It is lunch time and you go to the ATM to get some cash out. There is an ‘out of order’ sign.
Assuming that will be sorted out soon, you go to another ATM and are confronted with a similar sign. You hope for the best and again assume that this is a one off and will be sorted soon. However, a few hours later as you leave the office, you see queues of people at ATMs all around the city.
You turn on the news and hear that after a crash in stock markets overnight in Asia, capital controls have been imposed in your country.
Can you imagine the impact on your life if overnight capital controls were put in place and you were not able to access your company’s capital and or your life savings?
How would you feel if overnight, your bank imposed withdrawal restrictions and you could only withdraw €60 per day? And that you were prohibited from wiring your hard earned cash to an investment provider or financial institution in a different country.
Today, hardworking people in Greece – savers and business owners – continue to suffer the economically devastating effects of capital controls including bank deposit withdrawal restrictions.
Restrictions on transferring cash abroad remain and this has prevented business owners from importing the various products they use to run their businesses or they sell to consumers.
The limits on cash withdrawals – now just €420 can be withdrawn per week – and this is hampering entrepreneurs and their ability to do business and indeed ordinary people trying to conduct their lives.
But this is Greece and they are a feckless, lazy people who do not pay their taxes?
Well the stark truth is that, many countries in the Western World have demographic, pension and debt time bombs ticking and soon to explode.
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The U.S. is the most in debt nation the world has ever seen. The National Debt continues to surge and is now over a whopping $18 trillion or $18,000,000,000,000 (twelve zeros).
You could wrap $1 bills around the Earth 70,747 times with the debt amount!
If you lay $1 bills on top of each other they would make a pile 1,984,803 km, or 1,233,299 miles high!
That’s equivalent to 5.16 trips to the Moon!
That does not even include the “off balance sheet” debt of the U.S. and the massive unfunded liabilities of over $100 trillion for social security, Medicare and Medicaid.
And we accuse the Greeks of dodgy accounting?
The UK, Japan and many EU countries – including Spain, Portugal, Italy and indeed France – have similar debt time bombs waiting to detonate.
Events in Greece in recent weeks may well be a vision of the financial future for all those who remain in denial and do not take preventative action.
Gold bullion has protected many Greek people in recent months as it has protected people throughout history from bank, markets and currency collapses.
Provided of course that one owns physical coins and bars in the safest vaults in the world and in the safest jurisdictions in the world.
