Campaign poster showing William McKinley holding U.S. flag and standing on gold coin “sound money”, held up by group of men, in front of ships “commerce” and factories “civilization”. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
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Why the Fed Has Declared War on Your Money
America's Roots WERE In
Sound (Honest) Money
Daily Reckoning essay explores the roots of sound (also referred to as 'honest') money in the U.S
Alexander Hamilton, America's first Secretary of the U.S. Treasury under U.S. President George Washington faced the challenge of restoring the U.S. economy that had been devastated by the U.S. Revolutionary War
.. "When money serves as a stable measure of value, it most clearly expresses the value of everything in terms of everything else."
.. Hamilton boosted the U.S. economy with legislation for the U.S. federal government to assume & pay off all the debts of the states, establishing the foundation for U.S. creditworthiness
.. the essay describes the historical success with the gold standard:
"Fixing a nation’s currency to gold assures that the currency maintains a stable long term value, without inflation, or deflation. That enables a nation’s money to serve as a measure of value, like a ruler measures inches, or a clock measures time. Such a stable measure of value, in turn, means money can best perform its most essential function in facilitating transactions .. The termination of any link between the dollar and gold immediately inaugurated worsening boom and bust cycles of inflation and recession in the 1970s, with inflation soaring into double digits for several years. Inflation peaked at 25% over just two years in 1979 and 1980."
In his latest report, John Butler sees a long-term stagflationary environment similar to the 1970s but it could be worse .. sees stagflation as the inevitable result of the aggressive, neo-Keynesian policy responses to the global financial crisis .. this report discusses the causes, symptoms & financial market consequences of the new stagflation .. "Stagflation is a hostile environment for investors .. Keynesian policies require that the public sector siphon off resources from the private sector, thereby reducing the ability of private agents to generate economic profits. So-called ‘financial repression’, a more overt seizure of private resources by the public sector, is by design and intent hostile for investors."
He recommends avoiding financial assets & cash altogether - instead accumulating real assets like gold & oil .. "Some readers might be skeptical that, from their current starting point, gold, oil or other commodity prices could rise tenfold in price from here. Oil at $100/bbl sounds expensive to those who remember the many years when oil fluctuated around $20. Gold at $1,300 also seems expensive compared to the sub-$300 price fetched by UK Chancellor Brown in the early 2000s. In both cases, prices have risen by a factor of 4-5x. Note that this is the rough order of magnitude that gold and oil rose into the mid1970s .. But it was not until the late 1970s that both really took off, leaving financial assets far behind .. If anything, a persuasive case can be made that the potential for gold, oil and other commodity prices to outperform stocks and bonds is higher today than it was in the mid-1970s."
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U.S. & China
Financial Repression Is Preventing Their Economic Recovery
CATO Institute Senior Fellow James Dorn explains how & why China has been picking up the pace of its purchases of U.S.Treasury Bonds recently, but "both it & the U.S. would be better off if China relied less on the accompanying investment & export-led model"
.. China is supporting U.S. Treasury bond prices from a desire to stimulate its export growth & to protect its state-owned enterprises, not out of the goodness of its heart to help the U.S. to finance debt & deficits
.. "Financial Repression in China and in the United States (with negative real interest rates) distorts the global allocation of capital. China, as a capital-poor country, should not be a net exporter of capital. By controlling capital flows, suppressing interest rates and pegging the exchange rate, China continues to rely on investment and export-led development. That model of development, with the central role of state-owned banks and enterprises, is not sustainable, as China's leaders have noted
.. It is in China's long-run interest to downsize its holding of U.S. debt by ending financial repression and allowing a greater play of market forces. A virtuous outcome would be to deny the U.S. government the means to over-leverage and overspend, while invigorating China's non-state sector by releasing scarce capital for private investment."
There is a growing trend among U.S. local city & state municipalities to use asset forfeiture to help finance their budgets & pay down debt
.. In a nutshell, civil forfeiture is the practice of confiscating items from people, ranging from cash, cars, even homes based on no criminal conviction or charges, merely suspicion
.. lots of this going on in especially Texas, Tennessee, Michigan
.. "A town of 150 people called Estelline Texas earns more than 89% of its gross revenues from traffic fines and forfeitures
.. If you think that example is just a one-off, think again. One of the most horrific instances of non-lethal police abuse last year was the story of David Eckert, the New Mexico man for whom a routine traffic stop turned into a nightmare of torture, including multiple involuntary anal probes. The police dog that 'sniffed drugs' and kicked off the entire episode wasn’t even certified to sniff for drugs in the state of New Mexico at the time. His certification expired two years earlier, but that didn’t stop local police from using it to harass and torture state residents."
Mr. Fisher is president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. This article is excerpted from his speech on July 16 at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism.
