PayPal mafia: the techno-feudalism that rules the world
Today I am providing my English translation of an article by Margherita Furlan, originally in Italian and published on AntiMafiaDuemila.com (link broken1) on Friday 24th April 2026.
(All formatting original, footnotes mine).
“War is the product. Chaos is the raw material. And the switch is the real power”
Between June 2024 and March 2026, three men visited Italy. They were not heads of State, they did not represent elected governments, and they had not received any mandate from the people. Yet each of them brought proposals to Palazzo Chigi2 capable of redrawing the boundaries of Italian sovereignty more than any international treaty. Larry Fink, the man who manages the largest concentration of capital ever held in private hands in history, founder and chairman of BlackRock, co-chair of the Davos Forum, the man whose annual letters to the world’s governments now carry the weight of secular encyclicals on the direction of global capitalism. Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX, owner of X and master of Starlink, the richest man on the planet, whose real power lies not in his wealth but in his physical control of the networks through which governments and armies transmit their communications. Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and Palantir Technologies, chairman of Palantir, founder of the Founders Fund, Facebook’s first external investor, and financier of [US] Vice-President [J.D.] Vance: the intellectual architect of technological dominance over politics and father of the world’s most controversial digital surveillance company. Three visits with varying degrees of access and a single outcome: a G7 country that has handed over its strategic control switches to foreign private entities, in a time of war, without Parliament debating the matter and without the public being aware of it.
This investigation reconstructs the facts, linking them to the precedent of the cybersecurity agreement with Israel, to the historical role of the Rothschild dynasty as the matrix of the global financial system, to Xi Jinping’s military purges as China’s response to the same phenomenon, and to the restructuring of world trade sought by [US President Donald J.] Trump and the intertwining of financial, technological and military power of which his presidency is an expression. The final question is simple: can Italy still call itself a sovereign nation?
The three visits to Italy: a chronology of systemic penetration. Larry Fink and BlackRock: capital buying up the state
The first high-level meeting between Larry Fink and the [Giorgia] Meloni government took place at the G7 summit in Borgo Egnazia, Puglia, in June 2024. Fink was among the guests selected by the Prime Minister, alongside Satya Nadella of Microsoft and the heads of ENI3 and ENEL4. It is not a courtesy visit. Meloni intends to position Italy as a prime destination for American capital, and Fink is the man who manages the largest amount of private money ever in history. Three months later, on 30th September 2024, Fink is received at Palazzo Chigi. The meeting, which lasted about forty minutes, was attended by the Minister for the Economy, Giancarlo Giorgetti, the Chief of Staff, Gaetano Caputi, and the CEO of Poste Italiane5, Matteo Del Fante. Del Fante’s presence was no coincidence: Poste Italiane is one of the public companies the government intends to privatise. The talks focused on data centres, energy infrastructure and transport. According to Bloomberg, BlackRock was considering the purchase of decommissioned ENEL thermal power stations to convert them into data centres dedicated to artificial intelligence. At Palazzo Chigi, a small working group, coordinated by the Prime Minister’s Office, was agreed upon to implement the collaborative projects, including BlackRock’s involvement in Italian-led reconstruction projects in Ukraine. Meloni also outlined investment opportunities for Fink in Autostrade6 (currently 51% owned by CDP7) and Ferrovie dello Stato8, both of which are publicly controlled.
To understand BlackRock’s specific influence in Italy, one must look at the figures. The fund holds a 7% stake in UniCredit9, 5% in Intesa Sanpaolo10, over 5% in Banco BPM11, 5% in ENEL, and significant stakes in Mediobanca12, Ferrari, Prysmian13, Moncler14, Stellantis15, ENI and the main multi-utility companies. The total exceeds €17 billion, making BlackRock the leading foreign investor on the Milan Stock Exchange.
In September 2024, the Meloni government authorised BlackRock to exceed the 3% threshold in Leonardo, Italy’s leading defence and aerospace group, in which the Treasury holds a 30.2% stake. The Meloni government authorised the transaction by exercising its special power over strategic companies, the so-called golden power, but imposed conditions that were not disclosed to either Parliament or the public. The Prime Minister’s decree is dated 18th September [2024]. Leonardo’s CEO, Roberto Cingolani, commented: “I am delighted by BlackRock’s interest. It is an important recognition”. BlackRock has thus become the sole private shareholder with a stake exceeding 3% in Italy’s leading arms manufacturer. Meanwhile, in January 2024, the fund acquired the GIP16 infrastructure fund for $12.5 billion, a fund that owns 50% of Italo, Italy’s sole private rail operator.
