Schiff TV - Update #1 - $2,000 dollar gold oz, next year

AngloAustrian hero, Peter Schiff, stands in a bear pit and defends his reasoning as to the why the dollar has had a temporary rally, but why it is ultimately going to collapse. (This video is also excellent because it demonstrates how Schiff - perhaps along with Ron Paul and Jim Rogers - was the only major American financial commentator predicting this recession BEFORE it happened).

Tremendous.



Look out for his very last line where he predicts that gold will hit $2,000 dollars an ounce, sometime next year (2009).

AngloAustrian prediction: He will be right.

And if you think this video is good, just try all of the rest, here:

=> Peter Schiff YouTube Videos

UPDATE: And for Schiff articles, try:

=> Peter Schiff - FSU Editorial Archives

Gold or fascism? It's decision time

When even shadow home office ministers are looking over their shoulders at routine persecution, kidnapping, and terrorism, instigated by the gestapoid numskulls of Zanu New Labour, I think it becomes clear that an important crossroads in British history has been reached.

That is to say, the choice between a commodity money standard, based upon real values, or a fiat paper money standard, based upon notional values backed up by the use of Mao's gun; a.k.a. fascism.

It has been a long road getting to this point, with perhaps the decision to declare war against Germany, in 1914, the major one, authorised as it was by a mere handful of cabinet ministers. The British government then issued enough fiat currency to float a Dreadnought in, to 'pay' for their war, but then refused to drop the amount of gold each pound was supposed to be worth after the war, despite this vast inflation of the currency supply. This led, inevitably, to the British government's break with the gold standard on the 21st of September, 1931, with this overvaluation of the pound having brought misery to millions in the 1920s.

Before 1914, though with many suspensions and obfuscations, particularly during the Napoleonic era, if an Englishman ever thought his government was monkeying around with the money supply, he could simply exchange his pound notes for gold, at the rate of 113 grains of 22-carat gold, per pound (or 7.3 grammes in the French specification).

I would never go as far as to say that this ability to turn paper into gold ever kept the government honest. But it certainly kept them a lot less dishonest, though they had been itching to get off the gold and the silver standard for centuries, particularly that boorish drunken gangster, Henry the VIIIth. The ruling powers finally saw their chance, in 1931, and grabbed it with both feckless hands. Ever since, with the ephemeral complication of the failed Bretton-Woods agreement, British government pounds have been worth whatever the British government have said they were worth.

Our lords and masters have thus been able to print up billions upon trillions of pounds, at whim, to fund whatever programmes they felt like wasting them on, be it the welfare state (which has produced entire towns full of, to quote a government minister, 'feral' children), the warfare state (which has invaded innumerable countries around the world often based upon the most outrageous lies - e.g. Iraq - making the world less safe for English people), or for whatever pensions, salaries, and other imposts they felt commensurate with their vainglorious importance. And all without worrying about ordinary English people turning up at the Bank of England and demanding gold for their pounds. Splendid!

To break off at a tangent, at this point, let us consider what a 'government' is.

Karl Marx was a spectacularly successful plagiarist, whose ideas have been responsible for the deaths of millions, but one thing he plagiarised well, stealing it from earlier French classical liberals, such as Adolphe Blanqui and Jean-Baptiste Say, was the class system. Blanqui and Say postulated that there are two classes in most societies that have governments. The first is the tax generator class; the second is the tax consumer class.

Sometimes in history, particularly around revolutions, the two classes swap places, but their functional natures remain the same. One smaller class, the expropriating tax consumer class, basically rob the tax generator class, on a regular basis, milking them like cattle. They are Uncle Murray's band of robbers writ large.

The larger class tolerate this shocking behaviour, and all the criminality associated with it, because the smaller class have persuaded them that this is the way it should be.

The methods involved in this persuasion often involve force, of course, but in the long run force is not enough. The larger tax generator class must be at least partially convinced that this is the way it should. Hence, the special tax consumer subsidisation of one of their main sub-classes, the intellectual elite. In return for a godly portion of the loot, the intellectuals must justify this two class system criminality. They can use God (as with the Normans using the Churches and Cathedrals as their main weapon to enslave the Anglo-Saxons), they can use the bribery of key groups (as in the welfare state and handouts for farmers), or they can use ideology (as they have been devastatingly successful with, when defending the idea of 'democracy').

Whatever method they use, the two classes remain distinct. The organisation, of course, which keeps the whole kaboodle in place, is 'the government'. It is the structural entity, or 'Matrix', if you will, which keeps the tax generators in their place, and which organises the distribution of the spoils to the tax consumers.

Think of the tax consumers as being a giant stag beetle upon the back of a tax generator, and the government as this nauseous insect's brain.

But this relationship between the two classes is about to enter another period of dramatic revolution. They may have killed the gold standard in 1931 (with the same occurring in the US in 1933), but the paper pound/dollar standard that was then created to allow the massive growth of total government, total welfare, and total war, is collapsing around our ears. They will NOT be able to revive it.

There are only two choices. We can either go back to gold, and liberty, and freedom, and putting the government back in a cage (which as an anarchist I am hoping we can later shrink down to an insignificant mouse trap) or we can adopt the only other way of preserving their ability to bleed us dry through inflation, and that route will be force.

This is how evil and stupid these people in the tax consumer class are. Despite condemning even themselves and their offspring to a potentially hazardous future based upon police state fascism, they would rather still go that way to keep their temporary spoils now.

I have news for them, of course. You may be able to steal all of my money, you thieving maggots. You may even be able to prevent me from leaving the country, so that you can pin me ever more deeply into the fleecing pen. And you may be able to silence me by threatening me with the consequences of speaking out. But what are you going to do when the money runs out? What are you going to do when I do just enough to survive myself, but produce absolutely no extra loot for you to steal from me? You can jump up and down all you like, but I will simply sit down in the street (or the Gulag), if it should reach that point, and just refuse to initiate or originate the creation of anything you can then take from me. And if you imprison us all, or even kill us all, who is going to do your work for you then?

