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.”
12/09/2014 - 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 All the money goes into one big pool since Glass Steagall was repealed.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
12/05/2014 - 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.
12/04/2014 - Central Banks and Financial Repression
“Central banks would like to escalate their devastating war on savers by driving interest rates even deeper into negative nominal and real territory. But they are now stymied for two reasons .. In the case of their preferred route of driving ‘real’ interest rates more deeply into negative returns by cranking up consumer inflation, they are blocked by economic reality. Households are still buried in debt and can no longer borrow, spend and ratchet-up their balance sheet leverage ratios as they did in the 40 years preceding the financial crisis. Likewise, a deflationary global economy— drowning in the excess industrial capacity and malinvestments that have been generated by nearly two decades of worldwide financial repression—– keeps a tight lid on the price of consumer goods. So the tried and true route of inflating governments out of their debt obligations has been precluded .. At the same time, interest rates are already at the zero bound in nominal rate terms, meaning that only significantly negative nominal rates can further reduce the burden of public debt. However, even central bankers are smart enough to realize that if the monetary and fiscal authorities of the state go too far in imposing negative rates on bank deposits or in threatening to ‘bail-in’ depositors, they could incite a run on the bank.”
– David Stockman
LINK HERE TO THE SOURCE ARTICLE
11/30/2014 - Financial Repression: Distorting and Inflating Asset Prices
“The purpose of central bank financial repression and ZIRP is to distort and inflate asset prices. Our monetary politburo even admits that it is in the monetary scam business via its self-serving doctrine called ‘wealth effects’ .. The game here is to drive the stock market averages ever higher through massive liquidity injections into the Wall Street dealer markets. This purportedly causes people to feel richer and to spend and invest more, creating a virtuous circle of prosperity, world without end .. We know by now, however, that ‘wealth effects’ money printing does not help the main street economy. And while it does produce awesome financial market gains—–these turn out to be unsustainable bubbles that inexorably crash .. The resulting financial bubbles have been global in scope .. The true nature of today’s Keynesian central banking – The actual impact of the current ‘wealth effects’ regime is not economic growth and rising profits, but, instead, a vast inflation of financial assets.”
– David Stockman*
LINK HERE to the source article
11/29/2014 - Financial Repression: Negative “Real” Rates are the Norm
Article highlights how a number of banks are charging institutional clients for depositing their funds, meaning the interest rates are negative .. Several banks, including Bank of New York Mellon Corp, Credit Suisse Group AG, Goldman Sachs Group Inc & JP Morgan Chase & Co., have applied this practice .. “Investors and corporations, along with investment funds and asset managers, are becoming the biggest victims of this practice. They view this change as revolutionary. Multinational organizations that manage large-scale operations in the continent are witnessing a spike in their expenses as a result of this practice. Fear of a doomed European financial system is one of the driving forces behind such drastic measures. Currently, the economy is at a halt and in desperate need for households and businesses to add money in the system and revive confidence in investors .. This might lead to abandoned clients looking for more secure options to place their misplaced money or force them to opt for high-risk instruments such as debt-based funds or repurchase agreements.”
LINK HERE to the source article
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
11/27/2014 - The Consequences of Imposing Negative Interest Rates
Pater Tenebrarum essay on the adverse unintended consequences of banks imposing negative interest rates on deposits, all a result of financial repression .. he points out how banks have recently started to charge interest on bank deposits in Germany, & now banks elsewhere are doing the same: “Other banks were presumably watching to see if depositors would flee, and when that didn’t happen, Commerzbank decided to go down the same road.” .. the essay quotes Austrian School Economist Ludwig von Mises on what happens when interest payments are abolished or go negative – owners of capital will begin to consume their capital & society will become impoverished: “.. there cannot be any question of abolishing interest by any institutions, laws, and devices of bank manipulation. What can be abolished by laws and decrees is merely the right of the capitalists to receive interest. But such laws would bring about capital consumption and would very soon throw mankind back into the original state of natural poverty.”
