“The Great Taking” Reconsidered
An Essay on David Rogers Webb’s Evidence and an Alternative Interpretation
David Rogers Webb spent decades in high finance—hedge funds, private equity, trading desks. He managed money through the dot-com crash and the 2008 financial crisis, developing methods to anticipate market movements by tracking Federal Reserve operations. In 2023, he self-published The Great Taking, a book that draws on primary source documents to argue something alarming: the legal infrastructure governing securities ownership has been systematically restructured, over fifty years, so that a “protected class” of secured creditors can seize everything when the system breaks.
The book is technically dense—necessarily so, given its subject matter. Webb walks readers through UCC amendments, Central Securities Depository regulations, and letters between Federal Reserve lawyers and European Commission working groups. For readers without financial backgrounds, this material can be difficult to evaluate. But the documents Webb cites are real, and his reading of them is informed by professional fluency.
The problem is what happens after people encounter this material. Many arrive at paralysis. If the legal infrastructure for total confiscation already exists, if powerful interests have spent decades preparing this trap, what’s the point of building anything? Saving anything? Participating at all?
That paralysis deserves examination. Webb’s documentary evidence is serious. The legal changes he describes did occur. The mechanisms function as he says they function. But “the infrastructure exists” and “the outcome is inevitable” are different claims. The first is verifiable. The second is a prediction about how humans will behave in future crises—and history suggests such predictions deserve skepticism.
What follows is an attempt to present Webb’s three strongest arguments with enough clarity that you can understand them, then offer a different interpretation of the same evidence. Not dismissal. Not “trust the institutions.” A working hypothesis: that the infrastructure Webb documents may be designed for something other than apocalyptic confiscation—for continuous, invisible loss socialization rather than one grand taking. This reframe may prove more useful than hopelessness.
The Documents Say What They Say
Webb’s most powerful evidence comes from the people who built the system, explaining how it works.
Start with what securities ownership used to mean. When you bought shares in a company, you received a certificate—a physical document with your name on it, registered with the issuing company. You owned specific shares. They were your property, like your car or your house. If your broker failed, those shares couldn’t be touched by the broker’s creditors. They were yours.
This system had a problem, or what was presented as a problem. By the late 1960s, trading volumes had grown to the point where the paperwork involved in transferring physical certificates was overwhelming back offices. The New York Stock Exchange suspended trading on some days just to catch up. This was called the “paperwork crisis.”
The solution: dematerialize securities. Instead of physical certificates, ownership would be recorded electronically. Instead of you holding your own shares, a central depository would hold them on your behalf. Your broker would maintain an account showing your entitlement to a portion of the pool.
Webb notes that the Depository Trust Corporation, created to implement this system, was led for twenty-two years by William Dentzer—a career CIA operative with no background in banking or finance, appointed after serving in various intelligence-adjacent roles in Latin America. Whether this detail is significant or coincidental, the system he oversaw transformed how Americans own securities.
The legal framework followed. In 1994, Articles 8 and 9 of the Uniform Commercial Code were revised across all fifty states. The revision was drafted by a small group—”probably counted on one hand, with a few fingers unused,” according to the principal drafter. These changes replaced the concept of securities as property with something new: the “security entitlement.”
A security entitlement is not ownership. It’s a contractual claim against your account provider—your broker, your custodian. You don’t own specific shares. You own a claim to a pro-rata share of whatever your intermediary holds in pooled form.
In 2004, the European Commission established a Legal Certainty Group to address cross-border securities settlement. They sent questionnaires to major financial authorities asking how their systems functioned. In March 2006, the Deputy General Counsel of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York provided a detailed response.
The questions and answers are included in Webb’s appendix. They repay careful reading.
When the EU asked whether investors holding securities in pooled form have rights to particular securities, the Fed responded:
“No. The security entitlement holder… has a pro rata share of the interests in the financial asset held by its securities intermediary… This is true even if investor positions are ‘segregated.’”
The word “segregated” appears in quotation marks because the legal meaning no longer matches the common understanding. Your broker may maintain separate accounting entries for your holdings. This provides no protection if the broker becomes insolvent and its holdings fall short of customer claims. Segregation is an accounting convention, not a property right.
The hierarchy of claims is explicit. When the EU asked about investor protection in intermediary insolvency, the Fed responded:
“If the secured creditor has ‘control’ over the financial asset it will have priority over entitlement holders… If the securities intermediary is a clearing corporation, the claims of its creditors have priority over the claims of entitlement holders.”
