Mark Moss explains why you don't legally own your bank deposits or stocks: financial institutions only owe them to you, and they can be seized. The $650 billion confiscation of Russian assets after the Ukraine invasion showed even sovereign wealth isn't safe. BRICS nations are now buying gold instead of U.S. Treasury securities.
Shoot, I guess the money in my bank isn't my money. As a matter of fact, we don't actually own anything. So for example, you might own Tesla stock or Apple stock or something like that. You don't actually own that. It's owed to you. E-Trade or Charles Schwab owes that stock to you. You don't own it. It's a big difference legally. Money in the bank is not your money. It's owed to you. And legally, that's a big deal, right? Legally, if you owe it to me, but you go bankrupt, I don't get it. I have no ownership. That's why when you go to the bank and you try to send money to a crypto exchange, they say, nope, we're not gonna send money 'cause it's not your money. Yeah. Decide what to do with it, right? Yeah. Okay, so now we, then the world really got put on notice when Russia had their bank account seized. There's 3 superpowers in the world that have nuclear weapons, Russia, China, and the US. When the Russia-Ukraine border dispute broke open, $650 billion of Russia's assets got seized. So the whole world was just notified instantly if they didn't already know, if you're one of 3 superpowers with nuclear weapons, that money is still not your money. And so the world goes, well, shoot, if it can happen to Russia, it can happen to anybody. So now all of the BRICS nations— Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, but now all the other nations that are joining, Argentina, potentially Egypt, Iran, etc.— they're all like, well, shoot, we don't want to buy US Treasuries, we're going to buy gold instead. So they're all trying to figure out what they can buy that can't be manipulated like US dollars. So this is what the world's going through right now.