That you would rather get to this point, rather than fix the money supply, makes you even more despicable to me than I thought previously. But I think your days are numbered. And when we do get to a commodity standard, hopefully within my lifetime, I will know this for a fact. We will have turned a corner.

It cannot come soon enough.

Fortunately, unless you do kill us all, even the road to fascist serfdom eventually leads back to the path to liberty, because fascist governments always collapse in the end, due to their complete inability to manage anything other than a basic agrarian economy (which in Britain would take us back to a population of around two million, mostly starving in most winters.)

Though sometimes I get the feeling that the tax consumers would rather even have this than actually become private producers in a free market. Ecomentalism may even be the outpouring of this emotion of refusing to embrace the free market. Thankfully, I don't think they will have the choice.

Freedom is coming.

I just wish it would hurry up getting here.

Government experts assess chances of economic recovery

There is so much appalling stupidity going on at the moment, with the world's politicians trying to turn a bad recession into a cataclysmic depression, that I'm almost spinning with disbelief. If only Uncle Murray were still with us, he would know exactly what to say. I'll limit myself to one short paragraph per story:

Federal Reserve announces new $800bn boost to strengthen US economy

Just where exactly did they get this money, then? Were they holding it in reserve? Or did they just create it out of thin air. Even the Zimbabweans might be laughing at this one.

Why Gordon Brown the manic meddler had to take such a massive gamble

Brown decided to push government spending up to 60% of the UK's annual GDP simply to give himself a slim outside chance of winning the next election. Did the USSR even get to 60% of GDP? Even they allowed some private farming and industry! Not so much Nero fiddling while Rome burns. More like Nero chucking on the petroleum tar, and borrowing more from the Arab traders down in the port of Ostia.

Gordon Brown leads bankrupt Britain into the 1970s

Been there. Done that. Don't want to do it again. But do we have any choice? With Calamity Brown in charge of the men with guns, the only option is to leave the UK. How long will that remain an option? Expect exchange controls. Expect emigration controls to keep the taxpayer sheep locked tight in the fleecing pen! Expect riots, all police heavily armed at all times, and a heavy-handed fascist British state.

OECD says Alistair Darling's forecasts for recovery are too optimistic

I would put Alistair Darling's forecasts on a recovery on the same level as my chances of emigrating to New Zealand before the emigration controls come down and forcing Dan Carter out of his All Blacks number ten rugby shirt.

Oh what is the point continuing. You can read the papers too.

AngloAustrian summary: We are ruled over by imbeciles. Let us hope that one day they are made to pay for their utter stupidity.

Jim Rogers Holding Gold

As you'll know if you've ever read his books, Jim Rogers isn't a full time Austrian. He just comes to Austrianism at a tangent, through his immense knowledge of markets and human psychology. He is also holding gold, as can be seen in the picture above, which is very Austrian behaviour.

If you want to know why he is holding gold, especially if you're currently holding dollars, then check out the Financial Times video link below:

=> The Dollar, Obama, China, and the Recession

Watch all four FT Jim Rogers videos, which will appear in sequence, if you want to know what's going to happen next in this world of chaos brought about by government stabilisation programmes.

In the first segment, this AngloAustrian hero explains his prediction from one year ago about why the dollar would rise (covering shorts) and why it will eventually collapse in the medium term (as soon as he sees that a dollar euphoria has set in, which is when he will abandon the dollar).

In the second segment he covers Obama and why his policies of protectionism and capital growth taxes will be such a disaster for America; in the third he discusses China and how commodities will come out of this recession first because of their sound fundamentals; and in the final segment he explains how the current government mania about "price deflation" is a flash in the pan caused by forced liquidation and the reason why massive government money pumping, as evidenced by lowering interest rates, will eventually create massive price inflation. (He even mentions the dreaded Zimbabwe word at one point!)

Along the way, Rogers covers exchange controls, how Long Term Capital Management should have been allowed to fail in 1998, taking most of the investment banks with it, and how possibly Bretton Woods II will choose the Euro or even the Renminbi as the new world money standard (and why this will fail).

AngloAustrian view: Fantastic!! Gotta see!! Marvellous!! Etc.

Pip pip!!

What 'he' said

I was going to pen a diatribe this evening, as is my wont, but what really is the point?

While I was sweeping the leaves from my garden, this afternoon, I caught up with my Lew Rockwell podcast back catalogue. In the final interview, that bloke Peter Schiff was questioned about the world economy by the Rockmeister. In a cunning twist of reality, Schiff managed to read my thoughts, word for word, as my iPod's hard drive whirred, and then repeated my thoughts back to me via my headphones.

Remarkable!

And in complete contravention of all known laws of physics!

However, if Terry Pratchett can be accused of stealing J.K.Rowling's idea about a school for wizards in a book published ten years before Harry Potter first saw the light of day, then I can claim that Peter Schiff is stealing my ideas too.

And this man, this so called Schiff-Meister, has the temerity to claim that his thoughts are original. Ha! What a nerve.

So if you want to know the Maturin Towers viewpoint at the moment, on virtually every economic question under the sun, the most efficient choice will simply to be to listen to Peter Schiff's so-called "interview" with Lew Rockwell.

If I believed in copyright, I would sue.

Visit the following page and then press the 'PODCAST' download button:

=> How the Government Wrecked the Economy

Or even better, just go to the following page, press the iTunes button, and simply subscribe to the entire Lew Rockwell Podcast opus. Sir Llywelyn is up to 72 pieces now, and at an average of 10 minutes apiece, that's 720 minutes of Austrianism at its finest.

=> http://www.lewrockwell.com/podcast/

But do remember that everything you ever hear on a Lew Rockwell podcast, especially when he's speaking to Peter Schiff, was first thought of here on AngloAustria.

It's an outrage.

BTW, it's particularly worth waiting for what Schiff says at the end of the podcast. Just substitute "British Government" for "American Government", which is Schiff's cunning way of masking his plagiarism, and you won't go far wrong. I was really cooking when I thought of his end piece statement. Marvellous!

