All-out attack on private property by the state and banks

by Prof. Dr. Eberhard Hamer,* Germany

1. The risk of expropriation of monetary assets

(20 June 2025) By definition, “money” is an asset that we seek as a means of exchange and for the preservation of value.

This was indeed the case in the past, when precious metal coins made of gold, silver or copper not only had a monetary value, but also a tangible value – such as the Krugerrand made of gold or the 5-D-Mark pieces made of silver.

However, gold and silver are heavy and therefore often difficult to transport and secure in large sums.

The currency then became paper money through banknotes, which replaced the coins. They were easier to hold, transport and store than coins and yet were considered to have the same value in circulation as coins because they could be exchanged for the amount printed on them at any time. The guarantor of the value was the state or the state central bank, with the FED for the first time a private central bank.

The “gold backing obligation” for banknotes ended in 1971 in the USA and then everywhere in the dollar empire by President Nixon. Since then, the dollar and Western currencies have no longer been backed by gold or metal, but only have a paper value. Everything else is faith and trust in redemption by the banking system.

Although the exchange function of money has grown through banknotes, the store of value function has diminished more and more. The central banks have not kept the money supply constant in relation to the quantity of goods (currency stability), but have increased it unrestrainedly (inflation) and reduced the value of the monetary units with the increase in money. The euro alone has lost 55% of its value in 25 years through unrestrained inflation.

Because there is no longer an anchor of stability for our currency, it is constantly being multiplied and constantly losing value.

Nevertheless, people trust the currency because they do not notice the loss in value or only feel it when the prices of goods rise.

Money is also multiplied by loans and debts, especially by governments. The USA has now accumulated debts of 36 trillion dollars, the EU (excluding all tax revenues) even over 3 trillion euros. France, Italy, Spain and Germany as well.

We have therefore allowed unfaithful states and central banks to create amounts of money that could never return to the currency cycle without breaking it, have long since left behind the possibility of a return to a proper currency through savings or tax increases (point of no return) and have set an inflation machine in motion that will spin faster and faster in the coming years (runaway inflation) and will inevitably collapse in value (crash).

The money multipliers (states and banks) therefore continuously cheat and expropriate the owners of monetary value by increasing the money supply (inflation) and thus causing the value of money to fall.

2. Securities

Many people invest their money in monetary assets in order to avoid the creeping devaluation caused by the increase in the money supply and inflation.

• Anyone who buys private or government bonds with their money receives interest and thus a certain equivalent value for the dwindling monetary value. This is profitable if the interest minus taxes is higher than the annual loss in value of the bonds.
• However, anyone who believes that he still owns the bonds is mistaken. He only has claims against his bank, which sold him these bonds, and the bank in turn has further claims against the debtors of the bonds.
• The more the ownership of the money is divided up internationally by the bonds, the more difficult it is for the original bondholder to ever see his money again.
• Example: A foundation had Russian government bonds that it considered safe because it believed the Russian state was safe. In the meantime, however, the USA and the EU have ruled that Russian bonds should be confiscated. So they are gone, stolen by von der Leyen and accomplices and no longer accessible to the bondholder.
• Even the interest that Russia continues to pay is being embezzled by the gang of thieves and used to finance Ukraine. In the meantime, even Trump, von der Leyen and Ukraine are arguing about who and how the 300 billion in confiscated Russian funds should be used. Thieves are fighting over the loot, and it is not the Russians who are the losers, but the global bondholders, who are likely to lose everything.
• Thus, for the first time since the Second World War, the confiscation of Russian assets has broken international property rights to financial assets and thus attacked the property basis of all international financial transactions and international investments and loans.
• Anyone who buys bonds now must expect that some powerful perpetrators in the world will confiscate these monetary assets and distribute them to their friends, or at least steal them from the bondholder forever. The bondholder will no longer get his money from the bank because the securities have been passed on and stolen by states against which the bank cannot enforce any claims.
• Anyone who still buys government bonds now is a gambler.
• Even the bonds of one's own state or large corporations are only as safe as these states or corporations are solid. The rising debt of almost all countries and corporations makes repayment increasingly unlikely (Soros: “Perpetual debt”).
• The right of ownership of monetary paper has thus become indirect, resulting in a highly problematic claim to restitution due to the dwindling creditworthiness of debtors.

