Europe decides to eat its capital

We now see why the profligate countries of the European Monetary Union allowed the European Central Bank to institute a negative interest rate against reserves AND now have allowed it to buy both private and public debt in violation of its charter. These profligate countries are the beneficiaries of the financial repression against savings. They now can sell their worthless sovereign debt (worthless in the sense that it cannot be repaid in money of the same purchasing power as borrowed) at a PREMIUM! The banks would rather take a smaller loss from buying sovereign debt at a premium than a larger one from holding reserves. The European Union’s rules against national deficits have been shown to have no enforcement mechanism, so a small negative interest rate can become a large one, just as a small national budget deficit can become a large one. Not only is there now no institutional restraint on money creation, there now is no institutional restraint on government spending. The two go hand-in-glove. Since government spends its budget primarily on welfare and warfare–neither of which activity generates a profit–its spending destroys the capital base of the country. The fact that there are few sectors of society that do NOT partake of the government’s largess means that there is no organized opposition to this process. All Europeans partake of what economist Thorsten Polleit calls “collective corruption“. Europeans are enticed to consume capital and are punished if they do not do so.