GOVERNMENT HAS CONTEMPLATED SEIZING PENSION MONEY FOR OVER A DECADE

Government Has Contemplated Seizing Pension Money for Over a Decade

Posted on October 20, 2013 by WashingtonsBlog

When the Chips Are Down, the Government Will Be Tempted to Grab Our Assets

Ireland, Hungary, Poland, Cyprus and other countries have seized pensions as part of move by governments to use long-term assets to fill “short-term deficits”.

Russia has “temporarily” seized private pensions while it carries out “inspections”.

But certainly America would never seize our pension funds … right?

Well, after Argentina seized its pension funds, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard – International Business Editor for the Telegraph – wrote:

It is a foretaste of what may happen across the world as governments discover that tax revenue, and discover that the bond markets are unwilling to plug the gap. The G7 states are already acquiring an unhealthy taste for the arbitrary seizure of private property, I notice.

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My fear is that governments in the US, Britain, and Europe will display similar reflexes. Indeed, they have already done so. The forced-feeding of banks with fresh capital – whether they want it or not – and the seizure of the Fannie/Freddie mortgage giants before they were in fact in trouble (in order to prevent a Chinese buying strike of US bonds and prevent a spike in US mortgage rates), shows that private property can be co-opted – or eliminated – with little due process ….

Forbes’ Richard Eisenberg claims that the government is targeting our 401ks with taxes.

Indeed, rumors have swirled around Washington that the government was considering seizing funds from our 401k accounts.

Martin Armstrong predicted last month:

Government Will Seize All Pension Funds Globally – In the US that will Include 401Ks….

And Paul Craig Roberts – former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury under President Reagan, former editor of the Wall Street Journal, listed by Who’s Who in America as one of the 1,000 most influential political thinkers in the world, PhD economist – notes that some government officials have considered this option more than a decade ago:

Matt Taibbi’s report on the looting of state and municipal pension funds in behalf of Wall Street’s financial gangsters heralds what is in store for our private pensions.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/looting-the-pension-funds-wall-street-is-grabbing-money-meant-for-public-workers/5352934

American conservatives who are so pleased that “those damned bureaucrats who live on the public tit” are getting their comeuppance fail to see the precedent for their own private pensions.

As long ago as the Clinton regime, Alicia Munnell, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston who was appointed Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy, the position I had held in the Reagan administration, advocated confiscating 15 percent of private pension funds on the basis of the argument that the pensions had accumulated tax free.

The writing is on the wall for private pensions. Once the dollar becomes too weakened by the printing of vast amounts of them in order to finance Washington’s budget deficit and to support the solvency of “banks too big too fail,” QE will have to end. Desperate for money to fill the gap, Washington will turn to confiscation of private assets should any be left after the coming economic collapse.

If this sounds like a whacky conspiracy theory, please remember that the American government has seized private assets before, and President Obama authorized seizure of property again last year. (And the U.S. government’s take-down of Megaupload was also an exercise of the power to seize all of the legal property held in a storage facility because a handful of crooks have illegal property in theirs.)

And the American government long ago decided to save the banks at the expense of the American people. And many have said that the government will grab bank deposits as Cyprus did … and the Fed hasn’t exactly dispelled the possibility.

Postscript: The big banks are trying their best to grab your money before the government. Specifically, the big banks have shaved money off of virtually every pension transaction they handled over the course of decades, stealing collectively billions of dollars from pensions worldwide. Details here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here.