Don't Bank On It!

INTRODUCTION

Think your money in the bank is safe? Think again.

Today there are more than 5,000 banks and savings institutions in the U.S., but assets are increasingly concentrated at the top. Forbes magazine reports that the 100 largest have $14.4 trillion in assets, representing 81% of total U.S. bank assets. [1]

But asset quality and profitability vary wildly among those institutions, especially in the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic - which cut the GDP by 3.5% compared to a GDP increase of 2.2% in 2019.

The nation's five largest lenders - Bank of America, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, U.S. Bancorp and Wells Fargo - say the financial stress caused by the pandemic could cause borrowers to default on a total of $104 billion in debt, according to CBS News. [2]

For example, JPMorgan Chase is predicting the bank could have to cover $32.1 billion in bad loans. That's nearly triple the $13.2 billion the bank was predicting a year ago.

Executives at Bank of America, JPMorgan and Citigroup, credit government stimulus, like the $2 trillion CARES Act, for preventing a banking meltdown. It remains to be seen whether government support has merely delayed heavy losses, or created a bridge for consumers and businesses until they to get to the other side of the economic malaise. [3]

There is also the major and growing problem of cyberattacks on the banking industry. Hardly a day passes without a financial or banking organization suffering a data breach or bank customers losing money from the account through stolen credentials.

Cyberattacks against banks spiked by a massive 238% from the beginning of February 2020 to the end of April 2020. The annual cost of cyberattacks in the banking industry has reached $18.3 million per enterprise according to Security Boulevard. [4]

On July 19, 2017 Bank of America, the nation's second largest bank, had a computer system outage that shut out customers nationwide from "accessing their accounts and online banking" for many hours. JPMorgan Chase bank had widespread outages on July 3 and May 11 that knocked out services for customers; the Washington Post reported that customers said they were unable "to withdraw money from ATMs or get any services inside bank branches." [5] Neither giant bank explained whether these outages were caused by computer failures or hackers.

Your bank account no longer exists in paper ledgers or as actual physical dollars in a local bank vault. Your account exists only as electronic blips in a computer; which a power outage, malfunction or hacker could garble, steal, or erase.

When a power blackout hit Puerto Rico in September 2017 because of Hurricane Maria, people found themselves unable to get money from an ATM or use credit cards; the Federal Reserve had to fly an airplane crammed with cash to the small island to prevent disaster. "In a cashless world, you'd better pray the power never goes out," says Ryan McMaken of the Mises Institute. [6]

A global agenda is being implemented that aims to make cash illegal, and to replace it with credit and debt. Here, too, you are at risk in many ways, as we discovered in August 2017 that one of the three giant credit reporting agencies, Equifax, had been hacked at least half a year earlier. The hackers had stolen data on the identity of at least 143 million people. These thieves had picked not only your pockets, but also your personal, social, and economic identity. [7] This was one more sign that trusting computers to run our world may have been unwise, and that we are far more vulnerable than most of us know.

Between 2007 and 2010, the average American family saw their median net worth plunge by almost 40 percent, putting them back economically to where they had been 18 years earlier in 1992, like a lost generation of prosperity. [8] Economic growth was anemic, and Mr. Obama became the first president in history never to have a month of 3 percent growth or better.

Under President Obama, record stimulus spending drove the national debt to nearly $20 Trillion, and this frightened many businesses out of hiring. The huge mandatory medical plan known as Obamacare turned millions of full-time workers into part-timers, and the jobs created were mostly as low-paid temporaries or hamburger flippers; 95 million Americans were jobless or underemployed.

Government caused this Great Recession, but politicians always prefer to blame others. President Obama and his comrades, as their scapegoat, blamed the banks. In 2010 Mr. Obama signed a 2,319-page law known as Dodd-Frank. By 2015 this law had completed only two-thirds of its work - imposing more than 22,000 pages of regulations on banks and other financial and investment enterprises.

"Dodd-Frank has made it impossible for bankers to function," Mr. Trump told Reuters in 2016. "It makes it very hard for bankers to loan money for people to create jobs, for people with businesses to create jobs. And that has to stop." [9] "Dodd-Frank is a disaster," said President Trump. "We're going to be doing a big number on Dodd-Frank. The American Dream is back." [10]

This updated White Paper will show you the challenges that all of us face with banks. We will explore how more than 100 years of Progressive rules have transformed banks from local institutions, where the neighborhood banker was one of the pillars of the community, to today where more than half of American accounts are held by just six giant institutions run by bankers whom some politicians paint as villains.

"Banks don't do much banking anymore," said one pundit. [11] They make far less in loans to ordinary borrowers, and pay far less in interest to ordinary depositors.

On April 6, 2017 the director of his National Economic Council Gary Cohn, a former executive at Goldman Sachs, surprised many by saying it may be good to split lending banks from investment banks. [12]

According to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, "deposits at U.S. banks in the fourth quarter of 2016 totaled $12.9 trillion, 65% higher than a decade earlier"¦." [13]

In these uncertain times, millions of us seem more eager to protect what we already have than to be paid interest on our money. Bank of America's consumer bank, for example, according to Morningstar paid a tiny 0.04% interest on deposits during the fourth quarter of 2016. [14]

These rock-bottom bank rates are no accident. A deliberate policy that economists call "financial repression" is being used by America's central bank, the Federal Reserve, to keep depositor interest rates below the rate of real inflation. This is why your savings lose value every day they are in the bank. [15] It is a calculated heads-the-bank-wins, tails-you-lose proposition.

THE RISKS YOU FACE

But "financial repression" may be the least of 20 potentially devastating risks you face if you trust your savings to a bank. Among these risks are:

1. Computer hackers, some of whom have foreign government backing.
2. Identity thieves access to accounts is often surprisingly easy.
3. Cyber terrorism targets banks. Your account is mere electronic blips in a computer.
4. "Flash crashes" could erase or garble your account.
5. Politicians are eager to take the wealth of both banks and depositors in a variety of ways - and have been changing laws to facilitate this.
6. Confiscation of bank accounts - including retirement accounts - by government is now legally possible.
7. Banks resist returning money to account holders.
8. Bank runs by depositors can happen because of fractional-reserve banking"¦.and could lead to forfeiture of your savings.
9. "Financial Repression" practiced by the Federal Reserve means that depositors earn little interest, and may soon have to pay banks for accounts.
10. Artificially low interest rates benefit government, but harm savers.
11. Government regulation makes banks afraid to lend, except to the government or Federal Reserve.
12. Government uses banks as its own ATM for funding.
13. Government powers are used to redistribute bank assets and credit.
14. Banks are being politicized through government pressure.
15. Bank regulation is now moving beyond the control of judges or lawmakers.
16. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation can only replace $1 for every $14 it now claims to insure - "fractional-reserve" insurance - and hence does not really "insure" your account.
17. A global tax on bank savers is being planned by the International Monetary Fund.
18. Your account could be confiscated by a surprise "cashless" policy.
19. Your bank is required to spy on you for the government, to notify it of any "unusual" deposits or withdrawals on your part, especially in cash.
20. Any account denominated in dollars is worth no more than paper dollars - the value of which can be erased overnight by massive government printing.

Truth be told, the place where you bank is not your father's or mother's bank anymore - even if the name is the same. And neither is your money; it has been re-engineered to lose value, too.

BANK BOOKIES

Today your bank account pays you almost nothing. Bankers have begun moving to "negative interest rates," meaning that the bank will no longer pay anything. Instead, savers soon will have to pay a bank merely to have an account.

Because of deliberate "financial repression," you are already losing purchasing power every day from your bank account...in effect, already paying a kind of "negative interest."

The savings in your account are now in many ways more at risk than ever before in American history. Banks and the accounts in them have become a target for money-hungry hackers, cyber-warriors and politicians because, as robber Willie Sutton famously said, "that's where the money is."

It once made good sense to put your money in a rewarding, risk-free bank account. Today it no longer makes sense to keep all of your savings in near-zero reward, high-risk bank accounts. You urgently need to adjust your thinking to this new reality. "Saving" at today's bank is tricking and trapping millions of Americans into being saps and suckers. Most of us are already paying a high price for not recognizing that the old world has turned upside down.

In this White Paper, we show you why and how banking and money have changed, and what forces are now reshaping and threatening them.

We will tell you why a former Harvard economics professor, after analyzing today's new risks, withdrew his own million-dollar savings account from one of America's largest banks.

We will show that withdrawing a sizable part of your own savings may meet more resistance from your bank than you would have expected. We will explain why "your" savings account is not, under new government policies and law, even legally "yours."

The surprising information we have unearthed in this White Paper could save your family's life savings, your own well-being, and your retirement.

WELCOME TO BANKING'S BRAVE NEW WORLD

Imagine waking up one morning to find your bank locked, access to your money via ATMs blocked, your ability to pay bills or buy food - and your boss's ability to pay you - all gone in an instant, without warning. If your bank accounts and credit cards were suddenly out of reach for days, for months, or forever, what would you do?

This happened to the people of the island of Cyprus in the Mediterranean Sea. The government needed money and, with Europe's approval, decided to confiscate a hefty piece of every private bank account, large or small.

Sound crazy? Welcome to banking's brave new rules, where, as we documented in our book The Great Withdrawal [16], the law now defines your accounts as "unsecured assets" owned, not by you, but by your bank if the government decides to seize its assets in a "bail in." The U.S. Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) and Bank of England already jointly agreed to such new rules in December 2012. [17]

FINANCIAL CONTROLS?