Secured creditors first. Then clearing corporation creditors. Then you.
The same letter addresses what happens when an intermediary hasn’t maintained enough securities to cover all customer entitlements—a “shortfall.” The rule is simple: customers share pro-rata in whatever remains. The Fed notes that “shortfalls occur frequently due to fails and for other reasons, but are of no general consequence except in the case of the securities intermediary’s insolvency.”
No general consequence—until insolvency. Then the consequence is that you receive a fraction of what your account statement showed.
These are not Webb’s inferences about how the hierarchy might work. They are the Federal Reserve’s own lawyers describing, in plain language, that secured creditors outrank entitlement holders and that shortfalls fall on customers. The letter doesn’t endorse Webb’s broader narrative—but it confirms the legal mechanics he describes.
Explain It Like I’m 6
Imagine you have a favorite toy—a red truck with your name written on it. You keep it at a big toy library because they have a nice shelf for it. The toy library gives you a card that says “One Red Truck.” When you want your truck back, you show your card and they give you your truck—the one with your name on it.
That’s how owning stocks used to work. You had specific shares. Your name was on them. They were yours.
Now imagine the toy library changes the rules. They take your red truck and put it in a giant toy box with everyone else’s trucks. They scratch your name off. Your card now says “You can have one truck from the box.”
But here’s the problem. The toy library also borrowed money from some older kids. And the older kids made a special rule: if the toy library ever gets in trouble, the older kids get to go to the toy box first and take whatever trucks they want. Only after they’re done do you get to take a truck from whatever’s left.
Your card still says “One Red Truck.” But there might not be any trucks left when it’s your turn.
One more thing. Your parents asked the toy library to keep your truck separate from the other trucks—”segregated,” they called it. The toy library said okay. But all they did was put a little sticker on the box that said “Some of these trucks belong to kids whose parents asked us to keep them separate.” The trucks are still in the same box. The older kids can still take them first.
That’s what happened to your stocks and retirement funds. You have a card that says what you own. But the things themselves are in a big box, your name isn’t on them anymore, and other people get to take from the box before you do.
Coordinated Global Harmonization
If the U.S. changes were isolated, they might reflect domestic regulatory capture—banks lobbying for flexibility, legislators not understanding what they were approving. But the same legal framework was pushed across all major jurisdictions within a compressed timeframe.
The Hague Securities Convention, drafted between 2002 and 2006, was designed to establish cross-border legal certainty for securities transactions. Its central innovation was the “Place of the Relevant Intermediary Approach” (PRIMA), which allows the governing law for securities to be set by account agreement rather than by where the securities are actually located. This makes it possible to route transactions through jurisdictions with creditor-friendly rules regardless of where the underlying assets sit.
The EU initially resisted. European legal tradition includes the principle of lex rei sitae—the law where the property is situated governs the property. Several European jurisdictions provided genuine property rights to securities holders, which would complicate seizure by secured creditors.
The 2006 Legal Certainty Group questionnaire was part of the process of identifying these “problematic” jurisdictions. Sweden and Finland were flagged as having laws that protected investor ownership too effectively.
Within eight years, both countries’ systems had been transformed. Euroclear—founded by Morgan Guaranty Trust Company of New York, now operating under Belgian law—acquired the Nordic Central Securities Depository in 2008, taking control of the Finnish and Swedish CSDs. The EU’s Central Securities Depository Regulation of 2014 mandated links between national CSDs and International CSDs, enabling cross-border movement of collateral.
Webb traces the specific legal changes in Sweden. By 2014, amendments to Swedish law authorized the local CSD to transfer legal control of customer assets to the ICSD without customer knowledge or approval, provided the counterparty was a regulated financial institution. The law states that normal restrictions on disposing of client assets “do not apply” when the counterparty is under financial supervision.
Swedish citizens can no longer hold Swedish government bonds in Sweden with property rights protected from intermediary insolvency. Webb moved to Sweden in 2009 specifically to hold Swedish government bonds with property rights. By 2014, that option no longer existed.
A bank disclosure document from Skandinaviska Enskilda Banken confirms the result:
“In the unlikely event of a shortfall of securities the client in question will not be able to claim a right of separation but will likely be considered as an unsecured creditor without priority to the assets of the bankruptcy estate.”
