Somebody's Watching You

ZeroHedge today reminded us of another reason to hold Bitcoins, with an article titled "Why 308,127,404 East Germans Americans Are Going To Get Hosed."

Highlights from the article:

"FinCEN is the executive agency tasked with ensuring that every US banker is an unpaid government spy through 'Suspicious Activity Reports'."

"Nearly 1.5 million Suspicious Activity Reports were filed across the US banking system in 2011, well over twice the number reported in 2004. On top of this, there were an additional -14.8 million- ‘currency transaction reports’ filed in 2011, a 6% jump over last year."

"A full 36 distinct federal law enforcement agencies requested information from FinCEN. And that doesn’t include state or local law enforcement."

"This is one reason why international diversification is so important – the likelihood of such collection and monitoring is greatly reduced when you bank overseas [TheBitcoinTrader: or move some of your savings into Bitcoin]."

"You don’t even need to be doing anything wrong (which is the case most of the time this happens) for one of these agencies to freeze your account ‘pending investigation’ with a simple phone call. Good luck getting it unfrozen."

"FinCEN also tracks the Report of Foreign Bank Account and Financial Accounts, commonly known as the FBAR. This form is required to be submitted by any US taxpayer with foreign financial accounts whose aggregate total exceeded $10,000 at any point during the year. In 2011, 618,134 US taxpayers filed an FBAR (which would have covered the calendar year 2010). This is more than a 100% increase over the filings just two years ago."

"It still leaves 308,127,404 Americans who have no backup plan, no insurance policy for their hard-earned savings. In other words, 99.8% of the population holds all of their money in an insolvent, corrupted, government-controlled, unsecured (though cleverly disguised) banking system."

Read the full article, here.

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Slovenia Nearly Bans Cash Outright

Thanks to Jon Matonis for this info:

According to recently amended tax law in Slovenia, a new maximum has been placed on the amount of cash that can used to pay a bill. Previously an already low 420 Euros, the limit has just been reduced to 50 Euros, which essentially bans cash from being used in all but the smallest of transactions (translated text):

"In the Official Gazette 101/11 of 12.12.2011 has been published Regulations Amending the Rules on the Implementation of the Law on Tax Procedure. Significant changes are mainly two.

In the second and third paragraphs of the first Article, the amount "EUR 420" is replaced by the amount of "50 euros". The cash can then pay bills only up to 50.00 euros (previously € 420.00)"

It appears that Slovenia might just beat Italy in the race to eliminate financial privacy and force citizens to use fee-based payment methods for all transactions.

On that note, here are some groin stretches you can do so it doesn't hurt too badly when we all have to start goose-stepping:

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