LINK HERE to the source article
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
11/22/2014 - Low Interest Rates From Financial Repression Means Savers Are Struggling To Save
Article from Korean news source (in English) highlghts how low interest rates mean Koreans are struggling to save .. “Low interest rates on time deposits mean that Koreans can’t save the way they used to .. Until the 1990s, when the average interest rate hovered at around 10%, a common way to build up assets in Korea was to set aside a portion of wages in the bank every month as a time deposit – after a while, you would be able to buy property with the savings .. not any more .. “Korean consumers will have to live with such low-interest bank savings for a substantial period of time as the country’s central bank is likely to keep its benchmark interest rate in response to the continued quantitative easing of major economies like Japan and the European Union.” .. when you take into account the inflation rate in Korea, you have negative real interest rates, characteristic of financial repression.
LINK HERE to the source article
11/22/2014 - FINANCIAL REPRESSION for DUMMIES
Gordon T. Long has been sounding the alarm on Financial Repression for quite some time. Unfortunately most people have been unaware that their wealth is being stripped away before their very eyes. But Gordon and his associates have devised a number of strategies that can be exercised to avoid this fate. Before you can solve a problem, you’ve got to admit that it exits.
11/18/2014 - Here is the Official G20 Document Approved By the G20 Countries for Banks To Confiscate Your Bank Deposits
See page 5 of the document below for the signed & agreed piece which allows banks to simply take your bank deposits, under certain conditions, in the event of a bank crisis: “The Key Attributes describe the powers and tools that authorities should have to achieve this objective. These include the bail-in power, i.e., the power to write down and convert into equity all or parts of the firm’s unsecured and uninsured liabilities of the firm under resolution or any successor in a manner that respects the creditor hierarchy and to the extent necessary to absorb the losses. Hence, the resolution strategies that are being developed for G-SIBs provide for a recapitalisation by a way of a bail-in (with or without use of a bridge institution) to support the orderly resolution or wind-down of a G-SIB in a manner that maintains at a minimum continuity of critical functions. As set out in the July 2013 FSB Guidance on the Development of Effective Resolution Strategies, one crucial consideration in the development of effective resolution strategies is the availability in resolution of lossabsorbing capacity in sufficient amounts and at the right location(s) within a group.”
G-SIB = global systemically important bank
LINK HERE to the source article
11/16/2014 - Financial Repression: Wealth Confiscation & Bailins Relating to Bank Deposits & Gold
International Man essay explores the growing trend of governments & banks to setup “bailin” mechanisms which effectively confiscate a certain percentage of bank depositor deposits at banks in the event of a banking crisis .. the European Union (EU) has now setup this type of bailin mechanism to start soon in Europe – All the banks in the EU will be given the freedom to perform their own bail-in: they may absorb any deposits that exceed €100,000 .. “Following the Cyprus bail-in, we believe that Cyprus was intended as a trial-balloon, that a similar bail-in would later be created for the EU, the US, and a host of other jurisdictions. That prediction seems to be panning out.” .. this essay suggests a similar movement may happen to the paper-gold market – potentially: “Banks could be given the go-ahead to simply cancel the paper-gold certificates that they have sold. This will enrich the banks by billions of dollars, and the only losers will be the greedy rich who have so much money to burn that they have purchased gold certificates.” .. banks doing this would be “praised” by governments for taking the action for the “Greater Good.”
11/15/2014 - Financial Repression: Central Banks & ‘Officials’ Will Force Banks To Buy More Government Bonds
Just as the Federal Reserve has stopped its quantitative easing program, the Bank of Japan stepped up to the plate to take over the bond buying .. now the New York Times reports that the Financial Stability Board, a panel made up of central bankers, finance officials & top regulators from the world’s largest economies, announce proposals this week that would double the amount of money that large banks would be required to have on hand to absorb losses .. the idea minimizes the possibility of governments to have to bail out their banks, plus makes banks buy government bonds at the same time – a double whammy to help governments with their debt & deficit burdens [Cliff Note: They call it ‘financial repression’. We think it would be more honest to call it ‘exploitation’ … Words can affect perception & make reality seem more innocent than it is. As an expression, ‘financial repression is similar to the expression ‘Quantitative Easing’ .. which sounds innocent until you call it for what it really is: creating new money from thin air for the benefit of those who are in control of the money system.] .. “The new rules would require global systemically important banks to hold twice as much capital, 6%, as required by the Basel III rules. In addition, banks would be required to have capital equal to at least 16 percent and as much as 20% of their outstanding loans, derivatives portfolios and other assets, after adjusting for risk. Part of this capital could be borrowed from investors who would earn interest, but would lose their money if the bank got into trouble. Combined with the impact of other new regulations, the rules would require banks to increase their capital to 25% of assets adjusted for risk.” .. the article emphasizes bank lobbyists will push back vigorously on these proposals.
