Profiles

Centrally planned economies often stick with terrible ideas for many years. But markets can take bad products, learn from them, and turn them into great products that give the public what it wants and needs.

The ECB is now turning to a new mechanism by which a bond’s value can be legally reduced by the issuer in times of hardship. The purpose is to allow central banks and governments new ways of ripping off the private sector. 

As the wage-earning population grows smaller as a proportion of the population, get ready for calls for "wealth taxes" which can keep the taxes coming in even as total wage incomes fall.