CNBC’s Rick Santelli & Charles Biderman discuss the global 0% rate policy, how it is causing global recession.
Blog
12/23/2014 - Financial Repression: 0% Rate Policy Causing Recession
12/23/2014 - Morgan Stanley on Financial Repression
From last year but mostly still relevant, provides insight into what financial repression is & what the investment implications are .. looks at financial repression as:
• Explicit or indirect caps / ceilings on interest rates
– Government regulation in the U.S.
– Ceilings on bank lending rates
– Central Bank interest rate targets
• Creation and maintenance of a captive, domestic investor base
– Capital account restrictions and exchange controls to force a ‘home bias’
– High reserve requirements
– Regulatory measures that require financial institutions to hold government debt in their portfolios
– Transaction taxes on equities; prohibitions on gold transactions
• Direct ownership of, or extensive management over, banks and other financial institutions
– Restriction of entry into financial markets
– Directing credit towards certain industries
12/22/2014 - Financial Repression By Central Banks and Private Banks Worldwide
In his latest essay, former Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury Department Dr. Paul Craig Roberts identifies the dangerous trend of more & more manipulation of the financial markets by central banks & private banks worldwide, provides analysis & consideration of whether this trend can continue or not .. emphasizes the forces of financial repression – negative interest rates – happening in a supposed economic recovery”
12/20/2014 - Financial Repression Banks Remove the “Heart” of Dodd-Frank
6 years of highly visible Dodd-Frank legislation and thousands of lines of regulation, with no public debate, was just quietly removed and “neutered” by the stealth of an “Ear-Mark”.
To maintain government financing the banks have held Washington hostage.
Maintain our profit margins and have the public accept the risk of $3003 TRILLION or….. else!
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Wall Street Moves to Put Taxpayers on the Hook for Derivatives Trades12-05-14 Michael Krieger, Liberty Blitzkrieg
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“The Most Egregious Sections Of Law I’ve Encountered During My Time As A Representative” 12-05-14 Michael Krieger, Liberty Blitzkrieg
The Bill (yet another ‘Ear-Mark’) allows financial institutions to trade certain financial derivatives from subsidiaries that are insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. — potentially putting taxpayers on the hook for losses caused by the risky contracts. Big Wall Street banks had typically traded derivatives from these FDIC-backed units, but the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform law required them to move many of the transactions to other subsidiaries that are not insured by taxpayers.
“It is because there is a lot of money at stake,” Johnson said. “They want to be able to take big risks where they get the upside and the taxpayer gets the potential downside,”
12/20/2014 - Financial Repression: Energy Company Debt Fallout from Federal Reserve Financial Repression Policies
Bloomberg reports on the unfolding fallout now happening in energy-company debt as a result of Federal Reserve financial repression policies of zero interest rates & stimulus-induced asset inflation .. “Since early 2010, energy producers have raised $550 billion of new bonds and loans as the Federal Reserve held borrowing costs near zero, according to Deutsche Bank AG. With oil prices plunging, investors are questioning the ability of some issuers to meet their debt obligations. Research firm CreditSights Inc. predicts the default rate for energy junk bonds will double to 8% next year .. ‘Anything that becomes a mania — it ends badly .. And this is a mania.'” .. The Fed’s decision to keep benchmark interest rates at record lows .. has encouraged investors to funnel cash into speculative-grade securities to generate returns, raising concern that risks were being overlooked.”
12/20/2014 - Financial Repression Creating System Bias and Noise
“The current capitalism suffocating regime of Keynesian central banking and extreme financial repression has created systematic bias and noise .. These distortions are the result of mis-allocations and malinvestments reflecting artificial sub-economic costs of debt and capital. The resulting bubbles and booms, in turn, cause highly aggregated measures of economic activity to be flattered by the unsustainable production, spending and investment trends underneath at the sector level .. Bubble finance does not create growth; it funds phony booms that end up as destructive round trips .. The meaning of the oil crash is that the central bank fueled bubble of this century is over and done. We are now entering an age of global cooling, drastic industrial deflation, serial bubble blow-ups and faltering corporate profits.”
– David Stockman
12/18/2014 - David Stockman – The CROMNIBUS “Abomination”!
Special Guest: David Stockman
David Stockman is the ultimate Washington insider turned iconoclast. He began his career in Washington as a young man and quickly rose through the ranks of the Republican Party to become the Director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Ronald Reagan. After leaving the White House, Stockman had a 20-year career on Wall Street.
