One of the more surreal articles I read in the last decade explained how some nations would move toward negative interest rates for personal bank accounts. Meaning the money you have in checking and savings, you could lose an ever increasing % of it annually for not spending or investing it, according to the whims of the ruling class. And if you did invest it, you would be taxed on its unrealized capital gains.
It sounded absurd, but if you want to see the truly unimaginable enacted into law, you usually have to look no further than the European Union.
This isn’t a new idea either. The European Central Bank, the institution that sets monetary policy for the eurozone, ran a negative deposit rate from June 2014 until the middle of 2022. The banks passed the bill down. By July 2021, 372 German banks were charging negative interest, and what started as a fee on large corporate balances had spread to private accounts of any size. Denmark’s Jyske Bank did it to its retail customers too. Europeans have already had money pulled out of their accounts for the crime of leaving it there.
Nearly four months into its grotesque new rollout, the “Migration Pact,” which forces quotas of foreigners into European nations, or charges €20,000 per migrant for turning them down, the protectors of liberal democracy continue to spread peace and prosperity with an iron fist. Now the EU is interested in personal savings accounts, no doubt dismayed by the fact that the wealthy of their nations are seeking to extricate their capital to places that are less ideologically punitive in their approach to personal finances.
Notice what the solution never is. It’s never lower taxes, fewer regulations, or an economy someone would actually want to park capital in. The money isn’t leaving because Europeans are financially illiterate. It’s leaving because they can do math. So rather than create nourishing conditions, they’d rather cage it in.
Something that will be possible when the EU moves to a Central Bank Digital Currency is baking into the currency negative interest rates, and even expiration dates on the funds, forcing people to spend their money before it becomes irredeemable. Using it to force stimulus and investment, and increasing their ever tightening control over the native populations they continue to subjugate. That move is closer than it’s ever been. The European Parliament passed its version of the digital euro bill this summer, and negotiators are aiming to finalize it by the end of the year, with a pilot slated for 2027. For now, Parliament says the digital euro will be non-interest-bearing, but there will be a per-person holding cap, a limit on the money you can hold! The addition of expiration dates and negative interest rates would only be a small financial crisis away.
My view on Cryptocurrency, Blockchain Technology, and Decentralized Finance, is that it has both the power to financially liberate, or ensnare a people, depending on who is, and how it is, finally implemented.
It’s critical when the transition takes hold that competition, individual rights, personal choice and national sovereignty are the driving forces behind it, not technocratic enslavement.
