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“Our current banking system is not free market capitalism.”

Suppose you bring a fur coat to a dry cleaner and later discover that the owner allowed his wife to wear it before cleaning it (an episode from Seinfeld). Or suppose you gave your car keys to a hotel valet and was told he lent your car to teenagers who took it for a joyride while you were sleeping at the hotel. You would not be too happy and for good reason. When you surrendered your clothes or your car keys, it was a bailment. You retained ownership and gave the clothes or car keys for safekeeping. In no shape or form did you surrender ownership of the items or lend out your property.

Suppose you lived in the eighteenth century and had a hundred ounces of gold. It’s heavy, and you do not live in a safe neighborhood, so you decide to bring it to a goldsmith for safekeeping. In exchange for this gold, the goldsmith gives you ten tickets on which are clearly marked as claims against a total of ten ounces. Now, gold is heavy and burdensome to carry, so in a short period of time, those claims will start circulating in place of gold. This is the creation of near monies. This doesn’t mean you have given up your ownership claims on gold but have instead used a simpler way of transferring ownership on this gold.

Of course, the gold now just sits in the vault, and no one usually comes to get some of it or even checks that it is still there. Quickly, the goldsmith realizes there is an easy, fraudulent way to get rich: just lend out the gold to someone else by creating another ten tickets…

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

Unsound Banking: Why Most of the World’s Banks Are Headed for Collapse

March 16, 2023

Unsound Banking: Why Most of the World’s Banks Are Headed for Collapse

You’re likely thinking that a discussion of “sound banking” will be a bit boring. Well, banking should be boring. And we’re sure officials at central banks all over the world today—many of whom have trouble sleeping—wish it were.

This brief article will explain why the world’s banking system is unsound, and what differentiates a sound from an unsound bank. I suspect not one person in 1,000 actually understands the difference. As a result, the world’s economy is now based upon unsound banks dealing in unsound currencies. Both have degenerated considerably from their origins.

Modern banking emerged from the goldsmithing trade of the Middle Ages. Being a goldsmith required a working inventory of precious metal, and managing that inventory profitably required expertise in buying and selling metal and storing it securely. Those capacities segued easily into the business of lending and borrowing gold, which is to say the business of lending and borrowing money.

Most people today are only dimly aware that until the early 1930s, gold coins were used in everyday commerce by the general public. In addition, gold backed most national currencies at a fixed rate of convertibility. Banks were just another business—nothing special. They were distinguished from other enterprises only by the fact they stored, lent, and borrowed gold coins, not as a sideline but as a primary business. Bankers had become goldsmiths without the hammers.

Bank deposits, until quite recently, fell strictly into two classes, depending on the preference of the depositor and the terms offered by banks: time deposits, and demand deposits. Although the distinction between them has been lost in recent years, respecting the difference is a critical element of sound banking practice.

…click on the above link to read the rest…

The “Barbarous Relic” Helped Enable a World More Civilized than Today’s

December 12, 2022

The “Barbarous Relic” Helped Enable a World More Civilized than Today’s

One of history’s greatest ironies is that gold detractors refer to the metal as the barbarous relic. In fact, the abandonment of gold has put civilization as we know it at risk of extinction.

The gold coin standard that had served Western economies so brilliantly throughout most of the nineteenth century hit a brick wall in 1914 and was never able to recover, or so the story goes. As the Great War began, Europe turned from prosperity to destruction, or more precisely, toward prosperity for some and destruction for the rest. The gold coin standard had to be ditched for such a prodigious undertaking.

If gold was money, and wars cost money, how was this even possible?

First, people were already in the habit of using money substitutes instead of money itself—banknotes instead of the gold coins they represented. People found it more convenient to carry paper around in their pockets than gold coins. Over time the paper itself came to be regarded as money, while gold became a clunky inconvenience from the old days.

Second, banks had been in the habit of issuing more bank-notes and deposits than the value of the gold in their vaults. On occasion, this practice would arouse public suspicion that the notes were promises the banks could not keep. The courts sided with the banks and allowed them to suspend note redemption while staying in business, thus strengthening the government-bank alliance. Since the courts ruled that deposits belonged to the banks, bankers could not be accused of embezzlement. The occasional bank runs that erupted were interpreted as a self-fulfilling prophecy. If people lined up to withdraw their money because they believed their bank was insolvent, the bank soon would be…

…click on the above link to read the rest…

When “Unallocated” Becomes Unavailable

March 24, 2021

When “Unallocated” Becomes Unavailable

For the past ten years, we’ve railed against the Bullion Bank fractional reserve and digital derivative pricing scheme. The solution has always been the removal of physical metal from the hands of the Banks and the Mints. Are we finally making some progress?

