sharply. These large denomination bills now
account for 60% of the Swiss currency in circulation.
The response of depositors to negative interest
rates has resulted in neoliberal economists, such
as Larry Summers, calling for the elimination of
large denomination bank notes in order to make
it difficult for people to keep their cash balances
outside of banks.
Other neoliberal economists, such as Kenneth
Rogoff want to eliminate cash altogether and have
only electronic money. Electronic money cannot be
removed from bank deposits except by spending it.
With electronic money as the only money, financial
institutions can use negative interest rates in order
to steal the savings of their depositors.
People would attempt to resort to gold, silver, and
forms of private money, but other methods of payment and saving would be banned, and government
would conduct sting operations in order to suppress
evasions of electronic money with stiff penalties.
What this picture shows is that government, economists, and presstitutes are allied against citizens
achieving any financial independence from personal
saving. Policymakers have a crackpot economic
policy and those with control over your life value
their scheme more than they value your welfare.
This is the fate of people in the so-called democracies. Any remaining control that they have over
their lives is being taken away. Governments serve
a few powerful interest groups whose agendas
result in the destruction of the host economies.
The offshoring of middle class jobs transfers income
and wealth from the middle class to the executives
and owners of the corporation, but it also kills the
domestic consumer market for the offshored goods
and services. As Michael Hudson writes, it kills the
host. The financialization of the economy also kills
the host and the owners of corporations as well.
When corporate executives borrow from banks in
order to boost share prices and their performance
bonuses by buying back the publicly held stock of
the corporations, future profits are converted into
interest payments to banks. The future income
streams of the corporations are financialized. If
the future income streams fail, the companies can
be foreclosed, like homeowners, and the banks
become the owners of the corporations.
Between the offshoring of jobs and the conversion
of more and more income streams into payments to
banks, less and less is available to be spent on goods
and services. Thus, the economy fails to grow and
falls into long-term decline. Today many Americans can only pay the minimum payment on their
credit card balance. The result is massive growth
in a balance that can never be paid off. It is these
people who are the least able to service debt who
are hit with draconian charges. The way the credit
card companies have it now, if you make one late
payment or your payment is returned by your bank,
you are hit for the next six months with a Penalty
Annual Percentage Rate of 29.49%.
In Europe entire countries are being foreclosed.
Greece and Portugal have been forced into liquidation of national assets and the social security
systems. So many women have been forced into
poverty and prostitution that the hourly price of
a prostitute has been driven down to $4.12.
Throughout the Western world the financial system
has become an exploiter of the people and a deadweight loss on economies. There are only two
possible solutions. One is to break the large banks
up into smaller and local entities such as existed
prior to the concentration that deregulation fostered. The other is to nationalize them and operate
them solely in the interest of the general welfare of
the population.
The banks are too powerful currently for either
solution to occur. But the greed, fraud, and selfserving behavior of Western financial systems,
aided and abeted by governments, could be leading
to such a breakdown of economic life that the
idea of a private financial system will become as
abhorent in the future as Nazism is today.
TheSovereignVoice.Org