INET video interview with Boston University’s Professor Kevin Gallagher on his new book .. discussion of international capital flows, how it is causing destabilizing effects in developing countries .. Gallagher points out that today a number of emerging economies, including Brazil, Taiwan, & South Korea, have been successfully experimenting with new capital account regulations (CARs) to manage volatile capital flows .. Gallagher develops a theory of countervailing monetary power that shows how emerging markets can & should counter domestic & international opposition to the regulation of cross-border flows, even as he acknowledges powerful attacks from a multiplicity of interests, seeking to undermine those very regulations .. 20 minutes
Media
02/14/2015 - Financial Repression – Capital Controls
02/12/2015 - Sprott’s Rick Rule on Financial Repression
Interview transcript with Rick Rule on the economy, global counterparty risks & the natural resource sector .. on the issue of capitulation in the finacial markets for natural resources: “We came close last October. There were some moments of absolute panic .. but we didn’t follow through with a capitulation… Capitulation usually follows a protracted period of diminished volume… I have never seen a bear market in the juniors end without one .. just because I haven’t seen it doesn’t mean it has to be that way.” .. identifies financial repression: “The fiscal regime that has been in place since the financial crisis is one where the political class has decreased the interest rate artificially, allowing the very large money center banks to borrow at extraordinarily low costs both from their retail deposit banks but also from their central banks and lend the money back to sovereigns. In effect what happens is that the central governments loan the banks money at .75% or 1% and borrow the money back from the banks at 2.5% or 3%, giving them a 1% or 1.5% interest rate carry at very, very, very low risk. That’s the way the Japanese subsidized their banks and made their banks solvent again after their currency crises.” .. 28 minutes accompanying video
02/08/2015 - Axel Merk: “We have Financial Repression Everywhere.”
Is deflation or inflation on the financial horizon? .. here is what Axel Merk thinks: “For me, it’s a slam dunk. We are going to get inflation. There are negative real interest rates in the developed world as far as the eye can see. Just about every country has negative real interest rates, and we have financial repression everywhere. I think we cannot afford positive real interest rates over an extended period. Just think about the U.S. with the entitlement wave coming against us. We got strong incentives in place to have negative real rates when the government has too much debt and when consumers have too much debt. The reason why we have this battle with inflation and deflation is we are clearly facing a deflationary bust, and central banks are fighting against it. If we didn’t have central banks, I’d be fully onboard with deflation, but because we cannot have bankruptcies, we will inflate our way around it .. Ultimately, inflation is going to first come up in the U.S., and that inflation is going to be exported to other countries.” .. 18 minutes
02/04/2015 - Financial Repression: “Inflation is a Means by Which a Country can Default on Its Debt”
Former U.S. Presidential policy advisor Dr. Pippa Malmgren explains how the UK & the U.S. are using inflation to default on their debts & their principal creditors .. highlights how interest rates in the bond market are being repressed (financial repression) by central banks worldwide .. “the balance between the state and the market has heavily shifted to the state since the financial crisis” .. 10 minutes
01/11/2015 - European Bank Runs Could Come To America
Interview with Boston University Economics Professor Laurence Kotlikoff .. Kotlikoff says Greece is in financial trouble & that could set off another global financial calamity: “So, you have the same problem. You have a country that is fiscally unsustainable, and they haven’t really been able to get out from under that situation .. It sets up a situation where you could have runs on other banks like in Italy, Spain, Portugal, and that could spread to other banks in other countries, including France and Germany. Remember, the big to do about the Cypriot banks that failed and said they weren’t going to pay off the depositors? That led to a major international panic. It was a small country with two relatively small banks.” .. bank bailins & financial repression .. a daisy chain of defaults and bank runs could happen in Europe: “It could also come to the U.S. If everybody believes the banks are going to be solvent and they can get their money out, that’s fine. But if everybody starts to run on the banks, you want to run before they do because you want to get you money out before it’s all gone.” .. sees the potential for U.S. hyperinflation if there is a loss of confidence in the FDIC deposit insurance system, as depositors take their money out & buy something real .. on the U.S. unfunded liabilities: “Social security is 33% under-financed, according to its own trustees report .. Our entire fiscal enterprise is about 58% under-financed .. the country is really broke.” .. 33 minutes
01/03/2015 - The Confiscation of Bank Deposits
Ellen Brown* explains how the recent G20 meeting rubber stamped new regulations that will make Cyprus style bank bail-ins a worldwide reality .. 24 minutes
12/23/2014 - Financial Repression: 0% Rate Policy Causing Recession
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
12/09/2014 - 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
11/28/2014 - Tim Price On Financial Repression
Article & interview on perspective by Tim Price on financial repression insight on UK Tip TV .. Rather than saving the global economy, very low interest rates are a ’coiled spring’ for trouble ahead .. very low interest rates are implementing financial repression, which involves deliberately holding down interest rates below inflation & keeping government borrowing costs low .. “People are piling into stocks because they’ve frankly got no other choice, but I think we’ve seen how this film ends.” .. Price thinks that investing in Asia is the best bet to deal in this environment.
