Topic: Breaking news: Poland confiscates private pension funds (Read 8094 times)

Civil servants only would be a great kind of government IMO. Then the whole population become neo-politicians, and we all vote on the legislation, like politicians do now. The civil servants just have to make it happen. I doubt the population could make things any worse than they are now. I hear arguments against direct democracy saying that the citizenry would be too focused on short term goals for themselves and not on the big picture, but that's a joke when you look at how the past and current forward planning has/will turn out.

This just proves that governments can manipulate the amount of official debt. Next time you see the official statistics for the debt, have that in mind.

When trying to estimate the real debt you need to add all the unfunded liabilities. In US that would be 100 - 200 trillions USD total debt with unfunded liabilities!

The point is public services have to be paid for some how.  Because of the debt based economy we are all used to now, we expect lower taxes and better services, well it just don't work!

Polish prime minister is a known liar so IMO this doesn't prove anything. Even if you can't withdraw those money as you please, they still  belong to you. The government just stole your money to keep a sinking ship afloat for a few more years.

True, but the non-believers will come around And those that trust the pension funds for their retirement are going to be sore out of luck.

In your face, Herp.

Prime minister of Poland telling that it wasn't private money and if that was so, everybody could withdraw that money - but they couldn't.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F4V2nMa63JE

You know, as much as i disagree with mucus, i will never put him on ignore because he is similar to the nagging feeling in my head whenever i see BTC prices overextend themselves to quickly without having any positive news to back it up.  Mucus has saved me a few bucks over the past few months by keeping me a bit gun shy on the buy trigger, and by convincing me every once in a while that the market is overextended and needs a correction.

Nobody outside the core group of evangelists believes that.

+1.  They were being slowly robbed for years by being forced to contribute to something that they never believed in.  Now that it is official, it is a non-event.  Crazy stuff.

I think you've underestimated the value of bitcoin to allay fear of the future.  And I'm not talking Armageddon.  10% interest with a -5% real return would be bad enough.  Its a big market -- a significant portion of the value of gold is attributable to this service.  Of course gold's role here is tarnished due to its ability to be detected, difficulty of being transferred, having been (once upon a time) declared illegal for this purpose and ultra high value density (hard to actually buy lunch with it).  So a diverse commodity strategy (gold, silver, bitcoin) makes a lot of sense... bitcoin ESPECIALLY looks good in the boiled-frog scenario (where life goes on, basic services still work, just another day where your savings are getting pilfered) compared to gold/silver.

Read the above posts from actual Portuguese people.  They are basically saying this is a non-event because no-one in Portugal ever believed that they'd see a dime from their "retirement" anyway!!!  WTF?!  That's like saying I'm not worried about radiation exposure b/c I already have cancer. 

So bitcoin HAS utility right now -- its utility is peace of mind.  And of course it does have "raw" utility -- the ability to buy tons of stuff either direct or via services like Gyft...

I'm sorry that's my instinctive reaction to up uP UP kind of posts coming from the profiteers who did nothing besides proliferating themselves.

The point here is: What's keeping Bitcoins seemingly valuable currently is not their utility but the willingness of people to exchange Dollars for them. Pretty much everybody who wants to do that exhausted their ability to do so, and once the money vanishes for some reason nobody will hop in to compensate. OTC deals will only go as far and the people who do them would be quite reluctant to pay higher prices without the 'price fixing' taking place at gox.
I'm not saying that can't change in the future, but how it stands that's how it is now.

for shame trolling lk that.  I've learn3d to expect better from your other posts.  gox is not bitcoin and everyone knows that if you have x usd and y btc in gox all it means is 2 numbers in some gox db.

btc encourages or at least does not penalize holding value personally.  and when you do so noone can take it without your permission.  not counting stealing your personal private key of course.  but that is very different then being able to shift millions of balances into your sphere so you can then borrow against it.

I would like to comment, as some users do not understand what "private pension funds" in Poland is. This is a fraud system.

Yes, the funds are governed by private entities (financial institutions). Yes, they are obligatory. No, we would never get "our" money out of them. Here is the scheme:

A given percentage of every salary goes to one of ~20 institutions. They take 7% of the amount (not the gain, the full amount!) for the fatigue. The rest is "invested", but 2/3 of that money is invested in Polish government bonds. In the years 2000-2010 (the greatest boom in Poland, economy grows, stocks grow, gold grows, house bubble grows) the best fund lost about 10%. If I kept it in my pocket, I would have at least 20% more. Had I invested, maybe 100%?

How is this "paid back"? First, government needs to buy the bonds back. What money does it take to do it? Taxes. Yes, we, the citizens, must pay more taxes to be able to get pension. Then the money is sent to national system (ZUS) and paid to the retiree. In 2013 the retirement from "private pension funds" was 90 PLN - 30USD - 0.25 BTC.
After the "nationalization" tax money goes directly to ZUS to be paid to the retiree.

The money in the funds is mostly government bonds, and we will never see a fraction of it anyway. And the current government lifted retirement age from 65 to 67 years recently. If these guys are in trouble again, they will lift it to 120 years soon.

To sum up: the public money was moved from the financial institutions (how much do you think they paid for creation of this system 15 years ago?) to government. Nobody lost now (except banksters). But in the next months, the government can raise the debt again, and build more stadiums for our grandchildrens' money.

I was wondering where Corzine was vaporizing funds these days..

Topic is still front page article on zerohedge http://www.zerohedge.com/

Governments are the reason mega corporation exist in this fascist world we live in. It is them and their regulatory BS that creates and maintains these megamonopolies and kill small businesses.

I think that bureaucracy is the natural conclusion of our urbanized lifestyle and the dependence that comes with it and because it is an effective system for urbanized man. I think it only becomes ineffective with sufficient self-reliance of individuals and families in terms of providing for themselves out of natural resources.
In my opinion that is the end-game of technological progress, either that or we go extinct.

does not exist in the first place at this moment because of all the regimes. Trully free market won't even let huge corporations and monopoly happen because they are way too ineffective.

Technology and knowledge accumulated won't go away, and we are not mature enough to live a primitive lifestyle yet, although I certainly hope that this is the endgame. If we ever evolve to a space faring species it would be a requirement.
But it would be affordable to run a rudimentary robotic farm for the middle class now.

In my own interpretation of primitivism technology plays a vital role in developing a sustainable society.

De-urbanisation? I agree that urban environments created the "wage slave" society we have today but what's the alternative you see? Abandon civilization to go live like primitive apes?