11/13/2014 - “WE’RE GOING TO BE FINANCIALLY REPRESSED FOR DECADES!”
Bill Gross, the 69-year-old billionaire co-founder of Pacific Investment Management Co., told Bloomberg Radio – AUDIO
Feeble returns on the safest investments such as bank deposits and fixed-income securities represent a “financial repression” transferring money from savers to borrowers, says Bill Gross.
Workers 65 and older, struggling with years of depressed yields, are the only group of Americans who are increasingly employed or looking for jobs, according to Labor Department participation-rate data.
Federal Reserve interest-rate policy that aims to cut borrowing costs. “I hate to be gloomy, but, yes, for the next 10 years, the oldsters, and I’m in that camp, are going to be disappointed in terms of the policy rate.” About 75 million baby boomers, born from 1946 to 1964, are starting to retire and face meager returns as a byproduct of the Fed’s decision to hold its benchmark rate near zero since December 2008. Policy makers also have quadrupled the central bank’s balance sheet to a record $4.22 trillion to drive down borrowing costs.
LETTER: FEDERAL GOVERNMENT ‘AGGRESSIVELY ENGAGED’ IN FINANCIAL REPRESSION 11-02-14
The $17.5trillion recognized federal government debt is one of the prime reasons why so many Americans, especially seniors, are having trouble making ends meet and why many of the young can’t save.
What’s happening is that since 2008, Washington has been aggressively engaged in a process called financial repression.
Financial repression is a deliberate policy by which deeply indebted governments, like ours, have historically used to discharge their otherwise unpayable debt. It’s a combination of chronic inflation coupled with artificially imposed low interest rates. What this effectively does is transfer wealth from savers to government.
One of the beauties of financial repression from Washington’s perspective is that it’s complex enough that the average person doesn’t understand how it works. This allows the government to keep taking vast sums of private wealth year after year without having to suffer any political consequences. That is, those in power stay in power.
Since the financial crisis of 2008, financial repression has been responsible for the yearly stealth transfer of hundreds of billions of dollars from the private sector to Washington.
The rationale is that it’s better to take something from everyone to resolve the financial predicament which the government regards as a societal problem.
One of the negatives of this hidden tax is that the prudent saver is punished. Another drawback is that financial repression makes it very difficult for people to save and thus accumulate some wealth.
I have been following events since the 1970s, and one of the things that stand out for me is the cavalier and even reckless ways in which government spends money. No responsible person would ever run their household the way politicians have run the government. So now we’re paying the piper for our collective spendthrift ways.
Peter Skurkiss, Stow
11/12/2014 - Federal Reserve Policy is “Financial Repression At Its Finest”
“I side with Hussman and have been in his camp for a number of years. Make calls like this and you look foolish until the bust happens. To paraphrase John (I cannot find the exact historical quote) ‘The choice is whether one looks foolish during the runup, or during the inevitable decline.’ .. Fed policy certainly represents financial repression at its finest. It’s very much behind the income inequality that Fed Chair Janet Yellen moans about all the time .. Forcing stock, bond and other asset prices higher only helps those who hold stocks, bonds and assets (the wealthy, not the poor) .. When stocks rise, it also drives CEO pay higher and higher via performance incentives and stock options. That money is not taken back when stocks crash. The irony is stunning. If Yellen wants to understand the central cause of income inequality, all she has to do is look in a mirror.”
– Mish Shedlock
11/12/2014 - Financial Repression: Wealth Taxes
CATO’s Dan Mitchel essay identifies the developments & evolution in thinking by politicians & the general public toward confiscating or taxing wealth .. emphasizes politicians want more money & deal with wealth inequality concerns .. on the consequences of wealth taxation/confiscation .. concludes: “A wealth tax is a very misguided idea. And that’s true whether it’s a permanent levy or a one-time cash grab by politicians .. The wealth tax will probably be a real threat in the not-too-distant future. America’s long-run fiscal outlook is very grim because of a rising burden of government spending, and other nations are in even worse shape .. When fiscal policy begins to deteriorate, even semi-rational politicians will join their leftist colleagues in a desperate search for more revenue. In a political world where inequality is a driving force and in an economic world where other tax sources have been exhausted, people with assets will have real reasons to worry.”
LINK HERE to the source article
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