In January 2014, Stephen Cotton walked into the British building where he had banked for 28 years, a branch of London-based giant HSBC that calls itself "The World's Local Bank." He filled out a withdrawal slip for $11,000 he owed to his mother. [18]

But the bank refused to let Mr. Cotton withdraw the money from his account. It demanded a letter from his mother. It also refused to let him withdraw $7,500 or $6,000. The bank at last let him take $4,500 from his savings, but refused to let him withdraw any more that day. Customers had not been informed of these arbitrary new rules that HSBC quietly imposed. "You shouldn't have to explain to your bank why you want that money," said Cotton. "It's not theirs, it's yours." Alas, under today's new laws he is mistaken. In the United States as well as in Australia, New Zealand, and much of Europe, our deposits belong to the bank. What you now "own" is a deposit receipt, an IOU.

"All these regulations which have been imposed on banks allow enormous interpretation," Member of Parliament Douglas Carswell told the BBC: "It basically infantilises the customer. In a sense your money becomes pocket money and the bank becomes your parent."

HSBC depositors can be required to "provide evidence" that they will spend it in an HSBC-approved way before they can withdraw their OWN money - or they may find it frozen. Worse yet, evidence is mounting that the U.S. banks have plans to do the same kind of thing in the name of "protecting" depositors from the rising threat of cyber attacks and identity theft.

JPMorgan Chase Bank sent a letter informing many business customers that "You will no longer be able to send International wire transfers" and "Your cash activity limit...will be $50,000 per statement cycle, per account." These changes, the letter said, "will help us more effectively manage the risks involved with these types of transactions."

"So...JPM is now engaged in the risk-management of ATM withdrawals?" asked ZeroHedge.com. "Reading between the lines, this sounds perilously close to capital controls to us...." [19] "[H]ow long," asked ZeroHedge, "before the $50,000 limit becomes $20,000, then $10,000, then $5,000 and so on, until Business Customers are advised that the bank will conduct an excess cash flow sweep every month....?"

As its frightening letter went viral on the Internet, Chase rushed to deny that it was implementing "capital controls" and reined in its new policy. Its "derisking" policy, said Chase, had caused an "Overreaction" among savers.

This letter is likely a tiny foretaste of the contingency plans by JPMorgan Chase and other giant banks for swiftly imposing capital controls on private savings accounts the instant the government so commands.

CYBER THREATS TO BANKS

Over the last two decades financial cyber attacks have grown in size, frequency and impact - often targeting banks, financial services, military and government agencies, and ordinary people.

"Cyber Attacks Are the 'New Normal' for Financial Services Industry," says The Wall Street Journal.

"A white paper from the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation, one of the world's largest post-trade services operators, identified cyber attacks as one of the most substantial threats to financial stability ... cyber attacks could have a huge financial and reputational impact, and severely damage market integrity," reports efinancialnews.com.

In 2017, hackers infected the computers of 140 banks in 40 countries with a program that let the criminals order bank ATMs to spit out untold millions into the paper bags of waiting accomplices. [20]

In 2016, North Korean hackers put a bug into the computers of SWIFT, the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications in Belgium, an electronic clearinghouse for global bank transfers. The hackers had SWIFT issue false documents that tricked banks in several nations into giving their agents a combined $81 Million, including $12 Million from Wells Fargo Bank in the U.S. [21]

And worse yet, many security breaches may not even have been discovered. In one Security Report, Cisco Systems said that every corporate or government computer network it has studied shows signs of hacker attacks.

Retailer Neiman-Marcus' computer network, say experts, apparently had a hacker's bug in it doing damage for at least nine months before the invading program that raided confidential customer information was discovered.

We know that during the Cold War era of spies and counter-spies, it was common for one side to plant "mole" agents in the other's agencies. These agents could remain dormant for years, even decades, doing nothing until being activated. It might be that major government agencies, corporations, power grids, and the six biggest "too big to fail" banks could already have dormant "mole" programs undetected in their computer networks that hackers and foreign agents can activate from far away at an opportune moment.

When Russia sent troops into Ukrainian Crimea, its waves of troops were preceded by massive cyber attacks designed to disable military, governmental and other computer networks in Ukraine. These digital attacks were intended to blind and cripple the command, control and communications computer programs of the smaller nation and its citizenry.

Our government, economy and society have become totally dependent on computer networks to move, record and safeguard our transactions and even our individual and company identities. What will happen when an enemy finds ways to unplug - or, perhaps worse, to pour vast amounts of false information into - our computer systems?

FINANCIAL WARFARE: THE NEW BATTLEGROUND

"This is America's new battle space. The doctrine of mutually assured destruction or the notion of taking on our military even after years of prolonged challenges is not something that enemies are even thinking of engaging in anymore. It's all about cyber attacks, attacking the financial and national infrastructure - that's the frontier," reports SiliconAngle.

"Every minute, of every hour, of every day, a major financial institution is under attack," reports the U.K. Telegraph. "Attacks are not limited just to theft and can take the form of denial of service assaults on a bank's online operations to prevent customers from accessing their accounts."

"Intelligence leaders said for the first time that cyber attacks and cyber espionage have supplanted terrorism as the top security threat facing the United States," reports Reuters. "The annual economic loss from cyber attacks is in the tens of billions of dollars."

China, Russia and the Middle East dominate the news as the launching points of cyber attacks. "A private U.S. computer security company issued a study accusing a secretive Chinese military unit of being behind hacking attacks on a wide range of American industries," says Reuters. The Chinese People's Liberation Army has a 125,000 cyber-soldier unit devoted entirely to such cyber warfare.

Former U.S. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta said that "the threat from cyber attacks and a future attack on the country's critical infrastructure could have an effect similar to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks of 2001."

The bottom line is that every single American citizen is vulnerable to this new form of financial warfare. The question now is not if, but when the next attack will occur.

"GAME PLAN" TO CRASH THE DOLLAR

America in September 2008 suffered a financial "Pearl Harbor," an internationally-launched, coordinated, computerized attack designed to drain overnight trillions of dollars from our most important financial institutions. The resulting panic persuaded federal lawmakers to approve vast emergency bailout funds for banks, brokers and key corporations.

This remarkably-timed attack and resulting economic confusion persuaded voters to renew the liberal Democratic control of Congress and to elect a charismatic but unknown and untested anti-capitalist radical community organizer as president. This foreign interference helped elect Barack Obama.

According to Defense Department consultant Kevin D. Freeman this attack was the culmination of three coordinated assaults that began in 2007 with "a speculative run-up in oil prices that generated as much as $2 Trillion of excess wealth for oil-producing nations, filling the coffers of Sovereign Wealth Funds, especially those that follow Shariah Compliant Finance."

Oil prices soared to $147 per barrel and devastated the American economy, already vulnerable from the housing bubble bursting. "The rapid run-up in oil prices," wrote Freeman in his 2009 analytic study Economic Warfare: Risks and Responses: Analysis of Twenty-First Century Risks in Light of the Recent Market Collapse, "made the value of OPEC oil in the ground roughly $137 Trillion (based on $125/barrel oil) virtually equal to the value of all other world financial assets, including every share of stock, every bond, every private company, all government and corporate debt, and the entire world's bank deposits." [22]

ECONOMIC TERRORISM?

"This means that the proven OPEC reserves," wrote Freeman, "were valued at almost three times the total market capitalization of every company on the planet traded in all 27 global stock markets."

The second phase of this assault on U.S. financial entities began in 2008 with a series of "bear raids" against companies such as Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers and seemed clearly coordinated to collapse the companies. "The bear raids were perpetrated by naked short selling and manipulation of credit default swaps, both of which were virtually unregulated," wrote Freeman. "The short selling was actually enhanced by recent regulatory changes...."

THE RUSSIAN BEAR?

"The source of the bear raids has not been traceable to date due to serious transparency gaps for hedge funds, trading pools, sponsored access, and sovereign wealth funds," wrote Freeman.

"What can be demonstrated, however, is that two relatively small broker dealers emerged virtually overnight," he wrote, "to trade "˜trillions of dollars worth of U.S. blue chip companies. They are the number one traders in all financial companies that collapsed or are now financially supported by the U.S. Government. Trading by the firms has grown exponentially while the markets have lost trillions of dollars in value.'"

Days after Russian forces invaded Crimea in Ukraine, newly-revealed footprints provide evidence as to who was behind the 2008 assault. BBC Business Editor Robert Preston authored an article titled "Russia 'Planned Wall Street Bear Raid'." In it he tells of the unaired portion of an interview he did with Henry Paulson, who in 2008 was U.S. Secretary of the Treasury.

Secretary Paulson told Preston that Russia had approached the Chinese to propose a "joint pact" that both nations dump selected U.S. bank securities on the market with the intent of increasing "the turmoil on Wall Street - presumably with a view to maximizing the cost of the rescue for Washington and further damaging its financial health." [23] China, Paulson told Preston, chose not to do this.

"FINANCIAL JIHAD"

The risk of phase three of this attack could involve "a potential direct economic attack on the U.S. Treasury and U.S. Dollar....," wrote Freeman. "A focused effort to collapse the dollar by dumping Treasury bonds has grave implications including the possibility of a downgrading of U.S. debt forcing rapidly-rising interest rates and a collapse of the American economy," Freeman wrote. He also noted that authorities had recently seized counterfeit U.S bonds with "a face value of $134 billion."

A year before Freeman's original study, the American Center for Democracy published a detailed analysis, "The Fifth Generation Warfare," of what its analysts Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld and Alyssa A. Lappen identified as the risk, tactics, strengths and weaknesses of what they called "Financial Jihad." [24]

As evidenced by Freeman's study for the Department of Defense, the Pentagon is acutely concerned about the prospects for economic warfare against the United States. The Pentagon has also been "war gaming" possible scenarios of social breakdown caused by an economic collapse. [25]

The world's billions of Internet users already suffer $1 Trillion annual losses to cyber crime, and according to some analysts it has become a larger source of criminal revenue in much of the world than illicit drugs. [26]

America's staggering debt remains the "single biggest threat to our national security," warned Admiral Mike Mullen. It weakens our capabilities, makes us more fragile and vulnerable, and makes others in the world perceive us as a world power in decline. [27]

OUR "FLASH CRASH" CULTURE

On May 6, 2010, the New York Stock Exchange suffered what came to be called "the Flash Crash," when the Dow Jones Industrial Average plummeted unexpectedly by nearly 1,000 points in only minutes, reportedly from a human entering a computerized market order with a few too many zeroes. [28] This order purportedly set off a cascade of computerized buy-and-sell programs around the world that are designed to respond instantly, and without consulting human beings, to sudden large changes in a stock's price. As each major trading computer reacted, it could have triggered an avalanche of programmed reactions in similar computers.

