Tag Archives: Central banks

The Era of All-Powerful Central Banks Is Over, by Charles Hugh Smith

Posted on November 3, 2022 | Leave a comment

Too bad the era of central banks isn’t over. Believe it or not, society can function without them. From Charles Hugh Smith at oftwominds.com:

Central bank gaming of Finance is the source of instability.

The era of all-powerful central banks is over for a simple reason: they failed: they failed their citizens, their nations, and they failed the world. Their policies have pushed wealth and income inequality to extremes that have destabilized the planet’s social, political, economic and environmental spheres.

As I have endeavored to explain for many years, this is the only possible outcome of central bank dominance. Once Finance becomes the primary mover of everything else, then it distorts everything into a skimming machine that benefits the few with access to central bank funding at the expense of everyone else.

Once finance dominates, then both the “market” and government become servants of finance. I say “markets” because once markets have been financialized, they serve the interests of cartels and monopolies and cease to be markets at all.

Government, regardless of the advertised “brand”, becomes an auction where the highest bidder gains control of governance and regulation, which are bent to serve the interests of the few with access to central bank largesse.

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A Banking Crisis Looms, by Tuomas Malinen

Posted on October 4, 2022 | Leave a comment

The banks are being hit by a one-two punch of declining loan quality and higher interest rates. From Tuomas Malinen at The Epoch Times via zerohedge.com:

My columns have turned rather apocalyptic of late, but for a valid reason. Just this week, we got confirmation that our financial system is, again, on the brink of collapse, when the Bank of England (BOE) was forced to enact, de facto, a bailout of the pension funds of the United Kingdom.

On Sept. 28, around noon, the Bank of England stepped (back) into the gilt markets and started buying government bonds with longer maturities to stop the collapse in their value, which could have caused the financial system to become unhinged. Pension funds were faced with major margin calls, which threatened to cause a rapidly cascading run on their liabilities, as trust in their liquidity and solvency would have become questioned by a widening circle of investors and customers.

Effectively, the BOE stepped in to limit the vicious circle of margin calls faced by pension funds because of the crashing values of the gilts.

Without the BOE intervention, mass insolvencies of pension funds, with about $3 trillion worth of assets—and thus most likely other financial institutions—could have commenced on that afternoon. It’s obvious that if one of the major financial hubs of the world, the City of London, would face a financial panic, it would spread to the rest of the world in an instant.

It looks as though the global financial system was pulled from the brink of collapse, once again, by central bankers. However, this was only a temporary fix.

It’s now clear that an outright financial collapse threatens all Western economies, because if pension funds, often considered very dull investors because of their risk-averse investing profile, face a threat to their insolvency, it can happen to any other financial institution. I consider that the banking sector will be the next in line.

Banking is a business of trust. If the trust in a bank or in the unlimited support of authorities for the bank, disappears, a bank run commences.

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Inflation is turning hyper, by Alasdair Macleod

Posted on September 16, 2022 | Leave a comment

Governments have no solutions to their food and energy crises other than more debt. Look for Covid-style debt and monetary expansion to those crises, which will only exacerbate inflation. Look for economic contraction as banks curtail lending. From Alasdair Macleod at goldmoney.com:

Money supply took off during covid lockdowns. It is now about to take off again to pay everyone’s energy bills. But that is not all.

Demands for currency and credit to be conjured out of thin air to pay for everything will be coming thick and fast. Expectations that energy prices, including European electricity, have peaked are naïve. Putin has yet to put the winter and spring screws on Europe and the world fully. It will be surprising if global oil and natural gas prices in Europe are not significantly higher on a twelve-month view. And Europe has messed up its electricity supplies — that is where the energy costs will rise most.

Bankers are trying to reduce their loan exposure to rising interest rates, undermining GDP. Besides paying for everyone’s energy bills, rescuing troubled banks, collapsing tax revenues, and difficulties in selling government debt on rising yields, governments are expected to apply economic stimulus to support both their economies and financial markets.