Before we begin, it is crucial that you understand this basic point: The globally recognized prices of gold and silver are not determined through the exchange of actual physical metal. Price is instead determined by the exchange of derivative contracts. Thus, the supply and demand of physical metal has very little day-to-day bearing on the derivative price. Instead, it is the supply and demand of the derivative itself that determines price.

About four years ago, I wrote the article linked below with the purpose of explaining, in as simple terms as possible, how and why this digital derivative pricing scheme benefits The Bullion Banks that have monopolistic control of these “markets”. If you’ve never read this post, please do so now:

Econ 101 — Silver Market Manipulation

The key pillars in maintaining this fraudulent pricing scheme are the market activities in New York and London. The CME-owned COMEX and the LBMA collective work together to manage price and the flow of physical metal that is needed to legitimize it. To understand this hand-in-glove approach, consider that Michael Nowak—the recently indicted former head of global precious metals trading for JPMorgan—also sat on the board of directors of the LBMA:

LBMA in “discussions” with JPMorgan following fraud indictment

For precious metal investors everywhere, it is vital that we one day force this pricing scheme to collapse. Since The Scheme is built upon leverage and hypothecation, the only way we can win this fight is if we can force a deleverage of the fractional reserve system…

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

A History of Inflationary Money: From 1844 to Nixon

December 15, 2019

A History of Inflationary Money: From 1844 to Nixon

So that we can understand the financial and banking challenges ahead of us, this article provides an historical and technical background. But we must first get an important definition right, and that is the cause of the periodic cycle of boom and bust. The cycle of economic activity is not a trade or business cycle, but a credit cycle. It is caused by fractional reserve banking and by banks loaning money into existence. The effect on business is then observed but is not the underlying cause.

Modern banking has its roots in England’s Bank Charter Act of 1844, which led to the practice of loaning money into existence, commonly described as fractional reserve banking. Fractional reserve banking is defined as making loans and taking in customer deposits in quantities that are multiples of the bank’s own capital. Case law in the wake of the 1844 act, having more regard for the status quo as established precedent than for the fundamentals of property law, ruled that irregular deposits (deposits for safekeeping) were no different from a loan. Judge Lord Cottenham’s ruling in Foley v. Hill (1848) 2 HLC 28 is a judicial decision relating to the fundamental nature of a bank which held in effect that

The money placed in the custody of the banker is to all intents and purposes, the money of the banker, to do with it as he pleases. He is guilty of no breach of trust in employing it. He is not answerable to the principal if he puts it into jeopardy, if he engages in haphazardous speculation.

This was undoubtedly the most important ruling of the last two centuries on money. Today, we know of nothing else other than legally confirmed fractional reserve banking. However, sound or honest banking, with banks acting as custodians, had existed in the centuries before the 1844 act and any corruption of the custody status was regarded as fraudulent.

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

How Fractional Reserve Banking Contributes to Increases in Money Supply

September 26, 2019

HOW FRACTIONAL RESERVE BANKING CONTRIBUTES TO INCREASES IN MONEY SUPPLY

Some commentators consider fractional reserve banking as a major vehicle for the expansion in the money supply growth rate. What is the nature of this vehicle?

We suggest that fractional reserve banking arises because banks legally are permitted to use money placed with them in demand deposits. Banks treat this type of money as if it was loaned to them. However, is this really the case?

When John places $100 in a safe deposit box with Bank One he does not relinquish his claim over the $100. He has an unlimited claim against his money. Likewise, when he places $100 in a demand deposit at Bank One he also does not relinquish his claim over the deposited $100. Also in this case John has an unlimited claim against his $100.

Now let’s assume that Bank One takes $50 out of John’s demand deposit without getting any consent from John in this regard and lends this to Mike. By lending Mike $50, the bank creates a deposit for $50 that Mike can now use.

Remember that John still has an unlimited claim against the $100 while Mike has now a claim against $50. What we have here that the Bank One has generated an extra spendable power to the tune of $50. We can also say that Bank One has $150 deposits that are Bank’s One liabilities, which are supported by $100 cash, which are Bank’s One reserves. Note that the reserves comprise 66.7% of Bank’s One deposit liabilities. This example indicates that Bank One is practicing fractional reserve banking.

Although the law allows for this type of practice, from an economic point of view, this results in money out of “thin air” which leads to consumption that is not supported by production, i.e., to the dilution of the pool of real wealth.

