Here’s What Happens When A Central Bank Goes Bust

Submitted by Simon Black of Sovereign Man blog,

Over the past several decades, people around the world have become so brainwashed that few people really give much thought anymore to the safety of their currency.

It’s not something people really understand… there’s apparently some Wizard of Oz type figure at the top of the hill pulling all the levers of the monetary system. And we just trust them to be good guys.

This is partially true. Today’s financial system is dominated by central bankers who have been awarded nearly dictatorial control of global money supply.

In allowing them to set interest rates, they are able to control the ‘price’ of money, thus controlling the price of… everything.

This power rests primarily in the hands of four men who control roughly 75% of the entire world money supply:

• Zhou Xiaochuan, People’s Bank of China
• Mario Draghi, European Central Bank
• Haruhiko Kuroda, Bank of Japan
• Ben Bernanke, US Federal Reserve

Four guys. And they control the livelihoods of billions of people around the world.

So, how are they doing?

We could wax philosophically about the dangers of fiat currency. Or the dangers of the rapid expansion of their balance sheets. Or the profligacy of wanton debasement through quantitative easing.

But let’s just look at the numbers.

In theory, a central bank is like any other bank. It has income and expenses, assets and liabilities.

For a central bank, assets are typically securities or commodities which have value in the international marketplace, such as gold or US Treasuries.

Central bank liabilities are all the trillions of currency units floating around… dollars, euros, yen, etc.

The difference between assets and liabilities is the bank’s equity (or capital). And this is an important figure, because the higher the capital, the healthier the bank.

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