Home » Posts tagged 'interest' (Page 2)

Tag Archives: interest

Olduvai
Click on image to purchase

Olduvai III: Catacylsm
Click on image to purchase

Post categories

Post Archives by Category

The Path to the Final Crisis

April 1, 2016

The Path to the Final Crisis 

Reader Questions on Negative Interest Rates

Our reader L from Mumbai has mailed us a number of questions about the negative interest rate regime and its possible consequences. Since these questions are probably of general interest, we have decided to reply to them in this post.

1-key-negative-interest-rates-02192016-LGThe NIRP club – negative central bank deposit rates – click to enlarge.

Before we get to the questions, a few general remarks: negative interest rates could not exist in an unhampered free market. They are an entirely artificial result of central bank intervention. The so-called natural interest rate is actually a non-monetary phenomenon – it simply reflects time preferences. Time preferences are an inviolable category of human action and are always positive.

Market interest rates consist of the natural interest rate plus two additional components: a price (or inflation) premium that reflects the expected decline in money’s purchasing power, and a risk premium or entrepreneurial profit premium that reflects the perceptions of lenders of a borrower’s creditworthiness and generates an entrepreneurial profit for those engaged in lending.

One often reads that interest is the “price” of money, but that is actually not quite correct. It is really a price ratio, the difference between the valuation of present against that of future goods. An apple one can obtain today will always be worth more than a similar apple one can obtain at some point in the future. If time preferences were to decline to zero, people would stop consuming altogether. All efforts would be directed toward providing for the future, but they would never see that future, because they would starve to death before it arrives.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Hillary’s Scary New Cash Tax

March 8, 2016

Hillary’s Scary New Cash Tax

Hillary’s Scary New Cash Tax

 

 

Have you heard of “negative interest rates”?

It’s become a phenomenon with economists and the media.

There’s a good chance you’ve read an article about it. We’ve covered it many times in the Dispatch.

I’m writing to tell you something about negative interest rates you haven’t heard. You certainly won’t hear about it in the mainstream press.

What’s coming at you is a historic event. It’s something our grandchildren will hear stories about…much like the Great Depression or the Cold War.

What’s coming could send the price of gold much higher in the coming years…and hand gold stock owners 500%+ gains.

If you know what’s coming, it could mean the difference between having lots of free cash in retirement or barely getting by.

To understand the gravity of this moment, let’s cover one of the most bizarre ideas in the world…

negative interest rates.

In a normal world, your bank pays you interest on your savings. It takes your money, pools it with other people’s money and loans it out.

The bank makes money by paying out less in interest on your deposit than it earns in interest from borrowers.

For example, it might pay out 3% to depositors while earning 6% from borrowers.

This is how it has worked for decades.

Negative interest rates turn your “normal” bank account upside down.

Negative interest rates could only exist in a crazy world where idiot politicians are in control.

Unfortunately, that’s just what we’re dealing with right now.

Politicians all over the world are ordering banks to charge depositors(you) a fee for storing cash.

It’s a perversion of saving. It’s a perversion of capitalism. It’s a perversion of planning for the future.

And it’s going to result in disaster.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

 

Horror Stories Emerge After A Cursory Look At Chinese Corporate Leverage

February 8, 2016

Horror Stories Emerge After A Cursory Look At Chinese Corporate Leverage

By now it is common knowledge that China has a major debt problem at the macro level, one which may be even bigger than expected because according to at least one analysis by Rabobank, China’s most recent debt has soared from the infamous McKinsey level of 282% as of mid 2014, to an unprecedented 346% currently.

Far less has been discussed about China’s corporate debt at the micro level. Back in October we were shocked when we looked at the inverse of corporate leverage, namely interest coverage within the heavily indebted commodity sector where we found that as of the end of 2014, just one half of Chinese companies could cover their annual interest expense, implying that according to a Macquarie analysis, some CNY2 trillion in debt was in danger of default.

This was over a year ago: since then both industry pricing and cash flow dynamics have deteriorated substantially and some estimate that more than three-quarters of leveraged commodity companies are dead zombies walking, suggesting a massive default wave is about to be unleashed.

And while we are keeping a close eye on this very troublesome development, last week the FT revealed something even more disturbing: Chinese corporate leverage, represented by the traditional debt/EBITDA ratio is, in some cases, absolutely ludicrous, especially among companies which in recent weeks have tried to mask their balance sheet devastation through global M&A activity, such as ChemChina’s recent record for a Chinese company $44 billion purchase of Syngenta, or Zoomlion’s $3.3 bid for US rival Terex last month.