LINK HERE to the source article and video
11/23/2014 - Insight into Financial Repression
Brinker Capital Senior Investment Manager, Jeff Raupp, CFA, provides commentary on the issues surrounding the debt burdens of many developed governments today, how this era of financial repression may impact investors .. 5 minutes
11/07/2014 - Chris Martenson on Financial Repression
Podcast discussion on how the Federal Reserve is destroying consumer savings, how central banks will be to blame for the coming bond collapse, how trying to keep gold & silver prices ‘corralled’ is part of the official plan.
10/19/2014 - Beware of Financial Repression
Peak Prosperity interview of Daniel Amerman on financial repression, based on his recent essay which we posted – see link below.
Great insightful article on financial repression by Daniel Amerman .. questions how the U.S. federal government can pay down its enormous debt .. sees 4 primary options that the government can take:
1) Decades of austerity with higher taxes and lower government spending.
2) Defaulting on government debts.
3) Inflating away the value of the debt through rapidly slashing the value of the currency.
4) Using “Financial Repression”, a process that is complex enough that the average voter never understands how it works, thus allowing governments to use this potent but subtle method of taking vast sums of private wealth, year after year, decade after decade, with almost no political consequences.
The essay reminds readers the 4th option is the likely approach, points out the world took this approach in the 1940s through the 1970s to pay down government debt .. “Because of the sheer size of the problem – most of the population must be made to participate, year after year. Financial Repression therefore uses an assortment of carrots and sticks to ensure that investors have little choice but to participate – on a playing field that has been rigged against them as a matter of design – even if they are among the small minority who are aware of what is being done to them.”The essay covers 4 areas of financial repression:
1) Inflation (Shearing #1)
2) Negative Real Interest Rates (Shearing #2)
3) Funding By Financial Institutions (Fence #1).
4) Capital Controls (Fence #2).
LINK HERE to part 1
LINK HERE to part 2
10/07/2014 - What is Financial Repression?
What does financial repression mean? .. short video explainer by Project M.
“This manipulation of the yield on government debt is the answer for the government, and socially, it is so much more acceptable than the alternatives. Whatever you think of the history of hyperinflation, austerity, default and deflation, they are socially incredibly disruptive, incredibly socially dangerous, and many of those market-driven events have led to warfare or massive domestic social unrest. I think in the grand scheme of things when the government sits down and decides which avenue to pursue, this avenue of repression .. will always be more socially acceptable than the market-driven events of austerity, hyperinflation, deflation, devaluation.”
– Russell Napier, CLSA
09/28/2014 - Gordon T Long: Financial Repression Killing Middle Class & Capitalism Itself
WallStrForMainStr Interviews Gordon T Long:
“We have over 250 interviews with top guests in discussion. The Gordon T Long discussion is over an hour long and one of the best ones we’ve done all year.”
09/20/2014 - Banking In The Age Of Financial Repression
St. Gallen Symposium with UBS, HSBC, Credit Suisse, Zurich Insurance Group.. a year old but still relevant