Recent days has seen the European Central Bank lend one trillion Euros to European banks — in effect printing one trillion Euros. The ECB is hoping to do two things. First is to keep effectively bankrupt banks in business as the governments of Greece and Italy do not have the funds to bail them out. Second, the ECB is hoping the banks use the loans to buy the bonds of Greece, Spain, and Italy, keeping their interest rates at manageable levels.
So far, they are succeeding. The financial systems of the above mention economies haven’t imploded. Secondly, the European banks have just received subsidized loans, and further increased their own borrowing. They have borrowed more so that they can lend that money to Euro zone governments through purchases of their bonds.
As argued earlier, the ECB is exacerbating the explosion of debt by printing money and lending it out at artificially low rates, which creates levels of debt at banks and governments that are unsustainably high.
The Federal Reserve in America is doing the same thing. It has pushed real interest rates into negative territory, which encourages banks to increase their leverage and it has bought hundreds of billions of dollars of US Treasuries which has enabled the US government to run the largest fiscal deficits in history — again, borrowing money at artificially low rates. Without the Fed’s assistance, the yields on Treasuries would rise dramatically and force the government to reduce their borrowing. The economy has natural checks that stop excessive behavior — but the central banks have intervened in the real economy and has not allowed its natural defenses to work.
The ECB and the Fed have turned money into a play thing of governments. They print so much that money will lose all meaning. It is like giving heroine to a person with cancer. The patient needs surgery and chemo if he hopes to recover. By giving him heroine, he will feel good and not feel pain, but his sickness is not cured. The same with the economy, it needs a retrenchment, new laws and policies need to be passed so that the economy can become solid and have healthy growth. The money printing and growth through borrowing means that the economy will continue to be dependent on increased borrowing to survive — the mountain of debt . When the patient is too sick to continue despite the heroine, when the economy comes to the point where more debt and printing presses only make things even worse, then that could well be the point where the Beast will rise to his pinnacle of power. In the ensuing economic chaos, he will take away the liberty of those under his power and force his mark upon them all.
Hitler rose to power in a Germany that was in a massive economic upheaval, beset by hyper-inflation that was created by their money printing presses. The Anti-Christ could very well rise in a similar environment of chaos. The pillars of that chaos are being created in the here and now.