An American fund is a major shareholder in Italy’s two leading banks, the country’s leading defence contractor, the only private railway operator, and the major energy companies. And the government, which would have the power to block it, has chosen to give its approval.
The reason why Palazzo Chigi is throwing open its doors lies in the budget figures. Italy has a public debt exceeding 140% of gross domestic product, and the Meloni government has committed, in an official document from the Ministry of the Economy, to raising a sum equivalent to 1% of GDP – over €20 billion – by 2026 through the sale of shares in public companies. Several analysts have described the target as unrealistic, but those billions are needed, and they are needed immediately: to reduce the debt, to finance the Budget Law, to demonstrate to Brussels that the accounts are under control, and to fund military conflicts. In this state of necessity, an investor like BlackRock does not have to knock on the door: it finds it already open.
On 23rd March 2026, Fink published his annual letter to shareholders, a 17-page document that every government in the world reads carefully. The message: “The old model of global capitalism is fracturing” and “self-sufficiency is expensive”. According to Fink, indebted governments can no longer finance defence, energy and artificial intelligence on their own. Private capital is needed, and Fink proposes that governments find ways to “encourage more money to stay at home”. BlackRock ended 2025 with an all-time record: $14 trillion in assets under management and $698 billion in net inflows, the best year in its history. Fink proposed transforming the entire global financial system into a digital platform. The project is called tokenisation: every share, every government bond, every fund unit, every property would be converted into a digital token, tradable via a smartphone at any time of the day or night, without going through a traditional bank. Fink compared this phase to the internet in 1996: back then, almost no one understood its significance; ten years later, it was governing our lives. BlackRock is already preparing: it manages $65 billion in digital currency reserves and $80 billion in listed digital financial products. The political significance is enormous and must be stated clearly: whoever owns and manages the platform on which all the world’s financial transactions take place does not need to govern countries. It is enough for them to govern the money that keeps them afloat. Whoever controls the tokenisation platform controls the world’s liquidity.
But why is BlackRock eyeing Italy with such greed? Italy is not Europe’s leading economy; it lacks Germany’s technology or France’s military projection. The answer lies in turning the perspective on its head. We must not look at Italy’s weakness, which is certainly real. Rather, we must look at America’s fragility, which is far greater than is commonly acknowledged and which explains, better than any theory, why BlackRock’s capital is so ravenously seeking out the savings of Italian households.
US federal debt stands at $39 trillion as of March 2026, growing at a rate of $7 billion a day, $300 million an hour, $5 million a minute. But that figure is merely the façade of the building. Behind it lie at least four further storeys of debt that no one ever adds up.
The first floor is the debt of American households. According to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, by the end of 2025 US households had accumulated $18.8 trillion in debt, a historic record, up by $740 billion in 2025 alone. Of this, $13.17 trillion is mortgage debt, $1.67 trillion is car loans, $1.66 trillion is student loans and $1.28 trillion is credit card debt, which is also at an all-time high. The average debt per American household is $105,000. The average mortgage payment has reached $2,025 a month. The average car loan payment is $742 a month. Almost 5% of all household debt is in arrears, the highest percentage since the 2008 financial crisis. Nearly one million university students with loans have accumulated arrears of more than 120 days.
The second issue is corporate debt. Non-mortgage consumer credit (business loans, financing, and lines of credit) reached $5.1 trillion by the end of 2025.
The third issue is the federal government’s hidden debt. In addition to the $39 trillion in official debt, the government has future obligations for which no funds exist. Social Security has $25 trillion in unfunded liabilities. Medicare has a further $53 trillion. Together, this amounts to $78 trillion in promises made to American citizens – pensions and medical care – without a penny set aside to honour them. If you add up the official debt, the unaccounted liabilities and these unfunded future obligations, the US federal government’s total deficit approaches $143 trillion, a figure that exceeds the gross domestic product of the entire world.
The fourth issue is interest. The federal government pays over a trillion dollars a year in debt interest alone, more than the entire defence budget – $3 billion a day. By 2036, debt servicing will cost over $2 trillion a year. As the chairman of the US House Budget Committee pointed out: “It took 200 years for the debt to reach the first trillion dollars. Today, that figure is what we pay every year in interest alone”.
