(Money Metals Exchange) Money in the bank isn’t what it used to be. Accounts denominated in today’s fiat currency units are depreciating thanks to negative real interest rates. In many cases, checking and savings accounts don’t even earn a nominal yield despite a string of rate hikes by the Federal Reserve.
Also of great concern is that today’s banking system is being weaponized to enforce ideological agendas. Dissenters from prevailing orthodoxy on matters of politics, culture, and healthcare now risk being “debanked” – having their accounts cancelled for committing wrongthink.
Former President Donald Trump had his Florida bank accounts closed in the wake of his disputed 2020 election defeat. He was also blacklisted by Deutsche Bank for political reasons.
Democrat Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has been censored on social media and had his non-profit organization threatened with bank account closures, apparently at the behest of the Biden administration. Kennedy is charged with the thought crime of spreading vaccine misinformation.
It doesn’t matter that much of what the public was initially told about the COVID vaccine by the CDC, the mainstream media, and President Biden himself – namely that the jab would prevent the acquisition and transmission of the disease – turned out to be misinformation. All that matters is that dissent from whatever the orthodoxy happens to be at any given moment is now grounds for being de-banked.
Dissident doctor Joseph Mercola recently had his bank accounts deactivated by JP Morgan Chase.
Also recently, anti-globalist British politician and gold advocate Nigel Farage was blacklisted by his bank for having the wrong political beliefs. Farage warns that banks are beginning to work with credit bureaus to review customers’ political speech as part of a de facto Chinese-style social credit system.
These high-profile cases are the tip of the iceberg. Countless numbers of lesser-known individuals and businesses are being cancelled by their banks for ideological reasons.
Back in 2013, the Obama administration launched Operation Chokepoint to push banks to crack down on supposedly high-risk business clients. Operation Chokepoint specifically targeted gun dealers, payday lenders, coin shops, and other businesses with a high volume of cash transactions. The stated rationale was to combat fraud and money laundering.
The result was to set the stage for bureaucrats and bankers to determine which persons and businesses are socially desirable and which aren’t, which can have full access to the financial system and which can’t.
Now that the banking system has been politically weaponized, will money itself become a tool for authorities to wield against dissidents? It could be if central bank digital currency replaces all forms of cash.
As part of the imposition of a digital dollar, government could arbitrarily declare that paper cash may no longer be accepted as legal tender by banks or businesses. And since all digital transactions can be logged and monitored in real time, they can also be instantly denied by the central bank issuer.
Holding wealth outside the banking system and out of U.S. dollar denominated assets is a must for anyone who seeks to become resilient to being financially cancelled.
The monetary value of physical precious metals does not change based on the political beliefs of the holder. Unlike a banknote whose value is governed by its issuer, a gold coin has intrinsic value as determined by the free market. And unlike an account at a financial institution, physical precious metals are uncancellable.