These automated computer programs, some pundits suspect, have put the modern computer-driven global stock markets on a hair-trigger, not unlike nuclear missiles of the early 1960s that were to be launched at the first sign of preemptive enemy missile attack because military planners believed they had to "use it or lose it." Only with the development of solid fuel rockets and invulnerable hardened missile silos did this hair-trigger policy change. Our weakening economy and the U.S. Dollar are becoming more vulnerable because, as Mr. Butler warned, we rely on ever-more-centralized systems.

Decentralizing our technologies would make America much less vulnerable to high-tech terrorism and breakdowns. What left-liberals condemn as "urban sprawl" would make us much harder for terrorists to attack and shut down. [29]

America's Democratic Party, however, is ideologically committed to forcing more and more centralized control onto every aspect of life in the United States. Decentralization and self-reliance would make Americans too independent, too free, and socialists want to replace individual liberty with collectivist control. These centralized systems of control make our economy and society vastly more vulnerable to many kinds of "flash crashes," inadvertent or deliberate, in the technological systems on which we depend.

The very idea that became the Internet began when the U.S. military considered how to build a computer system that could not easily be shut down - and recognized that decentralization was the key, that a network of many small, independent computers linked together would be much harder to disrupt than a network that operated through one giant command computer.

This kind of individualistic decentralization of power was the same idea America's Framers sought to build into our society and Constitution. And this is what the collectivist "Progressive" politics of the past 100 years have sought to eradicate.

Under today's collectivist government systems, the risk that a "flash crash" could cascade into a massive crash of the dollar and economy therefore grows bigger every day.

If the U.S. Dollar and our financial institutions have been targeted for disruption and destruction by global power brokers and terrorists, then it would be prudent to "decentralize" a portion of our personal investments and life savings out of their bull's-eye. This saving remnant should be converted into something with value that will survive - and even grow in the wake of an economic collapse.

Such attacks, including an assault only weeks before the 2008 elections, played a key role in electing President Barack Obama in 2008. We should not be surprised. As the great Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu wrote 2,500 years ago in The Art of War, war is not waged only with soldiers and arms. It is also waged by undermining an opponent's economy, values, morals and culture.

Freeman's book, Game Plan: How to Protect Yourself from the Coming Cyber-Economic Attack provides additional confirmation (from a Defense Department insider) of an international plan (discussed in detail in our recent books) to bring down the dollar as the world's reserve currency. [30] The pattern he now sees, past and future, unfolds this way:

Stage 1 occurred 9-11-2001. Islamic terrorists targeted the WTC buildings with the goal of slashing the financial jugular vein of America. The attack successfully closed the U.S. stock, bond and money market trading for six days. Assets would be frozen.

Stage 2 occurred 9-15-2008. Research now confirms that Arab Sovereign Wealth Funds leveraged their $2B windfall from oil price profits to conduct a $20B "bear raid" on America's major financial institutions, such as Merrill Lynch, Bear Stearns, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and ultimately Lehman Brothers - which plunged the U.S. into a housing collapse and deep recession - and which our nation still suffers from today. The economy would be frozen.

Stage 3, Freeman predicts, will be a "bear raid" on the U.S. Dollar. It is no secret the Arabs, Russians and Chinese share the goal of replacing the U.S. Dollar as the world's reserve currency. Their ultimate goal is to introduce a new gold-backed Russian Ruble and Chinese Yuan during the next U.S. or global panic. The dollar would be frozen.

Any coming bear raid on the U.S. Dollar could take many forms: a staged cyber attack on the five major U.S. banks, closing down bank account access, another "flash crash" on Wall Street, or targeting America's power grid or water supplies. Our vulnerability to a major cyber attack grows daily.

Our enemies' goal is to create a major financial panic that would discredit the U.S. and our already 98% debased dollar. Their goal is for American citizens and foreign trading partners to begin shunning the U.S. Dollar all at once in favor of a new currency with a more trustworthy store of value and gold backing.

A cyber attack on the U.S. Dollar could happen at any time - without warning. Therefore, holding significant wealth in stocks, bonds and banks has never been riskier.

In our books we outline specific steps that could be taken immediately to minimize the impact of a major cyber attack, such as: asset diversification outside of dollars, escaping the Fed's rampant dollar creation, cutting back regulations on the free marketplace, and re-applying our Framers' values.

We need to move vulnerable paper and financial assets into time-tested physical assets like gold and silver. Do not get caught by surprise the day the dollar dies.

HOW DID WE GET HERE?

The general idea of banking apparently began in ancient Mesopotamia, where citizens could store their grain, and later money, in pagan temples for safekeeping. Our word "bank" comes from the name of the wooden benches, banques, where Renaissance Italian moneychangers sat to ply their trade. Today we practice what economists call "fractional-reserve banking" - which economist Murray Rothbard called a fraud and Ponzi scheme that ought to be illegal.

Fractional-reserve banking began several centuries ago with the goldsmiths of London and the Netherlands. Gold was the accepted form of money back then, and people frequently put their gold coins on deposit with goldsmiths who had the safeguards to protect these coins. Goldsmiths soon noticed that customers usually left their coins untouched for months or years and were content with tradable paper receipts. This in the entrepreneurial merchants' minds created an opportunity, so they began lending out their customers' coins for interest.

This, of course, let goldsmiths profit by magically "multiplying" the money supply, but it presented a legal dilemma. The coins still belonged to the customers and were held as "demand deposits," meaning that a customer could at any moment demand to get his or her coins back. The original coins, however, were now in the hands of the borrower.

If a goldsmith had sufficient money, he could simply give the customer the equivalent value in gold coins. But what if he could not instantly do this? What if this sparked alarm among the customer's friends, who ran to the goldsmith to demand the immediate return of their deposits as well?

This kind of "bank run" panic by depositors was, and remains, the great peril of fractional-reserve banking and has forced into bankruptcy many a bank when depositors lost confidence in its ability to return their money. Bank runs happen because depositors believe that the first to demand their money back will get whatever reserves a shaky bank has.

In the early 1800s, British courts began to consider who actually owns the money in a fractional-reserve bank - the depositor, the borrower, or the bank itself. Their rulings began the precedents affirmed forcefully in recent years by European, British, American and several other governments - that when a depositor opens a bank account, what he puts in it becomes an "unsecured asset" of the bank that governments can seize to pay the banks' obligations. You do not own your "own" bank accounts. The bank does, even though you have a conditional IOU that might allow you to sue for its return.

BANKING IN AMERICA

America's Framers had seen the games played by British bankers, speculators, judges and sharpers. This is why the U.S. Constitution specified solid money, not paper currency that could easily be printed and debased by the government. This is why most opposed having a central bank modeled on, and entwined with, the Bank of England. They had seen the kinds of corruption and gimmickry such institutions caused.

"If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency," warned Thomas Jefferson, "first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks, and corporations that will grow up around [the banks], will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs."

President Andrew Jackson destroyed the second attempt to establish such a central bank, and for almost a century the United States thrived and grew through state and local banks.

Over the next half-century a political battle raged between Hamiltonian Big Government advocates who created in succession two central banks empowered to manipulate the country's money supply - and other leaders, including Jefferson and President Andrew Jackson, who favored decentralized power and who distrusted and brought down both national banks. President Donald Trump reportedly keeps a painting of President Andrew Jackson prominently displayed in the Oval Office.

When government currency was in short supply, people bought, sold and saved by using the paper notes usually issued by small private banks. This was risky for savers because government regulations typically confined such banks' lending to a single state or even town, meaning that these banks were usually too small to have large reserves and could quickly run out of money and collapse if customers panicked and started withdrawing their savings. Such bank runs were all too common in the young Republic.

GOVERNMENT-CAUSED BANK FAILURES

State governments "required banks to collateralize their notes by lodging specified assets (usually state government bonds) with state authorities," according to University of Georgia economist George Selgin and George Mason University economist Larry White. "[C]lusters of "˜free bank' failures were principally due to falling prices of the state bonds they held," write Selgin and White, "suggesting that the bond-collateral requirements caused bank portfolios to become overloaded with state bonds." [31]

Or as economist Robert P. Murphy explained in The Politically Incorrect Guide to Capitalism, "government regulation actually unbalanced the banking system." [32] Government demands that banks buy large quantities of debased state bonds could push otherwise-solvent banks off a cliff. And as with today's inflation created deliberately by the Federal Reserve, innocent savers paid the price for government's greed and Progressive economic theory.

THE LURE OF EASY MONEY

During the War Between the States, President Abraham Lincoln issued Greenbacks, which like today's paper fiat currency were backed not by gold or silver - but by nothing. Even the U.S. Government refused to accept Greenbacks, its own money, as payment for certain taxes. Yet many liked the new currency, as they later would prefer silver to gold, because this allowed them to repay debts with cheaper currency of lower value than the money they had borrowed. Banks, other lenders and savers tended to favor gold because it was honest money that usually held or even increased its value over time. Gold-backed currency therefore meant that people had to repay at least the same value they borrowed, plus interest.

This honest money prevailed following the War Between the States, and helped create some of the greatest prosperity in American history. The market and fractional-reserve banks still rose and fell with the business cycle of a dynamic economy. Severe crashes and bank failures happened, but most healed quickly because people were generally prudent, accustomed to balancing risk and reward as to where they put their money.

