Transcription
This is Matthew CRS's Bitcoin University. Today, I want to talk about the European Union confiscating, quote-unquote, "unused savings." There's been this article that's been circulating widely on acts about the European Commission to use 10 trillion Euros of citizen savings for EU defense.
The European Commission estimates the total level of unused savings of EU citizens at 10 trillion euros and paid special attention to this phrase, "unused savings," because we'll come back to that. The European Commission intends to find ways to mobilize this money to finance its plans to militarize Europe and support the European military-industrial complex, according to a statement by European Commissioner for financial services and savings and investment union, Maria Louise Albuquerque, or Albuquerque, distributed by the EC press service task reports.
This is an article that comes out of Belarus; it looks like that's where the domain is, so we're going to look into this, see how much of this is true. It looks like this is based on a speech which was indeed given by Commissioner Albuquerque to the European Commission, and in it, he has a couple of phrases I want to go through, a couple of paragraphs. He says, quote, "Today we have some 10 trillion Euro of citizen savings in low-yield deposit accounts. Europeans are among the best savers in the world, yet they're not getting significant returns on their savings. This is simply not fair."
I think it's pretty funny to hear something like that from a bureaucrat. Doesn't he understand that it's Europe's own Central Bank, it's the ECB itself, that sets the short-term interest rates that savers receive? The ECB intentionally pins these interest rates always below the true rate of inflation as a way of further stealing from savers by eroding their purchasing power. So it's pretty funny to hear him say that this is not a fair situation. Of course, it's not a fair situation; we live under these Central Bankers unfortunately, and of course, the Federal Reserve, the US Central Bank, does the same thing in the US in terms of manipulating interest rates.
If we take a look at ECB deposit rates, this gives us a rough idea of what savers can receive in the Euro area, and for many years, in fact, this number was actually negative, where you'd lose money keeping money in a savings account. And then it recently, uh, became positive, guys, as high as 4%, and now is being cut again. But what's really unfair, of course, is when a central bank pins interest rates and makes them negative. This is not something he mentions in his speech; he's just concerned that he sees a pile of money sitting there in savers' saving accounts, in savers' accounts, that he wants to use.
If European savers choose to keep their savings in low-yielding savings accounts, perhaps it's actually rational behavior, even if bureaucrats don't approve. Maybe European savers are worried about war on the continent, as we're going to be talking about. Maybe they've been laid off as Germany continues to de-industrialize after the US blew up the natural gas pipelines from Russia, Nordstream 1 and Nordstream 2, and also after Germany blew up its own remaining nuclear power plant. This is how you commit civilizational and economic suicide, which is pretty pathetic to see. You know, you can't run an industrial economy without cheap baseload electricity, and for that, you need either hydrocarbons or nuclear, and Germany seems to be allergic to both of them because of the dominance of the Green Party for so many years, completely destroying the country. Europe is not especially windy, and it's dark for much of the year, so you cannot depend on solar or wind energy to provide this cheap baseload for the electric grids.
Now, maybe these European savers are saving up to buy a house. We're talking about different reasons why it might be rational for them to have quote-unquote "unused savings." Maybe they're saving up to buy a house, and it's become extremely difficult because money printing has put the average housing, the average house price or apartment price, beyond the reach of most young adults in Europe and everywhere else. Or maybe European savers don't want to invest their savings in low return on equity, highly regulated, sclerotic European companies, which is what most of them are.
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This month, the EU Commission will unveil the Savings and Investments Union. This is, of course, what the speech was about that we were talking about. We'll turn private savings into much-needed investment; that sounds definitely sinister. And we'll work with our institutional partners to get it off the ground. So, of course, there's some good money for bankers to be made here as well about this initiative. The Savings and Investments Union will build upon the successful completion of two action plans, blah, blah, blah. It aims to connect savings to the most productive investment, as if the government could ever do something like this, match savings with productive investments with a focus on the union's strategic objectives. Oh, how, how, uh, what are the odds that, of course, the union's strategic objectives would be the most productive investment? They're just defining it to be this way, including quote, "innovation, decarbonization," of course, blowing up your nuclear power plants and making sure you don't have any more hydrocarbon hydrocarbons, digital technology, and defense. Defense is probably going to be more like war. It will focus on increasing returns on savings of EU citizens and widening financing opportunities for businesses, improving the competitiveness of the EU, and again, that strategic objective includes innovation. Governments simply cannot command or legislate quote-unquote "innovation" into existence. If they could, every country in the world would be wildly prosperous. True innovation actually just happens when governments get out of the way of smart and productive people; let them freely communicate and share and critique ideas. This is where free speech comes in and is a very important part of societal innovation, and also when the government enables people to easily start companies without having to endure endless bureaucratic red tape. If you have free speech, if you don't have a lot of bureaucracy, you can have much better innovation in terms of people starting new tech companies, especially.
By contrast, the EU is the opposite of all these things; it's a highly regulated, bureaucratic, woke nightmare of a place to do business. And this is not just me as an American, an ugly American pointing that out. Mario Draghi spelled this out late last year in his devastating report on European competitiveness, pointing out that only four of the world's top 50 tech companies are European. And I'll put a link to this, this, uh, report in the description notes below.