In fact, as the otherwise demure FT notes, “so high are the debt levels at ChemChina and several other companies behind some of the country’s biggest overseas investments that financing for the deals would have been difficult or prohibitively expensive were it not for the backing of the Chinese state, analysts said.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

2016 Theme #3: The Rise of Independent (non-state) Crypto-Currencies

January 6, 2016

2016 Theme #3: The Rise of Independent (non-state) Crypto-Currencies

This week I am addressing themes I see playing out in 2016.

A number of systemic, structural forces are intersecting in 2016. One is the rise of non-state, non-central-bank-issued crypto-currencies.

We all know money is created and distributed by governments and central banks. The reason is simple: control the money and you control everything.

The invention of the blockchain and crypto-currencies such as Bitcoin have opened the door to non-state, non-central-bank currencies–money that is global and independent of any state or central bank, or indeed, any bank, as crypto-currencies are structurally peer-to-peer, meaning they don’t require a bank to function: people can exchange crypto-currencies to pay for goods and services without a bank acting as a clearinghouse for all these transactions.

This doesn’t just open the possibility of escaping the debt-serfdom of central and private banks–it opens the door to an entire global economy that’s free of the inequality and concentration of wealth and power that is the only possible output of central bank created and distributed money.

Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert and I discuss these possibilities in The Keiser Report: Radically Beneficial World (25:43).

Recall that central bank money is borrowed into existence, which means interest must be paid until the money is extinguished by the payment of debt.

In effect, today’s wars, bread and circuses, etc. will be paid for in perpetuity by our kids, grandkids and their kids. This is debt-serfdom. The only possible output of borrowing money into existence is debt-serfdom.

Debt jubilees, no matter how well-intended, simply maintain the system of bank-issued money and debt-serfdom: dialing back the debt load from impossible to bearable does nothing but continue financial feudalism.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Living a Lie

December 11, 2015

Living a Lie

“Above all, don’t lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

The lies we tell ourselves are only exceeded by the lies perpetrated by those controlling the levers of our society. We’ve lost respect for ourselves and others, transforming from citizens with obligations to consumers with desires. The love of mammon has left our country a hollowed out, debt ridden shell of what it once was.  When I see the data from surveys about the amount of debt being carried by people in this country and match it up with the totals reported by the Federal Reserve, I’m honestly flabbergasted that so many people choose to live a lie. By falling for the false materialistic narrative of having it all today, millions of Americans have enslaved themselves in trillions of debt. The totals are breathtaking to behold:

Total mortgage debt – $13.6 trillion ($9.9 trillion residential)

Total credit card debt – $924 billion

Total auto loan debt – $1.0 trillion

Total student loan debt – $1.3 trillion

Other consumer debt – $300 billion

With 118 million occupied households in the U.S., that comes to $145,000 per household. But, when you consider only 74 million of the households are owner occupied and approximately 26 million of those are free and clear of mortgage debt, that leaves millions of people with in excess of $200,000 in mortgage debt. Keeping up with the Joneses has taken on a new meaning as buying a 6,000 sq ft McMansion with 3% down became the standard operating procedure for a vast swath of image conscious Americans. When you are up to your eyeballs in debt, you don’t own anything. You are living a lie.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

A Question of Money – Interest – Bankers

September 8, 2015

A Question of Money – Interest – Bankers

Dow-Bonds

QUESTION: 

Mr Armstrong, interesting article today, the story of the store of value (at least long term) has always confused me. One can look at saving accounts also as an asset as it yields the interest payment and one relinquishes the access to the money. No difference to bonds.

But your article causes some questions: as you stated before the FED buying bonds does not increase real money supply, so what caused the decline of purchasing power of money in the asset class of equities? Is it that the manipulating of interest rates distorted the actual confidence and time preference in the economy which can be measured by the velocity?

You posted earlier that the velocity has declined. People do not want to invest but save which is not an option for big money as it doesn’t yield any or very little return. Hence enterprises buy back shares and smart money has no other option.

Interest rate hike by the FED, eventually increasing retail participation, a cooling world economy, sovereign debt crisis and the flight to the Dollar. The outcome of your computer, a rise in US stock markets including a possible phase transition, seems comprehensible.

The only thing what leaves me with amazement is what do they really intend? I don’t believe that the families who run the banking system, operating for centuries in money business, do not understand that. I can only assume that for being protected by government the banking cartel buys the governments time and keep financing the deficits.

