Bank of Japan's War on Cash: Demand for Safes and Big Denomination Yen Notes Soar! Gold Priced in Yen Surges!

At the outset of the imposition of NIRP,  the average Japanese seem to be vehemently pushing back on the Bank of Japan’s (BoJ) attempts to shanghai their resources.

First, the imposition of NIRP has only caused fissures in the establishment. This can be seen in mainstream media, as well as in the reactions of several politicians to the BoJ

According to Fidelity/DJ Business News (February 18)

A clash Thursday between Japan's central-bank chief and lawmakers highlighted the downside of negative interest rates: They are making the Japanese public feel negative.

Bank of Japan Gov. Haruhiko Kuroda, who announced the nation's first move into minus rates three weeks ago, found himself dodging a concerted attack in Parliament from lawmakers who charged the policy was victimizing consumers and sending a message of despair.

Next, in anticipation of non bank savings, sales of safes (and safety boxes) have suddenly boomed!

From Fortune.com (February 23, 2016)

Negative interest rates mean customers effectively pay a fee for parking cash in banks, so Japanese citizens are beginning to hoard yen, according to the Wall Street Journal, and they need somewhere to put it.

Sales of safes have doubled from the same period a year earlier at chain hardware store, Shimachu, according to theJournal. The chain has already sold out of one model worth $700. Others savers are considering more unconventional storage spaces.

“In response to negative interest rates, there are elderly people who’re thinking of keeping their money under a mattress,” Mariko Shimokawa, a Shimachu saleswoman told the Journal.

Third, real cash demand has spiked as exhibited by zooming demand for the yen's big notes!

From Bloomberg (February 24, 2016)

Demand for 10,000-yen bills is steadily rising in Japan, even as the nation’s population falls and the use of credit cards and other forms of electronic payment increases.

While more cash might sound like a good thing, some economists are concerned that it shows Japanese households are squirreling away money at home instead of investing it or putting it into bank accounts -- where it can make its way back into the financial system and be put to productive use.

That’s a big problem for Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and his central bank chief, Haruhiko Kuroda, as they try to spur consumption and reflate the stuttering economy.

The mountain of cash in Japan amounts to almost 100 trillion yen ($890 billion), equivalent to about a fifth of the size of the economy. And last year the number of 10,000-yen notes, the biggest bill, increased by 6.2 percent, the largest jump since 2002.

Increased demand for big note cash has likewise surfaced in Europe.

Lastly, gold prices in yen has likewise surged.

Despite the recent correction in the prices of gold based on USD, the yen price of gold continues upward as shown in the chart from the World Gold Council.

Perhaps my observation is being incrementally affirmed

Coupled with growing ban on cash by governments mostly under NIRP, the likelihood of imposition of myriad capital controls, prospective bail-ins or deposit haircuts on troubled banks, and or even perhaps outright protectionism, probably gold senses a massive disruption in the banking system, and the large scale drying up of global liquidity as the public gravitate towards cash with gold functioning as an alternative medium of exchange.

Confiscations of private sector resources to finance desperate bankrupt governments will likely deepen. From zero bound, to zero to negative and to the war on cash, as well as, to various capital, transactional and people controls, these shows of the slippery slope of the government's thrust.  So it won't take long, when governments will likely expand their prohibitions or increased regulations to include safes and safety boxes and gold ownership. Add guns to it. Yes people will need guns to protect their home based savings.

How the Nazi Regime’s Gun Prohibition lead to the Holocaust

At the Mises Institute, associate professor of economics at the University of Louisville, Audrey D. Kline does a splendid book review of a book by Independent Institute’s Stephen P. Halbrook’s Gun Control in the Third Reich: Disarming the Jews and “Enemies of the State

 

Ms Kline summarizes Mr. Halbrook’s account of how Nazi Germany conducted a step by step approach—beginning with gun control laws then to emergency decrees (which suspended various civil liberties) to centralized control over police et.al. —in the imposition of repression and genocide against the Jews.

This signifies what Austrian economist Robert Higgs calls as the “ratchet effect”—seemingly irreversible expansion of government in times of crisis. The Nazi’s serial mission creep of restricting civil liberties particularly for the Jews lead to a disarmed and defenseless populace and eventually paved way for their extermination or the Holocaust.

Here is the intro… (bold mine)

There is no shortage of theories or writings related to the rise of the Third Reich and the subsequent Holocaust. Stephen Halbrook’s 2013 book, Gun Control in the Third Reich offers a compelling and important account of the role of gun prohibition in aiding Hitler’s goals of exterminating the Jews and other “enemies of the state.” While much of the early gun prohibition was created with supposedly good intent, Halbrook carefully and meticulously details how a change in political regime facilitated manipulating some well-intentioned gun registration laws and other gun prohibition to be used in inconceivable ways.

