by Reverse Engineer, Doomstead Diner
Published on the Doomstead Diner on 04 February 2016
Discuss this Rant at the Diner TV Table inside the Diner
What are the benefits to TPTB for getting rid of cash? They are many, but let me read from a recent Op-Ed featured on Bloomberg Newz, home base for tentative 3rd Party POTUS candidate Michael Bloomberg:
Greetings Doomfans, and welcome to another edition of the Frostbite Falls Daily Rant, here on the Doomstead Diner.
I’m taking a break this week from my Weather Gone Wild series, which so far has covered Floods, Tornadoes, Snowstorms and Earthquakes but still has many episodes to go including Droughts, Hurricanes and Vulcanism and any other Wacky Weather you can think of like Haboobs for instance, which actually have nothing to do with Raquel Welch, Selma Hayek or Kim Kardashian. Lol.
For this week, I’ll return to my roots in Economics, which has been my Doom Focus since I woke up to collapse in the aftermath of the collapse of the investment banks Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers back in 2007-2008.
The topic for this week is the so-called “War on Cash” currently being promoted and undertaken by TPTB as the Final Solution to our economic woes. This first started being bandied about when Cyprus and Greece went under the bus, and these countries put limits on the amount of cash anyone could pull out of an ATM on a given day in order to stem the tide of a run on the banks as the folks in those countries desperately tried to get their savings out of the banks before they crashed and they unfortunately get to “bail in” the bank with their money, and make sure the banksters running the racket continue to receive their bonuses.
Of course it’s not just the Greek and Cypriot banks that are insolvent, they ALL are, EVERYWHERE. Just banks in weak and small countries don’t have the ability to paper over their losses with the endless creation of new credit through methods like QE, or Quantitative Easing, which basically amounts to central banks buying up Dogshit Collateral in the form of bad loans and bonds issued out by various nation states and corporations and issuing out freshly printed toilet paper on the basis of that dosgshit.
Sadly for the banksters running the show here, gimmicks like QE are less successful all the time, there are losses everywhere that need to be recognized at some point, and tey are increasingly unable to find ways to cook the books that actually WORK. So they dig still deeper into the Twilight Zone of everr more ludicrous monetary policy like NIRP, or Negative interest Rate Policy.
Under a NIRP regime, all sorts of cockamamie effects start to occur. First off, if you drop your money into a bank for “safekeeping”, it COSTS you money to do that! Not only that, this is considered an “unsecured” LOAN to the bank, in which case if the bank goes tits up in a BK, you are about LAST on the list of people who might get paid back something here, pennies on the dollar at best but probably a big fat ZERO. Pigmen holding Derivative contracts with said bank are Senior to you, and everybody knows in any prep school the juniors get butt fucked by the seniors.
On the other side of this insane equation, if you actually can somehow BORROW money, you get PAID to borrow. If I could somehow walk into my Credit Union and Borrow $1M at -1% interest/year (not compounded), then each year this loan was outstanding the bank would OWE ME $10,000!!!!
Obviously, my credit union will NOT loan me money under this regime, but for the pigmen at the top of the Food Chain here running the TBTF banks, this a real possibility. Endless FREE MONEY just by borrowing at negative interest offered by Da Fed! The more you borrow, the more you make! Think of the Bonuses you could generate if you borrowed $1T at -1% interest!
It’s so fucking stupid you wonder how Nobel Prize winning Economistas can pitch this shit with a straight face, but they do nevertheless. And in fact the whole idea gets increasingly more play in the MSM as the banksters struggle to keep a totally insolvent banking system floating another day.
The problem with this idea of course is that about NOBODY in their right mind is going to drop their savings into a bank that is charging a negative interest rate. At this point, after cashing your weekly paycheck at the bank, you take the cash and stuff it in the Bank of Sealy or into a waterproof container you bury in the backyard or some undisclosed location in a national park which only you have the GPS coordinates to go recover, stored in a 256 bit encrypted file on your cell phone. This works of course only for so long as there actually IS physical cash you can withdraw from the bank to bury, and also only as long as said physical cash maintains its value from year to year. However, whoever printed the cash to begin with puts a Serial Number on it, so year old cash when you try to spend it could easily be depreciated at the POS terminal by 1%. Whether Cash continues to exist or not, TPTB can make any old rule they like to devalue it, although this becomes much, much easier once you go all digibit and get rid of the cash altogether.