But before we end, I want to turn to this discussion of unused savings, because this is what was really being discussed on X. This term, I think Canute von Holm had a great summary here: There's no such thing as quote-unquote "unused savings." Money is never idle but always of some use to its owner. Money perpetually acts as insurance against uncertainty. When people are saving money, it's not being unused; in fact, it's being used as a way of hedging against future uncertainty. "Unused savings," the way governments use this phrase, it's simply another Orwellian neologism, another new word, another warping of the language by the government in the service of government overreach. It means that a government is looking for new ways to confiscate your private property after you've already paid income taxes and capital gains taxes and property taxes and government license fees on the same, same money; that's when it becomes savings. You've already run the gauntlet of all these government taxes, but that's not enough for the EU; they want to tax you even more, quote-unquote, "unused savings." You could just think of it as private property that the government hasn't succeeded in stealing from you yet. Idle savings is savings that you worked hard to accumulate that the government wants to redistribute to idle, lazy people, especially government bureaucrats.
And then there's this phrase, "hoarding," that always comes up in this context as well. Government never hoards, but it accuses you of hoarding. This is always the last word you hear before a government tries to steal your private property. And this is funny; this was in the Executive Order 6102 by President Franklin Roosevelt, in which he forbade the quote-unquote "hoarding" of gold coin, gold bullion, and gold certificates. These were just savers trying to hedge against dollar devaluation, but he uses this pejorative, "hoarding." Whenever you see "hoarding," you know the government's about to try to attack your private property.
TR Deer has a couple of great tweets here I wanted to highlight in this context since he comes out of Europe. The people who want to mobilize the 10 trillion in private citizen savings and who are overseeing 13.8 trillion EUR in combined government debt seem to be as excited as ever about subsidizing questionable regimes all around the world. And he's quoting Ursula von der Leyen here, saying, "We're presenting a new 4.7 Euro billion global gateway investment package for South Africa." Really, Europe should take care of its own people before it worries about this. And then Tor points out, "Remember what von der Leyen said last week: 'Rearm Europe' could mobilize close to 800 billion euros of defense expenditures for a safe and resilient Europe."
And here's the conclusion, which I think is probably correct: Core is the ambition to transition the EU from a welfare state to a warfare state union. It seems that Europe, for the past 100 years, has fallen back and forth between these two things: a welfare state and a warfare state. And then Tor points out this tweet from, or this article from the Netherlands Ministry of Defense: For the first time in 30 years, investigating reinstating the draft. So this is quite, quite ominous. And I think if you're paying attention, all the warning signs are here. If you read history books, you've seen this happen before. EU politicians may be looking into war as a way of gaining even more control over their populations and trying to distract them from their failed immigration policies, which have been a complete disaster, and the massive government debt loads. Manufacturing a crisis is a great way to stay in power and consolidate, and consolidate power, as well as we've seen from 9/11, leading to the Patriot Act and the forever wars, which were great for the military-industrial complex, not too good for the US debt load or for the common American. And, and of course, with COVID, the massive money printing that followed, the stripping of constitutional rights, the huge profits for Big Pharma and their enablers, internet censorship, and everything that came with that.
So how can you protect yourself and your savings, whether you're in Europe or elsewhere? Consider leaving Europe before it's too late. I hate to say that, some people probably should stay and fight for the homeland, whatever their homeland is, uh, but if you fought for the homeland, for example, in the Soviet Union in 1918, at the time of the Russian Revolution, you had to wait until you were over 70 years old for things to be restored. So sometimes you might have to just leave the EU. I believe it is in the process of imploding; it's not going to be pretty, especially as the monetary union is torn apart in the process. It's becoming more and more totalitarian every week. And also remember that it's a fool's errand to try to save in a money like the Euro that politicians and bankers can print up for free for themselves while you need to work long hours for and pay taxes on the same money that they can print up for free.
So if you're a European, consider moving your savings into Bitcoin to protect your savings, to the extent that they even let you get into Bitcoin anymore. I think it's an even worse situation as we have now in, in the EU, when politicians are eyeing your quote-unquote "unused savings," which you already pay taxes on, and trying to come up with ways to get you to, to invest that money in war and decarbonization. I think it's funny to juxtapose those two things, as the EU Commission does, because what's the carbon footprint of a massive war in the European continent? These people seem to want opposing things. Will I be able to buy carbon credits to offset all the bombs? Inquiring minds want to know.
It looks like Europe really does not want a peace to be brokered by the US. This is from a couple of weeks ago: Leaders arriving in Kiev, urging Zelenskyy to stay the course and refuse efforts by the Trump administration to end the war. Leaders in attendance from Canada and all over Europe. Also here, Ukraine, EU leaders are in Kiev to encourage Zelenskyy not to greet broader peace. The message is clear: Stay the course. These people are bent on war.
If you want to go deeper into Europe's decline, you might also join my recent video on the new CBDC, Central Bank Digital Currencies, coming to Europe in October of this year. I'll put a link to this in the description notes below. And I should say, of course, here, needless to say, I don't take joy in any of this decline. This is not about some American nationalism or jingoism trying to lord it over Europe. At one point in my life, actually, I was strongly considering moving to Germany, drawn by its literature, its music, and its general culture. But that Germany and that Europe that I admired back in the '80s and '90s is now unfortunately mostly dead, as far as I can tell from visits, killed by the very leaders that were supposed to protect and preserve Europe. I fear that Europe, or at least Western Europe, is now well past the point of return. And the thing is, when you put this in historical conflict, when you put this in historical context, I should say, Europe has always been a place of endless war, and the last 80 peaceful years may they prove to have been the exception rather than the rule. I'll put a link to this in the description notes below, showing battles from 2500 BC to 2016, and we can see Europe here is simply one battle after another, with the last 80 years really being the exception rather than being the rule.
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