Ya no habrá más crisis: el pacto secreto de la banca y el Estado que te las cobra a plazos

There is a phrase that disappeared from the official vocabulary and almost no one has noticed it. In 2008, with the stock markets plummeting, political officials admitted in private and sometimes in front of a microphone that it was sinking. Visible panic, banks falling live, governments improvising a rescue every weekend.

Since then we have had a pandemic that paralyzed the planet, a war in Europe with an energy shock included, and the fall in 2023 of several American banks and a Swiss entity with 167 years of history. Any of those episodes would have been enough, only two decades ago, to cause a global depression. And yet, here we are, nothing has sunk. The official phrase now is another:

We have tools, tools to solve it. And it's true that they have them. What they don't explain in any press conference is how those tools work, what they are made of and especially who pays the bill every time they use them, because someone pays them, always. Only that the payment is now designed with enough talent so that they don't appear in any receipt. Stay, because we are going to examine how this world is really financed without crisis.

at least apparent, the monetary illusion, the rise in taxes that no one has voted, the role that the bank plays in all this, with a proposal, by the way, from Brussels, recent, this same week, that confirms it. I'll explain it to you shortly. And remember that you have many ways to support this channel, commenting and sharing, subscribing. That's totally free, by the way, making a member for very little, so it's worth a coffee and a croissant at a certain time, or just watching this video until the end.

so that we all push the algorithm that sometimes is made the roll. In any case, do what you do. On behalf of my team, I thank you. And now, yes, I said it, don't go away, that what you're interested in today is also interesting to you.

Let's start by recognizing something that from the critical analysis sometimes it is difficult to admit: emergency management has improved a lot. In March 2023, Silicon Valley Bank went from fashion bank to corpse in 48 hours and on Sunday night they had already created a mechanism deployed so that no depositor would lose a dollar. Credit Suisse was liquidated in a weekend. The pandemic that literally closed the world economy responded with billions of stimulus in a matter of weeks.

Compared to the three years of agony between 2008 and 2012, this is another league. Stay with these two surnames, Reinhardt and Sbrancia. Later on, they will be the key that will explain absolutely everything that I want to tell you today. Because the interesting question is not whether the tools work, because they work. The question is what price they have and why that price never enters the public debate.

Think about the difference. A sharp shock has a date and has culprits. Governments that fall, a banker before the judge, even if it's just one. And for a picture. What has replaced the sharp shock lacks right now of both things. And that's where what I want to tell you starts. But first.

Before continuing, a 30-second note. Today we are going to see that the most harmful thing for your money is called inflation, which will appear, and that there is a certain interest in that inflation to persist. Hence, the stopped savings in an account that does not make any money is not a good decision. That is why today's sponsor fits very well with what we are talking about. Trade Republic has a 3% remuneration account for new customers.

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You have the link in the QR that appears on the screen, in the description and in the comment fixed. Follow it so they know that you're on my side, that I won't be any further. And now, let's get to today's topic. The nominal illusion.

The first tool is the oldest and most elegant one. Make everyone have more money while the money is getting less and less. Your payroll goes up, the price of your house goes up, your account has more zeros than five years ago. The feeling is directly that you are progressing. But try to measure your salary in purchase baskets, in years needed to access the same house that your parents bought. And in mirroring you will see how it is gradually falling apart.

In Spain, the real wage has only moved for example in three decades while the nominal did not stop growing. Nobody has taken anything away from you. At least not anything you can point with your finger.

You can't even point with that finger at a guilty person. Simply, what you have now, buy less. This was not discovered by anyone by science. This has been written for a long time. John Maynard Keynes himself said it, who is not a saint of our devotion, but he wrote very interesting things. He said it in 1919. He said that the economic consequences of peace

through a continuous process of inflation, generated that governments could secretly and inadvertently confiscate an important part of the wealth of their citizens. And it also found that this process ruined in a way that not a man among a million was able to diagnose. A century later, that phrase remains an exact technical description, with a difference:

Now we have data and in real time to calibrate the doses of that poison. Look at the language of 2021 and 2022. Inflation was "transitory", they said. For 18 months of official reports they talked about that, while inflation was two digits higher in Central Europe. I don't think they provoked it on purpose. I don't think so. It could be. But then I'll explain why that distinction is important.