CROMNIBUS
We interrupted David Stockman in Aspen where he was just finishing an article concerning the Cromnibus Bill which the Senate having passed was forwarding to the White House. You can easily sense the annoyance in David’s tone about yet another “abomination” out of Washington of a $1.1T, 1600 page Bill and no one given the time to even read it. “Pork and earmarks” were blatantly evident and tacked all over it. As a former Washington insider he is very clear on what is wrong in Washington.
It seemed very appropriate to ask David on this day to talk with us about Financial Repression!
FINANCIAL REPRESSION
“Honest interest rates and financial asset prices come about from price discovery in the free market owing to the interplay of supply and demand for savings, borrowing and other forms of investment in the marketplace.The opposite of that is the regime we have today which I call the regime of financial repression.
“It is characterized by Dishonest or false prices that are not set by the market but are administered by the central bank under the doctrine of ZIRP, QE, wealth effect and all of the other artifices they have invented to justify intervention in the heart of the financial market day-in and day-out! Capitalism cannot function efficiently nor can the economy grow at a healthy sustainable, balanced rate if you do not have a free market within the capital markets or money markets. It is at the very heart of the capitalist enterprise. Today we do not have that! We have absolute Financial Repression!‘
BANKS HAVE BECOME WARDS OF THE STATE
“We have a problem with the banking system in this country todayand that is because banks as they now exist and function are not free market institutions by any shape, form, function or form of imagination! They are essentially wards of the state”
Stockman believes they would not exist in their current form nor would they take the kinds of risk they take if it were not for:
- The $9T of government deposit insurance,
- Access to the Fed’s discount window,
- Banking licenses from the state which therefore shield them from the claims they would be exposed to otherwise.
The resulting level of malinvestment and market distortions will soon come to an end when we again have realistic price discovery. He believes it is “only a matter of time before we have another more cataclysmic financial meltdown” due to the sheer weight of speculation in this central bank, bubble driven era which is now occurring.
12/16/2014 - Egon von Greyerz – Lessons Learned from the Suisse Gold Referendum
Special Guest: Egon von Greyerz – Matterhorn Asset Management AG
Interview with Egon von Greyerz of Matterhorn Asset Management .. on the recent Swiss Gold Initiative vote:
Lesson Learned:
“You can’t fight the Elite! When they decide they will beat you, they will beat you — eventually however they will fail!”
“The whole of the elite were against us. Now, we thought the people, the Swiss people, would be on our side because the Swiss people understand the importance of gold. They were clearly influenced by the massive campaign of the government and of the central bank. The losses for the Swiss National Bank could have been very serious, and that’s why they were quite desperate to stop this initiative.”
What are the ramifications now?
“Switzerland now has to print money. The currency is only backed by 7% gold, and now they have a free-for-all to print more money .. this, of course, will be very bullish for gold because it won’t be just Switzerland. Virtually, every country in the world will start printing money.”
On November 30th the Swiss voted on:
- Returning their national gold which is held abroad back to Switzerland
- Requiring the Swiss National Bank to hold 20% of their assets in physical gold
- Prohibiting further gold sales
So why was this referendum so important? Because Switzerland has, for hundreds of years, been a bastion of sound monetary policy and low inflation. But this has gradually changed in the last 100 years since the creation of the Fed in the US and especially during the past 15 years when the Swiss government quietly removed the 40% gold backing from the revised Federal Constitution which was adopted by popular vote in 1999.
No paper currency has ever survived throughout history in its original form. And the Swiss Franc from having been a strong currency is now in the process of being slowly destroyed by the recent policies of the Swiss National Bank (SNB).
Since 2008 the SNB’s balance sheet has expanded 5 times from CHF 100 Billion to CHF 500 Billion. So Switzerland has printed around 400 Billion Swiss Francs in the last 6 years in order to hold its currency down against the Euro and other currencies. CHF 400 Billion is around 2/3 of GDP.
12/15/2014 - Andrew Sheng with the FRA Financial Repression With the former head of the Hong Kong SEC
Special Guest: Andrew Sheng – Former Head of the Hong Kong SEC
ANDREW SHENG , Distinguished Fellow of the Fung Global Institute and a member of the UNEP Advisory Council on Sustainable Finance, is a former chairman of the Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission, and is currently an adjunct professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing. His latest book is From Asian to Global Financial Crisis.
Andrew Sheng has spent his career in Asia as a central banker and regulator. He summarizes the current global situation as developed economies simply “kicking the can down the road” to avoid the painful and inevitable structural changes that must lie ahead. “There are no free lunches. Avoidance will only make it more expenses and painful later on!” He quotes former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers on this subject; “do you want your teeth pulled out slowly or very quickly?” Sheng concludes “we are going to have a long tooth ache for a very long time to come!”