Your money for nothing and your chicks for free

Just what exactly is wrong with price deflation? I like price deflation. I like prices dropping. It’s the only good thing in a recession and it helps the rest of us survive as our incomes fall. Price deflation has happened in the computing industry for years. If you can’t afford a 100 gig hard drive laptop, just wait six months and there it will be, dropping at 20% per annum, until you can afford it, as it has done since the laptop was invented, with ever more features, power, and functions, at ever-decreasing prices. Does anyone ever complain when computer hardware gets cheaper? Do computer companies go bust? (Yes, bad ones). Do computer stores go bust? (Yes, bad ones.) But good computer companies and good computer stores prosper, especially as the regular price drops keep wiping out their poor competition. Yet somehow this pricing model, with which we are all familiar, must not be allowed to happen to the sacred cows of the car industries of the world or other related corporate welfare junkies (especially those employing lots of voters in marginals).

But people will stop BUYING, screams Ambrose Pritchard-Evans, in the Torygraph. Yes, Ambrose, people will stop consuming what they don’t need and only buy what they truly need. What is so wrong with that? Will they drop dead in the street because they don’t purchase a plasma high definition TV and stick for a while with the old 30 inch one?

With the money they have left over they can save, and their savings will grow in value, as prices drop, so they will become wealthier. And as they save, and clear their debts, they will also become less dependent on money lenders and debt. People who have borrowed to consume will find it tougher, but since when did those who consume without producing ever deserve to suck the lifeblood out of the rest of us to help these feckless spend monkeys?

Businesses which have over-extended and which have invested in the wrong product and service lines will go bankrupt. Good. The resources under their control will then be released to come under the control of better entrepreneurs who will supply the rest of us with what we truly need. People will still exist. The resources will still exist. All that will change will be those managing these people and these resources. Bad entrepreneurs will become employees again. And those employees who want to chance their arm at becoming dragonishish den entrepreneurs will get their chance.

Deflation cleanses. And here’s the rub. It’s GREAT for poor people. As the cost of consumables drops, POOR people can afford to buy more. Deflation brings them out of poverty. They can now afford to buy or rent houses. Deflation helps solve the problem of homelessness. As bad companies go bankrupt, good companies can spring up to replace them, to bring even better cheaper services to the rest of us, and then provide the UNEMPLOYED with work as they manage scarce resources better. The entire nineteenth century, when Britain and America were both on the gold standard, supplied a CENTURY of deflation, with prices in all businesses constantly dropping for almost 100 years. Did the Victorians complain that the price of every consumable kept constantly dropping in price, for decade after glorious decade? That transport prices kept dropping? That service prices kept dropping? To ask these questions is to know the answer.

And let’s just think about what Gordon Brown is saying. He is trying to keep housing prices UP. This will keep houses out of the reach of the aspirational poor. But isn’t socialism ABOUT helping the aspirational poor? I must have misheard if it wasn’t.

And here’s the best bit. As prices drop, people come to resent paying fixed amounts in taxes, such as property taxes. Governments then come under pressure to cut their spending, by sacking their useless staff. Of course I would be glad if most government staff were simply useless. Most of them, however, such as jobsworth regulators, are positively HARMFUL to the economy. So as the government’s income drops, it must sack these harmful people, thereby also encouraging the fresh shoots of economic recovery. These people can then find something useful to do in the private sector, once again helping us to recover.

Deflation is a good gardener. It prunes. It weeds. It tidies. Of course all the weeds protest, especially as we lay them into the bonfire, and it is painful for over-extended plants in the garden as it clips them with its brutal shears. But with the ash from the fire, or the compost from the waste, we can create fertiliser to create a much healthier and cleaner garden. And relatively quickly.

The pain of deflation can be over with quickly, if the government gets out of the way. The problem comes when the necessary friction of deflation is made to drag on beyond its natural span. Most people can survive a few months of unemployment. As a self-employed person I know exactly what that’s like. But when governments drag out this pain out to last long needless years, real long-term suffering ensues, just as it did in the 1930s and as it has recently in Japan. We only get these dreadful long-term depressions when we follow the tenets of Keynesianism. Before Keynesianism we had central bank inspired crashes, yes, and the tulip mania brought on by the Bank of Amsterdam in a related fashion with its cack-handed manipulation of the silver supply in Europe, but we never got these years-long depressions until the followers of Keynes took roost in the heart of government. Keynesianism is at the heart of the problem, yet somehow its prophets, such as Paul Krugman, still seem to be the ones with their hands on the tiller, even after causing all of the financial calamities in the twentieth century.

Why? Because Keynesianism appeals to government, because government takes pride of place in the Keynesian universe. Governments and Keynesians also hate deflation, because it destroys government power. Government income decreases, as spending taxes decrease, and as wages taxes decrease, and as people’s resentment of fixed taxes increases. Their ability to borrow is also cut because people will not lend out their precious resources at low rates of interest. Therefore of the three great methods to finance government consumption spending, only inflation is left. So all excuses are used to defend this heinous practice, along with its accompanying low-pegged interest rates, which then also enable the government to keep borrowing.

High-return-demanding savers, who are pushing up things like LIBOR rates, are therefore attacked, and clever wheezes are invented to tax these savers to hand over their loot to feckless consumers, the most stupid of these processes being to increase government borrowing to hand out consumption bribes, with the unsaid promise being made that taxes will increase later to pay for this credit card style binge. These are the hand-to-mouth economics of the Stone Age. Civilisation began when the first Cro-Magnon saved up some food, and did not consume it, to later give themselves enough time to create a better flint knife for butchering animals more quickly, thereby allowing more consumption in the future. This civilisation grew until the invention of monetary inflation, and later central banks to manage this inflation, which destroyed value and destroyed wealth, against the countervailing trend of the rest of the civilisation, until, as now, this public sector wealth destructive process has even outpaced the wealth creation of the private sector.

We are now going backwards into decivilisation, brought on by socialism, and will continue to do so until something dramatic happens to remove the socialists from our backs.