Because one thing is not to cause a fire and another very different is to look at the fire you have in front of you with the hoses off because the smoke is casually fixing your accounting. And here comes the good thing, because the nominal illusion has a second round of the nut, of which there is still less talk. The rise in taxes that no one voted for. The IRPF is a progressive tax, right? More income, higher rates, higher types,

The system makes sense if the sections move with inflation. When they don't move, something very perverse happens. They raise your salary by 3% to compensate that life is 3% more expensive, your purchasing power has not really improved anything, but that nominal increase pushes you to a higher fiscal scale and you pay a higher average rate. In the end you end up losing. It is called cold progressivity and it is an increase in taxes that has never happened before in Congress.

In Spain, for example, the state rate of the IRPF has been frozen since 2015. We have been 11 years with an accumulated inflation of more than 12% only in the last cycle. Even AIREF said so. It calculates that administrations enter about six tenths of the extra GDP per year

More than 10 billion euros because the government itself recognized 2.3 billion euros against Brussels alone in 2025, a figure that the technicians in this case of Hacienda consider very short. The result is added? Yes, 325 billion euros of collection in 2025, a historical record with the deficit falling to 2.18% of GDP. Without tax reform, it turns out

that there is nothing that can change it without a single vote. France has a legal mechanism that automatically adjusts the sections to inflation, but Spain, for example, does not have it and other countries either. And it doesn't seem like a forgetfulness. It works very well. How to fix it? If you make more money. Frédéric Bastiat wrote in 1848 that the state is the great fiction through which everyone strives to live at the expense of everyone.

Bastiat said it. Bastiat himself gave us the exact tool for this case. He said that in economics there is what is seen and what is not seen. And you can see the record collection celebrated in press wheels. What is not seen is that, for example, according to AIREF itself, more than a third of the recent collection increase is purely the effect of inflation, of prices. The merit is that inflation. But who pays inflation?

You and I have seen how inflation impoverishes. We only know that on the one hand, while the Treasury is recording on the other that impoverishment disguised as wage improvement. But

What would happen if I told you that this mechanism needs a partner with enough balance to absorb all the debt that the system is emitting and thus generates that inflation? And that the same week we are in, Brussels has proposed to make more room for that debt? Look, the necessary partner. This week in the Financial Times it has been announced that the European Commission will propose to reduce capital requirements for the bank.

The official version talks about simplifying a redundant and competitive framework in the United States and the United Kingdom. But beware! I laugh because I don't cry. Because that part of the argument is correct. The European framework is a kind of thousand sheets of superimposed mattresses that not even the supervisors themselves defend with enthusiasm. But look at the concrete piece they play. The devil lives there.

It is proposed to eliminate the additions of something called Pillar 2 on the leverage ratio. I translate it to you in classical Latin. In the capital rules considered by risk, the public debt of your own country is zero risk.

A bank can buy it without consuming capital, as if it did not exist. The only rule that puts, let's say, some kind of ceiling on that trap is the leverage ratio that measures capital against total assets without asking for the risk. It is literally the only thing that prevents a bank from filling out state bonds to the brink.

When you loosen that norm, specifically, what you are doing is clearing up space in the balance for that sovereign paper, for that printed money that has nothing to do with production. It's counted as they want, but that's making room for debt. And there's no need to speculate with intentions because the United States has already done it and left it written. Your reform of the reinforced leverage ratio came into force on April 1st of this year.

Have you heard a lot about this? The official argument of the Federal Reserve said that the norm had become the main restriction instead of the emergency mattress that should be, and that disincentivized intermediation in debt of the treasure. Let the United States do it, because as they make the dollars ... A Fed governor, Stefan Miran, publicly lamented that he would not take the opportunity to exclude the treasure bonds directly from the calculation. But the United Kingdom is going in the same direction.

Europe, the United Kingdom, the United States. There are three jurisdictions, the same rule, the same triennial. The word "coincidence" starts to make this suit big, right? Because what does the bank earn?

It wins everything. Zero risk in sovereigns, remuneration of the reserves parked in the central bank, thousands of millions of public money between 22 and 24 in exchange for basically nothing. And now they have more leverage. No one coerces anyone. The state needs a captive buyer for a decade of growing emissions and the bank needs an asset with regulatory privilege. That is called symbiosis in biology.

With a historical detail that is worth remembering and for that we have to get out of here for a moment and go to 1945. The Second World War. Join me in 1945, a moment at the end of the Second World War. The United States was out of conflict with a public debt of more than 100% of its GDP, the United Kingdom above 200%, figures that today we would associate with the imminent collapse of a country in some case,

Three decades later, those debts had been reduced to perfectly manageable levels, in very little time, and there was no unpaid or productive miracle that could explain all this on its own. The question is how they did it. Here come the two surnames I asked you to save: Carmen Reinhardt and Belén Sbrancia.

