The central planners are setting the stage for the next round of officially sanctioned theft and this time they mean to assure that you have no way(s) of escaping.
They’re coming for your cash. This is a risk that Charles Hugh Smith explored for us back in June in a very well-received analysis.
Once a fringe idea, this concept is now being openly discussed and debated at the highest levels publicly. Which means it is being hotly discussed behind closed doors, and likely has been for a long time.
The effort boils down to this: the past efforts to get the economy back on a high-growth, borrow-and-spend inflationary track failed. QE just flat out didn’t work from any of those standpoints. Of course, QE did enrich the banks (record profits!), enrich the 0.1% (never faster or higher!), and allow governments across the globe to dig themselves deeper in debt.
Because of all that silliness, the Fed et al. find themselves trapped by Frankenmarkets of their own making, unable to raise rates for fear of causing a market crash that gets away from them — which would pretty much expose all of their prior actions as failures, and themselves as intellectual frauds.
Obviously, something must be done!
But what? What does one do next when outright money printing and asset market levitation haven't done the trick? Some, like Paul Krugman and others with similarly flat learning curves, proclaim that the failure of money printing (QE) to work is evidence that not quite enough money printing was done. So let's do more this time!
But the central planners have started to move away from that position because, well, here we are 6 full years stuck at 0% money and nothing good is happening. Worse, bad things are now multiplying. China is stalled, Europe is economically stagnant and now grappling with a refugee crisis, Japan is back in recession, and the US is starting to look perilously weak with several key indicators now in territory only ever seen in recessions (e.g. corporate forward profits are negative and industrial production down 8 out of the last 9 months).
So what to do, what to do? For a long time we’ve agreed with Jim Rickards’ prediction that the next move will likely be QE for Main Street. This would take the form of a tax holiday, or that plus a rebate of prior year(s) tax payments.
by michael_rudmin 