3. Equities

Instead of investing in bonds, you can also invest your money in equities.

The signatory still recalls that he used to buy shares as paper certificates with dividend coupons attached. He then had to cut off the dividend coupons every year and could exchange them for cash at the bank. Nowadays, however, there are no longer any share certificates. Instead, all you can buy from your bank is a digital account item with the identifier of a share that is held in some foreign country by some foreign bank in a foreign company.

If a dispute arises, the account holder would have to prove which share he owns. Ownership of the share has therefore evaporated so indirectly that it has become a mere account claim.

Since state intervention through sanctions and confiscation of third-party property values has become increasingly common, shareholder rights have not only become more and more indirect, but also weaker and weaker; they are no longer documented in material form, but only digitally, and as a mere claim are therefore in constant danger of being lost to the investor.

Investors also have less and less ownership influence over the companies themselves. Shareholders' meetings are organized by the banks themselves, usually in consultation with the company's board of directors. This is because the banks have collected the shareholders' powers of attorney and thus actually disenfranchised them.

Normal investors also no longer have any influence on the share price. This is done by the major investors and banks among themselves, depending on speculation, corruption and the interests of the majority shareholders.

4. Devaluation of real estate by the government

According to Article 14 of the German Constitution (GC), property and inheritance rights are theoretically protected against expropriation by the government. However, the law has left a loophole open, namely that “the content and limits of expropriation shall be determined by law” (Art. 14 para. 1 GC). In addition, the use of property should “at the same time serve the common good” (Art. 14 para. 2 GC).

Contrary to the strict property protection of the Weimar Constitution and even the Nazi dictatorship, encroachment on citizens' real estate assets via these legal loopholes is now becoming increasingly common.

Socialist and green ideological governments are increasingly restricting the use of agriculture and even forestry as well as the rental of our homes, thus limiting property rights and regulating use according to their ideological guidelines. Never since the liberation of farmers 200 years ago has the sovereign right of farmers and foresters to use their land been so directed, reduced and controlled as it is today, so that a large part of agriculture has not only become a land bureaucracy, but also land use is less and less based on arable and forestry principles than on state subsidies.

Private property is thus being manipulated and reduced by state dirigisme.

The same applies to tenancy law, in which the owner of the property is less and less able to exercise the freedom of action over the rental property that is actually legally required of him, but rather the rental bureaucrats decide to whom and for how long the property may be rented, when notice may be given, which rent increases are permissible, how the rented premises must be designed and which ancillary rental costs the landlord must bear.

Even in the former East Germany, such over-regulation led to residential property becoming unprofitable, deteriorating not only in price but also in substance, and tenancy law was seen as a “tenant's basic right of use”, which could be abused to the point of damage and permanent withdrawal from the landlord.

If you consider that most private properties are a form of old-age security for the hard-working reconstruction generation, many interventions in our tenancy law are not only “property-like interventions”, but also deprivations of old-age security.

Although our previously most secure property in land, forestry and real estate is still protected against private abuse, the state is increasingly interfering, directing, manipulating, controlling and abusing it for ideological purposes.

If an ideological policy wants to recreate the former zonal border with a “green belt” and deprive land and forest owners of any further management, this is an expropriation-like intervention that should actually be compensated to the private owner in accordance with Article 14.3 of the German Constitution.

Or when overzealous monument authorities place houses or entire private quarters under monument protection and thus not only prohibit the owners from making changes, but also prescribe the type of reconstruction, this is again an intervention equivalent to expropriation, which should be compensated, but is not.

Or if ideologically programmed forestry offices prescribe not only the type of management, but also the tree harvesting (no open land) and the tree selection for reforestation, these are interventions in forest assets that should be considered equivalent to expropriation.

According to Article 14 of the German Constitution, interventions equivalent to expropriation are regarded as expropriations themselves and would therefore have to be compensated to the private owner in accordance with Article 14.3 of the German Constitution. In the meantime, however, the government has increasingly encroached on the direct ownership of the real estate sector without being ordered by the courts to impose limits or pay compensation. Most interventions equivalent to expropriation are expropriations under the German Constitution, but are not recognized by the courts as worthy of compensation. The courts have therefore become the government's helpers in reducing the property rights of private property owners.