Students of history as well as Second Amendment enthusiasts will find this a fascinating book and will find parallels between gun prohibition in pre-Nazi and Nazi Germany, and attempts to prohibit types of gun ownership and implement other forms of gun prohibition in the United States today. The current climate in the United States surrounding gun prohibition combined with a president who uses his office to impose executive order in ways not historically common gives many citizens pause, especially when looking at the era of the Third Reich. While certain states have imposed gun registration laws recently, enforcement of the laws remains unclear.

While Halbrook is careful to point out that a combination of factors led to the events of the Holocaust, there is no denying that many of the pre-war activities contributed to Hitler’s ability to disarm targeted groups, particularly the Jews. The rapid pace with which Hitler disarmed the populace in Germany is startling. Halbrook’s account is gripping, thorough, and full of legal documentation, leading the reader through the sometimes-daily changes in gun prohibitions that furthered Hitler’s agenda. Ultimately, the prohibitions enacted by the Nazi regime led to monopoly control of firearms by the Nazis and eliminated the ability of many groups in society to defend themselves. A similar progression in contemporary society related to government control of firearms and the firearms industry is a concern of many gun owners in the United States today.

Read the rest here

The bottom line is that governments act to attain political goals hardly in a sweep but via a series of arbitrary edicts, legislations, decrees and etc. … or the ratchet effect. Gun controls or inflating bubbles serve as stepping stones for government repression.

War on 3D Printed Guns: US Government Censors 3D Blueprints

Here is what I earlier wrote

With the proliferation of 3D printed guns, the next step governments will likely take is to regulate 3D.

As predicted, the US government forced a takedown of 3D gun blueprints

From the Forbes:

The battle for control of dangerous digital shapes may have just begun.

On Thursday, Defense Distributed founder Cody Wilson received a letter from the State Department Office of Defense Trade Controls Compliance demanding that he take down the online blueprints for the 3D-printable “Liberator” handgun that his group released Monday, along with nine other 3D-printable firearms components hosted on the group’s website Defcad.org. The government says it wants to review the files for compliance with arms export control laws known as the International Traffic in Arms Regulations, or ITAR. By uploading the weapons files to the Internet and allowing them to be downloaded abroad, the letter implies Wilson’s high-tech gun group may have violated those export controls.

“Until the Department provides Defense Distributed with final [commodity jurisdiction] determinations, Defense Distributed should treat the above technical data as ITAR-controlled,” reads the letter, referring to a list of ten CAD files hosted on Defcad that include the 3D-printable gun, silencers, sights and other pieces. “This means that all data should be removed from public acces immediately. Defense Distributed should review the remainder of the data made public on its website to determine whether any other data may be similarly controlled and proceed according to ITAR requirements.”

Unfortunately for the US government, the markets have already anticipated such a move. There has been more than 100,000 downloads of the blueprint prior to the takedown.

Again from the same article:

Wilson, a law student at the University of Texas in Austin, says that Defense Distributed will in fact take down its files until the State Department has completed its review. “We have to comply,” he says. “All such data should be removed from public access, the letter says. That might be an impossible standard. But we’ll do our part to remove it from our servers.”

As Wilson hints, that doesn’t mean the government has successfully censored the 3D-printable gun. While Defense Distributed says it will take down the gun’s printable file from Defcad.org, its downloads–100,000 in just the first two days the file was online–were actually being served by Mega, the New Zealand-based storage service created by ex-hacker entrepreneur Kim Dotcom, an outspoken U.S. government critic. It’s not clear whether the file will be taken off Mega’s servers, where it may remain available for download. The blueprint for the gun and other Defense Distributed firearm components have also been uploaded several times to the Pirate Bay, the censorship-resistant filesharing site.

So the US government will have to extend its censorship to cover New Zealand based Mega and Pirate Bay.

But since the technology is already out, this will find various ways to spread. Thus the US government will have their hands full in instituting controls.

The cat and mouse chase between marketplace and regulators on the 3D technology has began.

CNN: 3D Printed Assault Weapons Available by End of April

The technology is there and continues to improve, so applications will also continue to expand to cover wide ranges of products, including controversial guns.

Assault weapons from 3-D Printing will be available by the end of April according to this report from CNN (hat tip lewrockwell.com)

Firearms 3D printer Cody Wilson of Defense Distributed and the Wiki Weapon project has been making wave after wave with every one of his statements, updates, videos and blog posts. He’s been making the circles, with an interview with Vice Magazine and now CNN.

