Just been notified of a half a percent rise in my bank account savings rate :)

FOCUS on sanctions:
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Why the US sanctions are not hitting Putin or Xi - but us

Someone in Washington has pressed the "replay" button. We hear the grim echo of history. For the intellectual basis of today's sanctions policy - which imposes punitive tariffs on rivals and punishes them with trade bans - comes from Woodrow Wilson.

As early as 1910, the then US president recommended economic warfare as the ultimate: "A nation that is comprehensively boycotted has no choice but to surrender. Thanks to this economic, peaceful, silent, but nevertheless deadly medicine, the use of armed forces is no longer necessary."

The belief in the omnipotence of economic sanctions persists to this day. When US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin was asked in 2019 what the US would do about a Turkey that allowed the Kurdish minority to be killed in Syria, he replied, "We can shut down the Turkish economy."

That's what Trump thought. That's what Biden thinks. So thinks Economics Minister Robert Habeck, who is in Washington today. But they are all united in error. The fact is:

Nations resist.

Sanctions fail.

The outcasts forge alliances among themselves.

Take Cuba, for example: to this day, the Caribbean state has not allowed itself to be impressed either by military infiltration or by punitive economic measures. On the contrary: Castro offered his island to the Soviets as a launching pad for nuclear missiles. The former German ambassador to Cuba, Bernd Wulffen, said only recently: "Harsh language or even economic sanctions lead to cementing the bunker mentality in Cuba."

Take Iran, for example: the Islamic Republic, which is hostile to the USA, has reorganised its supply chains and is now in the economic prime of its time. The gross national product has doubled in only three years and, according to an IMF projection, will increase by another twenty percent from 2023 to 2027. The construction of its own atomic bomb is also close to completion, according to all Western experts.

Take Russia, for example: within a very short time, Putin was able to circumvent the sanctions and acquire new import and export partners. The whole world is keen on Russian oil and gas. The world's largest democracy - India - is taking the place of the small German democracy as the buyer of the fossil product range. For 2024, the Russian Federation expects - according to the current forecast of the International Monetary Fund - an economic growth of 2.1 per cent, which is considerably higher than that of the Federal Republic of Germany with 1.4 per cent.

Example China: The US sanctions are the most important driver in the emergence of a Chinese domestic market. Its consumer base exceeds the American domestic market threefold. Under the pressure of Western sanctions, China has formed a powerful economic alliance with Russia, India, Iran and Turkey.

Why is this important?

Because America refuses to acknowledge this inconvenient truth - and is driving itself and its partners into a veritable sanctions frenzy. Agathe Demarais, director of the Economist Intelligence Unit in London, the analysis institute of the Economist, has precisely recorded the increase in sanctions:

US President George W. Bush issued 3484 sanctions against companies, individuals, nations and organisation in eight years
President Donald Trump launched around 3900 sanctions against the same group of people between 2017 and 2020. That was four sanctions per working day.
When Joe Biden took office, the pace increased enormously. Today, the US operates 70 different sanctions programmes out of the Treasury Department, affecting 9000 nations, individuals, states and organisations. In her book "Backfire", Agathe Demarais speaks of "sanction overkill".

Why is this dangerous for German and European companies in particular?

Because the USA has discovered that sanctions may not work on its opponents, but they are all the more effective in the camp of its own friends and economic partners. They are forced to end their hitherto successful economic relations - e.g. with Cuba, Iran, Russia and China - and are pushed to the side of the Americans.

A sanctions monopoly is created that pushes market forces aside. In the absence of alternatives, Germans, French and other NATO countries now buy from the USA, of necessity also expensive liquid gas.

With the threat that the sanction-breaker will be excluded from the US market, political friends are turned into willing trading partners. And if the friend is not willing, fiscal force is used, as Agathe Demarais has researched:

From 2009 to today, American companies have had to pay only 300 million dollars in fines, while other countries have paid a total of 4 billion.
A foreign company pays an average of 139 million US dollars for violating the sanctions regime, while a US company pays an average of only 2 million, 70 times less.

We summarise: Those who are supposed to be hit are not. But the political friends and partners suffer because their previous business is made more expensive, more complicated or impossible.