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

Don’t Get Distracted By The Trump/Fed Soap Opera – The Crash Will Continue

November 28, 2018

Don’t Get Distracted By The Trump/Fed Soap Opera – The Crash Will Continue

At the beginning of 2018 I wrote extensively on what was likely to happen under the administration of Jerome Powell, the new Federal Reserve Chairman. In my article ‘New Fed Chairman Will Trigger A Historic Stock Market Crash In 2018‘, published in February, I predicted that the Fed would continue interest rate increases and balance sheet cuts throughout the year and they would knowingly initiate a crash in equities.

To be clear, this was not a very popular sentiment at the time, just as it wasn’t popular when I predicted in 2015 that the Fed would launch interest rate hikes instead of going to negative rates in order to start a catalyst for economic crisis. The problem some people have with this concept is that they just can’t fathom that the central bank would deliberately crash the system. They desperately cling to the notion that the Fed and other central banks want to keep the machine rolling forward at any cost. This is simply not true.

The claim is that the banking elites are “required” to keep the system propped up in a state of reanimation because they are reliant on the system to provide capital and thus “influence.” The people that assert this argument don’t seem to understand how central banks operate.

As most liberty activists should know by now, central banks are essentially a legally protected counterfeiting scheme. Using fractional reserve banking at a ratio that is secret, central banks create their own capital from thin air, and they can infuse capital into international banks at will when it suits their purposes. There is no “profit motive” for the banking syndicate.

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

Warren Buffett Explains Bubbles: But He Doesn’t Know We Are In One

September 13, 2018

Warren Buffett Explains Bubbles: But He Doesn’t Know We Are In One

Buffet explains bubbles: “People see neighbors ‘dumber than they are’ getting rich.”

Warren Buffett explains Why Bubbles Happen

Buffett was asked by CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin if he is worried another crisis will happen again.

“Well there will be one sometime,” Buffett said in an interview for CNBC’s “Crisis on Wall Street: The Week That Shook the World” documentary. The documentary airs Wednesday night at 10 p.m. ET/PT.

“People start being interested in something because it’s going up, not because they understand it or anything else. But the guy next door, who they know is dumber than they are, is getting rich and they aren’t,” he said. “And their spouse is saying can’t you figure it out, too? It is so contagious. So that’s a permanent part of the system.”

That last paragraph perfectly explains Bitcoin. Most of those investing in cryptos have little idea how they work, or what they are even buying.

Buffet made no mention of the corporate bond bubble, the equities bubble, or even the crypto bubble. He does not see any bubbles now, at least that he mentioned.

Symptom or Cause?

Buffett confuses a symptom (rampant speculation) with the true cause

The Fed (central banks in general), keep interest rates too low, too long
Fractional reserve lending
Moral hazards like bank bailouts
Poor fiscal policies and massive government debt

In short, there is no free market in anything and thus no valid price discovery. There would always be speculation, but Fed policies and fractional reserve lending are the root cause of bubbles.

The Degrading Facts of a Fake Money Hole in the Head

September 1, 2018

The Degrading Facts of a Fake Money Hole in the Head

Squishy Fact Finding Mission

Today we begin with the facts. But not just the facts; the facts of the facts. We want to better understand just what it is that is provoking today’s ludicrous world. To clarify, we are not after the cold hard facts; those with no opinions, like the commutative property of addition. Rather, we are after the warm squishy facts; the type of facts that depend on what the meaning of ‘is’ is.

Fact-related pleas… [PT]

The facts, as far as we can tell, are that we are presently living in a land of extreme confusion. The genesis of this extreme confusion is today’s fake money system. And the destructive effects of this fake money system have spread out like a virus into nearly all aspects of daily life.

Plain and simple, central bank fiat money creation, multiplied by commercial banks through fractional-reserve banking, propagates financial and economic chaos. The experience of long periods of money supply expansion punctuated by abrupt, episodic contractions, has the effect of whipsawing the working stiff’s efforts to get ahead. This trifecta of offenses has debased the rewards of hard work, saving money, and paying one’s way.

Quite frankly, these facts are insulting. In particular, they are insulting for those running in the rat race for their family’s daily bread. These facts are also insulting for retirees, who worked for four decades only to have their life savings extracted by the depredations of the fake money system.

Early rat race conditioning [PT]

Short-Sighted Decisions

The facts are that on August 15, 1971, Tricky Dick Nixon stiffed the world unconditionally. He defaulted on the Bretton Woods system, and terminated the agreement that allowed member nations to redeem their paper dollars, acquired through trade, for gold. But that’s not the half of it…

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

Can an Economy Advance Without Savings?

January 21, 2018

Can an Economy Advance Without Savings?

According to Frank Decker, Honorary Associate at the University of Sydney Law School, it certainly can. Not only that, but eschewing savings in favor of “monetisation of assets” will yield better results! I refer to his article in Economic Affairs–Volume 37, Number 3, October 2017–, a publication of the Institute of Economic Affairs, London.

