Excluding institutions such as
Blackrock and Vanguard, which are composed of multiple investors, the largest
single players in global equity markets are now thought to be central
banks themselves. An estimated 30
to 40 central banks are invested in the stock market, either directly
or through their investment vehicles (sovereign wealth funds). According
to David Haggith at Zero Hedge:
Central banks buying stocks
are effectively nationalizing U.S. corporations just to maintain the illusion
that their “recovery” plan is working. … At first, their novel entry into the
stock market was only intended to rescue imperiled corporations, such as
General Motors during the first plunge into the Great Recession, but recently
their efforts have shifted to propping up the entire stock market via major
purchases of the most healthy companies on the market.
The U.S. Federal Reserve,
which bailed out General Motors in a rescue operation in 2009, was prohibited
from lending to individual companies under the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010, and it
is legally
barred from owning equities. It parks its reserves instead in bonds and
other government-backed securities. But other countries have different rules,
and central banks are now buying individual stocks as investments, with a
preference for big tech companies like Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft.
Those are the stocks that dominate the market, and central banks are
aggressively driving up their value. Markets, including the U.S. stock market,
are thus literally being rigged by foreign central banks.
The result, as noted
in a January 2017 article at Zero Hedge, is that central bankers, “who
create fiat money out of thin air and for whom ‘acquisition cost’ is a meaningless
term, are increasingly nationalizing the equity capital markets.” Or at
least they would be nationalizing equities, if they were actually “national”
central banks. But the Swiss National Bank, the biggest single player in this
game, is 48
percent privately owned, and most central banks have declared their
independence from their governments. They march to the drums not of government
but of private industry.
Marking the 10th anniversary
of the 2008 collapse, former Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and former Treasury
Secretaries Timothy Geithner and Henry Paulson wrote in a
Sept. 7 New York Times op-ed that the Fed’s tools needed to be
broadened to allow it to fight the next anticipated economic crisis, including
allowing it to prop up the stock market by buying individual stocks.
To investors, propping up the
stock market may seem like a good thing, but what happens when the central
banks decide to sell? The
Fed’s massive $4 trillion economic support is now being taken away,
and other central banks are expected to follow. Their U.S. and global holdings
are so large that their withdrawal from the market could trigger another global
recession. That means when and how the economy will collapse is now in the
hands of central bankers.
Moving Goal Posts
The two most aggressive
central bank players in the equity markets are the Swiss National Bank and the
Bank of Japan. The goal of the Bank of Japan, which now owns 75 percent
of Japanese exchange-traded funds, is evidently to stimulate growth and defy
longstanding expectations of deflation. But the Swiss National Bank is acting
more like a hedge fund, snatching up individual stocks because “that is
where the money is.”
About 20 percent of the SNB’s
reserves are in equities, and more than half of that is in U.S. equities. The
SNB’s goal is said to be to counteract the global demand for Swiss
francs, which has been driving up the value of the national currency, making it
hard for Swiss companies to compete in international trade. The SNB does this
by buying up other currencies, and because it needs to put them somewhere, it’s
putting that money in stocks.
That is a reasonable
explanation for the SNB’s actions, but some critics suspect it has ulterior
motives. Switzerland is home to the Bank for International Settlements, the
“central bankers’ bank” in Basel, where central bankers meet regularly behind
closed doors. Dr. Carroll Quigley, a Georgetown history professor who claimed
to be the historian of the international bankers, wrote of this institution in”
Tragedy and Hope” in 1966:
[T]he powers of financial
capitalism had another far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world
system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political
system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This
system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the
world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private
meetings and conferences. The apex of the system was to be the Bank for
International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland, a private bank owned and
controlled by the world’s central banks, which were themselves private
corporations.
The key to their success, said
Quigley, was that they would control and manipulate the money system of a
nation while letting it appear to be controlled by the government. The economic
and political systems of nations would be controlled not by citizens but by
bankers, for the benefit of bankers. The goal was to establish an independent
(privately owned or controlled) central bank in every country. Today, that goal
has largely been achieved.