Perhaps this is the irony of the modern age: the US economic sanctions are working - just in a different way than Woodrow Wilson had intended.
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Another one bites the dust.

Silicon Valley Bank seized by FDIC, marking largest shutdown of a US bank since 2008

Its failure marks the largest shutdown of a US bank since 2008, when Washington Mutual fell during the financial crisis.

ByKEN SWEET AP logo
Friday, March 10, 2023 2:34PM

https://abc30.com/silicon-valley-ban...-svc/12938130/

^ You beat me to that story.

One can only pray that this is not the beginning of another landslide. Just short time ago the Silver Gate Capital Bank learned that it maybe is not a good idea to exclusively focus on financing cryptocurrency- and cyberdeals for its customers; now Silicon Valley Bank, ranked on 16 amongst US banks. SVB is the second biggest fincancier of startups in Silicon Valley with over 30,000 of such starting - or non-starting - customers. The HighTech sector lost feathers in recent weeks and months, and many startups had to withdraw their cash form the bank therefore, consuming it. The bank suffered immense loss of liquidity, trying to counter that by selling bonds worth 21 billion, but under value, since the bank is in an emergency and needed cash at any cost. It now has a deficit of 2 billion dollars. Customers empty their bank accounts in a rush to leave the ship before it sinks. Thats why the bank'S hope to save itself by selling its stocks did not work: it did not generate cash, but cash holders - customers - started to flee in droves. SVB stocks lost 60% value yesterday and was not traded today at all. Its fate now has been sealed by the authorities.

The fear is that this fate will be shared by other banks soon, too, because the economy is such that companies need money and thus emptying their bank accounts, bringing their banks into trouble that way. Banks thus need to sell bonds, but with now raised interest rates it means these bonds get assessed newly and their value is being reduced. This could lead to losses for the banks that mount even further the higher the need for cash by companies becomes: making them emptying their bank accounts even faster. Needing the banks to sell more bonds under value. Rising their losses. The changes in the Fed'S and ECB's interest rates may make sure that although the banks today probabaly would no "infect" each other like 15 years ago, banks individually and independently from each other could get caught in a maelstrom, due to the above explained mechanism.

If we would have a real money, then we would not have this criminal abuse called fractional reserve banking, and these things would not be possible neither in event nor in destructive reach and follow-on effects.

Core inflation is in meltdown mode since three quarters now, showing climbing inflation even in times when the normal inflation seems to stagnate or drop. Not good. Absolutely not good.

Trying to collect the currency units they flooded the market with by raising interests, will soone ror later cause collapse. Not doing so will sooner or later cause collapse. There is no way out anymore. They will sooner or later trigger what harmlessly is called a currency- reform, which means replacing the old one with a new one, a paper FIAT currency of course. It comes at the cost that most people will suffer expropriations not seen since several generations.

I am very, very pessimistic on all this, but that is probably no surprise for anyone here. To me the question is not if, but when.

Bonds should not even be a trading item. They should not even exist. There are so many abstract paper-and-ink inventions they call a "financial product" that are nothing but fraudulent schemes. But the fractional reserve banking madness is at the core of all evil.

"Credit is consumption in advance, which will be omitted in the future." For an intelligent person, this one sentence, written by Ludwig von Mises, is already the content of everything important to know about sound economic principles. That it is not understood shows how completely broken our "money" system and our way of credit-driven economy really is. Alles kaputt. Using credit in an economic cycle can only then not cause desaster if the credit is based on somebody else not consuming and so saving what he is not consuming. Then he actually has something in excess which he can lend to somebody else. But today we allow cretaign credit beign created from nothing, and wiohtoiut consumption renunciation. This is where the system starts to derail. The FIAT "money" and the fractional reserve system were created by states to spend more than their economies could support. And then we are stunned by the desaster that is homing in on us? There is not a single place in the world, not a single country, where peopel actually pay with actual money. We have no money worth that name, nowhere in the world. Bonds, dollars and euros, all that paper bits of leaflets: nothing of that holds a value, nothing of that is "money". Its state-sponsored fraud.