His most recent proclamation is will alarm many, bring hope to a few, but leaves us with our heads scratching. Wilson has said that they will have the technology to 3D print a firearm by “the end of April.”

“Well to have a printable gun — it’s my intention to have that done by the end of this month and we’re at the end of March now so it’s my intention to have it done by April,” he said. This would, in theory, prompt a new era in personal firearm manufacturing and a new paradigm for gun control.

“The assumption is one day the technology will become more ubiquitous and widespread,” Wilson said on “The Lead with Jake Tapper.”

“It will fall in price, and materials will be developed in a better place than they are now, so yes, if you were to have one in your home and you have the gun file, you can just click print and have the gun.”

The rate of advance of 3D technology will only render prohibition and other regulatory statutes obsolete. Of course, we expect government eventually to attempt to "regulate" 3D. But again such measures are bound to lag and thus fail.

3D technology in combination with others (mobile computing, nanotech and etc...) will change the way we do things and force us to specialize. A wider adaption of the 3D technology also means the path towards social decentralization.

Graphic of the Day: A Weapon Guide for the Uninformed

This is from Michael Ramirez of the Investor’s Business Daily (hat tip Lew Rockwell Blog)

By applying selective attention based on the media’s account (which serves as stimulus), supposedly intelligent people fall for the sensational.

Obama’s Push for Gun Prohibition

US President Obama pushes for a radical overhaul of gun laws.

From Bloomberg,

President Barack Obama unveiled the most ambitious gun-control agenda in decades today, announcing a $500 million package of legislative proposals and executive actions aimed at curbing firearms violence, from mass shootings to street crime.

The president, counting on a shift in public opinion since the shooting rampage at a Connecticut elementary school last month, challenged Congress to mandate background checks for all gun buyers, ban high-capacity ammunition clips, and reinstate a ban on sales of assault weapons

Obama signed 23 executive actions aimed at circumventing congressional opposition to new gun restrictions, including several designed to maximize prosecution of gun crimes and improve access to government data for background checks.

Couched in social morality, Obama’s proposal, which has been psychologically anchored on spur of the moment public impulse (availability heuristic), resonates of his predilection for the expansion of government, and importantly, for a spending $500 million blitz.

Again from the same article:

The administration also plans to address legal barriers that may prevent states from sharing relevant medical information, to review standards for gun locks, require federal authorities to trace firearms recovered in criminal investigations and direct the Centers for Disease Control to research the causes of gun violence.

The new spending would go mostly for training and data- collection programs. Obama wants $10 million for the CDC to conduct further research, “including investigating the relationship between video games, media images, and violence.”

Another $20 million would expand a reporting system to gather data when firearms are used in violent deaths, whether homicides or suicides. To encourage states to share criminal and mental health records for the federal background database, Obama proposes spending $20 million this year and $50 million next year.

School districts and police departments would get $150 million to hire school resource officers, psychologists and social workers and another $65 million for teacher training.

Obama again urged lawmakers to approve an existing request for $4 billion to help communities keep 15,000 police officers on duty.

So gun control looks like stimulus camouflaged mostly for the bureaucracy.

Yet like almost all prohibition laws once this gun control comes into effect the likelihood is to bring the assault weapon and sporting rifle ban into the underground (shadow economy).  And along with the other typical consequences: greater fraud, corruption, and higher risks of violence.

This reminds me of a quote attributed to Russian revolutionary and USSR Premier Vladimir I Lenin

A system of licensing and registration is the perfect device to deny gun ownership to the bourgeoisie.

Incidentally, Lenin’s Russian Civil War resulted to a death toll of 8 million people where only 2 million were from combat deaths according to eNotes.com.

Of course, Lenin introduced the infamous concentration camps or the Gulag

So like all aspiring tyrants, gun control has been the traditional recourse for assuming total social control.

Further, Obama’s thrust to use of “mental health” as checks on gun ownership represents the assumption that bureaucrats know better and have better moral standings than the citizenry have been premised on statolatry or the fiction of the puritanical or deifed state.

Additionally, the gun control regulation opens the portals of public censorship via "investigating the relationship between video games, media images, and violence.” 

The psychiatric treatment approach through social policies has been used as a prominent tool to attain total social control—the therapeutic state

Writes Professor Thomas Szasz at the Citizens Commission on Human Rights International: (hat tip Bob Wenzel) [bold and italics original]

“Although we may not know it, we have, in our day, witnessed the birth of the Therapeutic State. This is perhaps the major implication of psychiatry as an institution of social control.”