In his work published in 2011, they named and numbered that mechanism. They called it financial repression. The recipe consisted of keeping the types of real interest negative for years, with inflation above the type that paid the debt. And so they could assure, through regulation, that the bank and the domestic savers would have no choice but to continue buying that paper that lost value.

They calculated that between 1945 and 1980, the real types were negative for approximately half a year and that only because of that, the United States and the United Kingdom liquefied debt for a value of between 3 and 4% of GDP each year. It was a silent fine paid by the saver without anyone signing any default. They already had the classes there. Maybe now they have learned to do something similar.

Bring the 2026 template. They will tell you that it does not fit because the central banks raised the types to 4.5. They had the nominal type. But the real continued negative, touching zero for a good part of the cycle. And there is something more important: the debt had been refinanced for very long periods during the era of free money. Life

The average life of the Spanish debt is around 8 years, so the rise in types takes almost a decade to reach the interest rate, while inflation eats up the stock from the first day. They are good, huh? That is why the Spanish P/B ratio debt has dropped these years without a single real adjustment euro. The denominator was lowered, it was inflated with the nominal P/B and it is manual. The 1945 manual follows where it always was, in the drawer above and well at hand.

Tactics, not strategists. Here I want to be very precise, because this is the point where many analyzes run to conspiracy, lose all the reason they had. There is no plan here. I don't think so. There is no room with 20 people designing your impoverishment at a glance. No, we would be overestimating them. What there is is something more prosaic and much more difficult to fight. Tactics.

Each actor in each bifurcation chooses the less painful exit for that Tuesday morning. The government that does not deflate the IRPF is only avoiding the headline of "Renounce 10 billion in collection". The collector who loosens the lever responds to the simultaneous pressure of an industry and a treasure that need the same. The sum of all those decisions

short-term type, produces a result that seems designed without anyone having designed it. And it works precisely for that. It is not a conspiracy. It is because there is no one to blame to point out or any document to filter. They are adapting in real time for their benefit, without counting on you. Now, that there is no plan does not mean that there is no knowledge. They know perfectly well what the machine does, because the academy has explained it to them with notes on their feet.

And there is a proof that they know it. Central banks bought more than 1,000 tons of gold a year in 2022, 2023, 2024. A pace that was not seen since the 50s, in post-war. In 2025, the pace was moderated to 863 tons, but it is still very high, with gold at historical prices and still almost doubles the average of the previous decade.

And the fact that sums it all up came at the end of last year. Gold surpassed American treasury bonds, as I told you in a recent video, as the world's main value reserve asset. And now think about it for a second. The institutions that issue the money prefer as a reserve the only monetary asset that is not anyone's debt. Those who know do not want it. Who manages the system is covering himself against the system? Is that what is happening?

Meanwhile, the loophole between bank and sovereign debt that Europe swore to dismantle after 2012, that "Doom Loop" as they called it, which was about to break the euro, gets fat with each of these decisions. And the European Fund for Deposit Guarantee that should protect you, the famous EDIS, has been blocked for 12 years and now it is relaunched by lowering a simple tap of liquidity between national funds everything it has.

Step forward. With style, huh? Yes, and in three languages. They are people. The truth is that you will be wondering, look, I'm here at the other end of the world, what can we do with all this?

Well, I'm not going to sell you recipes, I don't trust anyone to sell them to you with this excuse, but there is a defense that does not cost money and that almost nobody exercises. Let's look for a solution. Change the unit of measurement. Stop counting your progress in euros and start counting it in what those euros buy. Dollars, lempiras, pesos, whatever. Look at your average IRPF type.

the one from five years ago and compare it with today's one and ask yourself what has improved in your life to justify those ups and downs, that difference. Nominal illusion only works with those who don't look at it from the front. The moment you see it, it loses almost all its power over your decisions, starting with the most important one: where and in what do you store the fruit of your work?

The system has learned to manage crises so that they do not hurt at once. We are not going to have any great crisis unless something really big happens. Do we agree? I see it that way. You learn, therefore, to detect how the deadlines hurt. That lucidity is not going to fix the world, but it is going to completely change your position within it. And in an environment designed so that you don't look, so that you don't look at anything, looking is already a lot. We continue.