Mr. Decker purports to answer the question “Central Bank or Monetary Authority? Three Views on Money and Monetary Reform.” The three views examined are commodity money, state money, and money as a derivative of property. All three views are explained very well, and a beginner to the study of the role of money will learn a lot in a short period of time.

Commodity money is the name Decker aptly gives to money backed by gold or some other widely accepted medium of indirect exchange. Commodity money’s proponents see two major advantages–that it ends inflation and the business cycle. He quotes Mises and Rothbard to good effect.

State money, or money as a state liability, is fiat money that all the world knows today. Its two most famous proponents are Keynes and Friedman. State money’s main advantages, as seen by Decker, are that the state can engage in countercyclical spending and the state can fund itself by printing all the money that it needs for current expenditures.

Decker’s third type of money–money as a derivative of property–sounds no different than fractional reserve banking, except that the fraction of reserves required to be held by the lending banks is so low that it is not a factor of lending restraint. Decker gives the example of a business that uses its assets as loan collateral. According to Decker, the money that the bank creates is NOT created out of thin air, because it is backed by private property; i.e., the loan collateral.

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

The Economic Benefits of Ending the Fraud of Fractional Reserve Banking

January 2, 2018

The Economic Benefits of Ending the Fraud of Fractional Reserve Banking

Fractional reserve banking (FRB) is fraudulent. It should be prosecuted as a crime rather than accepted as normal practice under current banking laws. Any society that respects property rights and the rule of law would not allow it. For those unfamiliar with the term fractional reserve banking or not quite confident of its complete meaning, let’s cover some basics.

What Is Fractional Reserve Banking?

All financial transactions must be settled ultimately by an exchange of standard money, otherwise known as “reserves”. Reserves in the US are composed of federal reserve notes (good old paper money in your wallet, piggy bank, retailers’ cash register tills, or bank vaults) plus reserve account balances held by banks at their local Federal Reserve Bank that may be exchanged for federal reserve notes on demand. The important point is that reserves are not the same thing as the money supply. The money supply is composed of cash outside bank vaults plus demand (checking) accounts at banks. A financial transaction is not complete until reserves are exchanged. For example, accepting a check from your neighbor for selling him your used car is not final settlement, because reserves have not yet been exchanged. The check might bounce. Or the bank upon which the check is drawn might become insolvent ; i.e., it does not have and cannot raise the reserves with which to pay you, the check’s payee, even though the bank balance of the payor, your neighbor, was at least as large as the check.

Most people assume that their money held at banks can always be exchanged for reserves, but such is not the case. Under a fractional reserve banking system banks are not required to keep one hundred percent reserves.

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

The Downright Sinister Rearrangement of Riches

October 27, 2017

The Downright Sinister Rearrangement of Riches

Simple Classifications

Let’s begin with facts. Cold hard unadorned facts. Water boils at 212 degrees Fahrenheit at standard atmospheric pressure. Squaring the circle using a compass and straightedge is impossible. The sun is a star.

The sun is not just a star, it is a benevolent star. Look, it is smiling… sort of. [PT]

Facts, of course, must not be confused with opinions, which are based upon observations. Barack Obama throws like a girl. The Federal Register is for idiots. Two slices of chocolate cake are one too many. Are these opinions right or wrong?

The answer depends on who you ask. What’s certain about opinions, however, is that like bellybuttons, everybody has one. Moreover, unlike free drugs from the government, everyone is in fact entitled to their own opinion.

Moving on from facts and opinions, the next classification we encounter is the wholly asinine. This broadly contains the absurd and ridiculous. Take most university teachers, barring natural science professors, for instance. They’re wholly asinine. The wholly asinine also extends to editors at the New York Times, Washington Post, circus hunchbacks, and the like.

Lastly, we want to mention the downright sinister. This includes sociopaths like Hillary Rodham Clinton, John McCain, nearly all of Congress, the Federal Reserve, fractional reserve banking, Washington lobbyists, a good part of Wall Street, and much, much more. Clearly, such people and professions don’t represent honest work. Rather, they epitomize less than honest work that’s performed by less than honest people.
Sinister mafia boss from Arkansas, possibly checking classified material on private phone… [PT] Photo credit: AP

Nixon Casts the Die

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

Stabbing With Their Steely Knives, They Just Can’t Kill the Beast

October 27, 2017

Stabbing With Their Steely Knives, They Just Can’t Kill the Beast

You were blameless in your ways from the day you were created till wickedness was found in you. Through your widespread trade you were filled with violence, and you sinned. So I drove you in disgrace from the mount of God, and I expelled you, guardian cherub, from among the fiery stones. Your heart became proud on account of your beauty, and you corrupted your wisdom because of your splendor…

