Get Prepared For Economic Catastrophe: You Are Being Sacrificed To Save The Too Big To Fail Banks

by Monica Davis

While the US watches the European bank catastrophe, too many people aren’t learning from it.  Basically, the European bank nightmare is another prime example of “too big to fail.”  When the whole system is rotten to the core, it’s the people, the individual taxpayers and deposit account owners who get screwed.

Depositors in Eurozone banks are facing a steep learning curve on just exactly what deposit insurance means. This column points out that the precedents set in Cyprus and Iceland show that deposit insurance is only a legal commitment for small bank failures. In systemic crises, these are more political than legal commitments, so the solvency of the insuring government matters. A Eurozone-wide deposit-insurance scheme would change this.  MORE HERE

In the Eurozone, individual depositers got scalped  when the EU forced small depositors to pay for the high crimes and misdemeanors of their banksters.   Criminal depositors who were using Cypriot banks to launder their money were warned well in advance, to withdraw their funds.  After the laundered funds left the country, Cyprus closed its banks in a bank holiday and snapped 15 percent or more right off the top of the depositors’ accounts–allegedly to pay for the bailout from the EU.

Americans have faced a similar learning curve during the last bank/mortgage crises, when we donated billions of dollars to failing banksters without puting conditions on the bailout. The banksters took the funds, paid themselves monstrous bonuses and didn’t use the funds to grant loans to home buyers.

Millions of families lost their homes and became homeless, while the criminals in the mortage and banking industries paid themselves outrageous bonuses. So, while too many Americans have forgotten this sordid history, others somehow think that the EU crisis is an isolated event that they don’t need to worry about.

And now we have something else to worry about: inflation. The world’s central banks are terrified: economic growth and job creation are central to their current monetary policies. They are willing to accept inflation as the price of maintaining stability. Somebody’s going to get hurt–but that’s collateral damage in a war of survival.

If the recent actions of central banks are successful, at some stage investors will need to start looking for inflation protection. With the BoJ, the US Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank, and Bank of England all putting economic growth and job creation at the top of their agenda, they being quite clear that (at some point) they are willing to accept some collateral damage in the form of higher inflation. MOREHERE