What I find most laughable about this situation is that everybody in the country, except perhaps a few wealthy government fonctionnaires, is saving at the moment, while all are being exhorted to consume. People are choosing NOT to go to a restaurant tonight, or at least to “try that delightful cheap-and-cheerful Italian”, rather than the fancy French restaurant they usually frequent. They are booking CHEAPER holidays, letting their three-year-old car do another year, spending just that little bit LESS on consumer electronics, and PUTTING OFF moving until their dream house gets cheap enough. Nobody is obeying Gordon. All are saving. So our money is to be handed to the most feckless and short-sighted in society, because they alone at least can be trusted to waste this largesse on whisky, fags, and curries, with no second eye on even the immediate future. All hail to the feckless! For they shall be our saviours!

The boom of the last decade designed by Gordon “King Canute” Brown to win several elections for the red socialists, and engineered by his happy workers in the open market operations division of the Bank of England, has come to an end and the unnaturally high prices it generated want to drop. The natural tides and forces of economics and the iron laws of supply and demand are insisting that these prices drop.

It is no good Gordon trying to prevent these drops, as he sits on his throne up to his waist in the waves, and the longer he tries to defy these waves, even with his pets at the Bank of England setting interest rates to 0%, the worse the final calamitous Tsunami will be.

These prices will drop whether Gordon Brown wants them to or not. The only choice is how quickly they do it, and how much pain we have to suffer until the correction of this recession is over. So just let them drop to where they want to go, and then let’s deal with the consequences.

The alternative of pumping in twice as much money, so that prices which want to drop by half ‘appear’ to stay the same, is ludicrous, stupid, and destructive. Yes, it temporarily helps the government and its friends for the reasons described above. But the government is only ever helped by preying on the rest of us.

They should be stopped in their tracks before they destroy our lives completely and drag us into another depression, a Japanese style stagflation, or even a Weimar republic nightmare. Dare I whisper Zimbabwe anyone?

Not that I have much hope of Gordon being brought to task. He is back in his Stalinist bombast mode and none of the intellectual pygmies in the Tory party or the British press seem capable of pricking his gargantuan pomposity. Today the BBC even told me that I should be thankful that prices rose last month at a slower rate than they rose the month before. Gordon’s plan is obviously working then! I think we should all be taken out and thrashed for listening to this gall and for actually wanting to believe that the solution to a crisis brought on by too much government borrowing, spending, and inflation, is for us to allow government to go on yet another tax-fed binge of borrowing, spending, and inflation.

If it gets much worse, I’m going to have to stop buying Bombay Sapphire gin and will need to shift down to the revolting Gordon’s gin. At that point, my friends, I think we will just about be ready for revolution. Or at least, I will.

And so, as the last of my Bombay Sapphire calls me from where I placed it earlier in the fridge, along with its accompanying lemon and Schweppes, I can only say one thing. Cheers!

The day the Bank of England cut interest rates to 3pc is the day it lost its marbles

Liam Halligan has written an excellent article in the Torygraph.

The impoliteness of the useless British police

The police in Henley today blocked off the main town car park for a Remembrance Day parade. Because the local council have double-yellow-lined all of the surrounding streets (to force you to use the pay-as-you-go car park), the nearest place to leave your car was about half a mile away.

Needing to drop someone off for the parade, I did the sensible thing any anarchist would do and parked up on a double-yellow line. I was away from my car for approximately 35 seconds, but this still gave a member of the fascist tax-enforcing licensed highwayman agency (a.k.a. British police) enough time to get there before I got back, with a ticket book in hand about to be opened.

A surge of adrenaline coursed through my veins, but I at least retained enough sense to bite my lip:

Fascist: Is this your car?
Anarchist: You have blocked the car park and I needed to drop someone off for the parade.
Fascist: Did you see this was a double yellow line?
Anarchist: (Says nothing. Gets into car and turns key in ignition.)
Fascist: Don't park here again!
Anarchist: (Closes door firmly and drives off, hoping the adrenaline surge will drop off quickly)

Obviously, I could bang on about how these people are too busy harassing taxpayers rather than catching criminals, and other assorted diatribes, but that would be uninteresting.

Once the adrenaline died down and I was back home, I did notice a few vaguely interesting things, however. The first was my intense anger at being approached directly by an agent of the state. I was absolutely livid and did absolutely the right thing by getting as far away as possible, from her, as fast as possible, before I did or said something I would later have regretted; I probably need to take an anger management course! The second was my complete internal derision for this agent and my total lack of confidence in the "fair play" and "judgement" of the British police.

They are now for me nothing but licensed highwaymen and I would rather be completely without them. I would then be able to arm myself heavily and I would be free from having to pay for their cars, salaries, bursaries, and pensions, and could then use the money to pay for some decent security and protection, via private insurance agencies.

The final point of interest was that at no point in our "conversation" was the police woman in any way polite. There was no "Is this your car, sir?", or "Could you please not park here again?" rhetorical questioning. It was straightforward questioning as if I was already a court-convicted criminal and direct provocative orders daring me to answer back.

This lets me into the mindset of the British police, who used to famed for their politeness. It means that they distrust us, those of us who are forced to pay their wages, that they are afraid of us, and that they see us as people who need more jack-booting than in previous times, because we are becoming more pushy and more non-compliant in our attitudes towards them.

I'm not suggesting that we will rise up tomorrow and storm their cosy police stations, but it does suggest that there is a general pervasive attitude that the agents of the state, in whatever form they take, are becoming less trusted than they once were, and less powerful, as they become more strident and provocative in their words and actions to prove who is boss. I should also imagine that when these useless form-fillers and tea-breakers do occasionally knock themselves out by finding the odd villain, they are getting less and less successful in gaining prosecutions from juries, because the juries will be filled by more people like me who see the police as nothing more than dangerous money-stealing parasites, rather than security-generating "public servants".

This will push them into trying to have more jury-free courts, to gain convictions, which will once again lessen their hold over us as the government turns itself more and more of an open dictatorship.