And the government already carried out an expropriation-like general attack on all property owners in 1948 with an “equalization of burdens” and is planning to do so again (with its own department in the Ministry of Finance). Mind you: partial expropriation by imposing a compulsory burden on property owners without compensation!

5. Result

Thus, not only monetary, but also real property rights are increasingly being dissolved by state intervention – in the case of monetary assets continuously through inflation, in the case of securities digitally through loss of ownership to a mere claim for surrender with reversal of proof and in the case of real estate through increasing ideological state intervention without compensation.

Strangely enough, there is neither loud protest nor reaction from the owners of securities and real estate, even though the Merz coalition has already decided on maximum debt (and thus devaluation) and a digital money conversion for total control of all owners of monetary value and is also planning a further equalization of burdens in the course of this inevitable currency reform.

In other countries, this would lead to capital flight, a flight from securities and a wave of property sales with the transfer of wealth to other countries – but Germans tolerate the encroaching state, especially when it presents itself as “serving the common good” in an ecological or redistributive socialist way.

The right to property has always been the basis of the market economy, the basis for entrepreneurial activity and for the fact that entrepreneurs bear the highest social risk of all social groups. All socialist and ideological governments have therefore deliberately reduced and manipulated property (and thus entrepreneurship and the market economy).

The unfortunate forced economy of the traffic light coalition government with its property restrictions should have been a warning to the successor coalition. Instead, it has given the old property-hostile perpetrators a new wealth of power. “Socialism instead of economics”, like “ecology instead of economics” before it, also leads further into recession, further into the abyss, although Merz wanted to buy himself some breathing space with more than a trillion in debt – probably in vain.

Only a strict guarantee of ownership and free profit opportunities would be able to bring about new entrepreneurship and a new economic miracle. The new coalition agreement does not provide for this.

6. Save yourself from the EU!

With the backing of the German government, the EU has even prepared an expropriation stage, the EU supervisory authority AMLA (Anti-Money Laundering Authority based in Frankfurt). Its primary purpose is to combat money laundering and financial crime, but it is also intended to locate existing assets throughout Europe so that they can be taxed or otherwise confiscated at a later date.

The EU Commission (von der Leyen) wants to record, consolidate and monitor all assets of legal and natural persons in the EU in a central database and later coordinate, manage and monitor the collected asset data, including accounts and safe deposit box registers and national real estate registers, in a register and may even independently impose penalties of at least one million euros if the reporting obligation is not sufficiently met. In addition, AMLA can block transfers and accounts, demand the surrender of documents and request tax and law enforcement authorities and customs to conduct house searches.

This marks the beginning of the preliminary stage (data collection) for the fundraising of all governments, as it is foreseeable that the escalating debt will lead to unsustainable interest burdens for the states. They will therefore have to confiscate the private assets of their citizens at some point and “first in a tax on the rich”, then in compulsory war bonds or the like.

At the instigation of the EU, a new total surveillance state is thus being established over the assets of all citizens, a costly euro bureaucracy is being created for this purpose and the expropriation of citizens' property is being openly prepared.

The more administration, the more control, the less freedom, the less property and the less prosperity!

* Eberhard Hamer (born 1932) is a German economist. After studying economics, theology and law, Hamer completed his doctorate. He then worked as a corporate lawyer. He was then appointed to the University of Applied Sciences in Bielefeld, where he taught as a professor of economic and financial policy until his retirement in 1994. In the 1970s, he founded the privately run Mittelstandsinstitut Niedersachsen in Hanover and published numerous essays and over 20 books on the subject of SMEs.

Source: © Prof. Dr. Eberhard Hamer, Mittelstandsinstitut Niedersachsen e.V.
https://www.goldseiten.de/artikel/657055--Generalangriff-auf-das-Privateigentum-durch-Staat-und-Banken.html?seite=116.05.2025, 16 May 2025

(Translation “Swiss Standpoint”)