Best regards,

G

INTR-CCON

ANSWER: The problem in so many areas is that we can focus on one issue, but the answer is a complexity of variables.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

 

 

 

Japan projects to spend 43% of tax revenue just to pay interest on the debt

March 5, 2015

Japan projects to spend 43% of tax revenue just to pay interest on the debt

It’s entirely possible that we may see interstellar space travel in our lifetime. And what a dream that would be.

But in the meantime, for anyone that’s losing patience with space technology, I would recommend you visit Japan. Because for anybody that has been here, this place is as close as it gets to being on another planet.

Japan is a land of irony and dichotomy. It is one of the most conservative cultures in the world, while simultaneously being one of the most perverted.

Business culture here is yet another thing that seems totally alien. Creativity and innovation are constrained by process and procedure. The individual is never celebrated, and dutiful compliance is everything.

In Japanese corporate culture, business meetings follow a strict agenda. New ideas, no matter how valuable, are simply not welcome.

They actually have a term here called nemawashi, which is a meeting before a meeting. The idea being that if you have an idea to present at a meeting, you need to discuss it first so that nobody’s caught off guard or embarrassed by not having a prepared response.

 

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Mainstream Money Mess – three aspects… and what they mean for new money-forms

February 3, 2015

The Mainstream Money Mess – three aspects… and what they mean for new money-forms

Background

This article looks at three of the most poisonous aspects of Mainstream Money from the perspective of a currency designer exploring new money-forms:

i) the interest on debt – 97% of money issued is created as interest bearing debt with horrendous consequences
ii) capital misallocation – most of that credit is allocated away from the real economy, and with no strategic guidance on priorities
iii) the monetisation of everything – the implicit narrative that anything that cannot be expressed in quantitative (monetary) terms has no worth

Many books and articles have been written about these three factors, and they are thankfully receiving increasing amounts of mainstream media coverage. This article attempts to briefly summarise the state of play in each area, from a particular perspective – that of the currency designer envisioning new currencies that might avoid the excoriating societal, economic and ecological impacts of such built-in dysfunction on future generations.

The Problem with Interest

Interest can be seen as capital-rent. Funds flow from a lender with more money than they curently need to a borrower with less money than they need. By definition the interest flow is from the poorer to the richer. So rather than the ‘trickle-down’ effect once postulated, we have a ‘trickle-up’ effect. In previous ages the power imbalance in the borrower-lender relationship has been partially addressed via debt forgiveness (jubilees) and through bankruptcy law. The current neoliberal-designed narrative emphasises the primacy of the debt – the ‘free will’ of the borrower and the unfairness of any write-downs to the lender. Thereby all lenders have licence to be predatory.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

 

Understanding what propels the World Economy is mandatory to comprehend its Demise

January 28, 2015

Understanding what propels the World Economy is mandatory to comprehend its Demise

Banking has existed for a long time. The idea of debt dates back to the ancient world, as evidenced for example by ancient Mesopotamian clay tablets recording interest-bearing loans. Far too many people attribute our financial doom to fractional banking etc. They are actually taking the side of the bankers who want money to retain its purchasing power or rise rather than devalue with economic expansion. Indeed, they are in truth arguing for austerity that is tearing Europe apart at the seams. They honestly do not comprehend what they are supporting. They want money to retain its value, yet they expect profits from investment, trading, and their home to rise in value with wages.You cannot have your cake and eat it simultaneously. What these theories tout is the stuff that Euroland was supposed to create and it is now sending the entire global economy into a major economic decline not seen since the 1930s along with the US law FATCA hunting down Americans globally lie dogs.

 

Here is a picture I took in the Roman Forum. This was the ancient Wall Street of its day known as the Via Sacra (Sacred Road). Cicero (106-43BC) wrote that anytime there was news of a disaster in Asia Minor (modern Turkey), a financial panic would be unleashed in the Roman Forum on this very street. The Via Sacra was the main street of ancient Rome, leading from the top of the Capitoline Hill, through some of the most important religious sites of the Forum (where it is the widest street), to the Colosseum.

Asia Minor was the “emerging market”  into which the Romans invested and lent money no different from today. Cicero tells us that the infamous traitor Brutus (85-42BC) who had lent money to the King of Cappadocia (Turkey) and to the city of Salamis at a 48% rate of interest. Brutus was not defending the people and the Republic when he killed Caesar, but his own greedy power. Brutus’ coinage depicts his own image declaring he killed Caesar proudly for the people on the 15th of March (Ides of March – EID MAR). This is why history repeats because human nature and ideas are always the same.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

 

Post navigation

Newer posts →

Olduvai IV: Courage
Click on image to read excerpts

Olduvai II: Exodus
Click on image to purchase

Click on image to purchase @ FriesenPress