And so, at last, with these higher brain thoughts about the nature of the state and how it touches our lives, my lower brain exhausted the last of its adrenaline and calmed itself down.

The sooner we are rid of these fluorescent-jacketed maggots, the better.

Bank of England: A welcome cut in rates... but months too late

More nonsense from the Torygraph, praising the Bank of England for its rate cut yesterday. Broadside duly delivered, though I really must protest at their 4,000 character limit, including spaces; don't they realise that Maturin Towers needs at least an 80,000 word limit! :-)

Posted by Jack Maturin on November 7, 2008 8:51 AM

So, it looks like we are heading down the same stagflationary waste disposal unit that the Japanese have been living in for the last two decades. To praise the UK government and its organs for this lowering of interest rates thus reveals the blinkered economic view of the Keynesian-dominated Telegraph editorial team.

To suppose that a problem caused by artificially low interest rates is going to be solved by artificially low interest rates, is to be living in the same world as a heroin addict who thinks that their destructive dependence on drugs will be solved by a regular prescription of diamorphine.

My apologies for what may seem like madness, in the light of "orthodox" Keynesian economic analysis, but what we need to be doing right now is to raise interest rates, to get this pain over with as quickly as possible. We need to rapidly liquidate the malinvestments of the last decade and to quickly remove the incompetent managements of badly run companies that took the wrong decisions in this malinvestment decade, before their poor decisions continue.

What this palliative measure will do is to keep asset prices up, thus preventing their quick liquidation, and keep bad managements in position because they will be able to borrow more cheaply to cover up their decision failures. They will thus keep investing in the wrong things, thus preventing other better people from making a better use of the scarce economic resources under their control. We are, it appears, deliberately turning a sharp corrective recession into a prolonged stagnating depression.

Free market capitalism, as opposed to the state capitalist model we live under, with its central planning board commissars and civil servants at the Bank of England, is based upon real saving and investment, that is putting off what you could consume today to get a better consumptive return in the future through productive investment.

This "easy credit" policy from the (Ha!) "independent" Bank of England, fed by money out of thin air, and remarkably in line with exactly what Gordon wanted, will punish savers and investors and reward consumers, which is exactly the wrong thing to do in a recession caused by too much consumption fed by easy credit.

Pretending that this new Bank of England paper money actually represents real savings is to be living in a dream world.

So what's going to happen next as we are deluged with this printing press confetti?

Get ready for zero per cent interest rates, because they are coming, and the subsequent destruction of all of your savings, investments, and pensions.

Get ready for ten years of destructive stagnation, just like they have had in Japan. And this was a country with the best savings rates in the world. We, in Britain, have one of the worst savings rates in the world, encouraged by a profligate all-consuming government to spend every penny as it came in the door; we may therefore be looking at an even worse prognosis.

Better go out and buy a Korean 100-inch high definition television while you still can, then, and while the pound in your pocket is still able to buy anything from abroad.

You'd better have something to watch while these pounds turn into worthless dust, due to this ongoing printing press madness.

Thanks, Bank of England. And don't think we will forget who caused this mess, when we look back in ten years' time.

Though of course central government employees, such as those at the Bank of England, will be fine. What little wealth there will still be left in the country will be taxed away to feed their index-linked government pensions. So why do they need to worry about anything as simple as the appalling consequences of their stupid actions?

A discerning gentleman writes:

Posted by David on November 7, 2008 9:32 AM

Thank you Jack Maturin for a fabulous web site. I have downloaded Americas Great Depression and will read it NOW

To which there was only one adequate response:

Posted by Jack Maturin on November 7, 2008 10:15 AM

Posted by David on November 7, 2008 9:32 AM

Thanks, David! :-)

If anyone else wants to learn the viws of the Austrian economists on what is really going on here, as opposed to the Keynesian orthodox view that we are currently being subjected to by the government and its various government-licensed organs, the very best book you can get hold of is "America's Great Depression" by Murray Rothbard.

First written in 1963, but going into five separate editions, not only does it rationally explain everything about the 1930s calamity of its title, it is also unerring in its predictions about how our current crisis would come about, what the world's governments would do in response, and why all of these actions would be exactly the wrong thing to do and what the unintended consequences of these bungling hand-to-mouth actions would be.

You can download a freely available PDF of this book via its publishers, the Mises Institute, from this PDF download address:

=> link

This is the plain speaking book the Keynesians do not want you to read. They can't refute it. And they fear that if too many people know of its contents, they are going to be out on their collectively aggregated ears.

The Rothbardian propaganda is spreading! ;-)

Later, another man of quality writes:

Posted by brian kelly on November 7, 2008 12:38 PM

[Posted by Jack Maturin on November 7, 2008 8:51 AM] - This seems to me an excellent post. The situation is complex - and not only for laymen such as me. But my instincts and opinions are entirely in conformity with this poster.

I won't reply on the Torygraph web site, because I don't want to hog it unless I have something vaguely useful to add, but if you reach this web site, brian, nice one! ;-)

Which God is Obama?

The hysterical religious reverence for Obama that has just swept the world, prompted me to work out which God Obama is most like. Is he a Jesus?


No, he's too smooth and too prone to talk too much. Jesus preferred actions to words and kept His sound bites short. Is Obama a young virile Apollo then?


No. Apollo is too sexually charged and Obama is definitely a "Son of God" figure and all of these heavenly characters possess a heavy maternal figure hanging over them. Jesus qualifies, of course, but we must rule Him out as above. So I had to hunt for a "Son of God" from a non-Christian religion. There are many, but which one would it be? Is he Zeus, the son of Rhea, the lady behind the origin of the milky way, as she spurted milk across the heavens while breast feeding Zeus in his crib?


No. Zeus is too old and too powerful. We saw from the Obama speech the other evening that Obama is going for the "new broom" youthful angle, so he's definitely a young God. Also, he made sure to get his retaliation in early and ensured he didn't promise to deliver us the world, so he's definitely not all powerful. But now I had him fairly nailed down. I needed a smooth, charismatic, confident, young, male Son of God, with a powerful maternal character protecting him and ready to do battle with evil, but with a certain amount of tear-jerking vulnerability. This God can bleed, I thought, and he must suffer and feel pain - though eventually he will transgress all difficulties and save the world! It could only be one God.


