By Mark Anderson
The 71st Bilderberg conference that just concluded June 15 in Stockholm, Sweden carries with it some highly significant global financial news that includes top European officials scheming on the best ways to part average Westerners from their hard-earned savings.
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Rep. Jason Smith—a sixth-term Missouri Republican enthusiastic about President Donald Trump’s trade agenda—attended the ultra-exclusive confab this year, due to his chairmanship of the House Ways and Means Committee. That committee, one of the most important in Congress, writes the nation’s tariff, trade, and customs laws.
The modern money changers that comprise a sizable part of the Bilderberg conferences know that, if wielded properly, tariffs tend to steer nation states away from world consolidation and toward national self-sufficiency through protection from predatory foreign trade practices and through re-industrialization. Thus, bending Smith’s ear is clearly in Bilderberg’s interest.
A call and email to Smith’s media spokesman, seeking any additional information about his participation at the conference, was not answered at press time.
Notably, someone with a keen interest in Smith’s views, Maros Sefcovic, the EU’s commissioner for trade and economic security, also attended Bilderberg this year. Back on Feb. 19, Sefcovic spoke to the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a Washington think tank often represented at Bilderberg—this year by AEI political-economy scholar Nicholas Eberstadt.
Sefcovic, in near-panic mode over the expectation that Trump wanted to apply sizable tariffs across the board to EU goods entering the U.S, returned to America in March to meet with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and U.S. Trade Rep. Jamieson Greer. Sefcovic then visited the U.S. in April, still seeking to tame U.S. tariffs.
Interestingly, one day after this year’s Bilderberg concluded on June 15, Sefcovic flew to the Alberta, Canada G-7 meeting to meet with Greer on the sidelines, amid ongoing trade negotiations between the EU and U.S.
Notably, Trump’s former U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, who now chairs the private Center for American Trade, also attended Bilderberg 2025, alongside Smith and Sefcovic.
This firsthand look by AFP at these tariff-and-trade matters playing a major role at Bilderberg happen to mirror, in part, what the Financial Post of Canada, via a Bloomberg News dispatch, reported on June 16:
[G-7] officials will discuss the current state of . . . trade negotiations, which are aiming to avoid a massive jump in tariffs before a July 9 deadline imposed by [President Trump]. The transatlantic allies have been rushing to clinch a deal [before] Washington will hit nearly all the [EU bloc’s] exports with a 50% tariff [Trump’s import duties would affect about 70% of EU exports to the U.S.]
Although the 11 items on the official 2025 Bilderberg discussion-topics list cannot be considered all-inclusive—as has been the case since Bilderberg was born 71 years ago—the economic matters reported here evidently came up, in one manner or another, in up to three of the conference’s topics “Transatlantic Relationship,” “U.S. Economy,” and “Europe.”
The other eight announced topics this year were: “Ukraine,” “Middle East,” “Authoritarian Axis,” “Defense Innovation and Resilience,” “AI, Deterrence and National Security,” “Proliferation,” “Geopolitics of Energy and Critical Minerals,” and “Depopulation and Migration.”
SAVINGS LOOTING SCHEME?
Another significant financial matter became clear upon careful inspection of Bilderberg’s official attendance list.
Maria Albuquerque of Portugal, who is the EU commissioner for financial services and the Savings & Investments Union, attended Bilderberg 2025. On June 12—just before her arrival in Stockholm—she released a major speech entitled: “Speech by Commissioner Albuquerque (by video message) for the high-level conference on European financial integration: Advancing the savings and investments union, jointly [organized] by the European Commission and the European Central Bank.”
Her speech—of particular interest to other 2025 Bilderberg attendees such as Bank for International Settlements GM-Elect Pablo Hernandez, European Investment Bank President Nadia Calvino, World Economic Forum President Borge Brenda, and Eurogroup President Paschal Donohoe, among other finance wonks—is quite revealing.
Albuquerque noted, “European financial integration could not be more relevant. Today’s discussions are centered on the Savings and Investments Union, or the SIU.” She maintains that “the political momentum” is behind the SIU.
True to Bilderberg’s form, a more power-concentrated “single supervision” of the SIU is being sought, although national authorities supposedly would be properly consulted. Tapping into Europeans’ relatively high savings will help solidify what Ms. Albuquerque describes as Europe’s “more fragmented” capital markets compared to the U.S.
She emphasized: “At the end of 2023, household financial assets in the EU totaled 34.5 trillion euro. Of that, around 11.5 trillion euro sits in cash and low-yield deposits.”
And while she claims the SIU scheme can provide EU citizens with a surefire way to grow their wealth, it’s not yet known if this plan is altogether voluntary and what kind of direct, tangible benefits the EU’s thrifty depositors would actually receive.
AFP isn’t alone in its skepticism toward the SIU. The impartial journal “GIS Reports” on May 6 strongly suggested that the SIU indeed may be a back-handed scheme to pilfer Europeans’ savings, putting the best face on compensating for a massive investment shortfall, amid high taxes and rising military bills levied on the very Europeans who manage to save well.
“As highlighted in the [European Commission’s] Competitiveness Compass … the EU will require an annual investment of 750-800 billion euros by 2030 to modernize its chronically distressed economy,” “GIS Reports” noted. “These figures stem from a September 2024 report by [career European banker and past Bilderberg attendee] Mario Draghi, which underscored the urgency for groundbreaking innovation across the board. … To these colossal sums, add Europe’s escalating defense requirements. Just a day before the SIU’s launch, the commission announced … a rearmament effort projected to cost up to 800 billion euros by the end of the decade.”
Various past and present Bilderberg attendees who’ve colluded and nurtured deals at this elite gathering, involved in defense, investing, AI, etc., can remain fat and happy for years to come by way of such manipulative machinations.