“When I use the term therapeutic state, I use it ironically, it’s therapeutic for the people who are doing the locking up, who are doing the therapy, it’s not therapeutic for the victims, for the patients.”

“In the therapeutic state, treatment is contingent on, and justified by, the diagnosis of the patient’s illness and the physician’s prescription of the proper remedy for it… Today, the therapeutic state exercises authority and uses force in the name of health.” The Founding Fathers “could not have anticipated…that an alliance between medicine and the state would then threaten personal liberty and responsibility exactly as they had been threatened by an alliance between church and state.”

“Inasmuch as we have words to describe medicine as a healing art, but have none to describe it as a method of social control or political rule, we must first give it a name. I propose that we call it pharmacracy, from the Greek roots pharmakon, for ‘medicine’ or ‘drug,’ and kratein, for ‘to rule’ or ‘to control.’”

“Formerly, people rushed to embrace totalitarian states. Now they rush to embrace the therapeutic state. When they discover that the therapeutic state is about tyranny, not therapy, it will be too late.”

“This phenomenon illustrates what I call the creeping therapeutic state. I see it as insidious, especially given the cooperation between the government and the media. This is allowed on television. But advertising Scotch, a legal drink, is not allowed. This subtly undermines the rule of law, the principle that if something is legal, then it’s legal, and if it’s illegal, then it’s illegal. A prescription drug is illegal; pharmacists cannot sell it to you unless you have a prescription. These are illegal drugs, but nobody calls them illegal drugs. So I see this as pernicious, as an example of what F.A. Hayek and Ludwig von Mises talked about—that the opposite of freedom is not brutal tyranny but capriciousness.”

The US has been in a transition to the land of the UNfree or what I call as the Philippinization of the US, and the consequences that goes along with it.

As I previously noted,

F. A. Hayek once warned that Americans are headed towards the road to serfdom. His admonitions appear as becoming a reality with the deepening of America’s police state aside from snowballing political and economic fascism, signs of which the US could be in a slippery slope towards dictatorship.

Video: Gun Debate between Alex Jones and Piers Morgan; the Behavioral Perspective

Marquez-Pacquiao move over: Alex Jones of the Infowars.com and PrisonPlanet.TV and CNN’s Piers Morgan in an impassioned debate over gun control at the CNN  (hat tip: Bob Wenzel)

Video 1 

Video 2 

Many will be turned off by the mercurial stance of Mr Jones in handling the debate.

But from the behavioral point of view, the debating tactic employed by CNN’s Piers Morgan’s seems hinged on the devious ploy called the “power of suggestion” or the "priming effects". Mr. Morgan repeatedly attempts to oversimplify what truly has been a complex issue through the selective use of statistics or by framing the argument on specific instances. This is an example of a debate where people talk past each other.

Writes Daniel Kahneman in Thinking, Fast and Slow (p.128) “our behavior are influenced, much more than we know or want, by the environment of the moment”, such that priming makes the audience “susceptible to the biasing influence”(p.127).

In short, by anchoring the debate on issues of the moment, Mr. Morgan’s technique appeals to the emotions of the gullible audience.

How to deal with this negotiation or debating strategy?

Mr. Kahneman advices (p.126)

If you think the other side has made an outrageous proposal, you should not come back with an equally outrageous counteroffer, creating a gap that will be difficult to bridge…Instead you should make a scene, storm out or threaten to do so…

This seems exactly how Mr. Jones deftly eluded Mr. Morgan’s traps.

This debate reminds me of the chilling words of Germany's Adolf Hitler whose Nazism was responsible for the death of about 25 million people during World War II (including the Holocaust),

The most foolish mistake we could possibly make would be to allow the subject races to possess arms. History shows that all conquerors who have allowed the subject races to carry arms have prepared their own downfall by so doing. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that the supply of arms to the underdogs is a sine qua non for the overthrow of any sovereignty...

What’s the Real Score Behind the Connecticut Massacre?

Has media’s account of the regrettable events at Newtown Connecticut been factually accurate? Or have they have been distorted to promote certain political agenda?

Paul Craig Roberts at the Lewrockwell.com raises some salient points by pointing at loopholes and inconsistencies in media's reporting.

But why RT Moscow’s focus on “assault weapons”? The accused, Adam Lanza, was immediately declared guilty. According to the Associated Press, the Newtown, Connecticut medical examiner, Dr. H. Wayne Carver said that “all the victims of the Connecticut elementary school shooting were killed up close by multiple rifle shots.”

