01/05/2017 - Former Goldman Sachs Managing Director Nomi Prins On Artisanal Money To Support Government Debt

“Why is this all happening? We had a financial crisis. It was scary for a lot of reasons. It was started in the United States. The biggest six banks in the United States have not really suffered in the wake of this financial crisis. The biggest six banks were at the core of the financial crisis are now 86% bigger in terms of assets, they are 43% bigger in terms of deposits. They have more tract in the derivatives market. They have more tract terms of the trading assets market. They are simply more powerful than they were before. They are continuing to be batted with settlements for crimes ranging from mortgage related crimes (the crux of the crisis), to libor scandals, to rigging foreign exchange to scamming customers. These crimes manifest in several ways, as we saw when Wells Fargo, one of the big six U.S banks, charged fees to its customers that they did not even have .. These banks have only been subsidized by, first our Federal Reserve and then internationally the cooperation of central banks – in a way that has never existed before. In the wake of our crisis, when the Federal Reserve brought money down to zero, they created Artisanal Money. It is not actually printing money. It does not require physical activity. It is the idea of creating money in all sorts of different ways to make its availability easy, its cost zero (or negative), of buying bonds (to continue to support government debt). They have made a policy supporting government debt by moving it to the central banks – in terms of purchasing. These central banks have created a whole dislocation of the nature of pricing in every single asset class.”

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