And who buys this debt? It used to be foreign governments, which a decade ago held over 40% of US Treasury securities. Today they hold less than 15%. The pool of stable buyers has dried up. The new buyers are private investors seeking profit, not stability, which makes the system more fragile with every shock. A third of all federal debt, around $10 trillion in Treasury securities, matures in 2026 and must be refinanced. Former Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has warned that the debt is approaching the threshold of so-called “fiscal dominance”, the point at which the central bank loses the ability to control inflation because the burden of debt is too great. And it is this colossus, with foundations creaking under the weight of nearly $140 trillion in debt and unfulfilled promises, that presents itself to the world as the guarantor of global financial stability and knocks on Italy’s door to manage our families’ savings.
Who is buying this debt? The answer to this question speaks volumes – more so than any geopolitical analysis – about the decline of the American order
For decades, the system worked like this: the US government spent more than it took in, issued government bonds, and foreign governments bought them. They were bought by Japan, China, the Gulf states and European central banks. For Washington, it was a perfect arrangement: it borrowed at rock-bottom rates because those buyers were seeking stability rather than profit. A central bank that buys US Treasury bonds does not sell them off at the first sign of trouble; it keeps them in its vaults as a reserve. This allowed the United States to finance its wars, its consumption and its standard of living at the expense of the rest of the world, which in return received the unwritten promise that the dollar would remain the global reserve currency.
That mechanism has broken down.
According to US Treasury data updated to December 2025, Japan remains the largest foreign creditor with $1.185 trillion in securities, the UK has risen to second place with $866 billion, and China has fallen to third with $683 billion. But the figure that matters is not the ranking: it is the trajectory. China held over $1.3 trillion in Treasury securities at its peak in 2013. It has sold nearly half of that in a decade, falling to its lowest levels since 2008, and continues to reduce its holdings month on month, for the third consecutive month in the first half of 2025. Beijing is systematically converting its reserves into gold and other assets as part of a stated diversification strategy: the Chinese central bank increased its gold reserves for eight consecutive months in 2025.
It is not just China. According to Visual Capitalist, between November 2024 and November 2025, China sold $86 billion worth of US securities, a drop of 11% over the year. Brazil and India, also members of the BRICS, reduced their holdings by a further $108 billion in total. This is a move that goes beyond the ordinary management of reserves: it is de-dollarisation in action, a conscious decision by countries representing half the world’s population to reduce their exposure to US debt.
Meanwhile, the total share of Treasury securities held by foreign governments and central banks has fallen from over 40% of the total in 2008 to around 30% in 2025. In relative terms, the world is pulling back from US debt. In absolute terms, the total value of foreign-held securities has reached $9.4 trillion, a nominal record, but only because the debt itself has exploded: the foreign slice of an ever-larger pie is becoming ever thinner.
Who has filled the void left by foreign governments?
Two key players. The first was the Federal Reserve itself, which between 2008 and 2022 purchased trillions of Dollars’ worth of Treasury securities by printing money – a process known as “quantitative easing”. However, since 2022, the Fed has reversed course and is drastically reducing its holdings. The second player, the one currently propping up the entire structure, is private investors: hedge funds, asset managers, private pension funds, and individual savers. According to Benjamin Braun, a researcher who has analysed Federal Reserve data, the “households” category in US financial accounts has grown enormously as a holder of Treasury securities, but this category largely masks the positions of hedge funds that bet on government securities through leveraged transactions. And therein lies the danger. A foreign government that buys Treasury bonds holds them for geopolitical reasons: it does not sell them at the first drop in price. A hedge fund holds them to make a profit: at the first sign of panic, it sells. The system has transformed from a structure built on the bedrock of the national interest to one built on the shifting sands of private speculation. Every shock, every crisis, every spike in interest rates can trigger a mass sell-off that the US Treasury no longer has the tools to absorb.