FINANCIAL REPRESSION
Sheng describes what he refers to as the “Financial Repression Tax”:
“Governments (via regulated banks) will pay depositors very low rates, sometimes below inflation rates in order to fund the budget. The result is what is known as a Financial Repression Tax. This represses the financial system. The biggest payers of the Financial Repression Tax become the pension funds, insurance companies and long term savers.”
“Besides the government tax, this effectively also allows the rich & privileged to borrow from the poor! Rich countries are borrowing from the poorer countries”
AVOIDING DAY OF INEVITABILITY OF STRUCTURAL ADJUSTMENT
“As long as central bankers are printing we have a ‘paper economy’ not a real economy. That is where Financial Repression really harms the system”
SOURCE OF GROWING GLOBAL INEQUALITY
Sheng feels strongly that the inevitable outcome of broad based Financial Repression is and has become global inequality. “Quantitative Easing and the ‘leveraged play’ around the world is worsening inequality“.
THE MARKET IS NOW POLICY DRIVEN
Sheng also believes the free market is presently not allowed to operate. Markets are highly distorted from trillions of dollars of ‘pumping’.
“People equate finance with debt. Debt is about risk shifting and not about risk sharing! We presently have things backward. If you think of the real economy as the horse, and finance as the cart; what we have today is the cart in front of the horse!”
CONSEQUENCES OF FINANCIAL REPRESSION POLICIES
Andrew Sheng believes we are headed for another crisis. Common sense could help fix the problems but he feels common sense appears not to be so common, especially when politics in involved.
This interview touches a broad range of the fallout from Financial Repression; from how the US Fed is now locked into low interest rates, the ‘hot money’ US Dollar Carry Trade and why lenders are more concerned about balance sheet repair than investment.
12/13/2014 - Iceland Plans to Impose a 25-40% Exit Tax on all Assets Leaving the Country
Bloomberg & Morgunbladid report that Iceland plans to impose an exit tax as part of removing its capital controls – all bank assets would be subject to the levy .. more financial repression .. “Representatives from Iceland’s government, central bank and parliament discussed imposing a tax as high as 40% on investors exiting the island.”
12/12/2014 - Financial Repression Has Caused Drastic Mispricing of Financial Assets
“There are financial time bombs planted everywhere in the world economy because central bank financial repression has caused drastic mispricing of nearly every class of financial asset, which is to say, every layer of collateral which has ratcheted-up the entire edifice .. This drastic central bank driven financial repression has unleashed a mindless pursuit of ‘yield’ or short-term trading gains that give the concept of ‘irrational exuberance’ an entirely new definition .. What is happening now is that risk is coming out of hiding; the collateral chains are buckling; the financial time bombs are beginning to explode. There is nothing especially new about this development—its the third occurrence this century. But there is possibly something different this time around the block. This time the carnage could be much worse because the most recent tsunami of central bank credit was orders of magnitude larger and more virulent than during the run-up to the Lehman event or the dotcom implosion. Moreover, the central banks are now out of dry powder—– impaled on the zero-bound. That means any resort to a massive new round of money printing can not be disguised as an effort to ‘stimulate’ the macro-economy by temporarily driving interest rates to ‘extraordinarily’ low levels. They are already there. So duck and cover. This storm could be a monster.”
– David Stockman
12/11/2014 - Moody’s and S&P Warn That European Banks Are At Risk Of Bailins in 2015
GoldCore article on recent developments relating to bailins & financial repression .. Banks in most western nations are vulnerable to bail-ins in 2015 & the recent G20 meeting in Brisbane was a further move towards the stealth bail-in regimes .. S&P Managing Director Stefan Best: “The European bail-in tool decreases the predictability of state support.”
12/10/2014 - David Stockman on how Negative Interest Rates are taking away Wealth from Bank Depositors
TomWoodsTV interviews David Stockman .. Stockman says the Keynesians have had their day in Japan & worldwide .. rails against Harvard University’s Ken Rogoff on the abolition of physical cash to facilitate the further expansion of monetary policy – governments trying to implement negative nominal real interest rates to take wealth away from bank depositors to help pay down government debt .. it’s financial repression .. 30 minutes
12/10/2014 - Financial Repression: Negative Interest Rates Are Coming To U.S. Banks
The WSJ reports that big U.S. banks – primarily of the TBTF variety – “are urging some of their largest customers in the U.S. to take their cash elsewhere or be slapped with fees, citing new regulations that make it onerous for them to hold certain deposits.” .. The banks, including J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., Citigroup Inc., HSBC Holdings PLC, Deutsche Bank AG and Bank of America Corp. , have spoken privately with clients in recent months to tell them that the new regulations are making some deposits less profitable .. “In some cases, the banks have told clients, which range from large companies to hedge funds, insurers and smaller banks, that they will begin charging fees on accounts that have been free for big customers, the people said. Bank officials are also working with these firms to find alternatives for some of their deposits, they said .. J.P. Morgan told some clients of its commercial bank recently that it would begin charging monthly fees on deposit accounts from which clients can withdraw money at any time. The new charges will start Jan. 1 for U.S. accounts, according to an Oct. 21 memo reviewed by the Journal, and later for international accounts.”