This pattern—coordinated pressure, treaty negotiation, regulatory directive, transformation of national law—is difficult to explain as independent evolution. The endpoints converge too precisely. The timeline is too compressed. The same actors (central banks, ICSDs, international working groups) appear at each stage.
They Are Planning for CCP Failure
To understand this argument, you need to understand how securities actually move in the modern financial system.
When you buy stock through your broker, you don’t receive shares. Your broker credits your account. Your broker holds its position at a custodian bank. The custodian holds its position at a Central Securities Depository. For cross-border holdings, the CSD links to an International Central Securities Depository. All positions are pooled at each level.
Now add derivatives. When two parties enter a derivatives contract, they typically clear it through a Central Clearing Party. The CCP becomes the counterparty to both sides—if Party A defaults, the CCP absorbs the loss rather than Party B taking the hit directly. This is supposed to reduce systemic risk by concentrating counterparty exposure in well-capitalized, closely monitored institutions.
The derivatives complex is enormous. Webb cites figures showing notional derivatives outstanding at roughly ten times global GDP. The actual risk exposure is smaller than notional values suggest, but still vast.
Here’s where the systems connect. Derivatives require collateral. When you enter a derivatives position, you post margin. When prices move against you, you post more margin. In a crisis, margin calls cascade through the system. The collateral to meet those calls flows through the CSD/ICSD infrastructure—the same infrastructure that holds everyone’s securities in pooled, intermediated form.
A 2014 report from the Bank for International Settlements describes “collateral management services” designed to enable “rapid deployment of available securities” to “meet margin needs at CCPs in times of increased market volatility.” The report discusses “automated” and “market-wide” systems for sweeping collateral to where it’s needed.
The objective, stated plainly in EU documentation Webb cites: “to utilize all securities as collateral.”
This brings us to capitalization. How well-resourced are these central nodes where all the risk concentrates?
The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation operates the Central Securities Depository and two systemically important CCPs for the entire U.S. securities market. According to DTCC’s March 2023 consolidated financial statements, total shareholder equity was approximately $3.5 billion.
That figure backs a market measured in hundreds of trillions.
DTCC’s own executives discuss what happens if a CCP fails. Murray Pozmanter, head of Clearing Agency Services, has stated that DTCC has pre-funded operating capital to start a replacement CCP in the event of resolution:
“As we go through our recovery and resolution planning we want to have the operating capital to potentially start up a new CCP in the event of the resolution of one of our CCPs. We definitely see the logic in having the operating capital to start up a new CCP pre-funded.”
Another DTCC executive noted that “what will drive this potentially happening may not be something we’ve seen historically—but the value comes in the planning.”
The Single Resolution Board, which governs bank resolution in the EU Banking Union, set 2023 as the deadline for finalizing resolution frameworks. Their Work Programme states:
“The coming twelve months will see the SRB’s focus moving from the more general phases of drafting and fine-tuning of resolution plans towards ensuring that each plan and preferred resolution strategy for each bank is implementable at short notice.”
Implementable at short notice. Pre-funded replacement infrastructure. Planning for scenarios not previously witnessed.
You don’t build these systems if you expect smooth sailing.
An Alternative Interpretation
Webb’s documentary evidence is solid. The legal changes happened. The infrastructure exists. But his interpretation—that this infrastructure is designed for a single, apocalyptic taking of all assets—contains logical problems that deserve examination.
Who exactly are “they”?
Webb describes “very few people” with “private, closely held control of all central banks.” He says “you may never know who they are.” The visible figures—politicians, regulators, central bank governors—are “face men” and “face women.” He invokes George Soros telling him “you don’t know what they can do.”
This vagueness is a weakness in an otherwise document-heavy argument. Webb can quote Federal Reserve lawyers precisely but cannot name the principals behind the plan he describes.
Why would money creators need to seize assets?
Central banks create money from nothing. They don’t need to seize your retirement account to become wealthy. They can conjure unlimited purchasing power by issuing debt that governments service through taxation. The extraction mechanism is already running—and has been running for over a century.
A critic might argue that asset seizure isn’t about wealth but control—that seizing everything transfers power regardless of nominal value. But consider: control through ongoing dependency outperforms control through dispossession. A population with mortgages, pensions, and credit card balances has something to protect and reasons to comply. A population stripped of everything has nothing left to lose. If the goal is stable, long-term control, ongoing extraction maintains leverage that total confiscation would destroy.
