Monday, October 24, 2011

Interest Rates are likely to never go higher - here's why

Why would banks need to court your deposits? With trillions of dollars of confetti money being printed in the U.S. and EU, nobody needs your money to lend to others because more can be printed.

When the balance sheet of banks get too thin on cash on hand, the Federal Reserve will "shore up" the "too big to fail" balance sheets by buying up US Government assets by creating money out of thin air, then pipe that to the big banks.

Right? If it's now commonplace to print money, why would banks offer you a big percentage rate to "borrow" cash from you so they could lend to others at a slight margin.

Banking as we know it is completely a new world. Up until the invention of all of these esoteric financial games that came with derivatives and insurance hedging against their moves, it became impossible to count money as the zero sum game that it should be. When one person spends a dollar, another person gains a dollar, and the person who spent it is one dollar short.

In today's printing of money, when a big bank is short, it just prints more to cover the shortfall. In the long run, the universe of dollars becomes lopsided because the big banks can do the stupidest things without risk, knowing that they are too big to fail. These things only end in revolution (as far as the history of democracy goes) and we're in a peaceful revolution now. When does it become violent? When there are food shortages.

And that's right around the corner.

1 comment:

CMY said...

Quite honestly, and in all seriousness, hearing this from you (when I've already believed it for a while now) sends shivers through my spine.

I think summer '12 is the breaking point-- that's when it gets violent and ugly..