– Ezekiel 28: 15-17

In horror stories originating from the times of the first songs there have always been common enemies. Creatures of sinister intelligence, blind violence, disingenuity, clever crafters of schemes, or often containing the capacity for all of these; lurking in the dark, or hidden in plain sight, but always waiting and watching. Little Red Riding Hood and the Three Little Pigs suffered through the antics of wily wolves. Rapunzel and Hansel and Gretel agonized before the wicked wills of warted witches; and with Jack of Beanstalk fame it was jeering giants who longed to grind his bones for bread, alive or dead. Star Wars had Darth Vader and the Lords of the Sith, whereas it was the evil eye of Sauron that ruled over J.R.R Tolkien’s shadowy land of Mordor. And for most of the world’s religions today it remains Lucifer, the morning star, who fell from heaven by the weight of a prideful heart and now reigns as the Prince and Power of the Air; tempting, taunting, and tantalizing, all of mankind.

In every story, there are heroes and villains introduced and funneled into the friction of rising action that results in a climax followed by the falling action which precedes any resolution. Also known as the Five Elements of a Plot, these components are the sine qua non of universal story telling across any genre or medium.

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

A History of Fractional Reserve Banking–Or Why Interest Rates Are the Most Important Influence on Stock Market Valuations? Part 1

October 16, 2016

A HISTORY OF FRACTIONAL RESERVE BANKING – OR WHY INTEREST RATES ARE THE MOST IMPORTANT INFLUENCE ON STOCK MARKET VALUATIONS? PART 1

William Hogarth – The South Sea Bubble

The South Sea Company was founded in 1711. The company was part of the treaty during the War of Spanish Succession, which was traded in return for the company’s assumption of debt run up by England during the war. The South Sea Company collapsed in 1720.

Central banks appear more powerful than at any time in their history – has something changed?
Not really – because of their role in government debt management and fractional reserve banking, central banks have always possessed this power

The main driver of stock market performance, since the 1980’s, has been interest rates. It will continue for the foreseeable future. Its influence has increased inexorably over the past thirty years but the mispricing of the market rate of interest has been a distorting and destabilising factor for much longer, in fact, since the invention of the central bank.

In the first part of this article I will look at the development of central banking with specific reference to the Bank of England. In part 2, I go on to suggest that the long run effect of government borrowing, at lower rates than corporate borrowers, increases pro-cyclicality, crowds out more economically productive private investment and, even as it reduces absolute interest rates for all borrowers, drives rates further below the “natural rate” leading to malinvestment.

Part 1, however, is predominantly an attempt to learn from history. You may detect the occasional “inverse déjà vu” – the unconventional monetary policies of the last few years have even more egregious precedents.

A brief history of central banking

Medieval Banking

The Bardi, Peruzzi and Acciaiuoli companies of Florence were the first true banks of the modern era.

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

You are currently living through the dumbest monetary experimental end game in history (including Havenstein and Gono’s)

June 18, 2016

You are currently living through the dumbest monetary experimental end game in history (including Havenstein and Gono’s)

We have seen several explanations for the financial crisis and its lingering effects depressing our global economy in its aftermath. Some are plain stupid, such as greed for some reason suddenly overwhelmed people working within finance, as if people in finance were not greedy before 2007. Others try to explain it through “liberalisation” which is almost just as nonsensical as government regulators never liberalised anything, but rather allowed fraud, in polite company called fractional reserve banking, to grow unrestrained. Some point to excess savings in exporting countries as the culprit behind our misery. Excess saving forces less frugal countries reluctantly to run deficits, or so the argument goes.

While some theories are pure folly, others are partial right, but none seem to grasp the fundamental factor that pulled and keep pulling the world into such unsustainable constellations witnessed in global finance, trade and capital allocation.

Whenever we try to explain the reasons behind the crisis, such as the build-up in non-productive and counterproductive debt (see here, here and here for more details) people ask us why did this happened now, and not earlier? It is a fair question that we have thought about and believe have one simple answer. Bottom line, the world economy is running on a system with no natural correcting mechanisms.

As we are never tired of pointing out, the Soviet Union only had one recession, the one in 1989. The system was stable, until it was not. A system that does not correct internal imbalances grows just like a parasitic cancer, eventually killing its host. If unsustainable capital allocations are allowed to continue unchecked, the pool of real savings will at some point be depleted. At that point recession hits because the structure of production is too capital intensive relative to the level of real saving available.

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

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