By trying to eliminate risk, the Progressive system that followed and is with us today generally made a few favored by government rich, while passing on to taxpayers the cost of bad fiscal judgment and speculation.

THE COMING OF THE FED

Because two Republican candidates split a majority of votes in the 1912 election, a mere plurality of voters elected radical Progressive Democratic candidate Woodrow Wilson as president.

Within a year, as we detailed in our books The Great Debasement and The Great Withdrawal, Wilson locked around the neck of American taxpayers a "Progressive" income tax of the type proposed by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in their 1848 Communist Manifesto as one of the 10 best ways to destroy capitalism.

Another of those 10 Marxist methods is for government to seize control of all banking and credit in a nation and re-direct it politically, which Wilson also rapidly commenced doing.

In 1913, under Wilson, a new cartel of 12 private central banks called the Federal Reserve, would begin turning America's gold-backed currency into mere paper - and soon use that paper fiat currency to reshape, rule and clandestinely tax the United States through chronic inflation. Unlike the gold standard, the new "elastic currency" would make government growth much easier.

As described in economic historian G. Edward Griffin's 1994 book The Creature from Jekyll Island, the Fed has precisely the power to issue and otherwise to manipulate the value of money that Jefferson warned about two centuries ago.

A court order gave Americans a glimpse of why the Fed prefers secrecy. Many tens of billions of dollars in recent bailout money were channeled via insurance giant AIG not to Americans but to foreign banks in Europe, Asia and the Middle East. [33] The Fed also facilitated up to $29 Trillion in loans or credit to help prop up banks around the world.

The Fed has become the central bank not only of the United States but also, in some ways, of the world. This private banking cartel, therefore, does not always put America's national interests first. The Fed's enabling legislation provided that American dollars, which until 1913 were supposedly 100 percent backed by the nation's gold reserves, under the Fed suddenly required only 40 percent gold backing"¦.and today none whatsoever.

Many Republicans in Congress were convinced that the Fed was designed to dethrone the gold standard and empower redistributionist Progressives such as the Silverites who wanted easy money, cheap credit that could be repaid with devalued dollars, and government spending unrestrained by a gold standard.

One lawmaker who opposed the Fed's creation was conservative Republican and longtime Massachusetts Senator Henry Cabot Lodge. "The [Federal Reserve Act] as it stands seems to me to open the way to a vast inflation of the currency," Lodge prophetically warned in 1913. "I do not like to think that any law can be passed that will make it possible to submerge the gold standard in a flood of irredeemable paper currency."

"INFLATION AND DEFLATION WORK EQUALLY WELL"

Another fierce opponent was Swedish-born Minnesota Republican Congressman Charles A. Lindbergh, father of the later-famous aviator. "This [Federal Reserve] Act establishes the most gigantic trust on Earth," said Lindbergh. "When the President signs this bill, the invisible government by the Monetary Power will be legalized. The people may not know it immediately but the day of reckoning is only a few years removed.... The worst legislative crime of the ages is perpetrated by this banking bill." In 1913 Lindbergh authored Banking and Currency and the Money Trust. [34]

In 1917 he published Why Is Your Country At War and What Happens to You After the War and Related Subjects, in which he argued that international financial interests had dragged America into World War I for their own benefit. [35].

"The financial system....has been turned over to the Federal Reserve Board," wrote Lindbergh. "That board administers the finance system by authority of....a purely profiteering group. The system is private, conducted for the sole purpose of obtaining the greatest possible profits from the use of other people's money." "To cause high prices, all the Federal Reserve Board will do will be to lower the rediscount rate..., producing an expansion of credit and a rising stock market," wrote Lindbergh. "Then when...business men are adjusted to these conditions, it can check...prosperity in mid career by arbitrarily raising the rate of interest."

The Federal Reserve, warned Rep. Lindbergh, "can cause the pendulum of a rising and falling market to swing gently back and forth by slight changes in the discount rate, or cause violent fluctuations by a greater rate variation and in either case it will possess inside information as to financial conditions and advance knowledge of the coming change, either up or down."

"This," Lindbergh continued, "is the strangest, most dangerous advantage ever placed in the hands of a special privilege class by any Government that ever existed."

These self-serving private bankers care only about their profits, not the public, warned Lindbergh. "They know in advance when to create panics to their advantage," he wrote. "They also know when to stop panic"¦. Inflation and deflation work equally well for them," Lindbergh warned, "when they control finance."

POLITICIZING MONEY

The rationalization for creating the Federal Reserve was that it would remove partisan and self-serving politics from policy decisions about America's money supply. Such decisions, America was told, would henceforth be made objectively by non-politicians uninvolved in the buying and selling of votes. (As comic writer P.J. O'Rourke observed, when government gets involved in buying and selling, the first things to be bought and sold will be politicians.)

The Fed's bankers, Americans were told, would be free to do what is best for the country, not the political party in power at the moment. The Fed was supposed to give us separation of monetary policy and state because, despite its name, the Federal Reserve System is in some ways scarcely more a part of the Federal Government than is the private shipping company Federal Express. The Fed's seven-member Board of Governors is regarded as a Federal Government agency. Its members are appointed by the President of the United States and consented to by the U.S. Senate for staggered 14-year terms. Out of these seven, the President appoints the Fed Chair, currently Janet Yellen, and the Vice Chair, and can reappoint them to a succession of four-year terms. Ms. Yellen will serve as Fed Chair until 2018, when President Trump can replace her.

CAESAR AND CENTRAL BANKS

"It is wholly impossible for a central bank subject to political control, or even exposed to serious political pressure, to regulate the quantity of money in a way conducive to a smoothly functioning market order," wrote economist Friedrich A. Hayek. [36] "A good money, like good law, must operate without regard to the effect that decisions of the issuer will have on known groups or individuals," wrote Hayek. "A benevolent dictator might conceivably disregard these effects," Hayek concluded. "No democratic government dependent on a number of special interests can possibly do so."

The Fed originally had one mandate - to protect the value and stability of the nation's money. In 1979 it was given a second mandate - to carry out monetary policy that produces maximum employment. Some analysts now say the Fed has taken upon itself a third mandate: to boost - or "levitate" - stock market values. The Federal Reserve seems also to have a fourth mandate - to make the economy seem as good as possible in the months leading up to elections [37] The Fed kept interest rates at or near zero during the 8 years of President Obama, making it possible for the government to borrow at virtually no cost. This was a great advantage as Mr. Obama added roughly $1 Trillion to America's debt for each of his 8 years.

But the moment Donald Trump was elected, the Fed moved to raise interest rates - which may be wise in the long run, but which makes it much harder to sustain economic growth and prosperity over the next two elections. Is the Fed and its Keynesian chairwoman Janet Yellen, a professor at the University of California Berkeley, completely non-partisan in making monetary policy?

The Fed has largely used up its bag of such monetary tricks. Like an addictive drug, its fixes of new money no longer stimulate. Its debt manipulations such as Quantitative Easing no longer work.

The Fed drove the interest rate at which government and the giant corporations can borrow to almost zero for President Obama's eight years. Even the Fed's economists know that in the long run this will destroy the economy for those needing interest income, such as elderly bank savers and lenders. The government, however, is totally addicted to borrowing at zero interest and lacks the revenue to cover its huge debts if interest rates rise. The Fed and other Progressive central banks around the world have an odd solution that brings us back to cash: let the interest rates fall below zero. Fall through the looking glass with Alice in Wonderland, many neo-Keynesians now promise, and somehow these even-steeper negative interest rates will cause amazing new economic stimulus.

"Like chemotherapy, negative interest rates are a harsh medicine," writes Bloomberg Business reporter Peter Coy. "It's disorienting when people are paid to borrow and charged to save." [38] It only works when money becomes a drug that distorts reality. Only one thing stands in the way of this Central Bank miracle solution, writes Coy, and that thing is cash. "As long as paper money is available as an alternative for customers who want to withdraw their [bank] deposits, there's a limit to how low central banks can push rates," writes Coy.

THE WAR ON CASH

If people wish to withdraw their cash, why would the banks not just let them take their dollars and go? No, this might unravel today's economic grand illusion and bring the whole game crashing down.

Total physical cash in the U.S. financial system is in the neighborhood of $1.47 Trillion. [39] Americans also hold perhaps up to $10 Trillion worth of electronic "money" in accounts in banks and other niches of the financial system.

The potential nightmare here is that market equities, bonds, mortgages, commercial paper and other wealth based on debt, and derivatives, add up to roughly $337 Trillion. If even a tiny panic or "run" on the system stampeded people into trying to cash out even 1% of these holdings, notes one research firm, these institutions would not have the physical cash to do so. [40]

This is what made the 2008-2009 crash so dangerous. Many people rushed to convert paper holdings to paper cash, which almost crashed the system and the dollar. The "War on Cash" is happening because cash has become intolerably dangerous to the giant illusion built mostly out of debt paper. Our economy is magic that works only when people believe the illusion.

In this war, it is risky to keep money in a bank, but it can also be risky to withdraw your money. Former Speaker of the House Denny Hastert was sentenced to 15 months in jail for not filling out the required government forms to withdraw his own money from his own bank account. Banks are now required to spy on you, to notify the government of any "unusual" or large transaction. Any cash you carry might be subject to civil asset forfeiture, with government keeping your cash unless you can prove to the government's satisfaction that you legally own it.

Our unbacked fiat currency itself is also an illusion. Do not be surprised when the International Monetary Fund (IMF) takes away the U.S. Dollar's monopoly as the Global Reserve Currency and gives the Chinese Yuan a share of that once-exclusive status. You will not want to be wholly invested in dollars or dollar-denominated stocks if or when that day comes - unless you have diversified a portion of your portfolio into gold. Gold has the old-fashioned virtue of being real, proven money for thousands of years.

