10/04/2014 - Financial Repression of Interest Rates Will Wreck The Economy
Bill Bonner explains why financial repression of interest rates will, without question, wreck the economy .. “Anything is possible in a NIRP (negative-interest-rate policy) world .. When central banks are resorting to negative interest rates, as the ECB did recently, everything goes topsy-turvy. A trillion dollars here… a trillion there. Pretty soon we’re talking about the end of the world as we have known it .. In Neverland, things are never what they seem. And we never know what they should be. Real prices are not set. They are discovered. Every minute. Every day. We know that today’s interest rates are not exactly on the level. But we don’t know how far off they are. Because the process of discovery has been perverted .. The interest rate you will pay depends on who you are. If you are a well-connected financial insider—say, a member of the Federal Reserve’s banking cartel—you can borrow from the Fed at 0.25% a year .. As Irish-French economist Richard Cantillon observed in the 18th century, when they are handing out free money, it pays to be in the front of the line. That’s because as more dollars are created, each one translates to a smaller slice of all goods and services produced. So expansionary monetary policies constitute a transfer of purchasing power away from those who hold old money to those who get new money.”