A third of all federal debt, around $10 trillion in Treasury bonds, matures in 2026 and must be refinanced. This means that the Treasury must find, within a few months, buyers willing to lend a sum greater than Japan’s gross domestic product. At interest rates that have risen in the meantime, which means paying even higher interest on an even larger debt. Former Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has warned that the debt is approaching the threshold of so-called “fiscal dominance”. In simple terms, this means the following: when a government is in debt to the tune of 25% of its gross domestic product, as the United States was in the 1980s, the central bank can raise interest rates to combat inflation without the cost of interest on the debt becoming unsustainable. But when debt reaches 124% of gross domestic product, as it does today, any rise in interest rates immediately translates into hundreds of billions [of Dollars] in additional costs for the state. The central bank finds itself trapped: if it raises rates to curb inflation, the cost of debt skyrockets; if it does not raise them, inflation erodes citizens’ purchasing power. It is a vicious circle from which there is no escape through monetary policy. Historically, there are three ways out: through devastating austerity, through currency devaluation, or through a war that restructures the economic order. Washington, for the moment, has chosen the third path. And it is in this context that BlackRock’s capital is knocking on Italy’s door, seeking our families’ savings to prop up a system that can no longer stand on its own.
But who decides when the tremors happen? Because crises aren’t earthquakes
Earthquakes have no perpetrators. Financial crises do. They have names, addresses and audited balance sheets.
When BlackRock, which manages $14 trillion, decides to shift even a fraction of its portfolios from one government bond to another, the move is enough to shift the interest rates of an entire country. This is not theory: it is market mechanics. A fund that holds 7% of UniCredit and 5% of Intesa Sanpaolo does not need to ring the Minister for the Economy to influence Italian economic policy. All it needs to do is sell. The day BlackRock began to reduce its exposure to Italian government bonds, the spread would rise even before the newspapers reported it. And the government, which was unable to say no to Fink when he came knocking with a smile, would be brought to its knees the moment Fink stopped buying.
When war in the Middle East blocks the Strait of Hormuz and oil prices rise, inflation accelerates, central banks are forced to raise interest rates, the cost of debt skyrockets, and indebted governments find themselves having to choose between cutting public services or selling off further State assets to those with the liquidity to buy them. Who has the liquidity? BlackRock, which in its 2026 letter candidly writes that governments cannot manage on their own and that private capital is needed. War breeds inflation, inflation breeds a tightening of interest rates, tightening breeds a public finance crisis, the public finance crisis breeds the sell-off of national assets, and the sell-off breeds profit for those who had the capital ready to buy. It is not a conspiracy. It is an economic model. And it only works if there is war.
Often, however, war is not even necessary. When Elon Musk posts a message on his platform, the markets react within minutes. He has done this repeatedly with cryptocurrencies, with Tesla shares, and with the bonds of entire countries. A man with a personal fortune of $850 billion and control over the platform on which investors, journalists and governments form their opinions is not an observer of the tremors: he is a potential trigger.
When Palantir provides US and Israeli intelligence services with software to select military targets in Iran and Gaza, it is not simply selling a product: it is helping to create the conditions that will trigger the next energy crisis, the next surge in inflation, the next collapse of government bonds in the most exposed countries. And who will pick up the pieces? The very same entities that sold the software weapons: BlackRock buys up the fire-sale companies, Rothschild handles the financial transactions, and Starlink ensures the communications.
The credit rating agencies, which with a downgrade can condemn a country to paying billions more in interest, are themselves partly owned by the major investment funds. The central banks that set interest rates are staffed by economists who have worked for the very financial institutions that profit from those rates. The governments that are supposed to regulate the system are funded in their election campaigns by the very same entities that govern it. There is no need for a secret room: all that is needed is an ecosystem in which the same players sit on all sides of the table.
War is the product because it generates the crises that make governments vulnerable. Chaos is the raw material because chaos gives rise to the demand for security, protection and capital, which only the lords of technology and finance can satisfy. And the switch is the real power because those who can turn satellites, data flows, capital flows and oil flows on and off do not need to govern countries. It is enough for them to govern the conditions under which countries are forced to operate.
Who stands to gain? And the answer, every time, points to the same names.
