"Financial repression" refers to government policies and strategies aimed at reducing borrowing costs or controlling interest rates. These measures are often used to benefit the government or specific groups in the economy, but they can disadvantage savers and investors by limiting their returns on investments.
Full definition
It also means current yields are really starting to hurt...
With financial repression promised for the foreseeable future, the industry's increasingly being pushed into a multi-year cycle of hardening insurance pricing.]
Beer, Wine, & Food Brick and Mortar California Daydreamin» Canada Cars, Trucks & Crashes Central Banks China Commercial Property Companies & Markets Consumers Credit Bubble Cryptos Debtor Nation Energy The French Debacle Teutonic Dilemmas Spain Federal
Reserve Financial Repression Housing Bubble 2 Inflation & Devaluation Information Age Japan's Juggle Jobs Transportation Wall St. Shenanigans
Beer, Wine, & Food Brick and Mortar California Daydreamin» Canada Cars, Trucks & Crashes Central Banks China Commercial Property Companies & Markets Consumers Credit Bubble Cryptos Debtor Nation Energy The French Debacle Teutonic Dilemmas Spain Federal Reserve
Financial Repression Housing Bubble 2 Inflation & Devaluation Information Age Japan's Juggle Jobs Transportation Wall St. Shenanigans
So after years of
financial repression by the Fed and its bankster partners, I welcome higher rates, hope they do cause massive dislocation, lead to a debt jubilee of some variety, and in the end, we may be forced to return to the gold standard (or a derivative thereof).
But the roots are global as well and at least one of the roots is
financial repression which is the major central bank's policies over the last nine years of recovery to drop interest rates to zero to buy risk assets, to push investors into risk assets and generate a lot of liquidity and credit.
Think of it this way: when real interest rates go down, there is less loss to holding gold, because fiat currencies suffer
from financial repression.
This was
why financial repression, although useful in the early stages of China's growth period because it turbocharged investment, ultimately became one of the county's biggest problems once investment no longer needed turbocharging.
Their sample included a lot of small OPEC countries, who necessarily had high growth and low interest rates when oil prices were high, as well as a lot of Asian countries that followed the Japanese development model and themselves
practiced financial repression, which of course made them pretty useless as points of comparison.
Financial repression includes directed lending to government by captive domestic audiences (such as pension funds), explicit or implicit caps on interest rates, regulation of cross-border capital movements, and (generally) a tighter connection between government and banks.
Economic mavericks like Max Keiser, financial critics like Steve Keen and mainstream economists like Paul Krugman are
debating financial repression, monetary and fiscal intervention or allowing for more free markets and more real capitalism.
And you shouldn't expect to see these market underpinnings removed — monetary stimulus will remain a stop - go exercise as every last wobble scares the central bankers, there's no real possibility the stimulus (to date) can ever be withdrawn, and
ongoing financial repression continues to force savers into equities (& other markets).
The quotation below comes from The Intelligent Investor, which was written right in the middle of the post-World War II period of
U.S. financial repression:
For those lacking such courage, Merk calls gold «the easy answer... It's a no brainer in a world of
financial repression over the next few years.
Financial repression comprises «policies that result in savers earning returns below the rate of inflation» in order to allow banks to «provide cheap loans to companies and governments, reducing the burden of repayments».