12/10/2014 - Simon Black, the SOVERIGNMAN with the FRA
Special Guest: Simon Black, the SOVERIGNMAN
SIMON BLACK , is the publisher of SovereignMan.com and “Sovereign Man: Confidential” – An International Investment Intelligence Service. A graduate of West Point he served tours of duty in the middle east as an intelligence officer before beginning SovereignMan.com. He has visited over 116 countries and visits 40-50 countries annually looking for investment solutions to suit the realities of today’s increasing government regulations and restrictions.
“Financial Repression is Theft.
It is a very clever, cunning deceitful form of theft.
Governments are stealing purchasing power and essentially defaulting on their obligation to maintain a sound currency.”
“Presently in many cases you have to pay a bankrupt government for the privilege of loaning them money!
Negative real interest rates is covert theft”
Simon believes that the mentality of many governments has shifted from an ‘abundance mentality’ to a negative ‘scarcity mentality’ that has left them chasing innocent, harmless people around the world (ie witness FATCA and the avalanche of renouncing citizenship) versus trying to attract productive people, being more competitive and “making the pie bigger”. This is no longer the thinking that the US was founded on.
THE SOVEREIGN MAN APPROACH
The problem we’re facing is the fragility and danger that comes from massive centralization of economic and political power. The solution then, is to decentralize.
This strategy of diversifying aspects of your life across the globe is calledInternationalization, and that’s what Sovereign Man’s Six Pillars of Self Reliance are about.
The SIX PILLARS OF SELF RELIANCE – Financial sovereignty in the 21st century
- Move your money to safety – Foreign banking
- Establish new roots abroad – Second residence and second passport
- Don’t bet your life on a single currency – Alternative stores of value
- Rely on yourself – Personal resilience in a fragile world
- Grow your wealth – Entrepreneurship and private investments
- Protect what you hold dear – Asset protection and privacy
12/09/2014 - Financial Repression: Banks Being Setup To Confiscate Bank Deposits & Other Assets in the Next Banking Crisis
Interview with Attorney Ellen Brown .. explains recent developments in regulations & G20 initiatives on bank BailIns, a form of financial repression in which banks are being setup to confiscate bank deposits & other assets in the event of a banking crisis .. “The banks will say, well, we don’t have it. All the money goes into one big pool since Glass Steagall was repealed. They are allowed to gamble with that money and that’s what they do. I think maybe Bank of America is the most vulnerable because of Merrill Lynch. Everybody is concerned, and they do very risky deals and they are on the edge. I think they have over $50 trillion in derivatives and over $1 trillion in deposits. . . The Dodd-Frank Act says we, the people, are no longer going to be responsible for the big banks when they collapse. It is not clear the FDIC will even be able to borrow from the Treasury, but even if they could, who is going to pay that money back? Let’s say they borrowed $1 trillion. Who is going to pay that $1 trillion dollars back? It will bankrupt all the small banks that had to contribute to this premium. They will say we’re raising your premium to everything you got, basically. Little banks will go out of business, and who is going to survive–the big banks. . . . What we’re going to have left is five big banks, and everybody else is going to be bankrupt.” .. The G-20 met recently in Australia to make new banking rules for the next financial calamity, Brown explains how these new rules will allow banks to take money from depositors & pensioners worldwide: “It became rules we agreed to actually implement. There was no treaty, and Congress didn’t agree to all this. They use words so that it’s not obvious to tell what they have done, but what they did was say, basically, that we, the governments, are no longer going to be responsible for bailing out the big banks. These are about 30 international banks. So, you are going to have to save yourselves, and the way you are going to have to do it is by bailing in the money of your creditors. The largest class of creditors of any bank is the depositors .. Theoretically, we are protected by deposit insurance up to $250,000 in the U.S. and 100,000 euros in Europe. The FDIC fund has $46 billion, the last time I looked, to cover $4.5 trillion worth of deposits. So, even though we are protected by the FDIC, the FDIC is not going to have the money. . . . This makes it legal for these big 30 banks to take our money when they become insolvent. They are too-big-to-fail. This was supposed to avoid too-big-to-fail, but what it does is institutionalizes too-big-to-fail. They are not going to go down. They are going to take our money instead.” .. 22 minutes
12/08/2014 - IMF Needs To Authorize Itself To Have Zero or Negative Interest Rates
IMF Paper proposes changes to its authority to ensure it is authorized & capable of handling negative interest rates .. “There is no authority under the Articles of Agreement for the Fund to establish a zero or negative SDRinterest rate .. This paper proposes technical amendments .. and the burden sharing mechanism to address these issues.” .. IMF preparing financial repression on interest rates.