Yes, it has to be Horus. It all fits. Horus is out of Africa (from Egypt), his mother Isis (Hillary Clinton) is an all-powerful matriarch standing jealous guard over him. His father Osiris (Bill Clinton) lost his penis, and Horus must regain the mighty organ from the evil Set (George Bush) to make Egypt whole again. Marvellous.

Many, say, of course, that the Isis-Horus axis was the original basis for the Mary-Jesus axis, and you will note that Jesus also came out of Africa (Egypt) to regain the promised land for his disciples. Which is a story I can leave for another day.

Even better than that, having solved this particular religious mystery I can rest. Not that it's going to do anyone in America any good. I hate to break this news to you, particularly if you are a BBC Newsnight reporter, but Obama really is a man of flesh and blood, not an omnipotent God, and he really does not possess holy transcendental powers, just a good way with words and the ability to deliver them with style. But I'll let you have your five minutes of fun. You'll see, anyway, in a couple of years, that he's just another Joe Blow from the suburbs with not the slightest idea of why socialism is the worst religion that has ever inflicted the Earth.

Enjoy the mystique while you can. And then wait for the bill to arrive.

We must do what the government wants otherwise we will lose our independence

As Murray Rothbard predicted back in 1963, what Gordon wanted, an "easy credit" policy to shore up his consumptive government spending, Gordon has received. That is, an interest rate as close to zero as he can get away with to aid his non-productive consumption and a pathetic attempt to help push the current recession's effects out into the long grass beyond the next general election, i.e. the deliberate creation of a depression. His thralls in the (Ha!) "independent" Bank of England today gave him the first tranche of his desire to get down to Japanese-style interest rates.

Hang onto your hats, sports fans, because the Bank of England base rate may have gone down by a gargantuan 1.5% today, to the lowest rate since 1955, at 3%, but that still means there is 3% left to go! And what will they do when even 0% interest rates fail to revive the dying body of the UK economy? How about negative interest rates! (Which is of course what we have, because round my way, and judging by my bills, my personal price inflation rate is running at around 10-15%, and has been for some time. It really is time to short money, and fly into real values. We'll be bartering before they've finished. We may even all start using a spontaneously arising commodity money!)

I've been banging on about this so long now I don't want to burden you with any more invective. I will just leave you with the thought that what we ought to be doing right now, contrary to all of this orthodox Keynesian "wisdom" from the tax-fed class, is to be increasing interest rates to help encourage savers, to shut down non-productive consumption, and to liquidate the numerous asset bubbles and bad managements allowed to inflate under the easy credit of the last decade. Even better, would be for nobody to do anything at all, and to allow the free market to set its own freely floating interest rate, based upon the market of individual time preferences, and using a commodity money unable to be manipulated by any central planning board commissars.

If you want to know any more, please, please, please do yourself a favour and read the first few chapters of Uncle Murray's "America's Great Depression". There is a beautifully produced PDF of this magnificent book, here:

=> http://mises.org/rothbard/agd.pdf

This crystal-clear exposition is as fine a piece of economic writing as you will ever see. You must read it, if you want to come out of the other side of this depression with your sanity intact. I will stop the propaganda now. Just read the book.

I will, however, leave you with just one thought. The cause of the credit crunch was the creation of an enormous asset bubble, via the machinations of the world's central banks under the direction of the U.S. Federal Reserve, creating trillions of dollars of credit out of thin air via the use of artificially low interest rates.

To think that the solution to all of this is to once again lower interest rates and print currency from thin air, until we drown in the stuff, is to have locked out the very synapses of your brain (unless of course you are an immoral debtor and you want your debts liquidated by this process). We are being sleepwalked into utter disaster and we must do everything we can to stop these imbeciles destroying our lives, our pensions, and our businesses, and then laughing all the way to their tax-guaranteed index-linked government pensions, as the rest of us downtrodden serfs are left gasping in the gutter.

Do you have a private pension? Are you relying on it for your old age? It's time for you to come up with a different plan because this pension, as it stands, is going to be absolutely worthless.

By the way, for what it's worth, this central planning board interest rate cut isn't really going to help. It may mask things for a few days, even perhaps for a few weeks, or even possibly a few months, but does a heroin addict really benefit from a pumped-in injection of diamorphine, even if pumped in by a man in a white coat? It is too late for these palliative measures. Stagflation is now the very best we can expect. And if this interest rate shredding keeps going, after this cash injection fails, even hyperinflation comes into the frame.

Welcome to the long run future of the Keynesians. C'est arrivé.

The top ten mistakes Brown will make next

There are, to quote Murray Rothbard, six major mistakes that anyone can make when trying to deal with a recession, which will turn it into a full-blown depression. Here they are, in full, taken from the best primer on our current travails, America's Great Depression, first written in 1963, but which has subsequently been updated in five editions. The freely available PDF of this magnificent book is here:

http://mises.org/rothbard/agd.pdf

As you're reading this list, please remember that it was first written 45 years ago. Here goes:

(1) Prevent or delay liquidation. Lend money to shaky businesses, call on banks to lend further, etc.

(2) Inflate further. Further inflation blocks the necessary fall in prices, thus delaying adjustment and prolonging depression. Further credit expansion creates more malinvestments, which, in their turn, will have to be liquidated in some later depression. A government “easy money” policy prevents the market’s return to the necessary higher interest rates.

(3) Keep wage rates up. Artificial maintenance of wage rates in a depression insures permanent mass unemployment. Furthermore, in a deflation, when prices are falling, keeping the same rate of money wages means that real wage rates have been pushed higher. In the face of falling business demand, this greatly aggravates the unemployment problem.

(4) Keep prices up. Keeping prices above their free-market levels will create unsalable surpluses, and prevent a return to prosperity.

