Category Archives: Banking

Global central banks racing to implement digital currencies as cities convert to ‘smart’ infrastructure: Track and control grid being erected right under our noses, by Leo Hohmann

Posted on December 11, 2022 | Leave a comment

Whenever they say they’re doing some planned “improvement” for us, they’re doing it for them. Their power, their control. From Leo Hohmann at leohohmann.com:

The Central Bank of Nigeria announced it will begin, effective in January, restricting cash withdrawals from banks and ATMs to just $45 per day as part of a push to move the country toward a cashless economy. 

If this were a one-off, I wouldn’t bother writing about it. But it comes on the heels of mega-banks announcing similarly creepy new policies in recent months in China, India, Russia, Brazil, Sweden, the U.S. and many other nations, all pointing to an imminent switch over to a global digital money system.

In the U.S., the Federal Reserve put out an announcement in November that it is launching a 12-week “pilot program” to test out a new central bank digital currency, or CBDC, with six major banks.

Thursday’s announcement in Nigeria is also a big deal because Nigeria is one of only nine countries that have already launched an official CBDC. That happened earlier this year, and now they are already moving to restrict the use of cash. This proves that digital currencies were never designed to function alongside paper currencies but rather to replace them.

Fox News reports that the Central Bank of Nigeria will limit weekly cash withdrawals to 100,000 naira ($225) for individuals and 500,000 naira ($1,124) for corporations, with a processing fee required to access more. 

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Digital Currency: The Fed Moves toward Monetary Totalitarianism, by André Marques

Posted on December 11, 2022 | Leave a comment

Like the Covid response, digital currencies have nothing to do with their ostensibly cited justifications and everything to do with power and totalitarian control. From André Marques at mises.org:

The Federal Reserve is sowing the seeds for its central bank digital currency (CBDC). It may seem that the purpose of a CBDC is to facilitate transactions and enhance economic activity, but CBDCs are mainly about more government control over individuals. If a CBDC were implemented, the central bank would have access to all transactions in addition to being capable of freezing accounts.

It may seem dystopian—something that only totalitarian governments would do—but there have been recent cases of asset freezing in Canada and Brazil. Moreover, a CBDC would give the government the power to determine how much a person can spend, establish expiration dates for deposits, and even penalize people who saved money.

The war on cash is also a reason why governments want to implement CBDCs. The end of cash would mean less privacy for individuals and would allow central banks to maintain a monetary policy of negative interest rates with greater ease (since individuals would be unable to withdraw money commercial banks to avoid losses).

Once the CBDC arrives, instead of a deposit being a commercial bank’s liability, a deposit would be the central bank’s liability.

In 2020, China launched a digital yuan pilot program. As mentioned by Seeking Alpha, China wants to implement a CBDC because “this would give [the government] a remarkable amount of information about what consumers are spending their money on.”

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PSYOP-MARKET-CRASH Black Swan Edition: Bank for International Settlements Warns of $100 Trillion of Hidden Debt Just Discovered, by 2nd Smartest Guy in the World

Posted on December 11, 2022 | 2 comments

The amount of derivatives and debt in the global financial system is so large that $100 trillion can be laying around, undiscovered. The total amount of derivatives is, by knowledgeable estimates, over one quadrillion (a thousand trillions). From 2nd Smartest Guy in the World at 2ndsmartestguyintheworld.substack.com:

The world faces a staggering financial meltdown with potential losses exceeding the total number of US dollars in circulation.

The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) is the central bank of central banks that for all intents and purposes directs all of the other various central banks from The Federal Reserve to the ECB to the BOJ.

The BIS is like the One World Government central bank to the various sovereign national central banks that appear to be independent, but are all privately owned and actively working against the interests of their respective nations.

The BIS is like the hyper-centralized control center, and the various national central banks are its “penetrator” nodes.

All of the national central banks will deploy their respective CBDC products to coincide with the imminent global financial crash to end all crashes. These CBDCs will be the opening salvos in the Great Reset. At some point yet another manufactured crisis will consolidate all of the various CBDC’s into a supra-crypto-SDR (Special Drawing Rights) CBDC that will function as the singular planetary digital currency, at which point the national central banks will all be consolidated into the BIS.

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Posted in Banking, Collapse, Currencies, Debt, Economy, Financial markets

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How Big Are the Fed’s Losses and Where Can We Go See Them?

Posted on December 10, 2022 | Leave a comment

You wouldn’t think an institution that can legally print money would lose money. From Wolf Richter at wolfstreet.com:

We find a good rubbernecking spot.

How Big Are the Fed’s Losses and Where Can We Go See Them?

by Wolf Richter •  • 110 Comments

We find a good rubbernecking spot.

By Wolf Richter for WOLF STREET.

A collapse-chart has been making the rounds in the social media, financial blogs, and the like. It’s being handed around without context, as if self-explanatory, sort of like, look, the world is collapsing. It’s from the St. Louis Fed’s data depository. The title of the chart says, among other things, ominously, “Liabilities: Remittances Due to the U.S. Treasury.” Whatever this is, it’s violating the WOLF STREET dictum, “Nothing Goes to Heck in a Straight Line.”

But beyond the funny aspects of the chart, there is something happening on the Fed’s balance sheet that is taking on momentum and heft: How much money the Fed is losing, where this lost money shows up, and how it derails a taxpayer gravy-train. The chart reflects that in a bizarre manner — it does a switcheroo — that we’ll get to in a moment.

A liability is money that the Fed owes some other entity – in this case, money that the Fed owes the US Treasury Department. But this particular liability account, “Earnings remittances due to the U.S. Treasury,” is kind of a funny creature.

It has a negative balance of -$13.2 billion as of the Fed’s weekly balance sheet released yesterday. On a balance sheet measured in trillions, this is pretty small. But it’s going to get a lot funkier.

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5 Principles Of Stagflation, by Jeffrey Tucker

Posted on December 10, 2022 | Leave a comment

Anyone who lived the 1970s knows what stagflation is. It’s back. From Jeffrey Tucker at The Epoch Times via zerohedge.com:

Stagflation is the combination of slow or falling economic output plus high inflation. For nearly two years, we’ve been stuck in this pattern and it still feels confusing. Prices for many items such as cars and homes have whipsawed around in strange ways, up one month and down the next, only to repeat the pattern.

As inflation started, many people believed the official line that this was “transitory,” a word that people heard as “temporary.” If you think about it, the word transitory is meaningless as a predictive tool. It means moving from one thing to another thing without saying what the thing is. It turns out that transitory meant a transition to a permanently and dramatically weaker dollar from 2019 prices.

People such as Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen likely knew this. They just wanted to calm people’s fears and keep them believing false things until the midterm elections. Contrast that to how this crowd handled the virus of 2020: They promoted public panic in every possible way as a means of terrifying the population into compliance and ultimately turning against the president. Indeed, that was the goal all along.

In any case, it should be obvious by now that inflation is the new normal. We’ll never see 2019 prices across the board again, simply because for that to happen, the Federal Reserve would have to tolerate a deflation of 12 to 15 percent. If that does happen—and it’s highly unlikely—it won’t be because the Fed wants it that way. It would suggest that the Fed had lost control completely.

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EU’s Oil Price Cap Creates a Price Cap… on Stupidity, by Tom Luongo

Posted on December 10, 2022 | Leave a comment

Another in a long line of stupid ideas from the EU. The official SLL over/under on the duration of the EU from 1/1/23 is two years. From Tom Luongo at tomluongo.me:

MOSCOW, RUSSIA – DECEMBER 1, 2021: Russia’s Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Maria Zakharova gives a weekly press briefing. Russian Foreign Ministry/TASS

The EU and the US went forward with their long-debated, long-telegraphed move to put a price cap on Russian oil at $60 per barrel.

By believing they can pressure suppliers into not hauling Russian oil lest they run afoul of the sanctions that support the price cap, they believe they can take only Russian oil off the market for the long run.

Because of the way oil is actually traded in the real world, versus the way it trades in Janet Yellen’s head, this policy is actually much harder to implement than it actually looks. You don’t buy oil at the crude oil counter at Target or Wal-Mart.

There isn’t a price tag you can look at and say yes or no too. As Tsvetana Paraskova at Oilprice points out, crude contracts are written based on a discount or premium to a benchmark price at a particular moment in time.

“Physical traders rarely trade on a fixed price,” John Driscoll, chief strategist at JTD Energy Services Pte Ltd, told Bloomberg. 

“It’s a much more complex space where they trade on formulas and spot differentials to a benchmark crude for the trading of actual cargoes as well as for hedging that follows,” said Driscoll, who has more than 30 years of trading oil in Singapore.

To complicate things further, the EU wants to remain flexible to change the cap at its discretion.

“The price cap is not set in stone – it “is fixed for now but adjustable over time,” the EU said last week.  

If this sounds like a recipe for complete disaster, it is.

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China: The World’s First Technate – Part 2 (with link to Part 1), by Iain Davis

Posted on December 10, 2022 | Leave a comment

Western governments don’t stand in opposition to the Chinese government; they want to emulate it. From Iain Davis at iaindavis.com:

In Part 1, we discussed the historical background of Technocracy Inc. that briefly found popularity in the US in the 1930s during the turmoil of the Great Depression. Technocracy was rooted in socioeconomic theories that focused upon the efficient management of society by experts (technocrats). This idea briefly held the public’s attention during a period of sustained recession, mass unemployment and growing poverty.

The technological capabilities required for the energy surveillance grid, essential for the operation of a Technate (a technocratic society), were far beyond the practical reach of 1930s America. Consequently, for that and other reasons, public interest in the seemingly preposterous idea of technocracy soon subsided.

However, in recent decades, many influential policy strategists—most notably Zbigniew Brzezinski and Henry Kissinger—and private philanthropic foundations, such as the Rockefeller Foundation, recognised that advances in digital technology would eventually make a Technate feasible. As founding and leading members of the Trilateral Commission, a policy “think tank,” they saw China as a potential test bed for technocracy.

We will now consider their efforts to create the world’s first Technate in China.

These articles build upon the research found in my 2021 publication Pseudopandemic, which is freely available to my blog subscribers.

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Posted in Banking, Business, Civil Liberties, Culture, Economy, Government, Media, Morality, Politics, Propaganda, Surveillance, Technology, Tyranny

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Major Economic Contraction Coming In 2023 – Followed By Even More Inflation, by Brandon Smith

Posted on December 9, 2022 | Leave a comment

We are looking at a very hard landing in 2023. From Brandon Smith at alt-market.us:

 

This article was written by Brandon Smith and originally published at Birch Gold Group

The signs are already present and obvious, but the overall economic picture probably won’t be acknowledged in the mainstream until the situation becomes much worse (as if it’s not bad enough). It’s a problem that arises at the onset of every historic financial crisis – Mainstream economists and commentators lie to the public about the chances of recovery, constantly giving false reassurances and lulling people back to sleep. Even now with price inflation pummeling the average consumer they tell us that there is nothing to worry about. The Federal Reserve’s “soft landing” is on the way.

I remember in 2007 right before the epic derivatives collapse when media pundits were applauding the US housing market and predicting even greater highs in sales and in valuations. I had only been writing economic analysis for about a year, but I remember thinking that the overt display of optimism felt like compensation for something. It seemed as if they were trying to pull the wool over the eyes of the public in the hopes that if people just believed hard enough that all was well then the fantasy could be manifested into reality. Unfortunately, that’s not how economics works.

Supply and demand, debt and deficit, money velocity and inflation; these things cannot be ignored. If the system is out of balance, collapse will set its ugly foot down somewhere and there’s nothing anyone including central banks can do about it. In fact, there are times when they deliberately ENGINEER collapse.

This is the situation we are currently in today as 2022 comes to a close. The Fed is in the midst of a rather aggressive rate hike program in a “fight” against the stagflationary crisis that they created through years of fiat stimulus measures. The problem is that the higher interest rates are not bringing prices down, nor are they really slowing stock market speculation. Easy money has been too entrenched for far too long, which means a hard landing is the most likely scenario.

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A Big Theory of Boom and Bust, by Jeffrey Tucker

Posted on December 8, 2022 | Leave a comment

The Austrian economists worked out the theory of booms and busts in a fiat money system. From Jeffrey Tucker at dailyreckoning.com:

Our times of boom to bust are the perfect illustration of the credit cycle first presented in its fullness in the 1920s. Why then? Because this was the first decade after most countries created central banks. They caused some very odd behavior that made 19th-century-style economics seem to have less explanatory power.

That was when a few economists working in Vienna put together a model for understanding how business cycles work in a modern economy. Their names were Friedrich von Hayek and Ludwig von Mises. They drew on their theoretical knowledge based on the following inputs:

Richard Cantillon (1680–1734) observed that when governments inflate the money supply, the effects are unevenly distributed among economic sectors, affecting some more than others and in different ways.

Adam Smith (1723–1790) explained that a critical element of rising wealth is embedded in the division of labor, in which individuals specialize in tasks and cooperate across firms and those firms cooperate with each other.

Carl Menger (1840–1921) saw money as an organic market creation, not an invention of the state, which implies that it should be produced like any other good or service.

Knut Wicksell (1851–1926) demonstrated that interest rates function as a price mechanism to allocate investment decisions over time, which is why the yield curve exists. Manipulation of the interest rate disturbs the natural allocation of resources.

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Three Strikes, You’re Out! By Bill Bonner

Posted on December 8, 2022 | Leave a comment

Workers of the world are getting poorer in real terms (purchasing power after inflation) for the first time this century. From Bill Bonner at bonnerprivateresearch.com:

More on the government’s middle class massacre…

 
 
(Source: Getty Images)

Bill Bonner, reckoning today from Baltimore, Maryland…

It looks like the post-Thanksgiving shopping binge was not nearly as successful as hoped. Here’s The Wall Street Journal:

Sales at bricks-and-mortar stores over Thanksgiving weekend fell short of prepandemic levels and were behind last year’s totals, another sign that Black Friday is losing its status as the crucial kickoff to the holiday-shopping season.

“It used to be people would wait in line from midnight for the stores to open at 4 or 5 a.m….”

What happened? 

Hot off the press is a report from the UN’s International Labor Organization. It tells us that for the first time this century, workers of the world are getting poorer:

This year’s ILO Global Wage Report… shows that, for the first time this century, global real wage growth has become negative while real productivity has continued to grow. Indeed, 2022 shows the largest gap recorded since 1999 between real labour productivity growth and real wage growth in high income countries. While the erosion of real wages affects all wage earners, it is having a greater impact on low-income households which spend a higher proportion of their disposable incomes on essential goods and services, the prices of which are increasing faster than those for non-essential items in most countries. 

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