TODAY'S TWO-CENT DOLLAR

What strange fruit have over 100 years of Fed meddling with America's money supply produced? You can see where the Fed has taken us with a glance at the Federal Reserve Notes most people now call money. When the Fed began, a $50 gold certificate included the words "Will Pay to the Bearer on Demand $50," making it clear that this piece of paper was merely a promissory note held in lieu of real money, a fixed and convertible quantity of gold.

Before the Fed became overseer of America's money, the economy rose and fell, with dollars slightly gaining or losing purchasing power. Overall the dollar grew in strength and value, so that what cost $100 in 1829 could be purchased for only about $64 in 1913. The gold dollar was not only a reliable store of value, but also an excellent investment in an appreciating asset.

After the Fed began to tighten its control over our money, the path of the dollar has been almost entirely downhill through inflation. Today's debased dollar has the purchasing power of only two 1913 pennies, a scant 2 /100ths of the 1913 dollar.

During World War I President Woodrow Wilson effectively took the dollar off the gold standard by making it extremely difficult to convert dollars to gold. Conservative Republican Presidents Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge brought America back quickly from a sudden sharp recession in 1920-21 by slashing government spending and the size of the Federal Government. Under their successor, Progressive Republican Herbert Hoover, the Fed contracted the money supply when a fever of margin stock buying tanked the Stock Market in 1929. The Fed's and Hoover's ill-advised attempts at economic engineering, as Milton Friedman later documented, turned what probably would have been just another short recession into a Great Depression that government interference in the economy made worse for more than a decade.

CONTROL FREAKS

Only the self-regulating feedback loops of a free marketplace can keep things operating optimally. When Progressives and their brother collectivists try to run an economy by command from a central authority, things sooner or later always crash and burn. Fed and politician efforts to abolish the business cycle and redistribute the capital they call wealth have incessantly made a mess of things.

Progressive collectivists inherited the most powerful and vibrant economy in the history of humankind in 1913, and they have choked it down to a nation with less than two percent annual growth, chronic high unemployment, and a War on Poverty that poverty won after taxpayers expended more than $21 Trillion dollars.

One-third of Americans have zero saved for retirement, and cannot afford a $500 emergency payment. Half live paycheck to paycheck. Why save when your lack of money means that government will take care of you? The next Progressive goal: a guaranteed universal basic income from the taxpayers, whether you work or not. Progressives, of course, believe that they are smarter than all the rest of us. They are obsessed with power and using it to impose their values, morals and ideas on the rest of us. They believe they CAN create heaven on Earth if only given lots more power, and lots more of other people's money.

"BANKS DON'T DO MUCH BANKING ANYMORE"

So what happens when Progressives try to control our banks? It is bad enough that we have fractional-reserve banking, which in a "too-big-to-fail" world means that government sees a frantic need to prevent bank failure at all costs. When you combine this problem with an endless effort by politicians to use banks as their own ATM to fund ideological and political wishes, you have recurring disasters such as the largely-stagnant Obama economy.

"Four of the five biggest problems in our banks and economy are being caused by the Fed," says Michael Cox, director of the O'Neil Center for Global Markets and Freedom at Southern Methodist University. Cox is also a former Senior Vice President and Chief Economist at the Federal Reserve Bank in Dallas, Texas. According to Dr. Cox, the Fed and Dodd-Frank rules have over-regulated banks, making them reluctant to lend money to anyone (except government and the wealthy). By flooding banks with money conjured out of thin air, the Fed has put banks in a liquidity trap.

And by keeping interest rates near zero, the Fed has given near-zero incentive to lenders, including bank savers; this has crippled investment capital formation, hiring and growth.

We live in a surreal economy in which the Fed has been lending money at almost no cost to the banks in order to provide liquidity; and the banks, because they fear being accused of making bad loans, lend that money back to the Fed in exchange for roughly 2% interest, risk-free.

Economist David Malpass, President Trump's Treasury Undersecretary for International Affairs, once wrote in the Wall Street Journal that "the banking system had lent over 18% of its entire assets to the Fed, $2.6 Trillion of the $14 Trillion in total assets." [41]

The Fed, in other words, pays big banks NOT to make risky loans to working people and companies. [42] This way the government can run on almost free borrowed money, using inflation of the dollar as invisible taxation. Giant corporations can buy back their own stock with borrowed money to appear profitable, without having to make successful products. And giant banks can do what they like best: speculative investing, not mundane home and car loans.

(This is why the "too-big-to-fail" banks have grown more than 30 percent, but more than 14 percent of small community banks that ordinary people and businesses depend on have disappeared or merged, since the burst bubble of home loans in 2008-2009 that still devastates our economy.)

"Banks," as one reporter put it, "don't do much banking anymore." [43] This is why business loans increasingly come from financial sources other than banks, and usually cost more than old-fashioned bank loans. Those who want the security of retiring with modest, solid interest from a bank account get herded into risky casinos like the stock market.

This is why, as President Trump's economic advisor Gary Cohn again said, we need to consider again splitting banks into either lending banks or investment banks"¦and we need to repeal all or most of the Dodd-Frank law so that banking can again be banking. [44]

We no longer live in a free market economy. Our nation's investment resources flow not to rational productive enterprises but to the Federal Government, its cronies, and the Federal Reserve, in part because banks fear vast regulatory powers. This grows the already-wildly-obese government and its number of dependents even larger.

If present trends continue, then by roughly 2035 the giant "non-discretionary" programs Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, plus rising interest payments on our soaring national debt, will devour every dollar in the Federal Budget. Not a penny will be left for infrastructure repair, the space program, scientific research, or national defense - unless the government raids the nation's retirement and other bank accounts.

THE GREAT WITHDRAWAL

So what has come of the politicizing of our banks, our currency, and our lives? Only approximately 100 million Americans pay at least 97 percent of all personal income taxes, and pull the wagon that the majority rides in.

Roughly 100 million Americans are receiving one or another form of means-tested welfare. Under President Obama, at least 49.5 percent of American households had someone who gets a government check, which in most cases gives everyone in that household an incentive to keep such checks coming and growing larger.

Welcome to the "too big to fail" welfare state, where future elections may become little more than bidding wars in which politicians win by promising the most free goodies and by most loudly demonizing those who will be taxed to pay for it.

CLASS WARFARE

The Class Warfare game behind this is all too obvious. "See that evil banker over there who refused to give you a home or car loan?" says the Progressive politician. "We're going to force him to give you a loan, or we'll put him out of business." Out of such politics came the Community Reinvestment Act, a huge government-made bubble in home prices, and a collapse that devastated home values and destroyed nearly 40 percent of the average family's net worth. [45]

America already has 15 states in which welfare pays more than a minimum wage job, thereby destroying the incentive to take such jobs. In Hawaii, welfare pays more than one would earn, after taxes, from a $60,000 per year job. When fewer work and pay taxes, more must be taxed away from those who still do work in order to sustain and expand the welfare state - and the voters who keep its Progressive politicians in office.

With an ever-growing lust for more revenue, politicians logically look for new ways to take it from our banks. President Obama did this by using the regulatory state to milk huge amounts of money from corporations in general and banks in particular to fund his Executive Branch of the Federal Government. Obama regulators squeezed $15 Billion - more than one percent of a trillion dollars - out of just one company, the bank JPMorgan Chase, in assorted penalties. JP Morgan as a result laid off 6,000 workers, adding to the unemployment burden on the economy and welfare state.

The Obama Administration extorted at least $44.95 Billion in settlements from five of America's largest banks, and shook down American banks, combined, for as much as $128 Billion. [46] President Obama's Administration imposed de facto taxes on America's banks (and other corporations) in the form of penalties and fines, to enrich not only the government, but also his ideological comrades. The leftist stick came with two small carrots to make this bank robbery more tolerable. Those bank executives who gave in and surrendered billions would not go to prison for their alleged financial high crimes, despite threats that they were "not too big to jail." And the banks were given the choice of paying less - if they agreed to pay a hefty portion of their fines and penalties to radical community activist groups that contributed to, and organized voters for, Mr. Obama's party.

At least $3 Billion of bank penalties went not to the U.S. Treasury to benefit taxpayers, and not to innocent victims of alleged bank wrongdoing - but to "non-victim entities" including la Raza, the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, and the Mutual Housing Association of New York, the latest reincarnation of ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now. ACORN disintegrated after it was implicated in widespread attempts at voter registration fraud. Its Illinois branch employed a young leftist radical steeped in Saul Alinsky tactics -- Barack Obama.

The billions President Obama got by intimidation were not taken solely from bank shareholders. They were also taken from depositors who no longer got free checking and other benefits, or paid new penalties for services, or were paid a lot less interest than before on savings accounts. [47] These are ways your bank made you involuntarily donate to the left-wing activists and political campaigns associated with President Obama.

The Obama Administration made it clear that they intended to impose huge penalties on the same banks again and again, as if these highly-regulated enterprises could be repeatedly looted as the President's personal ideological ATM machines. What Mr. Obama did, said former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, was "worse than a mafia shakedown." [48]

In 1819, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall wrote that "the power to tax involves the power to destroy." We are now beginning to learn that government's power to regulate is also the power to kill. President Trump has slashed regulations, and he seems far less likely to abuse regulatory power than did his predecessor.

CYPRUS, U.S.A.

One vast pool of money in America not yet seized by politicians is our retirement accounts - 401(k)s, IRAs, pension funds and more - that add up to more than $19.5 Trillion dollars.

The Obama Administration was acutely aware of what Argentina did in 2008 - how its government struck in the dead of night. People there woke up the next day to find that the money saved in their bank retirement accounts was gone. In its place was an equal face value in Argentine government bonds.

Trouble was, the real market value of those bonds was only about 29 percent of their face value - so in the name of protecting the people, the government in effect stole nearly three-quarters of their retirement savings.

