Bank Confiscation In Cyprus: One Year Later

SovereignMan  March 17 2014

sovereignManSimonBlackIt was almost exactly one year ago to the day that an entire nation was frozen out of its savings… overnight.

Cypriots went to bed on Friday thinking everything was fine. By the next morning, they had no way to pay bills or buy food.

It’s certainly a chilling reminder of how quickly things can change. And why.

The entire crisis sprang from a mountain of debt. The government had accumulated too much debt. The banking system had accumulated too much debt.

And banks had lost a lot of their customers’ money making risky, stupid bets on things like Greek government bonds.

By March 2013, Cypriot banks were almost entirely devoid of cash.

Sure, customers could log on to a website and check their bank balances.

But there’s a huge difference between a number displayed on a screen, and a well-capitalized bank that actually holds abundant cash.

The government was too insolvent to bail anyone out. And as a member of the eurozone, Cyprus didn’t have the ability to print its own money.

So they did the only thing they could think of– confiscate customer deposits.

And they imposed capital controls on top of that to make sure that people couldn’t withdraw their remaining funds out of the banks as soon as the freeze was lifted.

It was a truly despicable act. But again, even though it all unfolded overnight, the warning signs were building for at least a year. Especially the debt.

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IMF Wants A 71 Percent Tax Rate

Infowars.com  December 13 2013

imf_theftRomain Hatcheul’s largely passed over article on the Wall Street Journal’s website was revisited yesterday by Simon Black over at the Sovereign Man blog. Black spells out the latest IMF scheme to steal wealth from the producers and enslave billions of people: a taxation rate over 70 percent.

“The IMF’s team of monkeys has been working around the clock on this one, figuring that developed nations can increase their overall tax revenue by increasing tax rates,” Black writes. “They’ve singled out the US, suggesting that the US government could maximize its tax revenue by increasing tax brackets to as high as 71%.”

Black notes that the latest criminal plot by the “grand wizards of the global financial system” is telling. It “might be the clearest sign yet that the whole house of cards is dangerously close to being swept away.”

Can a person still be considered “free” when 71% of what s/he earns is taken away at the point of a gun by a bankrupt, bullying government? Or are you merely a serf then, existing only to feed the system?

Hatcheul explains that taxation schemes like the one cooked up by France’s socialist government – a 75% tax on income above one million euros – will not produce the result desired: the wealthy will avoid taxation, as French actor Gérard Depardieu did when he turned over his passport and became a tax exile. French billionaire Bernard Arnault applied for Belgian nationality in response to socialist thievery and penned a piece titled: If U.S. Had 75% Tax Rate, You’d Leave Too. Continue reading

The Financial Game Goes On

WIFLI  October 13 – 19 2013

Kurt Nimmo nicely summarizes October’s first 16 days in American politics with this title, “Yawn. Government Non-shutdown Ends.” An examination of the government’s own figures shows that only 17 % of the government actually did shut down.

Which 17%? The 17 that caused Americans to lose access to services despite the fact that the government itself would lose revenue doing so. “Tasked with selecting which functions of government should be shut down, the Obama administration created a firestorm of negative publicity this week when it ordered rangers to barricade otherwise fully accessible public areas in Washington, including war memorials. An angry Park Service ranger indicated to Washington Times columnist Wesley Pruden that there is a political motive behind the closure of the open-air memorials. “We’ve been told to make life as difficult for people as we can,” he said. “It’s disgusting.”” http://www.wnd.com/2013/10/disgusting-ranger-reveals-shutdown-orders/

As you may recall the government shutdown occurred because America had reached its debt limit and could no longer fund its liabilities without raising the debt ceiling. You would think under the circumstances that expeditious movement and rapid resolution would be the order of the day. Not so.

According to Standard & Poor’s the US government opted instead to rack up a $24 billion price tag for its 16 days of political jousting. “The financial services company said the shutdown, which ended with a deal late Wednesday night after 16 days, took $24 billion out of the U.S. economy, and reduced projected fourth-quarter GDP growth from 3 percent to 2.4 percent.” http://swampland.time.com/2013/10/17/heres-what-the-government-shutdown-cost-the-economy/

The spiteful action of closing the National Parks cost the government $76 million in daily revenue and about $3.1 billion in lost government services.

Feeling sick yet?

Unsurprisingly Obamacare was at the heart of the logjam. This is because Obamacare is an economic time bomb about to explode on the American middle class. It is so costly that much of the disastrous rollout of healthcare.gov was due in large part to the government not wanting people to see the likely costs they would incur before signing up.

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More On Bitcoins And Capital Controls

Sovereign Man March 15 2013

BitcoinEarlier in the week, I wrote to you about an Argentine car rental agency that had started accepting Bitcoins as a means to bypass local capital controls.

We received a lot of questions about the article, the most common of which was “What in the world is a Bitcoin?”

Let’s start by looking at our current monetary system.

In most countries, a small tiny banking elite exercises total control over that nation’s money supply. And we’re just supposed to trust them to be good guys.

Yet central bankers around the world have conjured trillions of dollars out of thin air, debasing the money’s value. It’s a concept any six-year old can understand. If money grew on trees, it wouldn’t be worth very much.

This is one of the key reasons why people buy gold. You can’t just conjure gold out of thin air. It takes years of exploration and investment to pull it out of the ground.

In the information age, though, we have an alternative.

Bitcoin is digital currency. It doesn’t actually exist in our physical world… only in computers.

If this sounds esoteric and far-fetched, it’s not. The vast majority of our monetary system today is already digital.

A very small percentage of all the currency circulating in the world exists in physical notes and bills. The rest of it is merely accounting entries in bank databases. Most financial transactions are just a reshuffling of these database entries. Physical currency seldom changes hands.

Bitcoin is similar in this respect… nothing physical exists. But there are some key advantages.

For one, Bitcoin is not controlled by any government or central bank. And two, it’s private.

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Simon Black ~ Why Is The US Government Planning For ‘Mass Fatalities’ ?

Sovereign Man | October 5 2012

You just can’t make this stuff up.

Late last week, a bill HR 6566 was introduced on the floor of the US House of Representatives. I couldn’t believe my eyes when I read it.

The bill is entitled the “Mass Fatality Planning and Religious Considerations Act,” and its stated purpose is “[t]o amend the Homeland Security Act of 2002 to require the Administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency to provide guidance and coordination for mass fatality planning…”

Hmmmm. Homeland Security. FEMA. Sounds like a fun party.

The bill was introduced a week ago, but it took the US Government Printing Office until this morning to actually make the text available to the public.

It turns out that my weeklong wait was for nothing. The bill itself is just a handful of paragraphs that merely reiterates the title… that the cracker jack team over at FEMA should be prepared to respond to mass fatalities in the United States, and to account for religious burial differences.

This is just one of those things that makes the stomach turn: the people who brought us the National Defense Authorization Act (authorizing the detention of US citizens on US soil) now deem it prudent to prepare for mass fatalities on US soil…

Moreover, they’re outsourcing it to one of the most failed government agencies in history.

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