Now you see it. No you don’t! :D

Wells Fargo says 'technical issue' causing customers to report missing deposits

The bank sought to reassure frustrated customers that their accounts remained secure and said it was working to resolve the issue.

March 10, 2023, 4:21 PM EST
By Rob Wile

https://www.nbcnews.com/business/bus...depo-rcna74419

Sounds like the issues with Germany's Postbank and Deutsche Bank trying to melt together. Customers for weeks and months since last autumn were unable to access their accounts, online or at the counter. Service was cancelled, service personnel at the counter could not help, telephone banklign was down. Those who wn ated to cancel their accoutns found themsleve sunable to dfo so and also did not even get replies. For soem, the sisues remain until today - since last autumn. For small businesses, this can be exitentially thgret5aneing - and it has crushed some of such businesses.



Germany, 2023 A.D.



Both banks tried since almost ten years to merge this way, one would have assumed that this is time enough to prepare for the final tehcncial joining. Well, never underestimate the Germans' ability to mess things always further up.

Safest place for your money will soon be to hide it under your bed :)

True, but first transform it into real valuable assets: diamonds, gold, silver, stuff like that; else inflation kills your savings safely under your pillow. And even then the state, the biggest sponsor of organised crime in the world, can plunder you, by prohibitions or mounting penalty taxes when one day you liquidize these assets again and must pay horrendous taxes (=protection money).

The state always wins. The people always loose. They deserve it not any different, they endlessly legitmize the plunderers with their votes although they could be demanded, if they are no more teens, to know it better. Life experience, you know. If you get lied to, and lied to, and get lied to agaion, and then lied to and mor elies and always lies, you should know sooner or later what to expect from them. And if then you nevertheless legitmize them to conitnue, then you only get what you deserve and have opted for, and you have given up any right to complain or to criticise.

Everybody should know what he gets if he votes for any party, no matter which one. Lies and betrayal. The whole global situation proves it. People vote with best hopes and intentions: so how can it be that things are constantly detoriating then and that the situation is so much out of control?

People are like lambs being led to the slaughterhouse. Their freedom lies in that they can chose whether to enter through the left or the right gate.


I say so sinc emany yeras,a nd will contnue to say so as logn as the ylet me. Its only a question of time before such views will face legal sanctions, and will get suppressed, I am certain. The EU mulls a social scoring system according to Chinese example, the death of cash money allows total control and threatening non-conformal beings by cutting of their payment supply, and it wants that any criticism of the EU must first be checked and allowed by an EU authority that is to be created, else the content of unapproved criticism is getting criminalised and sanctioned. Bureaucrcay as a tool to establish tyranny.

Credit Suisse does a Stuka-dive by over -20%. Its the second-biggest Swiss bank. Customers have withdrawn their funds in large numbers. The government and the bank's board of directors are trying to be optimistic and appeasing. Currently the situation has been caugh tup it seems, butat a muc lower value level.


If I may speculate: its only a quesaiton of tiem before both the FED (earliuer) and the ECB (later) lose their courage and stop - and reverse? - the higher

- interest course they plotted last year. Which in the long run of course will make things even much worse.



We need to allow that banks as well as zombie businesses who were put on life support in recent years but are not competitive and survivable anymore, leave the market. In Europe at least but I assume in the US as well, there are now way too many foul apples in the basket. That many nations demand banks, pension fonds and insurrances to "invest" :haha: in state bonds as well, does not make it better, but worse. Its a criminal abuse of power.

Credit Suisse now at -30%.

Credit Suisse shares plunge as bank fear widens.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-64964881

The central banks have created bubbles and bubbles, and then blew them up more and more.

Are we seeing the first cracks in the balloon hull?

The deposit guarantee system in Germany guarantees, depending on the institute association, 0.6 to 0.8% of the total customer deposits. It's already better positioned than the American one, but please - what are guarantees for not even 1% of the deposits?

Joys of fractional reserve banking, one of the biggest coups in the history of financial crime. Have fun.

Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung:
-----------------------------------


After the turbulence surrounding the Silicon Valley Bank, politicians and financial supervisors repeated it like a mantra: There is no risk of contagion, the big banks are now much more resilient. But the storm has not yet passed the financial markets, as the fall in the price of Credit Suisse shares now shows.