Furthermore, this article points to evidence as to why the expansion of central bank credit has a far greater impact on prices than contracting bank credit. The replacement of commercial bank credit by central bank credit will have a far greater inflationary impact than the deflation from bank credit alone.

Attempts to rescue the American, European, and Japanese economies by replacing commercial bank credit with central bank credit will probably be the coup de grace for fiat.

We can begin to anticipate the path to the destruction of purchasing power for all fiat currencies, not just those of Zimbabwe, Turkey, and Venezuela et al. A global hyperinflation is proving impossible to avoid.

First it was covid, now it is energy… 

For the magic money tree, its exfoliation is just one thing after another…

Having recognised the impracticality of putting price controls on Russian gas and oil, the EU is turning to protecting all households and businesses from the energy crisis. Even Switzerland, and now the UK are bowing to the inevitable consequences of combining inflationary monetary policies of recent years, environmental wokism, and frankly irresponsible energy policies with the decision to sanction the world’s largest energy exporter.

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Why Artificially Low Rates Are Bad for You, by Daniel Lacalle

Posted on July 25, 2022 | Leave a comment

Perpetually suppressed interest rates are a lot like a diet of junk food and candy. It may taste good for a while, but eventually it will make you sick. From Daniel Lacalle at dlacalle.com:

The disastrous era of negative rates may be ending, but it is not over. Imposing negative nominal and real rates is a colossal error that has only encouraged excessive indebtedness and the zombification of the economy. However, nominal rates may be rising, but real rates remain deeply negative. In other words, rates are still exceptionally low for the level of inflation we have.

Negative interest rates are the destruction of money, an economic aberration based on the idea that rates are too high and that is why economic agents do not invest or take the amount of credit that central planners desire.

The excuse for implementing negative rates is based on a fallacy: that central banks lower rates because markets demand it and policy makers only respond to that demand, they do not impose it. If that were the case, why not let the rates fluctuate freely if the result is going to be the same? Because it is a false premise.

Imposing artificially low rates is the ultimate form of interventionism. Depressing the price of risk is a subsidy to reckless behaviour and excessive debt.

Why is it bad for everyone to keep negative rates?

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Will Fed Crash Global Financial Markets for Their Great Reset? By F. William Engdahl

Posted on December 18, 2021 | Leave a comment

With or without the Fed global financial markets are headed for a crash. From F. William Engdahl at williamengdahl.com:

t’s looking increasingly likely that the US Federal Reserve and the globalist powers that be will use the dramatic rising of inflation as their excuse to bring down the US financial markets and with it, crash the greatest financial bubble in history. The enormous inflation rise since the malicious political lockdowns and the trillions of dollars in emergency spending by both Trump and Biden, coupled with the continuation of the Fed’s unprecedented near-zero interest rate policies and asset purchases of billions in bonds to keep the bubble inflated a bit longer– have set the stage for an imminent market collapse. Unlike what we are told, it is deliberate and managed .

Supply chain disruptions from Asia to normal truck transport across North America are feeding the worst inflation in four decades in the USA. The stage is set for the central banks to bring down the debt-bloated system and prepare their Great Reset of the world financial system. However this is not an issue of inflation as some mysterious or “temporary” process.

The context is key. The decision to crash the financial system is being prepared amid the far-reaching global pandemic measures that have devastated the world economy since early 2020. It is coming as the NATO powers, led by the Biden Administration, are tipping the world into a potential World War by miscalculation. They are pouring arms and advisers into Ukraine provoking a response by Russia. They are escalating pressures on China over Taiwan, and waging proxy wars against China in Ethiopia and Horn of Africa and countless other locations.

