Friday, January 30, 2009

Brown tries to line up escape route

Has Gordon been reading Murray Rothbard again?

Speaking at Davos today, Gordon Brown outlined his 'vision' for a single 'global financial regulation system'.

By the time of his upcoming G20 summit, this 'vision' will have transmuted into the World Reserve Bank long forecast by Austrian economists as the inevitable outcome of Monetarist and Keynesian inflationist agitation.

However, as Ron Paul and many others in the Austrian School have long said, nothing these shysters want to try will work, because the world paper monetary system has nowhere to go but into the toilet. The only true solution will be a fully 100% gold reserve or silver reserve standard (or both), though it may take several painful decades before we get there.

It has long been the rant of all socialists, that socialism will only 'work' when the whole world is forced at gunpoint to adopt it. The same story is true of their very close brethren in the central banking lobby. 'If only we could all inflate together, then it would all work out', is the general message underlying their crooked aspirations.

Obviously, a World Reserve Bank with one world currency (which Keynes himself wanted to call the "bancor" and The Economist wanted to call the "phoenix") will be an absolute disaster, which will destroy all living standards everywhere. But what does Gordon Brown care about other people's lives being destroyed by reckless socialist action? If there is one thing he is world class at, then this must be it.

So as long as he gets to be the first chairman of the WRB, once he is tossed out on his ear from the bunker at Downing Street by the peasants with pitchforks, he cares not one jot.

Though it will be sweet if, as is rumoured, Obama fails to turn up at Gordon's upcoming G20 conference to start the WRB process rolling. The sulk from Brown should hopefully then be enough to finally finish this incontinent madman off.

Well, we can but hope.

Though it will only be a matter of time before Obama then proposes the WRB himself, to enable this God-King to claim all of the 'credit' for having saved the world with his 'visionary' outlook. He'd better do this quick, however, because when the paper dollar finally goes 'bang', the United States economy may be out-performed by Lithuania.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Don't believe anything Mc Clown does is without an agenda. At the moment he is posturing for the IMF to change it's role to ensure that when he has to resort to it for a loan he can insist that it is a perfectly normal and reasonable thing to be doing.

Anyway, even if they did consider a gold standard, which they won't, they would probably insist on pegging the price, so rendering the entire exercise a farce.

Jack Maturin said...

You're right. They'll try lots of things, EXCEPT a 100% gold standard.

None of them will work.

(Except possibly a 100% silver standard, though that would be boring, because Au-strianism would have to change its name to Ag-strianism! :-)

I suppose they might try a pegged fractional reserve gold standard, with gold at $1,000 dollars an ounce, but this will still be subject to the same boom-bust cycle full fiat fractionisation is subject to and won't work either.

And who really knows what McBroon is up to? But you're right, whatever his public pronouncements are, there will be a hidden agenda behind it that 'benefits' Brown, to the detriment of everyone else.

Although in reality it will hardly make a blind bit of difference when the Cameroons take over, the day Gordon Brown is dragged out of the bunker will be a day of celebration in Maturin Towers, though I hope when he is that it is the LAST we ever see of him, and he doesn't pop up again in the EU, the UN, the World Bank, the IMF, the World Reserve Bank, or any other socialist organisation, to further torment us with his derangements.

My best guess is that we will suffer a couple more decades of financial Keynesianism, with governments trying to cling onto power via their monopoloy of the monetary process. But then a private organisation, such as GoldMoney, will be the medium of exchange of choice for international trading partners to engage with each other, which will eventually percolate down to the man in the street.

Governments may not have anything to do with it, but a hard money commodity standard is coming whether they want it or not, and then we will be able to strink the bastards down to size.

The other guess is that God-King Obama makes such a ham-fist of the US economy, that an emergency resolution is passed by the US government to install Ron Paul or Peter Schiff as US President. Though this guess comes more under the sub-title of "Hallucinogenic Randian Dream" rather than reality, but hey, it keeps me going! ;-)

The problem with Obama is that he is so 'loved' by most of the US people, that he will suffer absolutely no blame for anything he does. It really will take a complete destruction of the US economy for most to even question his "rightness", and even then it will be somebody else's fault, in the same way that Roosevelt's collosal errors were all blamed on Hoover.

But in some ways, who cares about the US. They are going the same way as the Roman Empire, the Spanish Empire, and the British Empire.

The real decisions in the next few years, given that the US government doesn't use its nuclear capability to blackmail the rest of the world, will be taken in China, the Middle East, and Russia.

All I have to work out what to do is how to say 'Golden Renminbi' in Hanzi Chinese. Perhaps my third best guess might be that the communist party of China introduces a 100% gold yuan? Or that the UAE introduces a gold dinar, or that the Russian CIS introduces a gold rouble?

If two of those came to pass, I might have to become a communist again! Though as I'm learning Chinese and Arabic at the moment, I think I'd struggle to also take on Russian.

We live in extremely interesting times.

Jack Maturin said...

As my study challenge for this morning, the proposed 'gold renminbi' would be:

金人民币

(jin ren min bi)

The 金 (jin) radical for gold, represents hidden treasure buried in the earth.