In a
paper presented at the 14th Rhodes Forum in Greece in October 2016,
Dr. Richard Werner, director of international development at the
University of Southampton in the United Kingdom, argued that central banks have
managed to achieve total independence from government and total lack of
accountability to the people, and that they are now in the process of
consolidating their powers. They control markets by creating bubbles, busts and
economic chaos. He pointed to the European Central Bank, which was modeled on
the disastrous earlier German central bank, the Reichsbank. The Reichsbank
created deflation, hyperinflation and the chaos that helped bring Adolf Hitler
to power.
The problem with the
Reichsbank, said Werner, was its excessive independence and its lack of accountability
to German institutions and Parliament. The founders of postwar Germany changed
the new central bank’s status by significantly curtailing its
independence. Werner wrote, “The Bundesbank was made accountable and
subordinated to Parliament, as one would expect in a democracy. It became
probably the world’s most successful central bank.”
But today’s central banks, he
said, are following the disastrous Reichsbank model, involving an unprecedented
concentration of power without accountability. Central banks are not held
responsible for their massive policy mistakes and reckless creation of
boom-bust cycles, banking crises and large-scale unemployment. Youth
unemployment now exceeds 50 percent in Spain and Greece. Many central banks
remain in private hands, including not only the Swiss National Bank but the
Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the Italian, Greek and South African
central banks.
Banks and Central Banks Should
Be Made Public Utilities
Werner’s proposed solution to
this dangerous situation is to bypass both the central banks and the big
international banks and decentralize power by creating and supporting local
not-for-profit public banks. Ultimately, he envisions a system of local public
money issued by local authorities as receipts for services rendered to the
local community. Legally, he noted, 97 percent of the money supply is already
just private company credit, which can be created by any company, with or
without a banking license. Governments should stop issuing government bonds, he
said, and instead fund their public sector credit needs through domestic banks
that create money on their books (as
all banks have the power to do). These banks could offer more competitive
rates than the bond markets and could stimulate the local economy with
injections of new money. They could also put the big bond underwriting firms
that feed on the national debt out of business.
Abolishing the central banks
is one possibility, but if they were recaptured as public utilities, they could
serve some useful purposes. A central bank dedicated to the service of the
public could act as an unlimited source of liquidity for a system of public
banks, eliminating bank runs since the central bank cannot go bankrupt. It
could also fix
the looming problem of an unrepayable federal debt, and it could generate “quantitative
easing for the people,” which could be used to fund infrastructure,
low-interest loans to cities and states, and other public services.
The ability to nationalize
companies by buying them with money created on the central bank’s books could
also be a useful public tool. The next time the mega-banks collapse, rather
than bailing them out, they could be nationalized and their debts paid off with
central bank-generated money.
There are other possibilities.
Former Assistant Treasury Secretary Paul
Craig Roberts argues that we should also nationalize the media and the
armaments industry. Researchers
at the Democracy Collaborative have suggested nationalizing the large
fossil fuel companies by simply purchasing them with Fed-generated funds. In a
September 2018 policy paper titled “Taking
Climate Action to the Next Level,” the researchers wrote, “This action
might represent our best chance to gain time and unlock a rapid but orderly
energy transition, where wealth and benefits are no longer centralized in
growth-oriented, undemocratic, and ethically dubious corporations, such as
ExxonMobil and Chevron.”
Critics will say this would
result in hyperinflation, but an argument can be made that it wouldn’t. That
argument will have to wait for another article, but the point here is that
massive central bank interventions that were thought to be impossible in the 20th century
are now being implemented in the 21st, and they are being done by independent
central banks controlled by an international banking cartel. It is time to curb
central bank independence. If their powerful tools are going to be put to work,
it should be in the service of the public and the economy.
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