentives are now in place and easy to see. For global banking elites, crashing the system and seizing everything is now in their own best interest, especially as the instability of the Federal Reserve’s fiat monetary system grows.
History Repeating
Technically, this would not be the first time the government and megabanks conspired on a “Great Taking.” In the midst of the Fed-created “Great Depression,” President Franklin Delano Roosevelt issued his infamous 1933 “Executive Order 6102.” The unconstitutional decree purported to require that Americans surrender their gold, supposedly to stabilize the banking system. In exchange, they received paper. And those notes were promptly devalued by 40 percent.
The next heist may make FDR’s looting seem trivial by comparison. The Great Taking, it seems, is now the Great Reset’s financial endgame in legal form: a vulnerability embedded in custody and settlement rules — activated in crisis — to dispossess the public and force total dependence while wiping out the middle class. The schemes have already been tested in state and federal courts during financial crises of recent decades. And now, the establishment is ready for widespread theft as soon as the right economic meltdown hits.
This is, plainly, neo-feudalism, updated for the digital age: not the abolition of ownership by decree, but the conversion of ownership into a conditional “entitlement,” revocable when the oligarchy decides the system “needs” what you thought was yours. The end result will be that, as the World Economic Forum predicted, “you will own nothing” — at least if these diabolical economic traps are not exposed and stopped. How they might make you “happy” is another question entirely.
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David Rogers Webb says that because the provisions for looting has been done legally, it must be dismantled legally, I think that would be a total waste of time. If you're in the looter's system, then you are agreeing to their terms. Do you ever get to make your terms in these so called "contracts"? No. It's all one-sided. It's up to individual sovereigns to get out of the system and make a fresh start. If the only recourse is the legal system, one would be simply "spinning their wheels" because the system architects have covered every base. Don't be their schmuck.
It was good to listen to that documentary a second time. I can articulate it better now... and it feels like there is an increasing sense of urgency now...