Otherwise Known As Confiscation …

Socialism is running short of other people’s money to give away … Little kiddies pay close attention.

IMF Discusses ‘One-Off’ Wealth Tax

People need to be aware that worsening the situation of one class of tax payers is never going to improve the situation of another. The particular wealth tax proposal mentioned by the IMF en passant is odious in the extreme, especially as the wealth to be taxed has already been taxed at what are historically stratospheric rates. It is noteworthy that the alternatives discussed by the IMF for heavily indebted states which are weighed down by the wasteful spending of yesterday appear to have been reduced to ‘default’ (either outright or via hyperinflation) or ‘more confiscation’.

How about rigorously cutting spending instead?

Lastly, a popular as well as populist target of the self-appointed arbiters of ‘fairness’ are loopholes, but as we have previously discussed, they are to paraphrase Mises ‘what allows capitalism to breathe‘.

Closing them will in the end only lead to higher costs for consumers, less innovation, lower growth and considerable damage to retirement savings.

It’s a cirle to doom, sort of like what Obamacare will be.

Insured Depositers?

It appears the American Banking Association has decided to put out fires early…

 While the crisis in Cyprus is a real concern for depositors in Cypriot’s banks, it has no implication for depositors in U.S. institutions. Depositors in U.S. banks are insured up to $250,000 and no insured depositor has ever lost money in a bank failure. The U.S. banking industry has rapidly returned to health with strong earnings, lower losses and significant increases in capital.

The FDIC insurance fund has over $25 billion in reserves and the banking industry – which bears all the financial costs of supporting the FDIC – pays over $12.3 billion each year to assure adequate funding.

Simply put, U.S. insured depositors are safe and their deposits are protected by a strong FDIC fund, a financially secure banking system and the full faith and credit of the U.S.

So, it seems, the basis for not worrying about US deposits is the rule of law and the deposit insurance? Remind us again what Cypriots thought they had?

Move along, nothing to see here …

For Everyone Shocked By What Just Happened… And Why This Is Just The Beginning

Zero Hedge writes …

Today, lots of people woke up in shock and horror to what happened in Cyprus: a forced capital reallocation mandated by political elites under the guise of an “equity investment” in insolvent banks, which is really code for a “coercive, mandatory wealth tax.” If less concerned about political correctness, one could say that what just happened was daylight robbery from savers to banks and the status quo. These same people may be even more shocked to learn that today’s Cypriot “resolution” is merely the first of many such coercive interventions into personal wealth, first in Europe, and then everywhere else.

For the benefit of those people, we wish to point them to our article from September 2011, “The “Muddle Through” Has Failed: BCG Says “There May Be Only Painful Ways Out Of The Crisis”, which predicted and explained all of this and much more. What else did the September BCG study conclude? Simply that such mandatory, coercive wealth tax is merely the beginning for a world in which there was some $21 trillion in excess debt as of 2009, a number which has since ballooned to over $30 trillion. And with inflation woefully late in appearing and “inflating away” said debt overhang, Europe first is finally moving to Plan B, and is using Cyrprus as its Guniea Pig.

For those who missed it the first time, here it is again. Somehow we think many more people will listen this time around:

Read the rest here …