US Federal Reserve

Submitted by Peter Diekmeyer via SprottMoney.com,

Ten years ago this week, Alan Greenspan left his post as head of the US Federal Reserve, facing disgrace among hard money advocates, which largely persists to this day.

However gold investors can learn an important lesson from how little influence Greenspan, one of the gold standard’s most eloquent backers, had during his 18-year tenure. A lesson that provides important clues as to future central bank monetary policy and its effect on precious metals prices.

Over the weekend, in response to Japan's stunning NIRP announcement, we predicted that two things would emerge: calls for the banning of cash, along the lines of previous invocations by "serious economists" such as these:

That the Fed has been boxed in by unleashing destructive monetary policies to "fix" decades of prior policy mistakes, is something we have been warning about since our first day. And, with every passing day that the Fed and its central bank peers pile up error upon error  to offset prior mistakes, the day approaches when this latest bubble, which some have dubbed it the "central banks all-in" bubble, will burst as well: Friday's shocking announcement of NIRP by the BOJ just brought us one step closer to the monetary doomsday.

Authored by Mark St.Cyr,

In a stunning policy move Bank of Japan Governor Haruhiko Kuroda introduced and adopted negative interest rates. The word “stunning” is fitting, for just weeks prior he stated there was no need to adopt such measures. It seems by all accounts his mind changed (or was made right?) after returning from Davos.

Now that the Bank of Japan has joined other central banks such as Denmark, Sweden, the ECB, and Switzerland into pushing its rates into what until just two years ago was considered the monetary twilight zone below the zero bound, and in the process sending a record $5.5 trillion in government bond yields negative...

... which quickly puts into in context all the recent warnings about physical cash being eliminated (because as a reminder negative rates and cash simply can not coexist as the latter provides a ready immunity from the former), such as the following: