Tag Archives: central bank policies

Digital Currency: What Do the Global Banking Elite Want? by Steven Guinness

Posted on January 26, 2020 | Leave a comment

Slowly but surely, the central bankers and their cronies and minions are edging towards a digital global currency. From Steven Guinness at stevenguinness2.wordpress.com:

Amidst the annual spectacle of the World Economic Forum in Davos, the Bank for International Settlements this week announced that multiple central banks have created a group that will ‘assess potential cases for central bank digital currencies‘.

Here is the press release from the BIS in full:

The Bank of Canada, the Bank of England, the Bank of Japan, the European Central Bank, the Sveriges Riksbank and the Swiss National Bank, together with the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), have created a group to share experiences as they assess the potential cases for central bank digital currency (CBDC) in their home jurisdictions.

The group will assess CBDC use cases; economic, functional and technical design choices, including cross-border interoperability; and the sharing of knowledge on emerging technologies. It will closely coordinate with the relevant institutions and forums – in particular, the Financial Stability Board and the Committee on Payments and Market Infrastructures (CPMI).

The group will be co-chaired by Benoît Cœuré, Head of the BIS Innovation Hub, and Jon Cunliffe, Deputy Governor of the Bank of England and Chair of the CPMI. It will include senior representatives of the participating institutions.

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Posted in banking, Currencies

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The Future of What’s Called “Capitalism”, by Charles Hugh Smith

Posted on January 23, 2020 | Leave a comment

What now gets labeled capitalism often is not capitalism at all, and sometimes its the opposite. From Charles Hugh Smith at oftwominds.com:

The psychotic instability will resolve itself when the illusory officially sanctioned “capitalism” implodes.

Whatever definition of capitalism you use, the current system isn’t it so let’s call it “capitalism” in quotes to indicate it’s called “capitalism” but isn’t actually classical capitalism.

Try a few conventional definitions on for size:

Capitalism allocates capital to its most productive uses. Does the current system actually do this? You must be joking.

Capitalism is based on private labor and capital freely choosing where to invest time/assets. Does the current system actually do this? You must be joking.

Capitalism enables comparative advantages which enrich everyone. Does the current system actually do this? You must be joking.

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Posted in Business, Capitalism, Currencies, Debt, Financial markets, Governments

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Hubris, by Sven Henrich

Posted on January 23, 2020 | Leave a comment

The bull markets in bonds and stocks will not go quietly into that good night. From Sven Henrich at northmantrader.com:

One day this bull market will end and the age of the central banking enabled debt bubble will be exposed for the hubris that it is and all the sins of “potential side effects” that central bankers warn about but never do anything about will come back to haunt all of us. It’ll be the age of the great unwind. Nobody will tell us in the moment when it peaks and I suspect it will not start with a bang, rather a whimper, but only end with a bang.

And this great unwind will not last a month or a year, but many years as all the excesses will have to work themselves through the system and all the systematic buy programs will turn into systematic sell programs that will be just as relentless on the way down as they were on the way up.

They very notion of the permanent can kicking we are witnessing now will reveal itself to have been a fantasy. People forget that 2019 and into 2020 came about because of systemic failure of epic proportions. The single one time central bankers tried to tighten blew up in their faces. And the Fed’s forced re-expansion of their balance sheet has now bestowed this blow-off top that has pushed asset prices the farthest distance above the underlying size of the economy that we’ve ever seen. A perversion of the financial system that has created wealth for the few not seen since the 1920s.

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Posted in Debt, Financial markets, Investing

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Backlash, by Sven Henrich

Posted on January 21, 2020 | Leave a comment

The rich get richer and everybody else is responsible for the ever-mounting debt. From Sven Henrich at northmantrader.com:

There’s an old adage: There are two guarantees in life: Death and taxes. Let’s modernize this a bit shall we? While it’s true even the rich still die these days (for now), but taxes are already a debatable question. After all taxes for corporations and the rich have come down dramatically in recent years and gaming of tax codes is the professional obsession of myriads of full time lobbyists and accountants who have found and lobbied every which way for the ultra wealthy to  minimize tax exposure in tax havens, offshore accounts and clever deduction schemes.

No, the modernized version of the death and taxes adage has morphed into something more sinister:

There are two guarantees in life: The rich get obscenely rich, everybody else gets to carry ever more obscene public debt levels.

This week we again get to see an annual ritual: The rich and powerful meet in Davos (119 billionaires are attending) and they get to ravel in having gotten even richer versus the year before and obscenely so as easy money by central bankers have once again levitated the prices of the very assets disproportionally owned by the wealthy: Stocks.

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Posted in Debt, Financial markets, Government

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David Stockman on What Triggers the Next Financial Collapse

Posted on January 10, 2020 | Leave a comment

The next financial collapse will owe it all to debt and central banks. From David Stockman at internationalman.com:

International Man: You have sounded the alarm on a coming financial crisis of historic proportions. How do Trump’s trade policies figure into your view that a crisis is coming?

David Stockman: Trump’s trade policies only create more risk and rot down below.

They’re just kicking the can down the road. With this latest move by the Fed, they have cut the interest rates three times and short-term rates are back at 1.55%. They’re pumping their balance sheet back up—it’s up $300 billion just since September.

The Fed has reverted to all of the things that have created the underlying rot—and that means when finally things break loose, it’s going to be far worse than it would have otherwise been.

Given that they’re kicking the can down the road, they’re building the pressure in the system to really explosive levels.

The trade chaos that Trump’s creating is probably the catalyst that will bring down the whole house of cards.

At end of the day, it’s about the Red Ponzi. The world economy would be not nearly as good as it looks had the Chinese not been borrowing like there’s no tomorrow and building regardless of whether its efficient or profitable.

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Posted in banking, Business, Collapse, Currencies, Debt, Economy, Financial markets, Governments, History

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How the Fed Robs You of Your Life, by MN Gordon

Posted on January 5, 2020 | Leave a comment

Money is the tangible store of your time and effort. Depreciating money robs you of that time and effort, your life. From MN Gordon at economicprism.com:

Today, as we step into the New Year, we reach down to turn over a new leaf.  We want to make a fresh start.  We want to leave 2019’s bugaboos behind.

But, alas, lying beneath the fallen leaf, like rotting food waste, is last year’s fake money.  We can’t escape it.  But we refuse to believe in its permanence.

Victorian economist William Stanley Jevons, in his 1875 work, Money and the Mechanism of Exchange, stated that money has four functions.  It’s a medium of exchange, a common measure of value, a standard of value, and a store of value.

No doubt, today’s fake money, including the U.S. dollar, falls well short of Jevons’ four functions of money.  Certainly, it comes up short in its function as a store of value.

Hence, today’s money is not real money.  Rather, it’s fake money.  And this fake money has heinous implications on how people earn, save, invest, and pay their way in the world we live in.  Practically all aspects of everything have been distorted and disfigured by it.

Take the dollar, for instance.  Over the last 100-years, it has lost over 95-percent of its value.  Yet, even with this poor performance, the dollar has one of the better track records going.  In fact, many currencies that were around just a short century ago have vanished from the face of the earth.  They’ve been debased to bird cage liner.

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Posted in banking, Crime, Currencies, Debt, Economics, Economy, Financial markets, Governments, Money

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David Stockman on How Trump Could Really Make US Industry Competitive Again

Posted on January 5, 2020 | Leave a comment

Other than some minor regulatory relief, Trump’s policies have hurt more than helped the US economy. From David Stockman at internationalman.com:

International Man: Trump’s America First economic policy seemed to help him win the 2016 election. He promised to renegotiate America’s trade deals and bring jobs back to the United States.

As president, Trump has used tariffs and other protectionist measures to try to reduce the trade deficit.

What do you think of Trump’s trade policies and tariffs?

David Stockman: The trade policies are idiotic. They haven’t improved the trade deficit. And have caused other problems.

We got the numbers in now for 2018 and we had the largest trade deficit in history!

The first point is that his trade policies are not accomplishing anything. In fact, it’s thrown many sectors under the bus. Manufacturers that import components from China are now paying much higher prices because of the tariff charge.

Farmers have gotten thrown under the bus in a major way. The whole agricultural export system that was patiently developed over many, many years has essentially been destroyed through retaliation.

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Posted in banking, Business, Debt, Economics, Economy, Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Government, Politics, Trade

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