Cryptocurrency is the future of money, banking and finance

Ladies and gentlemen, we live in interesting financial times.

In 2008 it became clear that our financial system isn‟t as robust as many people thought. In response to this “credit crisis”

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, president Obama launched a 700 billion stimulus programme. A global financial meltdown was narrowly averted.

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Turns out this stimulus programme wasn‟t nearly enough. By december of 2011, the US Federal Reserve

alone bailed out or insured banks to the tun

e of 30 trillion dollars. That‟s about a quarter million dollars for

every US household.

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And the same is happening in Europe, here in the UK, in Japan, and in many other countries.

And it‟s not just the banks that cause trouble, it seems.

In october of 2011, brokerage firm

MF Global

went bankrupt after a bet on Greek debt turned sour. Many clients today still fear never seeing back their assets, because they had been used as collateral for the greek gamble and for many other gambles like it. Actually

, there is serious evidence that the practice of using customers‟ financial assets as collateral to

trade in the markets

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in other words: the practice of misappropriating client assets

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is widespread among large brokers.

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And what to think of the recent

LIBOR scandal

? This scandal made headlines during the summer of 2012, when it became public knowledge that the benchmark interest rates for more than $400 trillion worth of financial contracts

—

including your mortgage agreement

—

have been manipulated consistently for at least two decades. Not that

interest rates

, the rates

that govern borrowing and spending around the world, are “natural”

anyway. For the past 100 years, interest rates have been set (manipulated, if you will) by central banks, making money cheaper than ever before and creating by now a very cruel no-win situation for savers globally, who are struggling to find something, anything, that will help them find protection against the rising inflation. In their efforts to prevent the financial system from going under, western

governments

have pushed up debt levels well over 100% debt to GDP, which, by any historical standard, is completely unsustainable.

And so a different course is now being ch osen: instead of “bail outs”, the n ew trend in mone

tary policy is

that of the “

bail-in

”.

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Basically “bail in” is the Cyprus solution: instead of taking money from the tax payer, the government takes the money from the saver, to allow for a “orderly resolution” of the bank.

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For more, I recommend reading the 2008 CITI bank report: “are the brokers broken?”.

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