(5) Stimulate consumption and discourage saving. We have seen that more saving and less consumption would speed recovery; more consumption and less saving aggravate the shortage of saved capital even further. Government can encourage consumption by “food stamp plans” and relief payments. It can discourage savings and investment by higher taxes, particularly on the wealthy and on corporations and estates. As a matter of fact, any increase of taxes and government spending will discourage saving and investment and stimulate consumption, since government spending is all consumption. Some of the private funds would have been saved and invested; all of the government funds are consumed. Any increase in the relative size of government in the economy, therefore, shifts the societal consumption–investment ratio in favor of consumption, and prolongs the depression.

(6) Subsidize unemployment. Any subsidization of unemployment (via unemployment “insurance,” relief, etc.) will prolong unemployment indefinitely, and delay the shift of workers to the fields where jobs are available.

No, Uncle Murray was not travelling in a time machine to observe what Gordon Brown just did in the last few weeks to save the Universe. The list above, written out 45 years ago, was taken directly from the Austrian business cycle theory, which itself had worked out in the 1920s all of the actions necessary to turn a recession into a depression.

Governments being utterly stupid and wrong-headed, it is therefore inevitable that they should unconsciously adopt this list of "what not to do" as the precise roadmap for their "heroic actions", whenever faced with such a crisis - always assume that the best thing a government can ever do in any situation is always the exact opposite of what they actually end up doing (though just like the famous Nutrimatic drinks dispenser, from the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation, they also occasionally get things right, but only by rare and particularly exceptional accident).

So what does Uncle Murray's list predict that Gordon will do next? Obviously, I've had to mix in a few things that we already know Brown will do, as his actions are a continuing narrative of total stupidity, but here are my top ten observations and predictions based upon the list above and predicated by Gordon Brown's over-arching ambition of becoming an elected prime minister:

(1) He will keep putting pressure on the Bank of England to reduce interest rates, perhaps even down to zero per cent (or close to it), to follow the Japanese play book.

(2) He will force banks to lend to bad credit risks, particularly in marginal constituencies, especially to voters requiring mortgages and to companies employing large numbers of voters.

(3) He will ramp up government borrowing even more than the £100 billion the market is expecting. The Bank of England will monetize this increasing government borrowing through their open market operations to directly stimulate monetary inflation, which will pyramid fractional reserve inflation, which will cause the "impossible" Keynesian nightmare of stagflation. (Although stagflation is impossible under the key tenets of Keynesianism, don't expect any Keynesians to admit that Keynesianism is bunk due to a little slip like this.)

(4) He will particularly increase government spending in marginal constituencies, no matter how wasteful the end result.

(5) He will increase taxation, particularly by targeting what he will portray as the "enemy class whose greed and narrow-minded selfishness created this crisis" (i.e. anyone who doesn't look like they'll ever vote for the Labour party).

So far, this is all rather obvious and you've read it all before on AngloAustria. What becomes interesting, however, is what he will do when the depression really begins to bite, due to the incompetent measures already described above.

(6) He will force wage rates to stay up, perhaps by making it illegal or at least extremely difficult for companies to offer their workers a choice of lower wages against the inevitable reality of redundancy.

(7) He will bring in price controls to "look after our farmers", to "look after our small businesses", and to "look after our hard working families". These price controls, keeping prices up, will empty the shelves in the supermarkets, but what the heck, it's all the fault of the exploitative capitalist class, so let's expropriate them too while we're about it!

(8) Taxes may be increased on savings to encourage people to spend.

(9) Inflation may even get deliberately stoked up to force people to spend their savings before their money becomes worthless.

(10) And finally, unemployment benefits and other related welfare state measures will be increased both to hold up the Labour party vote and to "protect our families in poverty from being further exploited by the failures of capitalism".

Dear Lord, I think I need to apply for a job as a Brown speech writer. I'm beginning to get the drift of it! :-)

Pip pip!!

Guy Fawkes - Hero or Villain?

As someone who aspires to Robert LeFevrian levels of anti-violence, wherever possible, I must preface my following remarks with the statement that I absolutely abhor the use of violence, except perhaps, in extremis, in personal defence. Mr LeFevre would of course say that even this level of violence is intolerable, and I salute him for this.

I must say, however, that I spent the entire early part of my life with the firm belief that the reason we British hold Bonfire Night, was to celebrate Guy Fawkes' attempt to blow up King James I, and the entire British parliament, in 1605, on this very date of November the Fifth.

It came as quite a shock to discover, at quite an advanced age, that we are supposed to be horrified by this failed attempt to remove the good order of the entire British government establishment.

I'm still shocked, shocked to find that most people I know continue to celebrate the memory of Guy Fawkes as a heroic man as opposed to his being a contemptible villain.

Politicians really are hated in Britain, and this is just one of the signs, as is the underground popularity of the film V for Vendetta, with its use of the iconic Guy Fawkes mask. Let us hope that this hatred turns into something far more positive, in time, which is the removal of politicians from our lives, or at least a severe diminution of their powers.

The pound is dead, the dollar is dead, and the euro is dead, no matter what short-term nonsense they foist upon us to prop them up. The Bretton-Woods II global agreement that the Bilderberger class will eventually try to bamboozle us with in the next few years won't fix this. All paper currencies eventually become worthless, no matter what you do - the only way they will eventually prop these currencies up will be at the end of Mao's gun barrel. This continuing failure of the world elites to make their paper currencies work, without returning to a commodity money standard, may be the opportunity we need to get these miserable thieves out of our lives.

A peaceable implosion of government power may then be the answer to our prayers, because if we can get back to a commodity money standard, this will immediately destroy much of the hold these people have over us - which is of course why they will do their utmost to stop it happening. And this is where I believe Fawkes and his friends were wrong. We should not use violence to overturn the men of violence.

All we need is the truth.

Goodbye America

So, my friend lost his outrageous spread bet on McCain and I won't be getting a couple of glasses of celebratory chilled fizz. Chiz!

