The European Central Bank President Mario Draghi has mentioned the possibility of using a negative interest rate to stimulate the European economy.  Remarkable.

 “The potential move by the world’s biggest custody bank comes after Mario Draghi, president of the ECB, said last week that the region could require “further monetary stimulus” to offset a strengthening euro.

If the eurozone were to go to negative rates that would actually present the opportunity for us to charge for deposits and we are giving that very serious consideration,” Todd Gibbons, BNY Mellon’s chief financial officer, said on a conference call as the bank unveiled its first-quarter earnings.”

Let this be an opportunity to review what has happened in the past 6 years.

Those who were gun slinging, margin debt leveraging, bad mortgage creating, bad mortgage paper bundling, cross collateralizing, rehypothicating of assets people have not only gone unpunished, they have prospered.  The markets are in record territories and no one has been held responsible for the 2007 2008 meltdown.  Bonuses, IPOs, stock option holders and receivers rejoice.  It was all disguised as “too big to fail” but apparently was also “too big to jail”.

Those harmed?  The people who save their money.  Now, the most recent of all proposals is to bring “negative interest rates” to the mix.  Under strong consideration from the ECB head Draghi, this is none other than a boiling down of the Federal Reserve’s cheerleading for 2% inflation while keeping zero returns on savings.  Both are theft.

Being a prudent saver has gone from being ill treated by a never ending “emergency stimulus” of zero interest rates to now being a victim of theft.  And no wonder that half the nation is two paychecks away from being broke. Why save?  Why be prudent?

As David Stockman has suggested, we are a planned economy controlled by a clique of economists from the mutual admiration society of academia.  They don’t have a doubt in their mind that they know more, know better, than a myriad of entrepreneurs, speculators, investors, market researchers, and consumers all working independently in a free market.

Even Bernie Sanders, the Socialist Senator notices.  He asked Yellen if we are still a “capitalist democracy” driven free by a free market.  She had no answer.

I have an answer.  Central Planning, an activity in which both the Federal Reserve and the ECB engage, is an anathema to a free market system.  A select few people are deciding to abort and depart from the free market that has served our country so well for over two centuries.  And it is clear and exhibited today that central planners always make decisions that favor some groups over others.  It is arbitrary and subjective.  It is a new and damaging system that will have long ranging ill effects upon our country.

James Longstreet