12/06/2014 - Financial Repression Sheering Savers & Investors
“I think that the reason bankers and governments dislike gold backed hard currencies is that it limits their ability to devalue their fiat currency and redistribute wealth in order to stay in power. The governmental solution to all the debt in the world is to try to inflate it away and slowly take money away from the people via currency depreciation and manipulating interest rates so savers and forced owners of government debt (such as pension schemes) make a negative return .. The market is not free, it is controlled .. A move away from fiat currency and back to using gold backed currency would remove the ability of governments to print money and this in turn would remove their ability constantly try to avoid facing the consequences of building up huge debts, which in term means they would have to face the music and actually have a plan to repay it .. It is the central banks and private banks who are complicit in this government sponsored process .. I am getting pretty fed up with having my savings earning no interest and possibly being devalued and of not being able to find any sensible place to invest my hard earned money due to central bank policies making it impossible to make any return anywhere without taking crazy risks.”
– Tim Price’s latest letter
12/06/2014 - Nick Giambruno with the FRA
Special Guest: Nick Giambruno – Casey Research
FINANCIAL REPRESSION
“Financial Repression is Financial Authoritarianism.
It is not only repressing financial aspects of people’s lives but all aspects of life and when you consider the amount of power that is wielded through Financial Repression, it is more accurate to call it Financial Authoritarianism!”
SOURCE OF FINANCIAL REPRESSION
Financial Repression is needed to help governments finance their debt, where the impedence comes from the level of government spending. Since almost all countries use a central banking model and fiat currencies this allows Financial Repression to exist. It gives the government the tools to implement Financial Repression which it wouldn’t otherwise have in a SOUND MONEY System.
“The lynchpin of how Financial Repression is implemented is the Central Banking Model “
“What is fundamentally wrong with this is that it allows the government to take something (that something being Purchasing Power) that is not theirs, without people knowing. You learn in kindergarden that you don’t take something that is not yours but that is exactly what they are doing!”
FATCA – FOREIGN ACCOUNTS TAX COMPLIANCE ACT
One of the most egregious examples of Financial Repression in the international arena is FATCA and the soon to be unleashed GATCA. The Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) effectively begins the process of ring fencing investors options through nothing more than a stealth form of capital controls.
The real issue to banks around the world is:
- Cost of Compliance
- Draconian penalties if even an honest mistake is made.
Therefore international banks don’t want American accounts which is making it horrendously difficult for Americans to now live and operate abroad. FATCA has laid the foundation for GATCA in 2018 which is part of the end game for global taxation.
Like Financial Repression FATCA (and GATCA) is devious and not upfront with the American people. FATCA is a blatant example of “government for the government by the government” versus a constitution based upon “a government for the people by the people”!
Learn more about FATCA / GATCA and more as Casey Research’s “International Man” talks what Financial Repression means around the world.
12/05/2014 - New G20 Rules on Financial Repression
Ellen Brown highlights the results of the recent G20 meeting in Australia, a meeting which Russell Napier called “the day money died” – the day deposits died as money .. Napier: deposits are now just part of the commercial banks’ capital structure, which means they can be “bailed-in” or confiscated to save the banks .. the new rules include derivatives, stipulating a priority of payment of banks’ derivative obligations ahead of everyone else in the event of a crisis .. Brown points out “everyone else” includes pension funds .. “‘Bail in’ has been sold as avoiding future government bailouts and eliminating too big to fail (TBTF). But it actually institutionalizes TBTF, since the big banks are kept in business by expropriating the funds of their creditors.” .. the new G20 rules being implemented emphasize turning bank liabilities into capital, with liabilities including “unsecured debt” like bank deposits .. Brown says banks are now offering “bailinable bonds” which convert into bank capital in the event of a bank crisis – pension funds are now buying these types of bonds in seeking yield sufficient to meet their pension obligations, but a recent policy brief by the Peterson Institute for International Economics calls “bailinable securities” fool’s gold that woud save banks at the expense of pensioners in the event of a bank crisis .. so investors, individuals, pensioners, savers & retirees are now at risk of confiscatory bail-ins to help keep too big to fail banks in business.