Yet Fox News reports that “A CNN reporter said police recovered three weapons at the scene: a Glock and a Sig-Sauer, which are handguns, as well as a .223 Bushmaster rifle. The rifle was in the back seat of the car the gunman drove to the school, the handguns were inside the school.”

The same Fox News report says: “Security measures implemented this year at Sandy Hook [the school] kept doors locked during class hours, and people have to be buzzed in before entering. There is a camera to view whoever enters the building.” If this report is correct, how did an armed Lanza gain entry to the school?

I tried to point out to RT Moscow that these news reports indicate that the accused dead gunman, whom no one can interrogate, if he is indeed the culprit, killed the children with handguns, not with an “assault rifle” left in the car, but that the medical examiner said the children were killed with rifle shots.

The discrepancy is obvious. Either the news reports are incorrect, the medical examiner is wrong, or someone other than Adam Lanza shot the children.

Reporting based on political agenda?

The focus on “assault weapons” is puzzling for another reason. According to news reports Lanza had a personality or mental disorder, or perhaps he was just different.

Regardless, he was on medication. So does the blame lie with guns or with medication?

As the agenda is to ban guns, the blame is placed on guns.

In the previous mass shooting at the Colorado movie theater, eyewitness accounts differed from the official account, and according to news accounts the suspect was involved with the government in some sort of mind control experiments and was found after the shooting sitting in a car in the movie theater parking lot.

Similarly, the Connecticut school shooting has puzzling aspects. In the real time report to the police, a teacher says that she saw “two shadows running past the gym.” The police radio recording also reports two men in a van at the school stopped and detained, and various news sources report that the police arrested a man in the nearby woods. The man says, “I didn’t do it,” but how would a man out in the woods know what had just happened? There are no TVs to watch in the woods; yet, the man denied doing the shooting. Very strange.

What often happens is that there are a number of initial false reports, such as in the Connecticut case the report that Lanza’s mother was a teacher at the school and was killed at the school, that Lanza had also killed his father, and that Lanza’s brother might have been involved. Any discrepancies in the official story then get thrown out with the false reports. As the media simply goes along with the official story and does not investigate, it is impossible to know what really happened. People just accept the official story.

Could Adam Lanza have been a fall guy?

Drone Warfare: Systematic Mass Killing of Innocents

It is sad and revolting to see how the recent gruesome shooting spree in Newtown Connecticut had claimed 27 innocent lives mostly children.

Yet what has been largely ignored by the public is how belligerent imperial US foreign policies continues to sow terror to unarmed civilians through drone warfare overseas.

This report from Daily Mail says that a US military personnel quit his job after learning of needless civilian deaths…many of them children.

A former U.S. drone operator has opened up about the toll of killing scores of innocent people by pressing a button from a control room in New Mexico.

Brandon Bryant, 27, from Missoula, Montana, spent six years in the Air Force operating Predator drones from inside a dark container.

But, after following orders to shoot and kill a child in Afghanistan, he knew he couldn't keep doing what he was doing and quit the military.

'I saw men, women and children die during that time,' he told Spiegel Online. 'I never thought I would kill that many people. In fact, I thought I couldn't kill anyone at all.'

Mass killings should be seen in a broader context and not just in the US.

As John Aziz at the lewrockwell.com/zero hedge observed: (bold original)

And if we value life and are opposed to violence against innocents, why do we demand action when 27 innocent Americans die, but not when larger numbers of innocent Pakistanis, or Afghanis or Yemenis die? One drone strike in Pakistan killed 69 children, dwarfing the impact of the Newtown Massacre. With predator drones now in American skies, how long until the “collateral damage” (remember – the NDAA declared the entirety of America as a battlefield) eclipses the Newtown massacre? Or how long until a foreign power or terrorist group hacks into a predator drone (technically feasible) over America and uses it as a flying bomb?  And how many more terrorist attacks against America will be fuelled by anger derived from the civilian casualties of the drone wars?

Obama might cry for Americans in Newtown, but where are his tears for the Pakistani and Yemeni children he has slaughtered? And what about for the many victims who died as a result of thousands guns shipped by the US government to the Mexican drug cartels via Fast and Furious?

The US government seem to promote the kind of policies it pretends to condemn. Drones as pointed out above (and in my previous post) is likely to become a commonplace security feature in the US which may entail the unintended consequences described above.

Yet it is hard to ignore of the possible influence of US foreign policies or the warfare state on her constituency or population. Or put differently, could the recent killing sprees signify as a policy blowback, where these assailants may have sublimely construed government's action as justifying their own?