Wholesale Savings Confiscation, Enforced Redistribution & The Decline Of The European Saver

[Editor's Note: The following post is by TDV Editor-in-Chief, Jeff Berwick]

The savings of 500 million Europeans is in danger of being stolen by the European Union. Why? Because the financial crisis is not over, according to an EU document.

In other words, what’s happened already in Cyprus – the stealing of savers’ money – will go continental, and eventually worldwide. Only more aggressively than in the Cyprus example. The logic is likely simple: there was hardly popular resistance to the confiscation of funds in Cyprus, so why not expand the program? 

As we’ve stated here at Dollar Vigilante over-and-over again, governments worldwide will persist with wholesale theft from savers. How do we know? Because governments keep telling their people this. We aren’t magic-8 ball readers. We simply read the news and make the proper connections. The IMF has blatantly stated financial repression is on the table, which we reported upon, and our readers have told us of increasing capital controls worldwide. 

This is why gold, silver, bitcoin and cash “under the mattress” really are the last resorts for people in the west. One thing is for sure, there will be a lot of people with sore backs due to lopsided mattresses. (Spare yourself that sore back: to learn more about asset internationalization, click here)  

When the time comes, the “usage” (such a pleasant way to put “theft”) of depositors’ funds in EU banks will not be voluntary, but up to the European Union’s discretion instead. The EU would then make long-term investments with the stolen funds “to boost the economy and help plug the gap left by banks since the financial crisis” as if this would inspire confidence in a financial system about as loved as the human-trafficking trade.  Of course, all of these funds would go towards lining the pockets of plutocrats and keeping a bankrupt financial system above-water for a few extra months. The banks need everything they can get. 

The EU is trying to manage it’s piecemeal 28-country bloc – madeup of diverse cultures and peoples with different lifestyles and histories- in order to find means of “funding small companies, infrastructure and other investments other than bank financing” because “the economic and financial crisis has impaired the ability of the financial sector to channel funds to the real economy, in particular long-term investment,” said the document, seen by Reuters.

The Commission is looking to ask the bloc’s insurance watchdog in the second half of 2014 for advice on how to draft a law “to mobilize more personal pension savings for long-term financing,” the document said. Mobilize seems such a palatable word for such flagrant tyranny. 

The EU executive is also looking into introducing an EU savings account, open to individuals whose funds could be pooled and invested in small companies. Inspired by the US MyRA program (which we term “TheirRA”), Europe will look into such collectivized savings instruments, likely as a way to streamline the “mobilization” of depositors funds.  Interesting the US got to this instrument first…

The EU document states the Commission will “take into account possible future increases in the liquidity of a number of securitization products” and will also “review” how EU rules treat covered bonds by the end of this year, thus making it official the EU is not opposed to re-allowing many of the products which led to the 2008 financial crisis. 

Why now? Wasn’t the Cyprus deposit confiscation blatant enough? This is tough to know. It could simply be that it is known by government and banking that such a thing will happen again-and-again, and that perhaps it would be best to predictively program the people to expect it. One thing is for sure: Europe is fixed. The savings of European Union’s 500 million citizens will be used to bail-in banks and line the pockets of bureaucrats.  So let’s put it still a bit simpler: the west is being robbed at gunpoint.  Are you in the west? Do you know how to protect yourself against such transgressions? If not, the TDV Newsletter can help.

I’ve written it before, I’ll write it again: this is not the last we’ve heard of wealth confiscation.