https://www.theepochtimes.com/is-a-serious-financial-crisis-next_4592701.htmlIs a Serious Financial Crisis Next?by Jeffrey A. Tucker
July 12, 2022
NOTE: when reading articles at The Epoch Times, DISABLE JAVASCRIPT in your browser. This can be done with a click of the mouse using free add-ons/extensions.Excerpt:Be grateful for what did not happen.
Two and a half years ago, governments around the world took the unprecedented step of “shutting down” their economies, which means the extreme control of people and their choices. This has proven to be devastating to prosperity, education, culture, health, and the prospects for liberty. Anyone could have anticipated this so it is not entirely clear why so many people in charge did not, at least that is what they now claim.
What did not happen—here is where the good fortune comes in—is a serious financial crisis along the lines of 2008. This occurs when a highly leveraged system is exposed by a dramatic rush by individuals and institutions to take back what they believe to be theirs, pulling their financial assets from the system and triggering all the mechanisms in place to save the banks and brokerage houses whose profits depend on retaining public confidence.
That never happened. The lockdowns affected mostly the “real economy” and not the world of leveraged finance and banking. That was bad enough. And now we are dealing with a huge problem of inflation that is a direct result of the government’s seemingly magic power to create the illusion of retained prosperity even though national and global economic systems went into a deep hibernation. Inflation is the expected result of a vast amount of liquidity working its way toward endemicity.
Now let us turn to events in Zhengzhou, China, a central financial hub with 12 million inhabitants. It is undergoing a deep financial crisis that has residents running on banks and authorities using every power accumulated during the COVID crisis to stop it from happening.
For some reason, Americans are inclined to dismiss events in China as something odd going on “over there” that surely cannot affect us here. That is the huge mistake that the United States and Europe made in 2020. We should not make that mistake again, and become aware that events in Zhengzhou could foreshadow real risks all over the world.
The New York Times reports the shocking scenes at both four banks and also the central bank, and how the government used “health passports” to prevent people from getting their money out of the banks.
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