It’s actually becoming difficult to remember, but, yes, the banks actually used to give you interest on your savings account in exchange for your deposit in their vaults.
Well, debt to the point of insolvency and past the point of insolvency is not focused on directly by Schiff, and such debt is central to the fullest discussion of the problems Schiff discusses.
Debt past the point of insolvency for decades is not generally repairable, ans so, war is the common historical solution with unpredictable result.
Capitalism past the point of insolvency is certainly not capitalism at all when institutionalized. Institutionalized debt that can never be serviced is an end stage of capitalism that was called “debt based capitalism” by Liu back in a 2008 article that defines the identification and the inevitable end of what is call the “new norm” today by Schiff:
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/JG22Dj06.html
Here, Liu deals with the dead end of zero interest rates:
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/GECON-04-041113.html
The complete works of Liu are here and relevant to Schiff’s discussion:
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Others/Henry.html
Liu is not mentioned often in the forum.
Here is a graph of US GDP, financed by debt issuance in excess of the GDP vs household, just published:
http://www.zerohedge.com/sites/default/files/images/user3303/imageroot/2014/09/20140917_chart.jpg
Low wages encourage revolutions. Here is a second graph in the same article showing stock market rise vs employmnet:
Zerohedge is a good current source of information and commentary.
This article was pretty good. I would go a little further and say that the Fed purchases are really just printing money and giving it to politicians to spend. The other subsidies go to the large banks to pay for ridiculously overvalued mortgage securities. This has not produced inflation yet here since a lot of the handout money goes to China in exchange for their crap. China has some inflation because of it. The banks turn their money around and buy up assets as the author implies. The asset purchases put a veneer of prosperity over an otherwise dismal economy.
