You've managed to touch on about half a dozen separate topics...
I feel that Governments are regulating banking institutions on credit and atm fees so that they can force people off paper money, onto electronic money.
I happen to believe that the government is far more under the control of the banks than vice versa. The government
passes laws, but the actual text for those laws (which very, very few of our Congresstwerps ever read, much less comprehend) are written by lobbyists for the banking industry in exchange for campaign contributions. Yes, it is primarily a process of bribery. Specifically, a lobbyist for the banking industry hands the Congresscritter the legalese text of the proposed law and the staff of the sponsoring or authoring senator/rep incorporates that text into the proposed law. Laws are really written by lobbyists. Those laws contain the loopholes and exemptions the bankers wish to have in place. When Dodd-Frank was passed as a response to the "banking crisis", this was something like a 1300 page law. D-F unleashed all manner of interest rate hikes and vicious fees on credit cards; to imagine that "altruistic" senators/congresspeople would have done such a thing in the interest of protecting their "constituents" is laughable. The trend these last few years is for lobbyists to write laws that are deliberately incomprehensible; so that when the banks commit massive what would be fraud to any person of normal sensibility, it is not necessarily clear that such activity is illegal. In essence, if the penalty for robbing a bank was that you had to give up 30% of what you stole, there would be a line around the block of people waiting to rob every bank. There is always a means of parsing assertions into finer and finer convolutions. And, you have generally mediocre gov't lawyers going up against the smartest, sharpest bankster lawyers on the planet. This creates a situation where the banks can take calculated law-breaking risks and the worst that happens is that they forfeit maybe half of what they stole. HSBC, convicted in no uncertain terms of laundering drug money...HOW COME they are still primary dealers for US Tsy bond sales? You mean, they haven't lost their license to operate in the US?
Additionally, almost all regulations governing banks and banking have no
OR ELSE phraseology. The best example are FDIC regulations. Time after time, the regs say the director of the FDIC SHALL....perform prompt, corrective action...(generally taken to mean, seizing and closing down a bank whose assets fall below statutory capital requirements.) By doing so, the director of the FDIC ensures that the FDIC fund takes no giant hit. But see, there's no OR ELSE....like Sheila Bair doesn't go to prison for ten years if she fails to seize a bank. Nobody knows what happens. The law doesn't say! But, if you or I rob a bank, we're going to the slammer for a specified number of years upon conviction. Everywhere in banking law, there are no penalties specified for regulators failing to perform their appointed duties. THIS is why we are where we are. We have laws. They simply aren't being enforced. During the S&L crisis of the early nineties, over 1300 banking executives were prosecuted, convicted, and many, many went to prison. During this crisis, which was
SEVENTY TIMES as large as that one, the number of banker convictions can be counted on ONE HAND. And Madoff doesn't count, that was a stock scheme. The idea that Jon Corzine is still running around a free man tells you all you need to know about the utter corruption of the present regime/system. And HE wasn't a banking exec, per se.
Meaning we would carry no more paper, we would carry plastic.
Well, the gov't doesn't like cash transactions, they think anyone who spends more than what it costs for a Starbucks is a drug dealer trying to launder money and/or evade taxes. They think YOUR money is THEIR money. And they want their cut.
In the US, this would force everyone to open a banking account, which would benefit the banks anyway.
They don't like cash. And the banks don't like having to count it and the Bureau of Engraving doesn't like having to replace it and transport it. If it could all be electronic digits, they would be happier. Agreed.
Then they will claim that the electronic funds are backed by gold, but you cannot turn in electronic funds for gold.
I am not sure this is an issue. If backed by gold, one should be able to buy gold with whatever is money. They may want to know who is buying gold, and that would potentially destroy one aspect of gold ownership--anonymity
It doesn't matter what the actual value of a thing is, only that people believe it has value.
True.
If people believe their electronic funds are really backed by gold, they will have no problem with it at all.
But if you can't buy gold with electronic digits, at a rather tightly-fixed exchange ratio, then I, for one, do not believe that people will believe the assertion that their money is gold-backed.
Meanwhile, whenever you sign a signature card at a bank, or sign any loan, if you read the small print you will quickly realize that there is a clause somewhere that states more or less, that by signing that document, you agree to pay on our national debt, pay the fed reserve which is really just a bunch of private banks, and not a Gov entity at all.
I think you are expanding that concept wildly, even if what you are saying is generally true. The idea of our currency as it is is that you can only pay taxes using said currency, and this is the method by which, to the extent they can, governments enforce the acceptance of their currency. You and I may have a deal to swap silver bullion for oranges, but if you wish to have any more widespread form of "moneyness" outside of our arrangement, and if that form generates what the gov't views as income and is thus taxable, the gov't will only accept their own-issued currency as payment for same. So somehow, somewhere, you are going to have to do something that somebody, somewhere, will pay you money for, so you can pay your taxes.
What you say about the Fed is true and well documented.