Why would entities with infinite money-creation capacity need to take assets that, by Webb’s own analysis, will have crashed 80% in value?
Control systems require something to control people with.
The control infrastructure is already in place and expanding without meaningful resistance: digital ID systems, biometric databases, financial surveillance, social credit mechanisms, programmable money. None of this requires a grand taking. It requires populations that comply—and populations comply because they have something to lose.
Consider a recent example from Australia. In 2021, the government announced that all company directors must obtain a Director Identification Number through a digital verification system. The penalty for non-compliance: a criminal fine of $13,200 or a civil penalty of $1.1 million.
Australia has approximately 2.5 million company directors. As the deadline approached, over a million had not yet registered. What happened? They registered. The threat of losing $1.1 million was sufficient. No assets were seized. The system extracted compliance by positioning itself to take—not by actually taking.
This is how modern control works. The capacity to take is the instrument. Actual taking breaks the instrument.
The logic of extraction systems.
If extraction ever falters because the system is squeezing too hard, the rational response is to ease off temporarily—let people recover, rebuild, resume producing value that can be skimmed. The goal of an extraction system is extraction, not collapse. You want the host alive and productive.
So what is the infrastructure Webb documents actually for?
A reframe: loss socialization architecture.
The legal changes ensure that when individual failures occur—a Lehman Brothers, an MF Global, a regional banking crisis—secured creditors are protected. Losses flow downward to customers and depositors. The big players are made whole at retail investors’ expense.
This isn’t preparation for one grand taking. It’s a system designed to spring repeatedly, in manageable doses, every time something breaks. Each crisis transfers wealth upward while maintaining the broader structure. The public absorbs losses; the protected class absorbs assets. But the mechanism preserves the overall system—the jobs, the debts, the tax base, the ongoing extraction.
Webb sees a trap designed to spring all at once. The evidence he presents may instead describe a trap that springs continuously, invisibly, in small increments—and has been springing for years.
Evidence Supporting the Alternative Interpretation
2008: The infrastructure was tested and the grand taking didn’t happen.
The legal infrastructure Webb describes was in place before the Global Financial Crisis. The “safe harbor” provisions protecting secured creditors from fraudulent transfer claims were enacted in 2005—just two years before the crisis began. Central clearing existed. The hierarchy of claims—secured creditors over entitlement holders—was established law.
Then the system broke. Bear Stearns collapsed. Lehman Brothers filed the largest bankruptcy in American history. AIG required an $85 billion emergency loan. Money market funds “broke the buck.” The entire financial system came within days of complete seizure.
The mechanism for taking customer assets existed. It wasn’t used comprehensively—but it was used selectively. Lehman’s prime brokerage customers discovered their “segregated” assets weren’t so segregated: JP Morgan, as a secured creditor, took customer collateral. MF Global’s collapse in 2011 showed the pattern repeating: over $1.6 billion in customer funds vanished, with secured creditors taking priority over the farmers and traders who thought their money was protected. The legal architecture worked exactly as designed—for specific failures, transferring specific losses to specific customers.
But there was no system-wide taking. What happened instead: bailouts, emergency lending, quantitative easing, zero interest rates. The broader losses were transferred to taxpayers and savers. The protected class was made whole.
Here’s what’s significant: the response to 2008 didn’t reverse or dismantle the legal architecture. It strengthened it. The Dodd-Frank Act expanded safe harbor protections. CCP usage became mandatory for more derivatives. Cross-border resolution frameworks accelerated. If the goal were apocalyptic confiscation, 2008 was the perfect crisis. Instead, the system used targeted loss socialization, preserved overall structure, and reinforced the mechanisms for future use.
Why preserve the system when you could liquidate it? Because the 2008 response worked exactly as loss socialization architecture should. Harvest the crisis, transfer the losses downward, strengthen legal protections, resume extraction with enhanced position.
The collapsed-asset problem.
Webb’s analysis of the “Everything Bubble” is correct: fifteen years of near-zero interest rates inflated all asset prices. Now rates have risen sharply. The math runs in reverse. Asset values must fall dramatically.
But this creates a puzzle for the grand taking thesis. Seizing assets after an 80% crash means taking 20 cents on the dollar. Compare this to ongoing extraction: management fees compounding annually, credit card interest at 20-30%, mortgage payments for thirty years, inflation transferring purchasing power from savers to debtors.