Low interest rates and abundant availability of credit in the nondepository market, the bond markets and other trading markets have spawned an abundance of speculative activity
“The Fed has been running a hyper-accommodative monetary policy to lift the economy out of the doldrums and counteract a possible deflationary spiral. Much of what we have paid out to purchase Treasurys and mortgage-backed securities has been put back to the Fed in the form of excess reserves deposited at the Federal Reserve banks. As of July 9, $2.517 trillion of excess reserves were parked on the 12 Fed banks' balance sheets, while depository institutions wait to find eager and worthy borrowers to lend to. But with low interest rates and abundant availability of credit in the nondepository market, the bond markets and other trading markets have spawned an abundance of speculative activity. ” -- Fabian T. Pfeffer, the University of Michigan professor who is lead author of the Russell Sage Foundation study.
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"Relying upon Macroprudential Supervision to prevent financial instability provides an artificial sense of confidence!?"
"I have grown increasingly co. ncerned about the risks posed by current monetary policy. First, we are experiencing financial excess that is of our own making. There is a lot of talk about "macroprudential supervision" as a way to prevent financial excess from creating financial instability. But macroprudential supervision is something of a Maginot Line: It can be circumvented. Relying upon it to prevent financial instability provides an artificial sense of confidence".
"There are some who believe that "macroprudential supervision" will safeguard us from financial instability. I am more skeptical. Such supervision entails the vigilant monitoring of capital and liquidity ratios, tighter restrictions on bank practices and subjecting banks to stress tests. All to the good. But whereas the Federal Reserve and banking supervisory authorities used to oversee the majority of the credit system by regulating depository institutions, depository institutions now account for no more than 20% of the credit markets".
Grant Williams Does An Admirable Job Of Bringing Both Together
Get a load of the first one that shows European banks are not lending to people anymore. On the second one, understand that above 0 means the math of it all is getting worse, even with austerity.
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Which Is Better For Getting People To Understand The Economy's Problems?
In his latest Hmmm, Grant Williams* makes the analogy of an episode from Monty Python’s Flying Circus, to the 'line' we are being fed by the Fed & other central banks .. highlights the example of Europe where the central bank has encouraged the buying of bond of bankrupt countries - "we'll make sure you don't lose money" - financial repression European-style .. "European banks loaded themselves to the gills with peripheral European debt as part of the quid pro quo with Draghi, but making free carry off the desperate central bank is hardly what used to pass for banking. Remember when banking used to be about things like making loans?" This is a thoughtful piece with graphs to substantiate the commentary. Don't miss it.
Click on "Hmmm July 28" to download the report (may have to provide your email address), or hit "View Fullscreen" far below next to the 'S' icon to enlarge the viewing .. John Mauldin, Best-Selling author and recognized financial expert, is also editor of the free Thoughts From the Frontline that goes to over 1 million readers each week. For more information on John or his FREE weekly economic letter go to: http://www.frontlinethoughts.com/learnmore .. permission granted by Grant Williams to us to post the below, courtesy of www.vulpesinvest.com funds.
DECLINING FINANCIAL WEALTH FOR MOST AMERICANS SINCE 2001
“The housing bubble basically hid a trend of declining financial wealth at the median that began in 2001” -- Fabian T. Pfeffer, the University of Michigan professor who is lead author of the Russell Sage Foundation study.
"For households at the median level of net worth, much of the damage has occurred since the start of the last recession in 2007. Until then, net worth had been rising for the typical household, although at a slower pace than for households in higher wealth brackets. But much of the gain for many typical households came from the rising value of their homes. Exclude that housing wealth and the picture is worse: Median net worth began to decline even earlier."
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The Typical Household During Era of FINANCIAL REPRESSION Now Worth a Third Less
New money is being re-directed to pay increasing debt loads as corporate profits come primarily at the expense of reduced income growth while inflation crushes real disposable income.
Controls +90% of the $5T in currencies traded daily.
FINANCIAL REPRESSION HAS BEEN AGGRESSIVELY PURSUED SINCE THE DOTCOM BUBBLE IMPLOSION
FIAT CURRENCIES ARE BEING DEVALUED IN A COORDINATED MANNER AS PART OF THIS MACROPRUDENTIAL POLICY
This is only evident by measuring a basket of Fiat Currencies in Hard Assets
HIDDEN TAX INCENTIVES
In conjunction with Wednesday's release, the U.S. Treasury department is expected to relax certain accounting burdens on the reporting of gains and losses "to ease the transition to a floating share price".
CREDIT RATINGS REMOVED
Separately, the SEC voted unanimously to re-propose a plan, originally floated in 2011, to purge references to credit-rating firms embedded in the SEC's money-fund rule. The change is a requirement of the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial law that requires federal agencies to scrub their rule books of references to credit ratings, forcing them to find new measures to help investors assess creditworthiness.
