When Banks Become Law Enforcers (Op-Ed)

A recent blog post titled ‘When Banks Become the Lawmakers’ sparked a realization that banks, and companies that provide financial services in general, are now doing much more than that.
In a utopian world of free markets, the interests of any private corporation including banks would need to balance out against the interests of the consumers. In today’s world of continuously growing government, however, the now 3-way scale is heavily skewed against the consumer.
The Problem: The debts in the western economies have reached levels unlike anything in history. As a lifetime of work by Martin Armstrong demonstrates, all great dynasties from Athens to Rome eventually went to great lengths to confiscate the maximum amount of wealth from its citizens to prevent the inevitable collapse. So it is not surprising that today, the US as the global supper power has deputized financial institutions to levels not seen before. While at the same time the common view on the street is that the financial institutions are the demons in the equation.
The Outcome: The hunt for Tax Revenue is reaching new levels as stricter enforcement of laws like FATCA along with filling out FBAR paperwork. Banks can now be held legally liable or be boycotted from the global financial markets if they do not collect all information on their customers and report certain things to the authorities. Perhaps many of these laws have always been on the books, but it’s the level of enforcement that maters.
Domestically in the US, it’s becoming very clear that every transaction is being monitored. Most people probably know that all transactions over US$10,000 are monitored by the FBI even though that amount is definitely not worth what it was when the law was put in place.

This post was published at Coin Telegraph on 2015-01-11.