The math is straightforward. A system extracting 2% annually from a $100 asset accumulates roughly $82 over 30 years through compounding—while the asset remains nominally in the owner’s hands, motivating their continued participation. A one-time seizure after an 80% crash captures $20. Even assuming the crash is manufactured precisely for this purpose, ongoing extraction generates four times the value while preserving the compliance mechanism.
Even assuming malevolent intent, the math favors ongoing extraction over apocalyptic taking.
Total dispossession undermines control.
Money functions as a control system because people believe in it. They organize behavior around earning, saving, protecting. Take everything from everyone and that mechanism breaks.
Webb suggests Central Bank Digital Currency will provide replacement control. But CBDC requires functional infrastructure and public participation. Coercion can compel usage under stable conditions. Coercion becomes harder when you’ve just taken everything the population had.
The 1933 precedent Webb invokes involved partial dispossession. Gold was confiscated, but people kept their houses, businesses, bank deposits. There was enough continuity that people still had something to lose—and therefore something to motivate compliance.
Total dispossession creates ungovernable conditions. This isn’t a guarantee it won’t be attempted—rulers miscalculate. But it’s an observation that total taking undermines the conditions necessary for stable control. If the goal is permanent power, destroying the basis of compliance seems counterproductive.
What This Means
Webb’s documentary evidence establishes real and important facts. The legal framework governing securities ownership has changed fundamentally. Secured creditors have priority over customers. Cross-border collateral mobility has been enabled. These changes occurred across jurisdictions in coordinated fashion. The people who built the system have explained, in their own documents, how it works.
The infrastructure exists. The mechanisms function as Webb describes.
The question is what the infrastructure is for.
The apocalyptic interpretation—everything seized at once in a manufactured crisis—requires believing that money creators need to seize assets, that controllers would destroy the mechanism that enriches them, and that post-taking control would somehow function without the compliance mechanisms that depend on people having something to lose. Each of these requires accepting a logical gap.
The loss socialization interpretation fits the evidence at least as well, and arguably better. It explains 2008. It aligns with the incentives of those who benefit from ongoing extraction. It matches what we observe: repeated crises that transfer wealth upward while preserving the overall system. It requires no hidden actors beyond the documented interests of financial institutions protecting themselves from losses.
Neither interpretation offers comfort. Both describe a system designed to benefit insiders at public expense. But one interpretation leads to paralysis; the other leads to engagement.
If everything will be taken in one apocalyptic event, nothing you do matters. If the game is rigged crisis by crisis, understanding the rigging helps you navigate it. You can make choices about where to hold assets, what to own, how much debt to carry, which counterparties to trust. Not because any choice guarantees safety, but because thoughtful choices are better than paralyzed inaction.
Webb ends his book with a question from Dickens’ Scrooge, confronting his own gravestone: “Are these the shadows of the things that Will be, or are they shadows of things that May be, only?”
The infrastructure is real. The evidence Webb presents is valuable—more people should understand how the system actually works. But the interpretation that leads to paralysis is not the only interpretation, and it may not be the most accurate one.
Understanding that you’re inside a loss socialization system is actionable knowledge. Understanding that everything will be taken is not.
The paralysis serves the interests Webb describes. A population that believes resistance is futile offers no resistance. A population that disengages from financial questions cedes the field entirely.
Whatever is planned, the outcome will be shaped by what people do—not only by what has been prepared for them. That contest is not over. It requires participants, not spectators frozen by inevitability.
The appropriate response to Webb’s evidence is not despair. It’s attention.
References
- Webb, David Rogers. The Great Taking. Self-published, 2023. Available HERE as PDF
- Federal Reserve Bank of New York. “Response to European Commission Legal Certainty Group Questionnaire.” March 2006. Reproduced in Webb, The Great Taking, Appendix.
- Bank for International Settlements. “Developments in collateral management services.” CPMI Papers No. 119, September 2014.
- Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation. “Consolidated Financial Statements as of and for the Years Ended December 31, 2022 and 2021.”
- Australian Director ID regime: Corporations Act 2001 (Cth), sections 1272B-1272D. Penalty amounts confirmed by Australian Taxation Office and ASIC, 2022.
- Carstens, Agustín. Remarks at IMF Cross-Border Payments Panel. October 2020.