Fund managers now have the Legal Right to 'suspend redemptions' by the you on your Money Market Funds
SEC Approves Tighter Money Fund Rules - Plan Allows Money Funds to Temporarily Block Investors from Withdrawing Money in Times of Stress WSJ
It is no secret that unlike other banks who, while directly intervening in the bond market only manipulate equity prices in relative secrecy (usually via HFT-transacting intermediaries such as Citadel), the Bank of Japan has historically had no problem with buying equities outright, traditionally in the form of REITs and equity-tracking ETFs. Which explains why overnight it was revealed that in order to boost the stock market, pardon, economy, the Bank of Japan is preparing to purchase exchange-traded funds based on the JPX-Nikkei Index 400 as an "option to boost the impact of unprecedented easing," according to people familiar with BOJ discussions.
Bloomberg reports that including funds that track the index would broaden the range of shares in the BOJ’s ETF purchases, and encourage companies to deploy cash for investment. That is the official storyline. It goes without saying that what the BOJ is really after is to generate further upside in the Nikkei225 which unlike other stock markets, is still notably in the red, because not only will the primary impetus behind QE - the wealth effect of the 1% - suffer, but also all those new billions in Japanese pension funds reallocated away from bonds and into stocks will continue to lose money. And the last thing the Abe cabinet, its popularity already flailing needs, is the realization that it has gambled the retirement funds of the locals on the biggest Ponzi scheme in Japanese history. READ MORE
Japan's Plan By Its Central Planners
For Financial 'Repression' Of The People:
Central Bank To Buy Bonds,
Pension Funds To Buy Stocks
Japan is moving to get its pension funds to sell Japanese government bonds (JGB) to its central bank, then use corporate governance & regulatory changes to force the pension funds to buy stocks
.. "A return to more normal JGB interest rates of above 3% – which will prove loss-making for present holders such as the BoJ – is not likely for at least two years. Part of the Bank of Japan (BoJ)/Ministry of Finance (MoF) strategy of encouraging Japanese private sector portfolio shifts away from JGBs into equity-type assets is that the BoJ can bear such losses far more easily than other investing institutions. One of the most important moves concerns redeployment of assets held by the $1.2tn government pension investment fund (GPIF), where decisions are imminent on investing more in domestic equities rather than government bonds."
“Redemption Gates” for Money Market Funds Acting Man -- ""The adoption of 'redemption gates' effectively means that money market fund boards will be able to suspend the property rights of their customers. Once again, this creates a big disadvantage for the money market fund industry in favor of banks, since demand deposits will continue to lack such 'redemption gates', in spite of the fact that banks are de facto unable to actually pay out all demand deposits, or even a large portion of them, 'on demand'. It is an interesting detail that retail customers are to be exempt from this regulation based on the idea that they are basically too addled to react to crisis conditions. Why are such regulations held to be required at all? Are regulators implying that the system has not been 'made safe' by adopting several telephone book-sized tomes of additional regulations?""
SEC Votes Through Money Market Exit Gates Zero Hedge -- the SEC has adopted the news rules designed to curb the risk of money market investor runs .. "Among the changes, funds will have to switch to a floating share price instead of the current $1/share (hence the term breaking the buck). But the key part: 'The SEC's rule will require prime money market funds to move from a stable $1 per share net asset value, to a floating NAV. It also will let fund boards lower redemption 'gates' and fees in times of market stress." .. suggests this may send money market investor rushing out & into other asset classes - the SEC, the Federal Reserve & the U.S. Treasury hope that asset class is stocks to keep the stock market rising .. "Clearly, everyone understand that the only purpose behind implementing 'gates' is to redirect the herd. And with some $2.6 trillion in assets, money markets can serve as a convenient source of 'forced buying' now that QE is tapering if only for the time being. The only question is whether the herd will agree to this latest massive behavioral experiment by the Fed, and allocate their funds to a stock market which is now trading at a higher P/E multiple than during the last market peak."
U.S. SEC poised to adopt reforms for money market funds Reuters
Fund managers on alert over money market shake-up FT -The SEC is looking to drive money market funds to only government securities, especially institutional money market funds - this means money market funds will be helping to pay for the government debt .. The SEC is also planning to allow fees and restrictions on redemptions in times of stress, but it is not clear how widely these will be applied across the money markets - FT: "Any restrictions on redemptions may not be severe at first, but the regulations will only become more restrictive over time. Don't waste time thinking you are going to monitor the situation and get out later. Get out now, when the getting is easy."