What are the benefits to TPTB for getting rid of cash? They are many, but let me read from a recent Op-Ed featured on Bloomberg Newz, home base for tentative 3rd Party POTUS candidate Michael Bloomberg:
“Much depends on the details, of course. But this is a welcome trend. In theory, digital legal tender could combine the inventiveness of private virtual currencies with the stability of a government mint
Most obviously, such a system would make moving money easier. Properly designed, a digital fiat currency could move seamlessly across otherwise incompatible payment networks, making transactions faster and cheaper. It would be of particular use to the poor, who could pay bills or accept payments online without need of a bank account, or make remittances without getting gouged.
For governments and their taxpayers, potential advantages abound. Issuing digital currency would be cheaper than printing bills and minting coins. It could improve statistical indicators, such as inflation and gross domestic product. Traceable transactions could help inhibit terrorist financing, money laundering, fraud, tax evasion and corruption.”
Don’t you just LOVE how this is going to be of “particular use to the poor”? See, the guys pitching this bullshit are REALLY CONCERNED about the plight of poor people, and this will HELP them! Hahahahahahaha,
It’s ALSO going to help inhibit terrorist financing AND resolve all those nasty problems of money laundering and fraud. If you buy any of this complete bullshit, please buy from me the Brooklyn Bridge project to move it to Miami so when the streets are flooded you can drive over the bridge and keep your Tesla batteries dry on your EV!
This is all utter nonsense of course, but that never stopped con men in any era, whether computers were available to scale up the con or not.
The outcome of a purely digital currency is quite obvious, which is “ALL YOUR MONEY BELONGZ TO US!’ On any given day, whoever holds the key to the switch on the supercoputer holding all your perceived digibit wealth can just flip it OFF. Have you ever tried to charge something and had your credit or debit card rejected for some reason? It’s quite embarassing when you take a potential mate out to dinner and your CC gets rejected of course. If there is no recourse to even CASH, you can’t get out of the restaurant without you and your girlfriend doing dishes the rest of the night!
Of course none of the techno-digibit money freaks never deal with the small problem of what you do in a BLACKOUT situation and nobody can access their account from their cell phone or POS terminal either. Soon as the power goes out, everybody’s money DISAPPEARS! Hopefully of course at some point the digibits reappear when the lights go back on, but what if that takes a week? Or 2 weeks? Or it NEVER comes back on! Everybody is instantly BANKRUPT!
In the current world, although 90% or more of all transactions are done with credit or debit cards, you at least have the fall back position of going to CASH in an emergency, and anyone who does not have a at least enough cash to cover a month’s worth of bills if you actually make enough money to save some is a complete nincompoop. Under an all digibit regime, there is NO PLAN B! Even bartering your Gold Coins in this situation would be pretty tough, as it is unlikely that Walmart will sell you a bag of rice for your Eagle or Maple Leaf. Walmart itself obviously has a problem doing any transactions with their Chinese suppliers when the power goes out in Bentonville, AR or in Beijing.
The whole meme is being couched in terms that this will HELP the common man and prevent nasty people from doing drug deals and laundering money and evading taxes. Fact is, none of that helps the common man at all, it only helps the TBTF Banks and Da Goobermint which facilitates the racket.
The push towards an all digital curreny appears to be in full force now, and the main question is whether there is a way to defend against this push? There is, at least on a relatively small scale for the typical J6P with not too much in the way of savings, which is the case for at least 50% of the population. In the next edition of the FFDR, I will detail how you secure meager savings against the currency manipultions and capital controls and removal of cash from the commerce system.
Coming soon to laptop near you.
And that’s all the doom, this time until next time, here on the Doomstead Diner.