To Keep their Global Grip on the Economy, Banks Now Charging Customers for SAVING Money

By Justin Gardner

Yesterday, it was reported that banks are preparing for an “economic nuclear winter” as the taxpayer-funded giveaway to megabanks – euphemistically known as “quantitative easing” – is on the verge of collapse.

Things look particularly grim in the EU, where Brexit has rattled the nerves of central economic planners who worship at the altar of banking cartels and stock market schemes. Major European banks such as Deutsche Bank, Credit Suisse and RBS have seen their shares plummet, and are now prepared for the worst.

Fear and uncertainty are being felt not only by bank executives, but also by citizens who have had no choice but to live under the system of central banks and stock market shenanigans. In Germany, people are losing faith in banks and finding that the only ones they can really trust are themselves.

Sales of home safes are skyrocketing now that interest rates have gone into negative territory and people are actually having to pay a fee for making deposits into their savings accounts.

Germans point to the European Central Bank, which since 2014 has tried to reignite eurozone inflation by pushing interest rates below zero. Savers now face the prospect of being charged fees on their deposits. Some companies and large private depositors already incur charges.

The latest such sign that penalty rates are creeping in comes from a small cooperative bank in the Bavarian town of Gmund on the Tegernsee lake. As of Sept. 1, the bank, Raiffeisenbank Gmund, will charge its customers 0.4% on deposits above €100,000. Some 140 customers with total deposits worth €40 million are affected, said management board member Josef Paul.

Safe manufacturers are reporting sales increases of up to 25 percent, and there are waiting lists for safe-deposit boxes in the bigger cities. Germans already have a reputation for distrusting banking institutions and are wary of the apparent movement by authorities to discourage cash transactions.

Germans use cash at almost twice the rate of Americans and have traditionally shied away from the stock market, which can eviscerate life savings in the blink of an eye — case in point, the hyperinflation in the Weimar Republic.

In return for this distrust of global banking schemes and penchant for self-sufficiency, Germans are being penalized for the act of saving money. The lesson from central banking cartels is, if you don’t give us your money through the stock market and various investment schemes set up to fleece the public, you will suffer.

“The moment the bank tells me I have to pay interest on my deposit I’ll take my €50,000 or whatever it is and put it under my pillow, or buy a safe and stick the money inside,” said  Dagmar Metzger, a 53-year-old entrepreneur in Munich…

Paying to save is “preposterous,” said Marlene Marek, 58, owner of a Frankfurt bistro. “I would rather withdraw my money and stash it at home, or keep it in a safe-deposit box at a bank.”

The central banking system is an insatiable beast. Not satisfied with receiving trillions from taxpayers through quantitative easing, it continues to find ways of fleecing the public.

Germans are fed up and are opting out. Maybe it’s time for the rest of us to do the same and use alternatives such as Bitcoin to work around the global banking cartels.

Justin Gardner writes for TheFreeThoughtProject.com, where this article first appeared.