With businesses struggling, a run on ATM’s, banks and other cash deposits, central bank calling back cash and every day people defaulting on every day credit – yeah, another global depression might be closer than thought.
Americans are suddenly defaulting on their personal debt at an alarming rate. Heck, even the American icon Colt is considering some form of bankruptcy.
Greece just pulled back every single bank’s reserve cash stockpile – just to keep them solvent. It won’t last long and the Greek people will soon want their money from those banks that now have no way to refund it. Bank run!!!! (it’s not a new movie)
What’s going on in America?
Well, banks are starting to put in cash controls, businesses are struggling to increase sales and energy stockpiles are growing from a lack of consumption.
Bank of America now charges a “cash handling fee” if a business or individual deposits a lot of cash.
Chase is reportedly forbidding its customers from storing cash in safety deposit boxes or using cash to pay bills:
As of March, Chase began restricting the use of cash in selected markets, including Greater Cleveland. The new policy restricts borrowers from using cash to make payments on credit cards, mortgages, equity lines, and auto loans. Chase even goes as far as to prohibit the storage of cash in its safe deposit boxes .
In a letter to its customers dated April 1, 2015 pertaining to its “Updated Safe Deposit Box Lease Agreement,” one of the highlighted items reads: “You agree not to store any cash or coins other than those found to have a collectible value.” Whether or not this pertains to gold and silver coins with no numismatic value is not explained.
Petroleum reserves grew another 5.3 million barrels even though production has slowed. Companies aren’t using as much energy to make/grow, transport, package and sell their goods because demand is dying – consumers are flat broke and running out of credit.
Producer after producer, company after company is reporting dropping top-line numbers.
Top line revenue represents money coming in before expenses – and it is dropping RAPIDLY.
Construction giant Caterpillar has had 28 months of declining sales.
The only choice American companies have is to reduce expenses to meet the reduction in income. People and services (advertising, cleaning, driving, inventory management, sales, etc) are their greatest expense and are going to take the brunt of the hit while companies are forced to get more competitive.
The way companies meet the need for efficiency is through automation – not hiring. The HUGE U6 unemployment figure is just the start as Google, Amazon and other monopolistic giants hire armies of robots to do the jobs Americans used to do – but it is necessary.
Asia has Alibaba and soon other nations will have something similar. That’s global competition.
Google may struggle with international relations and Chinese regulatory obstacles. A Chinese firm, Baidu, is replicating the Google model and is able to include billions of Chinese consumers while Google is shut out of the EU due to regulation and relegated out of Asia due to the great Chinese Firewall.
Consider the Chinese controlled and funded Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) which replaces the IMF and World Bank in the global community, it won’t be long until the Chinese can ignore the rest of the world completely (especially the U.S.)
As China’s numbers keep coming in so weak, one has to imagine – what happens if both America and China’s economies go south .. right.. fricking .. now?!?
Kind of hard to imagine this happening without a plan… just .. so .. hard.