The Obama Administration considered an even bigger expropriation of retirement accounts here. When an exploitable crisis provides a pretext, do not be surprised if the next Progressive government suddenly confiscates the money in our accounts - as happened in Cyprus.

When President Barack Obama and his party controlled both houses of Congress, Democratic lawmakers in the Dodd-Frank law created a powerful new regulatory agency, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), funded not by Congress but directly by the Federal Reserve.

The CFPB's Obama-appointed director boasted that he was "exploring" ways to control Americans' 401(k)s, IRAs and other retirement plans. "The runaway, unaccountable regulators at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau would like to 'protect' the IRAs of U.S. citizens by making them into a $20 Trillion ATM for the government," warned famed financial author George Gilder.

Like Argentinians, American savers could "be forced to buy Federal debt" by having their savings seized and replaced with government bonds," wrote Forbes Magazine columnist William Tucker. These bonds would be the basis of an annuity that paid a fixed, small amount; could never be withdrawn; and that like Social Security would go back to the government, not your children, when you die.

In 2013 the Democrat-controlled U.S. Senate suddenly erased a long-established rule allowing filibusters against certain presidential appointees. President Obama immediately used this change to pack the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals with judges who share his ideology. This is the second most important court in America, the court that prevents regulators from abusing their power.

The packed court then ruled that the CFPB was not constitutionally funded, and the CFPB has appealed this ruling. But despite this good news, the fast-growing power of the regulatory state creates huge uncertainty over what politicians and the "deep state" might soon be able to do with banks and their customer accounts. It may have opened the door to government confiscation of the wealth of banks and savers.

INFLATION: THE STEALTH TAX

In the United States and other major Western nations, easy-money-addicted, spendaholic politicians eager to print debased money have run up what a December 2013 International Monetary Fund (IMF) Working Paper by two famous Harvard University economists describes as the greatest "debt in 200 years." [49]

The best way to deal with "the endgame" to this "global financial crisis" of stratospheric debt, propose Harvard economists Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, is a combination of debt restructuring, deliberate inflation, a "variety of capital controls under the umbrella of macroprudential regulation," and "an opaque tax on savers" (emphasis added) using "financial repression" to siphon off the purchasing power from saver bank deposits. This kind of stealth confiscatory tax, targeting private savings accounts, is in keeping with the theories of late British economist John Maynard Keynes, who wrote of the "paradox of thrift."

Thrift since ancient times had been seen as a virtue, but in the new Progressive Keynesian economics thrift was seen as evil. Keynesians deem it evil because when thrifty people save money, this slows its velocity through the economy and thereby makes their nation less prosperous.

Inflation is a hidden tax that relentlessly expropriates money from such savers' bank accounts and allows governments to steal its value merely by printing debased paper fiat money.

Progressive economist John Maynard Keynes in his 1919 book The Economic Consequences of the Peace wrote this: "Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalist System was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens...."

"As the inflation proceeds and the real value of the currency fluctuates wildly from month to month," Keynes continued, "all permanent relations between debtors and creditors, which form the ultimate foundation of capitalism, become so utterly disordered as to be almost meaningless; and the process of wealth-getting degenerates into a gamble and a lottery."

"Lenin was certainly right," Keynes concluded. "There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose." [50]

Inflation makes a nation's currency and economy weaker, and it also makes that nation's individual citizens weaker, less self-reliant and independent, more insecure, and more willing to surrender their rights to a protective, paternalistic government.

PICKPOCKET POLICY

"Inflation is as violent as a mugger, as frightening as an armed robber and as deadly as a hit man," said Ronald Reagan, who understood that "inflation" is just another word for theft of people by government.

What is a saver to think, therefore, when Federal Reserve chair Janet Yellen, like her immediate predecessor Ben Bernanke, says that it is the Fed's aim to deliberately create at least two percent inflation, enough over the next 15 years to steal a third of the purchasing power of the dollars we struggle to save for retirement?

Two famed Austrian economists understood this perfectly, as we showed in our book The Inflation Deception. "Inflation is not an act of God," said Ludwig von Mises. "Inflation is a policy."

"History is largely a history of inflation, usually inflations engineered by governments for the gain of governments," said Nobel Laureate Friedrich A. Hayek. Hayek advocated free competition among currencies - letting you freely choose the most reliable and honest currencies or gold with which to buy or sell or save - as one way to deter governments from debasing their own money to make their exports cheaper and to sneakily rob their own citizens.

Remember that when dealing with banks, your savings' real value is stored in at least two places - the bank itself, and the "store of value" of the currency in which your bank accounts are denominated, usually U.S. Dollars. Government can loot both.

The essence of "Financial Repression" is that Fed and federal policymakers are deliberately shrinking the value of dollars via inflation faster than your deposit is permitted to gain value from interest. This is a key reason that you lose purchasing power every day that you have a bank account, even if in the end you withdraw roughly the same number of dollars safely. Each dollar is worth less than when you deposited it. The Federal Reserve aims to create 2% per year inflation, which would erase approximately 10 percent of your savings every 5 years, and 80% of your real savings during a 40-year lifetime of work. The paper dollar is therefore no longer a safe haven of value for your earnings.

The write-downs of debt that Reinhart and Rogoff propose would likely be done via "monetizing" the debt, printing vast amounts of paper currency out of thin air. This will trigger high inflation and greatly diminish the purchasing power of dollars people have saved. Some will benefit from this, especially the government and those whose savings were in solid things such as gold that will rise in value as the dollar falls. It could bankrupt those who trusted paper dollars as a reliable store of value.

President Obama's Keynesian economic policymakers have targeted American savings accounts not only because this is where most of the last vast pools of private wealth are - but also because their aim is to punish thrift and transfer saver wealth into the hands of Big Government spenders for redistribution. Another IMF study, titled "Taxing Times," calls for a global "'capital levy' - a one-off tax on private wealth." This tax, the study advises, ought to be "implemented before avoidance is possible," apparently by surprise against the assets of the wealthy. And what are the assets easiest for government to locate, lock up and easily confiscate? Bank savings accounts. [51]

THE $34,000 QUESTION

You might not think of yourself as wealthy, but if you earn more than $34,000 per year you are among the top one percent of income earners on Earth....and the IMF's aim is global wealth redistribution. The world's current astronomical debt crisis could be solved, this IMF study predicts, with a "one time" levy "of about 10 percent on households with positive net wealth."

As Forbes columnist Bill Frezza noted, this IMF tax will go after everybody with property or bank accounts, "everyone with retirement savings or home equity...would have their assets plundered under the IMF's formulation." [52]

"Financial wealth is mobile," write the IMF experts, who call for "enhanced international cooperation to make it harder for the very well-off to evade taxation by placing funds elsewhere." International tax havens, as the banks of Cyprus were before the regulators and financial controls took them over in 2013, must be ended to achieve "a revenue-maximizing approach to taxing the rich...." "There is a surprisingly large amount of experience to draw on, as such levies [on the wealthy] were widely adopted in Europe after World War I," write the IMF experts.

"And we all know how well that worked out," retorts Frezza. Many successful Europeans fled with their wealth, leaving poverty and politicians behind. Germany's Weimar Republic sought prosperity as today's governments have - not through productivity but a printing press churning out endless debased paper currency that enriched speculators, not producers. The resulting devastation of conservative values such as a work ethic and thrift paved the way to a Great Depression and dictatorship.

THE ANTI-PROGRESSIVE CONCLUSION

If you wish to save your savings, withdraw them now before the perfect storm strikes and confiscates them. Convert a surviving remnant of your cash into something of proven, solid value that the politicians cannot run off a printing press. You can already see the perfect storm converging, the flashes of its lightning, and the evidence that its targets include your bank account. You may have only hours or days before this storm strikes your savings account. But if you free a portion of your money now from the traps of paper currency and bank accounts, your life savings will become much safer.

The government would justify its action, of course, as "protecting our retirement accounts." Any money taken will be replaced with government debt paper, in effect IOUs, as happened in Argentina. Unlike IRAs or 401(k)s, your retirement money could be redistributed to others who never saved a penny.

Your retirement savings might, in effect, be turned into Social Security Version 2.0, and employers may soon be forced to fund such accounts for all employees - based on required buying of government debt so government can keep growing bigger.

President Obama, for example, offered to let working poor people participate in a version of a federal worker retirement program he called "Myra." This program would allow workers to acquire government bonds, the same sort of debt paper that foreign nations are now reluctant to buy from us out of fear its obligation might never be repaid. The bonds Mr. Obama offered the poor were paying a bank-like interest rate of 1.7 percent. Mr. Obama, in other words, recruited even the working poor to help pay for his lavish, oversized government.

WHY MAJOR U.S. BANKS FAIL THEIR "STRESS TEST"

Banks, remember, have been forced to buy government bonds since the early 1800s...and are required to fund even more such government debt today to be allowed to stay in business. The cost of doing this has always been passed on to you in the form of lower rates of interest on your savings.

This is why fractional-reserve banks are required to pass "stress tests" to demonstrate their financial soundness - which for medium-sized banks can mean reserving as little as $3 for every $100 they have in deposits.

In the first stress tests, 29 of 30 American banks "passed" with flying colors. As New York University analysts found, however, with even tiny adjustments to test standards, 5 of the 6 biggest banks would have failed. And one economist notes that, even with its power to print money out of thin air, the Federal Reserve would fail its own "stress test" standards.

When former Harvard University Economics Professor Terry Burnham considered this, it led him to withdraw $1 Million from his own account at one of our nation's biggest banks, the Bank of America. [53] Dr. Burnham no longer trusts big banks to return his money or the Fed to make sound policy.

Dr. Burnham earned a Ph.D. in Business Economics from Harvard and a Masters from the MIT Sloan School with a concentration in finance. He also has worked for Goldman, Sachs & Co. He understands what is now happening better than most do.

