What is the DSRB, how does it work, and how can we stop it?
The DSRB is a war bank, a financial wing of NATO where governments pool tax dollars together with private capital to expand funding to the arms industry. Its purpose is simple: to enable countries like Canada to hit NATO’s new military spending target of 5% of GDP, equal to $150 billion a year, at the expense of people’s needs such as vital social services.
The minds behind this project are not nurses, teachers, or workers. They are the biggest banks and arms manufacturers in the world, such as JPMorgan Chase, which served as a key advisor in the plan for a NATO bank. In other words, those who stand directly to gain from the drive to war are writing NATO policy.
According to them, governments like Canada ‘spend too much’ on healthcare and education. They argue that democratic budget processes are ‘too slow’ and ‘too political’ to meet NATO’s needs.
Translation: when people demand hospitals and schools, it gets in the way of weapons contracts. So they want to bypass the public.
Instead of Parliament debating military spending openly, the DSRB will guarantee profits for private banks and arms manufacturers through a new financial machine designed to run above democratic control. They are telling us plainly: democracy is an obstacle.
We can also see that the DSRB is response to successful organizing efforts, such as Scotia Bank’s recent divestment from Elbit Systems as a result of a sustained BDS campaign. By using the DSRB instead of investing directly, private banks and corporations avoid public backlash and receive cover from the smoke screen of a multi-national financial institution which will make ‘following the money’ much more difficult.
So how will the bank work?
First, member states will provide ‘paid-in capital’. That means tax dollars are fed directly into the bank.With public money,, the DSRB will offer low-interest loans to private corporations, thus expanding a dangerous cycle of militarism and violence on the public dime.
Most importantly, the DSRB will “underwrite risk” for commercial banks. This means that if a private bank wants to lend to an arms company and the deal looks risky, the DSRB steps in to guarantee it. If profits are made, corporations keep them. But if there are losses, they are borne by tax payers, AKA us.
NATO and JPMorgan Chase call this a “counter-cyclical safety net.” What does that mean? During economic downturns, when workers are losing jobs and governments claim there is no money for social programs, military spending will be locked in and protected.
Hospitals can close. Unemployment can skyrocket. But weapons contracts will be stable.
The goal is to secure a AAA credit rating so the bank can borrow cheaply on global markets even if many of the DSRB’s member countries do not have AAA ratings themselves. In other words, the stronger states guarantee the debts of the weaker ones, so the entire NATO bloc can expand arms production and foment global military conflict. These debt guarantees will surely come with stipulated concessions, allowing the most powerful NATO States to essentially determine the internal political and economic policies of weaker partners.
With the ongoing drive to war as its backdrop, the Ontario provincial government put together a bid to host the bank here in Toronto which is over 100 pages long, detailing tax breaks and other incentives to be given to the bank if Toronto is selected as the host city. In the report, we are told that military spending creates jobs and boosts the economy.
Even if this were true, we would reject it, because prosperity built on destruction, the deepening of Canadian Imperialism, and the militarization of the economy, is not prosperity that working people, or any people of conscience for that matter, can accept.
But it’s not true.
Military spending channels public money into corporate coffers. It does not circulate through communities the way healthcare, housing, or education spending does. Weapons systems are capital-intensive, secretive, and dominated by a handful of giant firms.
Carney, Ford, and Chow have all echoed claims that this scheme will create thousands of jobs, however, this is highly dubious. A study just released by Brown University in Rhode Island demonstrates that military spending is inefficient for job creation. The study, an update on a report from 2023, shows that military spending (including both government defense spending and various private military industries) produces an average of five jobs per $1 million in spending, including both direct jobs and jobs in the supply chain. By contrast, 13 jobs are created for every $1 million in education spending – nearly three times as much employment. Healthcare spending creates 84% more jobs than military spending, while infrastructure and clean energy create from 24% to 64% more.
Even on the government’s own terms, the DSRB fails.
The DSRB will not solve the housing crisis. It will not lower grocery prices. It will not strengthen public healthcare. Rather than providing more of what workers need, the result of this NATO war bank will be a wealth transfer of billions of dollars from working people to multinational arms corporations guaranteed by the government, while locking Canada into permanent war footing.
But the DSRB is not inevitable.
It depends on public consent, quiet media coverage, and the assumption that we will not notice. Therefore we must expose it. We must oppose it. We must demand that public wealth serves people’s needs, not the profits of banks and arms manufacturers.