Free Republic

Weekends and holidays are the perfect time to catch people off guard…Like a street thug committing a mugging, capital controls blindside most people—otherwise, they wouldn’t be effective.The government declares a surprise bank holiday and shuts all the banks—mere hours after they denied they were even thinking about such actions.They impose capital controls to stop citizens from taking their money out of the country.Cash-sniffing dogs, which make drug-sniffing dogs look friendly, show up at airports and border crossings.At this point, your money is like a lobster in a trap. It doesn’t require much imagination to see what comes next.Once a desperate...

COMMENT: Dear Marty, I was trying to wire money from my bank account in Italy to the one in the UK, just to realise that I can no longer transfer more than 6,000EUR per month. The Soviet EUSSR is in full capital controls mode. I am missing the beauty of Italy every day, but I am so glad to live in Brexit UK. Good luck to the old continent. REPLY: I warned that all my sources were confirming, three very high up, that Europe would quietly impose capital controls on June 30, 2020. That has now taken shape. Europeans and...

It was precisely two months ago, on September 2nd, when we explained that as a result of China's recent currency devaluation, in order to mitigate the inevitable capital outflows that such an FX move would unleash, China was "scrambling to enforce capital controls" in order to prevent the exit of hot (and not so hot) money from China's economy. We then said the following to explain why "this is great news for bitcoin": Which is why we would not be surprised to see another push higher in the value of bitcoin: it was earlier this summer when the digital currency,...

UPDATE: CoinTelegraph has been informed that the annoucement, on which the following article is based, was originally published in People's Daily, the official newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party with the CAC reposting it on their website. So while the article doesn't represent the opinion of the CAC, the People's Daily is a major publication in China, whose main readers are Chinese officials. *** While many media outlets and financial experts have pointed to the large influx of funds from China to Western bitcoin exchanges as the cause of the recent bitcoin price spike, China’s Internet watchdog has announced that...

Another of history’s many lessons is that governments under pressure become thieves. And today’s governments are under a lot of pressure. Before we look at the coming wave of asset confiscations, let’s stroll through some notable episodes of the past, just to make the point that government theft of private wealth is actually pretty common... Will more countries introduce capital controls or asset confiscations in the next few years? Duh, of course. Debt levels are unmanageable, so they have to be lowered. And there are only three ways to do it: deflationary collapse that wipes out the debt through default,...

  The best indicator of a chess player's form is his ability to sense the climax of the game –Boris Spassky, World Chess Champion, 1969-1972You've likely heard that the German central bank announced it will begin withdrawing part of its massive gold holdings from the United States as well as all its holdings from France. By 2020, Bundesbank says it wants half its gold reserves stored in its own vault in Germany.Why would it want to physically move the metal from New York? It's not as if US vaults are not secure, and since Germany already owns the gold, does...

Political Economy: Hillary Clinton says our trade deficit and reliance on foreign investors are big problems, and wants to fix them. But her cure would be far worse than the disease, and should be rejected out of hand. Can't say we're surprised. Given a choice, Clinton has always opted for government control over market magic. This was true in the early 1990s, when she and a handful of secretive bureaucrats and leftist advisers tried to nationalize our health care system — 15% of the economy. It was true last month when, outraged at soaring oil company profits such as Exxon's...