And this is where we must turn our attention back to Italy. For whilst America’s fragility explains the need, Italy’s wealth explains the objective. Italian families are wealthy
This is no mere figure of speech. According to the Boston Consulting Group’s 2024 annual report, Italy ranks eighth in the world in terms of investable financial wealth, with total household assets of around $6.9 trillion. Data from the European Central Bank, updated to 2025, puts the net wealth of Italian households at €10.991 trillion. This figure exceeds the combined gross domestic product of France and Spain. Italy has 517,000 millionaires in Dollars [sic] and 2,600 ultra-high-net-worth individuals with assets exceeding one hundred million [Dollars?]. And the favourable tax regime for wealthy new residents – a flat tax of €100,000 per year regardless of income – is attracting thousands more every year. But the figure that really interests BlackRock is not how many wealthy people Italy has. It is where Italians keep their money: in the banking system. 25% of Italy’s total financial wealth is parked in deposits and cash. Not invested in shares, not put into funds, not entrusted to asset managers. Simply deposited in current accounts and savings accounts, where it yields little or nothing. Across the entire Eurozone, the phenomenon is even more widespread: European households hold over €10.8 trillion in bank deposits. According to the Allianz Global Wealth Report, published in September 2025, this capital “remains largely inactive in terms of productive investment”. The report notes that bank deposits account for over half of total financial assets even among the wealthiest households in the eurozone. This is no trivial figure: it amounts to €10.8 trillion which, from the perspective of an asset manager such as Fink, represents the largest reserve of untapped capital on the planet.
To understand what is happening, we must therefore put ourselves in Fink’s shoes
On the other side of the Atlantic, there is a government – the US government – that is desperately in need of finding buyers for its debt, because foreign governments are pulling out and the Federal Reserve is no longer buying it. In Europe, and in Italy in particular, there are trillions of Euros sitting idle in the current accounts of households that do not know where to put them, on a continent with falling birth rates, an ageing population and pension systems under pressure. For Fink, it is a simple equation: those savings must be mobilised and channelled into the capital markets. Into his markets. When, in his 2026 annual letter, Fink proposes tokenisation—i.e. the transformation of every financial security into a digital token tradable via a smartphone at any time of the day or night—he is building the pipeline through which those deposits will be siphoned off. When he proposes reforming the US social security system by allowing pension funds to invest in diversified portfolios rather than solely in government bonds, he is pointing to the model he intends to export to Europe. When he writes that “Europe’s greatest economic challenge is its ageing workforce” and that artificial intelligence “could defuse the demographic time bomb”, he is offering European governments a reassuring narrative that justifies the transfer of their citizens’ pension savings to funds managed in New York. This is not philanthropy. It is not international cooperation. It is the largest project to drain capital from the Old Continent to the US in modern history. And it is presented as a favour.
The short circuit, laid bare, is this
On the one hand, there is a country – the United States – which is running up a debt of $1 trillion every 71 days, pays more than $1 trillion a year in interest alone, has a total shortfall of almost $143 trillion in debts and outstanding liabilities, and has lost the trust of its long-standing creditors. On the other, a country, Italy, whose households have accumulated nearly €11 trillion in net wealth and hold a quarter of it in bank deposits, ready to be collected. In between stands BlackRock, offering itself as an intermediary: it takes Italians’ savings, invests them in US markets, pockets the commissions, and with those flows helps to prop up Washington’s debt edifice. The Meloni government is opening the doors: privatisations, golden power granted to a foreign fund over the national defence company, confidential working groups at Palazzo Chigi, investment prospects in Autostrade and Ferrovie dello Stato. No one is asking Parliament for permission. No one is explaining to citizens that their savings are about to be redirected. Italy is not merely a laboratory of technological dependency. It is the ideal financial prey, and so it is for a reason that contains within it a painful paradox: it has a poor government and wealthy citizens. The government needs to sell to balance the books. Citizens have the savings to buy, but they do not realise they are the commodity. The perfect combination for those who sell debt and buy savings. And the most bitter thing is that those assets, those nearly €11 trillion, were not accumulated by hedge funds or financial dynasties. It is the fruit of the labour, thrift and sacrifice of generations of Italian families who have set aside, year after year, whatever they could. It is the grandmother’s savings, the postal savings book, the current account kept for emergencies. And that is exactly what they have set their sights on.
End of part one – to be continued [see here]
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Global Infrastructure Partners
Thank you SO SO MUCH for this lucid explanation of what is gong on, Ismaele! This has drawn together dots so neatly. Priceless article.
I hope you are accumulating extra paying members from the superb work you are putting in. <3
Again, thank you so much Ismaele for the brilliance and clarity in this article by Furlan! The question is where will this go? How will it end? Who and what can stop this pillaging, when, with the exception of ordinary people earning and saving through their hard work, living their lives (in Italy and every Country), the greater framework overtaking us all is decidedly consciously, voracious and systematically evil without a shred of conscience or Humanity?