Dr. Burnham expresses what we have been saying for years - that the risk of putting your life savings in a bank account is now far higher than the near-zero reward. It simply no longer makes logical sense to put your nest egg at such risk for little or no interest.

"Eventually, the absurd effort to create wealth through monetary policy will unravel in the U.S. as it has every other time it has been tried," writes Burnham, "from Weimar Germany to Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe."

"Ever since Alan Greenspan intervened to save the stock market on October 20, 1987, the Fed has sought to cushion every financial blow by adding liquidity," writes Burnham. "The trouble with trying to make the world safe for stupidity is that it creates fragility"¦.We need a system that promotes stability and allows people (not printing presses) to make us richer."

"But if Bank of America is not safe, where can you and I put our money?" asks Burnham. His suggested options: keep some cash at home, even though this has its own risks; pay off debts; pre-pay taxes and other obligations; and try to find a safer bank.

"Someone should start a bank...that charges (rather than pays) interest and does not make loans," writes Burnham. "Such a bank would be a good example of how the Fed actions create unintended outcomes that defeat their goals. The Fed wants to stimulate lending, but an anti-lending bank could be quite successful. I would be a customer."

When politicians go wild printing currency, we wrote in our book Crashing the Dollar, "the conversion of evaporating paper money into almost anything durable - gold, furniture, antiques...will retain value better than a politician's promissory note, i.e., paper fiat money like Weimar's Mark or today's U.S. Dollar."

We now see what the Fed has done to debase our dollar as a store of value, and how the Fed and Federal Government have used regulation to turn our once-trustworthy banks into ATMs for greedy politicians.

WHAT CAN YOU "BANK ON"?

Every day we slip closer to a "cashless" society where our savings, credit and legal identity are mere ghosts of electrons blipping across computer screens and silicon memory chips. How secure are we in a world of military and mercenary computer hackers?

Or with terrorists soon armed with nuclear devices that emit an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) able to eradicate computer circuits for up to hundreds of miles around ground zero? Or we may face an even stranger threat such as a giant solar flare that could shut down most of our computer networks, and therefore our banks and stock exchanges. Such a "Carrington Event" flare devastated the world's telegraphs in 1859.

Millions of us have trusted our savings and our future to computers and the worldwide web, but now we are discovering that this spider web is a risky place.

The bigger government gets, the hungrier it becomes. It continues rapaciously to devour private wealth in America, despite President Trump's efforts to stop this. Politicians are now eyeing America's biggest banks and the bank accounts in them, because that's where the money is.

You urgently need to rescue a portion of your savings from the bank, and from paper dollars, and reinvest this into things that cannot be run off a printing press or computer in Washington, D.C., such as physical gold and silver coins.

You have invested in politicized money and politicized banks. To secure what you have worked so hard for, you need to diversify, to put a portion of your savings into solid investments that are universally-accepted, reliable stores of value that cannot be stolen or destroyed by inflation, computer terrorism and hacking, or politicians. Become your own banker, and create your own savings that are as good as gold.

