Governments Grabbing or Taxing Cash At Will Now
May 7, 2015 Economic News
By Jeff Berwick
We have been warning for years that as bankrupt Western countries came closer to being completely insolvent that they would begin instituting capital controls, doing bank bail-ins, taxing cash and outright just stealing cash.
All of these things have come to pass now in one form or another. Here are four examples of the countless that we could choose from.
THE USA – LAND OF THE FREE
The first is a heartbreaking story of spent a man who spent more than a decade running L&M Convenience Mart, a gas station, restaurant, and convenience store in rural Fairmont, North Carolina. Then, one year ago, without any warning, agents from the IRS seized his entire bank account, which was his entire life savings, totaling more than $107,000.
The reason? They said he had been depositing money in small amounts (as a convenience store just might do) under the amount that would trigger a reporting requirement for the last decade.
That’s all they needed. No charges, no arrest. They just deemed that he had been depositing small amounts of money into the bank for years and that was reason enough to impoverish him. What is a “big amount”, by the way? It is anything over $2,000. The Bank Secrecy Act (BS), which, like all cute regulatory names, requires banks to do the exact opposite of “secrecy” and to betray their customers’ financial secrets to the US government, mandates that anything over $2,000 is “suspicious” and must be reported.
And if you deposit anything under $2,000 regularly? That is suspicious too, as that man found out.