The looming collapse of the dollar system, which will bring down most of the world with it owing to debt ties, will come as the major industrial nations go fully into economic self-destruction via their so-called Green New Deal in the EU, and USA and beyond. The ludicrous Zero Carbon policies to phase out coal, oil, gas and even nuclear have already brought the EU electric grid to the brink of major power blackouts this winter as dependency on unreliable wind and solar make up a major part of the grid. On December 31, the “green” new German government oversees the forced closing of three nuclear power plants that generate the electricity equivalent of the entire country of Denmark. Wind and solar can in no way fill the gaps. In the USA Biden’s misnamed Build Back Better policies have driven fuel coats to record highs. To raise interest rates in this conjuncture will devastate the entire world, which seems to be precisely the plan.

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The Greatest Game, by Jeff Booth

Posted on April 7, 2021 | Leave a comment

This article will stretch your brain a bit, but can’t we all use some mental exercise? From Jeff Booth at medium.com:

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete”

— Buckminster Fuller

Breakthroughs, that step-change our lives for the better, invariably come from something that most people couldn’t see. Our belief of how the world should exist and operate is shaped from looking backwards, not forward, so it makes sense that new paradigms that change everything — face resistance in our minds. Because most people don’t see them, breaking through an existing paradigm needs to provide enough compelling value for users to disrupt an old paradigm. Apple’s iPhone for instance, didn’t copy the market leader, Research in Motion’s Blackberry design of needing a keyboard or selling to businesses who required RIM’s security. It created a digital interface when that wasn’t ‘needed’ and created an entirely new platform that changed the industry as a result. Along the way, the Blackberry died, unable to compete with the value for users, that was now increasing exponentially on Apple’s platform.

That process describes “Creative Destruction” a paradoxical term first coined by Joseph Schumpeter in 1942 to describe how Capitalism works in a “free market.” Entrepreneurs innovate and “create” value for society — and that value gained by society also often “destroys” the former monopoly power. That process and its importance is at the centre of how all modern economies have evolved and given rise to most of the benefits to society we take for granted today. New winners become so valuable that they disrupt existing market power or structures. It is all driven from a near-constant flow of innovative entrepreneurs with bold ideas and the capital backing them that go up against the status quo and are only successful, “if’’ they create value for society.

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Market Weekly: When Yields Rise, Narratives Fall, by Tom Luongo

Posted on March 7, 2021 | Leave a comment

Do central banks really control markets? Notwithstanding the fervent hopes of millions of investors, they don’t. From Tom Luongo at tomluongo.com:

The big story of the past couple of weeks is rising bond yields. Everyone’s talking about it. Everyone’s got a theory about it. Even me.

Why are yields rising?

What does rising yields mean?

But, to this point I’ve kept my mouth mostly shut on this, at least in public. I reserve my gut reactions for my Patrons, giving us the opportunity to work through ideas.

The financial press industry is obsessed with gut reactions because headlines are all that matters. It used to just be to sell newspapers or generate clicks. But now, with algorithmic trading, headlines are the market.

Central banks and politicians use their pulpit in real time to stick save markets or push them in whatever direction they want them to go — at least in the near term.

So do short-sellers, media personalities, and boiler room blowhards… but enough about Jim Cramer. The market is comprised of all of this confusing and contradictory information.

And it’s why we’re obsessed with the news flow and desperate to parse the purposefully opaque language of those with control over the money spigots.

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Unsound Banking: Why Most of the World’s Banks Are Headed for Collapse, by Doug Casey

Posted on January 27, 2021 | 2 comments

You might want to read this article because the global financial system is about to collapse and after reading it you’ll at least know why. From Doug Casey at internationalman.com:

Bank collapse

You’re likely thinking that a discussion of “sound banking” will be a bit boring. Well, banking should be boring. And we’re sure officials at central banks all over the world today—many of whom have trouble sleeping—wish it were.

This brief article will explain why the world’s banking system is unsound, and what differentiates a sound from an unsound bank. I suspect not one person in 1,000 actually understands the difference. As a result, the world’s economy is now based upon unsound banks dealing in unsound currencies. Both have degenerated considerably from their origins.