FOOTNOTES

1 https://www.forbes.com/sites/antoinegara/2020/01/22/americas-best-banks-2020/?sh=35f4d5cf4392
2 https://www.cbsnews.com/news/bad-debt-100-billion-biggest-banks/
3 https://qz.com/1918462/big-bank-earnings-show-worst-is-yet-to-come-for-us-economy/
4 https://securityboulevard.com/2020/12/banking-industry-faces-surge-in-cyber-security-challenges/
[5] Sintia Radu, "Chase Bank Computer System Was Down Most of Monday," Washington Post, July 4, 2017. URL: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/business/wp/2017/07/03/chase-bank-website-down-ahead-of-independence-day/?utm_term=.68e1c7c0f75a; Kristin Broughton and Allison Prang, "Chase Outage Knocks Out Payments Service for Customers Nationwide," American Banker, May 11, 2017. URL: https://www.americanbanker.com/news/chase-outage-knocks-out-payments-services-for-customers-nationwide
[6] Ryan McMaken, "In A Cashless World, You'd Better Pray The Power Never Goes Out," ZeroHedge, October 11, 2017. URL: http://www.zerohedge.com/print/605093
[7] Lowell Ponte, "The Unseen Storm: It Could Put America Underwater F0rever," PontificationBlog, September 11, 2017. URL: https://pontificationblog.wordpress.com/2017/09/11/the-unseen-storm/
[8] Yian Q. Mui, "Americans Saw Wealth Plummet 40 Percent from 2007 to 2010, Federal Reserve Says," Washington Post, June 11, 2012. URL: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/fed-americans-wealth-dropped-40-percent/2012/06/11/gJQAlIsCVV_story.html?utm_term=.b8f9a4989789
[9] Deborah DSouza, "Trump Orders Review of Dodd-Frank, Repeal of Fiduciary Rules (GS), Investopedia, February 3, 2017. URL: http://www.investopedia.com/news/trump-scale-back-doddfrank-repeal-fiduciary-rule-wsj-gs/
[10] Glenn Thrush, "Trump Vows to Dismantle Dodd-Frank "˜Disaster'," New York Times, January 30, 2017. URL: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/30/us/politics/trump-dodd-frank-regulations.html?_r=0
[11] "Banks Don't Do Much Banking Anymore - and That's a Serious Problem," Pacific Standard, February 3, 2014. URL: https://psmag.com/banks-don-t-do-much-banking-anymore-and-that-s-a-serious-problem-d9c1fe47d0a8
[12] Elizabeth Dexheimer, "Cohn Backs Wall Street Split of Lending, Investment Banks, Bloomberg, April 6, 2017. URL: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-04-06/cohn-said-to-back-wall-street-split-of-lending-investment-banks; "Gary Cohn Supports Splitting Lending and Investment Banks: Bloomberg," CNBC, April 6, 2017. URL: http://www.cnbc.com/2017/04/06/gary-cohn-supports-splitting-lending-and-investment-banks-bloomberg.html; Ryan Tracy and Emily Glazer, "Gary Cohn Backs Breaking Up Big Banks," Wall Street Journal, April 6, 2017. URL: https://www.wsj.com/articles/gary-cohn-backs-breaking-up-big-banks-1491491219; Lionel Laurent, "The Warning to Investors in Cohn's Glass-Steagall Wish," Bloomberg, April 6, 2017. URL: https://www.bloombergquint.com/gadfly/2017/04/06/the-warning-to-investors-in-cohn-s-glass-steagall-wish
[13] Christina Rexrode, "Rate Increases Can Be Slow to Trickle Down to Your Deposits - Update," Morningstar, March 15, 2017.
[14] Ibid.
[15] Carmen M. Reinhart, "Financial Repression Back to Stay," Bloomberg, March 11, 2012. URL: http:// www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-03-11/financial-repression-has-come-back-to-stay-carmen-m-reinhart. html; Carmen M. Reinhart and M. Belen Sbrancia, "The Liquidation of Government Debt," National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) Working Paper # 16893. March 2011. URL: http://www.imf.org/ external/np/seminars/eng/2011/res2/pdf/crbs.pdf; Alberto Giovanni and Martha De Melo, "Government Revenues from Financial Repression," American Economic Review, Vol. 83 #4 (September 1993). URL: http://www.jstor.org/discover/10. 2307/2117587 uid=3739560&uid=2&uid=4&uid=3739256&s id=21101221127691; Buttonwood, "Carmen Reinhart and Financial Repression," The Economist, January 10, 2012. URL: http://www.economist.com/blogs/buttonwood/2012/01/debt-crisis/print; Member of the European Parliament Nigel Farage, "Europe Is About to Impose Extreme Repression," King World News (Interview), June 22, 2012. URL: http://kingworldnews.com/kingworld- news/KWN_DailyWeb/ Entries/2012/6/22_Nigel_Farage_-_Europe_is_About_to_Impose_Ex- treme_Repression.html
[16] For a detailed discussion of what happened in Cyprus, see Craig R. Smith and Lowell Ponte, The Great Withdrawal: How the Progressives' 100-Year Debasement of America and the Dollar Ends. Phoenix: Idea Factory Press, 2013. Pages 143-172.
[17] "Resolving Globally Active, Systemically Important, Financial Institutions: A Joint Paper by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Bank of England" (monograph), December 10, 2012. URL: http://www.fdic.gov/about/srac/2012/gsifi.pdf; Ellen Brown, "It Can Happen Here: The Bank Confiscation Scheme for US and UK Depositors," Global Research, March 29, 2013. Global Research is a journal of the Centre for Research on Globalization in Montreal, Canada.
[18] Bob Howard, "HSBC Imposes Limitations on Large Cash Withdrawals," BBC News, January 24, 2014. URL: http://www.bbc.com/news/business-25861717
[19] Tyler Durden, "Creeping Capital Controls at JPMorgan Chase?" ZeroHedge, October 16, 2013. URL: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-10-16/creeping-capital-controls-jpmorgan-chase
[20] Laura Mowat, "Banking Warning: Computers of Financial Institutes Around the World Attacked by Hackers," U.K. Express, February 11, 2017. URL: http://www.express.co.uk/news/world/766154/banks-warning-computer-hackers-finances-attacked-Kaspersky
[21] Sarah Vanier, "The Most Devastating Cyber Attacks on Banks," SentinelOne, August 10, 2016. URL: https://sentinelone.com/blogs/the-most-devastating-cyber-attacks-on-banks/
[22] Kevin D. Freeman, Economic Warfare: Risks and Responses: Analysis of Twenty-First Century Risks in Light of the Recent Market Collapse (Monograph). Cross Consulting and Services, 2009.
[23] Robert Preston, "Russia 'Planned Wall Street Bear Raid,'" BBC News, March 17, 2014. URL: http://www.bbc.com/news/business-26609548?print=true
[24] Rachel Ehrenfeld and Alyssa A. Lappen, "The Fifth Generation Warfare," FrontPageMagazine.com, June 20, 2008.
[25] Eamon Javers, "Pentagon Preps for Economic Warfare," Politico, April 9, 2009. URL: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0409/21053.html; Jonathon M. Seidl, "Pentagon Has Been "˜War Gaming' for Economic Disaster Since Early "˜09," TheBlaze.com, December 7, 2010. URL: http://www.theblaze.com/stories/pentagon- has-been-war-gaming-for-economic-disaster-since-early-09/
[26] Jim Kouri, "$1 Trillion Lost Annually to Cyber Crime, Say U.S. Senators," Examiner.com, May 24, 2011. URL: http://www.examiner.com/public-safety-in-national/1-trillion-lost-annually-to-cyber-crime-say-u-s-senators
[27] Olga Belogolova, "Mullen Addresses Debt, New National Security Team," National Journal, April 28, 2011. URL: http://www.nationaljournal.com/nationalsecurity/mullen-addresses-debt-new-national-security-team-20110428
[28] Michael MacKenzie and Telis Demos, "Fears Linger of a New "˜Flash Crash,'" Financial Times, May 5, 2011. See also John Melloy, "Year After May 6 "˜Flash Crash,' Rumblings of a Stock Correction," Cnbc.com, May 4, 2011. URL: http://www.cnbc.com/id/42899594/Year_After_May_6_Flash_ Crash_Rumblings_of_a_Stock_Correction
[29] Lowell Ponte, "Terrorism Central?" FrontPageMagazine.com, August 18, 2003. URL: http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=16740
[30] Kevin D. Freeman, Game Plan: How to Protect Yourself from the Coming Cyber-Economic Attack. Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 2014. Freeman is also author of Secret Weapon: How Economic Terrorism Brought Down the U.S. Stock Market and Why It Can Happen Again. Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 2012.
[31] George Selgin and Larry White, "How Would the Invisible Hand Handle Money?" Journal of Economic Literature, Vol. 32 No. 4 (1994). Pages 1718-1749.
[32] Robert P. Murphy, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Capitalism. Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 2007. Pages 94-95.
[33] Pallavi Gogol and Barbara Hagenbaugh, "Billions of AIG's Federal Aid Went to Foreign Banks," USA Today, March 17, 2009. URL: http://www.usatoday.com/money/companies/manage- ment/2009-03-16-some-aig-billions-went-to-banks_N.htm;
[34] Charles August Lindbergh, Banking and Currency and the Money Trust. Washington, D.C.: National Capital Press, 1913. Google books reading copy: URL: http://books.google.com /books?id=B9IZAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v= onepage &q&f=false
[35] Charles August Lindbergh, Why Is Your Country At War and What Happens to You After the War and Related Subjects. Washington, D.C.: National Capital Press, 1917. Google books reading copy: URL: http://books.google.com/books?id=qzAWAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false
[36] Friedrich A. Hayek, Denationalisation of Money: The Argument Refined: An Analysis of the Theory and Practice of Concurrent Currencies. Third Edition. London: Institute of Economic Affairs, 1990. This can be downloaded from the Internet at no cost from http://mises.org/books/denation- alisation.pdf
[37] Patrick Allen, "The Fed Will Make Sure Obama Wins in 2012: Strategist," CNBC, April 28, 2011. URL: http://www.cnbc.com/id/42794512/The_Fed_Will_Make_Sure_Obama_ Wins_in_ 2012_Strategist
[38] Peter Coy, "The Death of Cash," Bloomberg Business, April 23, 2015. URL: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-04-23/negative-interest-rates-may-spark-existential-crisis-for-cash
[39] The $1.47 Trillion estimate of U.S. currency in circulation is as of February 22, 2017. Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System,"How Much U.S. Currency is in Circulation?" Current FAQs. URL: https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/currency_12773.htm
[40] "Why Central Banks HATE Cash and Will Begin to Tax It Shortly," Zerohedge, May 18, 2015. URL: http://www.zerohedge.com/print/506627
[41] David Malpass,"The Fed's Taper Is Already Paying Off," Wall Street Journal, March 13, 2014. URL: https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304250204579432931749236634
[42] Caroline Baum, "Opinion: Why the Fed Paid Banks Not to Lend," MarketWatch, March 24, 2017. URL: http://www.marketwatch.com/story/why-the-fed-paid-banks-not-to-lend-2017-03-22
[43] "Banks Don't Do Much Banking Anymore - and That's a Serious Problem," Pacific Standard, February 3, 2014. URL: https://psmag.com/banks-don-t-do-much-banking-anymore-and-that-s-a-serious-problem-d9c1fe47d0a8
[44] Elizabeth Dexheimer, "Cohn Backs Wall Street Split of Lending, Investment Banks, Bloomberg, April 6, 2017. URL: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-04-06/cohn-said-to-back-wall-street-split-of-lending-investment-banks; "Gary Cohn Supports Splitting Lending and Investment Banks: Bloomberg," CNBC, April 6, 2017. URL: http://www.cnbc.com/2017/04/06/gary-cohn-supports-splitting-lending-and-investment-banks-bloomberg.html; Ryan Tracy and Emily Glazer, "Gary Cohn Backs Breaking Up Big Banks," Wall Street Journal, April 6, 2017. URL: https://www.wsj.com/articles/gary-cohn-backs-breaking-up-big-banks-1491491219; Lionel Laurent, "The Warning to Investors in Cohn's Glass-Steagall Wish," Bloomberg, April 6, 2017. URL: https://www.bloombergquint.com/gadfly/2017/04/06/the-warning-to-investors-in-cohn-s-glass-steagall-wish
[45] For a detailed description of the Community Reinvestment Act's impact on housing and our economy, see Craig R. Smith and Lowell Ponte, Crashing the Dollar: How to Survive a Global Currency Collapse. Phoenix: Idea Factory Press, 2010. Pages 40-54 and 57-70.
[46] Andy Koenig, "Look Who's Getting That Bank Settlement Cash," Wall Street Journal, August 28, 2016. URL: https://www.wsj.com/articles/look-whos-getting-that-bank-settlement-cash-1472421204; "Holder Cut Left-Wing Groups In On $17 Bil BofA Deal," Investor's Business Daily, August 27, 2014. URL: http://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/holders-bank-of-america-settlement-includes-payoffs-to-democrat-groups/; Andrew C. McCarthy, "Holder's Bank of America Heist Funds Left's Community-Organizer Shock Troops," National Review, August 28, 2014. URL: http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/386539/holders-bank-america-heist-funds-lefts-community-organizer-shock-troops-andrew-c; Robert Donachie, "Tens of Millions In "˜Consumer Relief' Funds Going To Liberal Activists," Daily Caller, August 30, 2016. URL: http://dailycaller.com/2016/08/30/tens-of-millions-in-consumer-relief-funds-going-to-liberal-activists/; Pam Key, "Schweizer: Obama's Justice Department Is Using Bank Fines to Fund Left-Wing Groups," Breitbart, October 24, 2016. URL: http://www.breitbart.com/video/2016/10/24/schweizer-obamas-justice-department-is-using-bank-fines-to-fund-left-wing-groups/; Matthew Vadum, "Bank Fines Elect Democrats," FrontPage Magazine, October 28, 2016. URL: http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/264647/bank-fines-elect-democrats-matthew-vadum
[47] Melissa Jacobs, "GOP Wants to Eliminate Shadowy DOJ Slush Fund Leftist Groups," Fox News, March 1, 2017. URL: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2017/03/01/gop-wants-to-eliminate-shadowy-doj-slush-fund-bankrolling-leftist-groups.html
[48] "Huckabee Rips DOJ's "˜Slush Fund Scheme' for Leftist Groups," WND.com, March 3, 2017. URL: http://www.wnd.com/2017/03/huckabee-rips-dojs-slush-fund-scheme-for-leftist-groups/
[49] Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth S. Rogoff, Financial and Sovereign Debt Crises: Some Lessons Learned and Those Forgotten. IMF Working Paper WP/13/266. Washington, D.C.: International Monetary Fund, December 2013. URL: http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/wp/2013/wp13266.pdf; Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, "IMF Paper Warns of 'Savings Tax' and Mass Write-Offs as West's Debt Hits 200-Year High," London Telegraph, January 2, 2014. URL: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/financialcrisis/10548104/IMF-paper-warns-of-savings-tax-and-mass-write-offs-as-Wests-debt-hits-200-year-high.html
[50] John Maynard Keynes, Essays in Persuasion. New York: W.W. Norton, 1963. Pages 86-87.
[51] Taxing Times, Fiscal Monitor/World Economic and Financial Survey. Washington, D.C.: International Monetary Fund, October 2013. See page 49. URL: http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fm/2013/02/pdf/fm1302.pdf
[52] Bill Frezza, "The International Monetary Fund Lays The Groundwork For Global Wealth Confiscation," Forbes, October 15, 2013. URL: http://www.forbes.com/sites/billfrezza/2013/10/15/the-international-monetary-fund-lays-the-groundwork-for-global-wealth-confiscation/
[53] Terry Burnham, "Is Your Money Safe at The Bank? An Economist Says 'No' and Withdraws His," The PBS NewsHour, January 30, 2014. URL: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/making-sense/is-your-money-safe-at-the-bank-an-economist-says-no-and-withdraws-his/; Tyler Durden, "Why This Harvard Economist Is Pulling All His Money From Bank of America," ZeroHedge, February 1, 2014. URL: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-01-31/why-harvard-economist-pulling-all-his-money-bank-america; Neil Cavuto, "Is Your Money at Risk at Big Banks?" (video of interview with Professor Terry Burnham), February 5, 2014. URL: http://www.foxbusiness.com/on-air/cavuto/index.html#/v/315850252000