The war on terrorism has been pushed deep into the financial system. The CIA and the FBI have specific departments set up to watch the money flows and activities of certain organizations. They can easily seize banks accounts and funds if they feel, or can prove for some reason that the money is being used for plans or attempts to strike a target. It would seem that this is probably a good thing, at least on the surface.
The question that then arises is what happens when the use of these powers are pushed too far? Are innocent law-abiding people being caught up in this system, and what ramifications does that have on the banking system?
Now we all are familiar with the saying "I have nothing to hide," or "If you're not with the program you are with the terrorist." Fine, we get it. Nobody wants to be with the terrorists or even give the appearance that they don't want to help, but what about restricting you access to your hard-earned money.
Think it can't happen, think again. It is happening now as we speak and has been for some time. Just recently, a long-standing influential account holder (name withheld for obvious reasons) that was well-known to his bank tried to remove money in the form of gold from a bank in Switzerland. He was told that anything above 200,000 Swiss francs could not be removed from the account because it had to do with anti-terrorism and bank laundering precautions. What?
There are other examples of people removing smaller amounts of money for cash purchases of things like automobiles that are being asked what they need it for, or what they are going to do with the money. Really?
The bank never asked, nor did they care where it came from when it was deposited. However, when they go to retrieve those funds at a later date, a cast of suspicion is thrown over them. Does that seem right? Are we terrorists by default because we want our money in a large sum for something?
A lurking concern should be if the banks and other financial institutions should find themselves in a situation that they are over leveraged or insolvent, hell let's just call it what it is BROKE. Will they use these laws that are now on the books to keep you separated from the funds you have deposited with them?
At the moment it does not seem to be a wide-spread problem, but as always, laws tend to creep into different areas and can have huge unintended consequences from their original purpose or worse yet can be used in a way that was never intended in the first place by people with less than honorable goals.
The next question that arises is what kind of backlash could this have on our financial institutions? If the public starts to feel that their money may not be available to them or worse could be seized. Will they decide to choose another method of safeguarding those funds? The sales of home safes have increased as much as 60% in just the last year alone and continue to rise every day. Are the Financial institutions of the world shooting themselves in the foot?
Each day, if you look back from where we came from say thirteen years ago, it would appear that the terrorist goal to restrict are freedoms around the world has been extremely successful. And if you don't count just physical attacks alone, I would have to say from all perspectives they have won. We are less free then we were, and are now looked at as suspicious from our own governments as we are slowly acclimated to a police state, truly a sad state of affairs.