Modern banking emerged from the goldsmithing trade of the Middle Ages. Being a goldsmith required a working inventory of precious metal, and managing that inventory profitably required expertise in buying and selling metal and storing it securely. Those capacities segued easily into the business of lending and borrowing gold, which is to say the business of lending and borrowing money.

Most people today are only dimly aware that until the early 1930s, gold coins were used in everyday commerce by the general public. In addition, gold backed most national currencies at a fixed rate of convertibility. Banks were just another business—nothing special. They were distinguished from other enterprises only by the fact they stored, lent, and borrowed gold coins, not as a sideline but as a primary business. Bankers had become goldsmiths without the hammers.

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The destructive force and failure of QE, by Alasdair Macleod

Posted on January 16, 2021 | Leave a comment

An analysis of the mechanics of monetary inflation, and how it may blow up the global financial system, by Alasdair Macleod at goldmoney.com:

This article concludes that quantitative easing as a means of stimulating economies and financing government deficits will fail. The underlying assumption is that the transmission of additional money to non-banks in order to inflate financial assets, and to banks to cover government finances, will become too great in 2021 for it to succeed without undermining fiat currencies and financial markets. Admittedly, this opinion stands in stark contrast to the common Keynesian view, that once covid is over economies will start to grow again.

To help readers to understand why QE will fail, this article describes how its objectives have changed from stimulating the economy by raising asset prices, to financing rapidly increasing government budget deficits. It walks the reader through the inflationary differences between QE subscribed to by banks and by non-bank financial institutions, such as pension funds and insurance companies.

Having exhausted the reduction of interest rates as the principle means of economic stimulation, central banks, and especially the Fed, have embarked on pure monetary inflation. Before the end of 2019, that became the driving force behind the Fed’s monetary policy. Since March 2020 the objective behind QE altered again to financing the US government’s budget deficit.

In this current fiscal year, just to fund budget deficits and in the absence of net foreign demand for US Treasuries, QE is likely to escalate to a monthly average of $450bn. Almost impossible with a stable exchange rate, but with the dollar being sold down on foreign exchanges and for commodities, the everything dollar bubble will almost certainly collapse.

Introduction

Now that the US has elected a new president who will appoint a new administration, we must forget recent political events and focus on future economic and monetary policies. It is a statement of the obvious that President-elect Biden and his new Treasury Secretary will be naturally more Keynesian than Trump and Mnuchin, and it is likely that the economic focus will be more on stimulating consumption than on supply side economics. Policies are likely to be closer to modern monetary theory, which is highly inflationary — certainly much more so than under Trump’s presidency.

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Hyperinflation is here, by Alasdair Macleod

Posted on October 17, 2020 | Leave a comment

By Alasdair Macleod’s definition, hyperinflation has indeed arrived. From Macleod at goldmoney.com:

Definition: Hyperinflation is the condition whereby monetary authorities accelerate the expansion of the quantity of money to the point where it proves impossible for them to regain control.

It ends when the state’s fiat currency is finally worthless. It is an evolving crisis, not just a climactic event.

Summary

This article defines hyperinflation in simple terms, making it clear that most, if not all governments have already committed their unbacked currencies to destruction by hyperinflation. The evidence is now becoming plain to see.

The phenomenon is driven by the excess of government spending over tax receipts, which has already spiralled out of control in the US and elsewhere. The first round of the coronavirus has only served to make the problem more obvious to those who had already understood that the expansionary phase of the bank credit cycle was coming to an end, and by combining with the economic consequences of the trade tariff war between China and America we are condemned to a repeat of the conditions that led to the Wall Street crash of 1929—32.

For economic historians these should be statements of the obvious. The fact is that the tax base, which is quantified by GDP, when measured by the true rate of the dollar’s loss of purchasing power and confirmed by the accelerated rate of increase in broad money over the last ten years has been declining sharply in real terms while government spending commitments continue to rise.

In this article it is documented for the dollar, but the same hyperinflationary dynamics affect nearly all other fiat currencies.

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