BAIL-IN (GLOBAL - G20 LEGISLATION)
FINANCIAL REPRESSION TIMELINE
Coming
POLICY CONTROLS (Monetary, Fiscal, Public & Tax Policy)
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The Fed's Financial Repression At Work: How Big Blue Was Turned Into A Wall Street Slush Fund David Stockman -- "IBM is a poster child for the ill-effects of the Fed’s financial repression. In effect, the Fed’s zero interest rate policies are telling big companies to issue truckloads of debt and use the proceeds to buyback shares hand-over-fist. That way fast money speculators on Wall Street are appeased by the resulting share price lift, and top executives collect bigger winnings on their stock options."
BoJ To Engage In 'Financial Repression'; We Stay Long USD/JPY - BNPP 07-11-14 eFX News "Japan now has one of the highest inflation rates in the G10. Our economists expect the BoJ to engage in ‘financial repression’ to restrain the rise in JGB yields that results from Japan’s fiscal dynamics," BNPP says as a rationale behind this view. "A larger overshoot in Japan’s inflation rate would also see the yen weaken. If inflation gets out of hand, we could, our economists suggest, see an ‘operation twist’ policy in Japan – similar to that witnessed in the US. This would entail aggressive purchases of JGBs coupled with interest rate hikes to stave off inflation. The resultant inversion in the yield curve, along with the upside shock to inflation, is a risk scenario for Japan and the ensuing adverse growth-inflation paradigm would necessarily entail a weaker yen," BNPP argues. "In addition, a re-allocation in the government pension investment fund (GPIF) and a likely pick-up in Japanese outflows will mean JPY weakens," BNPP adds.
Fischer worries about macroprudential policy- 07-10-14 FT Mr Fischer’s most interesting remarks relate to his experience with macroprudential policy in Israel. Israel’s bank supervisor used a range of tools to restrict mortgage lending and try to avert a housing bubble. Mr Fischer draws three lessons:
Through the Process of Abstraction the 2012 Thesis outlines how the Global Macro is presently on a well defined path towards a global Fiat Currency Failure and the emergence of a New World Order.
2012 will be highlighted by social unrest during a period of heightened conflict and tension. As economic growth declines and chronic unemployment becomes even more broad based on the world stage, Macro Prudential Policies of Financial Repression will accelerate.
Increasing centralized planning and control by sovereign government will further push advanced societies towards collectism and statism.
ABSTRACTION
TABLE OF CONTENT- (To Assist in your Sectional Download Choices Below the Table)
LATEST LONG Wave TECHNICAL ANALYSIS ON FINANCIAL REPRESSION
Coming in July
STRATEGIC MACRO INVESTMENT INSIGHTS
The Indirect Exchange - The Expert in the Indirect Exchange is Ty Andros, Tedbits
Gordon T Long is not a registered advisor and does not give investment advice. His comments are an expression of opinion only and should not be construed in any manner whatsoever as recommendations to buy or sell a stock, option, future, bond, commodity or any other financial instrument at any time. Of course, he recommends that you consult with a qualified investment advisor, one licensed by appropriate regulatory agencies in your legal jurisdiction, before making any investment decisions, and barring that, we encourage you confirm the facts on your own before making important investment commitments.
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Financial Repression describes an economic policy in which capital controls and regulations are implemented by governments and central banks, the aim of which is to reduce public debt burdens through the distortion of financial market pricing.
Financial Repression always means a combination of measures that lead to a notable narrowing of the investment universe for investors. Money is thus channeled into specific directions to create a ‘home bias.
1- Strict investment regulations (Solvency II, Basel III)
2- Negative real interest rates g
3- Interest rate ceilings s
4- Open credit dirigisme
5- Nationalizations
6-Regulation of cross-border capital movementst
7- Prohibition of unwanted trading practices such as naked short selling
8- Compulsory loans
9- Prohibition of certain investment assets (e.g. gold)
10- Special taxes (e.g. securities taxes, financial transaction taxes, wealth taxes, higher value added tax on silver, import duties on gold etc.)
11- Direct interventions, such as government intervention in pension funds (Portugal, Ireland, France, Hungary) and subsequent redeployment of investments in favor of government bonds.
12-Growing discrepancy between financing costs of private sector participants versus governments.
The term ‘Financial Repression’ was first employed by McKinnon and Shaw in 1973 and has been rediscovered in the course of the current crisis by Reinhart and Sbrancia in their paper “The Liquidation of Government Debt.”
Federal Reserve Must Print Money To Keep Interest Rates Low - Cliff Küle 05 June 2021
Financial Repression To Accelerate With Increased Desperation- KWN 24 March 2021
Through the Process of Abstraction the 2012 Thesis outlines how the Global Macro is presently on a well defined path towards a global Fiat Currency Failure and the emergence of a New World Order. 
