Along with exposing widespread international surveillance, Edward Snowden has revealed how exactly the US is financing its military ambitions, according to Max Keiser.

RT: Surely not even you can make any kind of link between the Snowden saga and the US economy?

Max Keiser: The American economy runs on the confidence, confidence that the world accepts the US dollar as world reserve currency, confidence that the US bond market will remain the standard. And what we are seeing is a sell-off in a bond market and a sell-off in the stock market, because confidence in the US and its ability to maintain a global empire through interest rates and the Central Bank policy is crumbling before the world’s very eyes. 

What’s interesting is that Edward Snowden worked for Booz Allen. Booz Allen allegedly along with a few other companies are the masterminds behind LIBOR market rigging, energy market rigging, FOREX market rigging. And this is really the fuel that keeps the American military empire going, because the American economy itself cannot support its military ambitions so they’ve resorted to market manipulation and the kind of intelligence that Edward Snowden is able to aggregate is key to manipulating markets in ways that make Booz Allen, allegedly, the channel for billions and billions of dollars into America’s military campaigns. 

And this is really about money, markets and manipulations. It’s not about security.  It’s not to do with anything that the White House says. Remember, the White House is a puppet of Wall Street, Booz Allen, the hedge funds and the financial interests of the corrupt bankers.        

RT: Can you also give us an idea of how some of those big companies like Google, or Facebook could actually benefit from this surveillance program PRISM? Is there financial a financial gain from them? 

MK: Absolutely, because all of the manipulation involves rigging the indexes. And the indexes are all data-sensitive. So, if you can manipulate the data, you can manipulate the indexes and you manipulate the markets. And if you have advanced knowledge of that inside information you can make billions of dollars of front-running, high-frequency trading, algorithmic trading. And, of course, all the banks on the Wall Street are in on this and all the banks in the UK.  
It’s very telling that the foreign minister of Ecuador said that, look “you are talking about us extraditing Edward Snowden, what about bringing back those bankers we asked you to bring back to Ecuador who we caught rigging and terrorizing our market?” What about the Icelandic bankers that have been asked by the government of Iceland to be extradited back to Iceland that are being held in the UK? What about these other instances where banking terrorists are being sheltered in the US and the UK? They’re not responding to extradition agreements. So this’s all about financial legerdemain, unfortunately, Americans don’t have enough money to fight their wars anymore so they have to resort to snooping, data-gathering, and market manipulation. 

RT: What about the diplomatic fallout? We’ve seen tensions between China and Washington but that of course leads to economic tension. Could that impact trade between the two? 

MK: I hope Russia, China, and Ecuador stand up to the financial terrorists in America and Britain. Stay the course. Don’t give in and don’t appease the financial terrorists on Wall Street. 

RT: But how could a small country like Ecuador stand up to a giant like America, where there is indeed trade between the two? 

MK: What Edward Snowden has proved is that if you live a principled life and stay true to your convictions then you can change the world. 

RT: Are we going to see financial fallout between China and the US? 

MK: Well China has got a fantastic card to play, one trillion US dollars that they can dump on the market anytime and jack interest rates up five or six points, which would throw the real estate market back into collapse. China is pulling the strings here and China has all the cards to play. America is the biggest debtor nation in the world. Look at the bond market today, it’s selling off spectacularly all over the world because confidence in the American hologram of finance is collapsing. They flipped the switch. They see that the emperor has no clothes. They see that there’s no underlying economic activity to support the military and financial occupations emanating from the US. It’s game over!

• A Permanent Economic Emergency