This could be simplified, easily, to just, "gold":

金 (jin)

Because 金 means "metal/gold/money" in the same way that the German word "geld" comes from a root which means all three.

So when you receive a pay cheque, in 25 years time, for 金200 Jin, for 200 gold grams, then you'll know that you read it here first! :-)

The silver renminbi (which might be more appropriate, given that the Middle Kingdom used silver coinage), would be:

银人民币

(yin ren min bi)

The 银 (yin) combination of a metal radical and a phonetic, suggests a precious metal (i.e. silver)

For those who've got this far, 人 (ren) is a person walking, 民 (min) is just a phonetic (which also happens to mean people). The final one 币 (bi) means coin, but I don't know what this radical represents. It looks like a man, or two men, exchanging cloth, so that could be it, but if anyone knows, can they fill me in so I can complete this assignment?

I really do have to get out more.

Let's hope that when the Chinese government finally cut the rope on the Yuan peg, they adopt either a gold coin 金 (jin) or a silver coin 银 (yin) standard.

Anonymous said...

Jack,

"nothing these shysters want to try will work, because the world paper monetary system has nowhere to go but into the toilet" -

Agreed

"The only true solution will be a fully 100% gold reserve or silver reserve standard (or both), though it may take several painful decades before we get there".

I'm no longer so sure it is the only solution. Have you ever, I wonder, come across the monetary theories of (the now almost forgotten) E.C. Riegel - a thoroughly good egg in respect of his opinions on individual freedom? I happened across one of his books about a year ago, and truth be told, could barely contain my excitement as I read it. "Riegel's thought kernel is the liberating notion that one should be able to monetize one's own productive capacity in a framework where voluntary trade and the convention of those who produce value concomitantly enjoy a commensurate means and mechanism to ensure there is the absence of unjust enrichment by a non—producing interloping third party".

His three principle books, two published posthumously, are: -

Private Enterprise Money
Flight from Inflation
A New Approach to Freedom.

These books and the ideas therin have the mark of genius and deserve a far wider consideration than they currently achieve - though I appreciate that this can said of any number of writers.

However, in my opinion the 'money and credit' issue is by far the single most important issue facing libertarians today, whatever their shade, as the current 'false money' lies at the heart of the increasingly global tyranny - as you indicate in the main article.

The last word of this comment goes to Riegel himself: -

"The power and responsibility to banish poverty, unemployment, insecurity, misery and war
rests entirely with you. You, in cooperation with other intelligent persons, can drive
economic and political evils further and further from the area of your life and ultimately
they may be driven from the face of the earth. You can do this by the money power in you,
expressed first in your own prosperity and happiness, and radiating to others. You can do
it and you must do it. There is no power outside of you that can bring these blessings to
you. Petitioning the Government is like writing to Santa Claus. You need no laws — there is
a law, a natural law that governs your money power. You need no government aid. When the
Government undertakes to solve man's problems for him, it undertakes the mastery of society,
and it cannot be both master & servant".

Best wishes,

Archie

Jack Maturin said...

I've never read E.C. Riegel, though I'll now look out for the name. What you're suggesting sounds a litte like Rothbard's reductio ad absurdum, where each of us issues our own fiat currency (though I've probably got this hopelessly wrong-headed).

Rothbard once apocryphally stood up at a conference, and wrote out a Ten Rothbard note, on a piece of paper, signing it with a flourish.

He held it up and declared it worthless, at which point a bidding war started out in the audience, along the lines of "I'll give you $20 dollars for it."

I seem to remember Hayek also came out with a currency idea, with notes based on various metals in bonded warehouses?

I think the trick is simply to get rid of government restrictions on money and just see what happens. That should keep all libertarians happy, of whatever flavour. So legal tender laws go, bimetallism goes, and taxes and other financial restrictions on monies go, especially 'specie bank holidays' and the protection banks got in the late middle ages for refusing to honour their own bank notes (a.k.a. fractional reserve privileges), plus the right of central banks to act as 'lenders of last resort' by printing up fake bank notes from out of thin air.

After that let's just see what happens. My suspicion is that the free money market would quickly choose gold or silver, or both, as parallel standards.

But as long as money is free and banking is free, that is the point, along with all special government protections for bankers removed, and bankers made to obey the same laws of contract that the rest us are obliged to use.

It continually sickens me when I read in newspapers or hear on television that 'banks represent the fullest flowering of the free market', when they represent the complete opposite to that, the part of the market which is closest to and most in bed with government.

After removal of all government protections of banks, E.C. Riegel's self-monetary generation, in whatever form it takes, is perfectably acceptable so long as (1) it is not fraudulent in any way, (2) people are prepared to use it.

I am not a gold fetishist. I'll take anything you've got, so long as I think I'm choosing it freely.

Cowrie shells, buck skins, tobacco, bonded warehouse metal receipts, Rothbards, cocoa pods, iron, copper, silver, or gold? Who knows what'll be most popular?

I don't think I'll lose much money though, if it turns out to be gold, with a side bet on silver.