This time, however, it is not a medium-sized institute with a special business model like the Silicon Valley Bank. Now a major bank is on fire, and there should no longer be any doubts about it due to the strict equity and liquidity requirements. But investors mistrust the institute more and more. This can be seen not only from the fall in the share price, but also from the skyrocketing risk premiums on the bond market. These are now signaling increased default risks for the bank.

Credit Suisse's crisis of confidence is certainly due to many shortcomings that other financial institutions have avoided. However, Credit Suisse is not an isolated case because it has stuck to investment banking for too long. Deutsche Bank found itself in a similar situation not too long ago. She had to make a deep, painful cut and has now regained her footing.

Deep cuts are also needed at Credit Suisse, but time seems to be running out. Should the major Swiss bank falter, given its size and importance on the capital market, it could trigger a financial crisis like the one that followed the Lehman collapse in September 2008. Then the resilience of the banks would really be put to the test.

It is to be hoped that the management of Credit Suisse and the supervisors in Switzerland will finally be aware of their responsibility. Because the crisis of confidence surrounding Credit Suisse has been smoldering for too long.
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Credit Suisse has been struggling with scandals for months: a money laundering investigation, loss-making investments, hassles in the boardroom. Yesterday, Credit Suisse published last year's annual results with bad news again. Accounting deficiencies were revealed. Auditor PwC spoke of "flaws in internal control systems". When it also became clear that Credit Suisse's main shareholder - Saudi National Bank - could no longer assist financially, investors started selling their shares. According to the Saudis, they cannot put more money into it as they are not allowed to own more than 10 per cent of the shares.

Clients' deposits are covered up to a limit of 100'000 CHF per client.

The main cause behind all these economical crisis we have had since 1929 is....Money, thereafter shares and other money related stuff.

I'm the only one here on this forum-Who is dreaming about a money free society. Like it is in Star Trek.

Markus

We already live in a money-free society, Markus. Nowhere in the world people pay with money. Which is the problem.

What we have is currency units - not money. And currency units are nothing more than counting aids.

Think you have a pear that I want and that you do not like, and I offer you an apple in exchange for your pear. You give me your pear, and I give you a piece of paper which reads "1 apple". Would you think you made a good deal? :03:

This way already started during the Napoleonic wars when Britain was practically bancrupt. Businessmen came together, lend - real, silver and goild-based - money to the crown, and ironically called themselves the bank of England for that, but 30, 40 years it was no joke anymore, but reality: an established, state-promoted fraudulent scheme. The crown collected and kept silver and gold, and handed out paper leaflets called bank notes. It continued in the American civil war when on both sides they sometimes could not pay their regiments' men with silverdollar anymore, and instead paid them with promissory notes for silver (which never got redeemed, of course). At that time there were over half a dozen silver dollars from private mints in circulation! One dollar of silver is one dollar of silver, no matter who mints it into a coin. The word "Dollar" comes from "Thaler","Taler", a Taler was a quantum unit, like karat, grams, ounces.

https://mises.org/library/monetary-breakdown-west

States and central banks are formidable forms of organised crime, plain and simple. The purpose of central banks is to prevent real money.


One ounce of gold currently buys and sells for around 1750-1900 Euros (in Germany, Dollar-Euro exchnage rates already considered). When I keep my oune of gold for thirty years and somebody else keeps his bundle of banknotes worth 1800 Euro, I know who of us two holds the better value in his hand in thrioty yeares form now on. As loing as the gansgter in the government have not annopucned a new gold prophibiiton and went on a plundering tour against the people again. I will still be able to get what you get for 31.1 grams of gold then, but he will not get in thirty years for his 1800 Euro what he may have gotten in our current present. That much is certain.



The key businesses the state has his hands in, are wars, blackm ailing protexciton money, and expropritation. The tools for these three purposes are called moral mission, taxes, and inflation. And inflation you can only have with paper currencies - not with real money.

Credit Suisse's share price surged by 40%.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-64973321

Oh look, another bailout.

First Republic Bank drops by almost -40%, suffering from too many customers rmeoving their deposits. Several other American regional banks are in troubles, too.



Yellen says all is under control. Means: all red lights are on.