What we also know is that a committed and charismatic socialist is about to inflict his own form of American nationalism onto the greatest country that ever existed, a country created via the magnificent ideology of John Lockean libertarianism, which, in one of the greatest shocks in history, threw off 10,000 years of statism (as exemplified by the mercantilist British state, as founded by the terrorist Normans).

Yes, alas, the mercantilist statism of Alexander Hamilton became the poisonous seed that has now come to full fruition, within America, in the person of Obama, but it was still a great country once upon a time.

That greatness, and the liberty upon which it was founded, is now going to be nailed inside a lead socialist coffin. Obama's victory was the final hammer blow, despite the legions of hopeful supporters clamouring his name at rock-concert style "celebrations", in the vain hope that one man really can change their lives for the better, with a wave of his socialist wand. Such hope. And such disappointment that these people will have within about 15 minutes of Obama's acceptance speech.

Any Americans reading this may not agree, but if you don't, and you're not entirely sure what Obama is going to do to you over the next four years (except continue the police state, continue the Empire building, and continue your crucifixion via taxes, regulations, corruption, and inflation - in fact, all of the things that caused you to throw out us Brits), here is what he has in store for you:

http://www.barackobama.com/pdf/ObamaBlueprintForChange.pdf

Dear Lord. To read it, as so many haven't, is to shed a flood of tears. Good luck.

If only Ron Paul were now U.S. President, you might have had the slightest smidgin' of a chance. As it is, I can only say one thing:

Goodbye America. What a terrible shame.

Things really are going to change. You're going to get even more government than you've ever had before. The only real undecided is whether you are going to get either a more national socialist government, or a more hard-left socialist government. Ultimately, there is no difference of course. Both end up with concentration camps and both eventually become such economic basket cases that they implode of their own accord. The trouble comes from the damage they wreak to lives before this implosion finally occurs, as it inevitably will. You could get lucky, of course. It could be the softer national socialism of Mussolini that you get, rather than the Hitlerian kind, or the softer hard-left socialism of Castro that you get, rather than the Stalinist kind, but whichever way it breaks, you are in for a period of Marxist-inspired horror, where the black-shirts who currently greet us at your airports, are going to fan out from your ports of entry to start policing every aspect of your lives (if they haven't already).

(Not that a McCain victory would have made the slightest difference - I simply held one last impossible dream that at the last minute, for whatever reason, the Republicans would have deposed McCain and replaced him with Paul. Yes, I know this was a ridiculous wisp of emotion trying to trump the inevitability of full-blown national socialism within any democratic state, but as I said below, I still think that hope is the most marvellous element making up the human condition. I just don't think that there's much left for America, at least not until it has seen through this latest throw of the national socialist dice.)

And now I must end this post, which could continue for some time otherwise, to try to figure out how I personally survive the onrushing economic disaster which has yet to blow our way. We have, as yet, only felt the merest and lightest of its breezes. The full storm has yet to hit. Obama's victory has, however, brought this financial hurricane closer to the shore. It is only a matter of time now, with the impossibility of a Paul government, your last real chance, before this storm really hits the shore.

Don't believe me? Just come back in about three years, and we'll talk again. If it gets really bad, we may even let you rejoin our monarchist system, once we too have thrown off our own socialist chains over here on the sceptred isle.

I shall happily take on the role of the Duke of Indiana (wherever the heck that is). My first job will be to sack everyone there who works for the state, and then abolish my own ability to charge either salary or expenses. I shall also, of course, continue to live here in England and never visit that glorious territory, in the manner of William Penn. For what need does any of us have, to have our lives ruled over by other people seeking out their own personal interests?

Pip pip!!

Why?

Why are people queueing around the block to vote in tonight's U.S. presidential election? Why are BBC reporters almost ejaculating with excitement about the probable victory of Obama, with their talk of the "rascist confederacy" and the "dawn of a new age in America"? Why, particularly, are we in Britain being subjected to blanket coverage of this foreign election?

What possible difference will it make to anything if either John Obama or Barack McCain wins this election?

Will American troops leave Iraq, if one of the candidates wins, despite their brutal occupation based upon a tissue of lies? No. Will American troops leave Afghanistan, despite being hated by everyone in Afghanistan outside of the ruling elite in Kabul? No. Will the oncoming depression be lessened in its intensity by government stupidity and non-productive consumption? No. Will American farmers receive less subsidies? Will hard core Muslims stop hating America? Will inflation end? Will the dollar not collapse? Will the Keynesians stop ruling the roost? Will Chicken Little be believed? Will anything at all, of any substance, be different, if one or other of the candidates gets elected?

Beats me.

So why are people queueing in car parks to vote?

I think it comes down to hope. The human condition is a hopeful condition. It always hopes that action can make a difference. It always hopes that human action can make a difference.

I applaud this spirit.

Not that it's going to make any difference at all, in this election. American foreign policy, the root of most of the world's evils, will remain the same. American domestic policy of feeding consumption through Federal Reserve inflation, will remain the same, thereby condemning the world to a protracted economic depression. Yes, Obama will tap this hope to try to win, but his presidency will make not a blind bit of difference to anything at all, except to perhaps which particular crooks get their beaks wetted first.

But hope will one day see us through this mess of the democratic God that has failed.

The trick for us libertarians is to capture this hope and to stop it being diverted into the pipe dream of democracy making a blind bit of difference. But hope still exists. Our chance lies before us. We should try to take it.

When Obama fails in two or three years, and it has all gone horribly wrong, we should take the socialists to task for their inevitable failure, despite the hope of the masses that this time someone can make socialism work.

Obama won't be able to make socialism work. No-one can. Mises proved that back in the 1920s with his economic calculation argument. The only thing that works is freedom and I hope that one day we Misesians can help people realise this. When we do, humanity will enter an Austrian golden age.

Getting back to the here and now, I especially hope that a friend of mine wins his bet that McCain will win. Not that I care a flying monkeys about McCain. It's just that I'll stand to benefit to the tune of a couple of glasses of chilled champagne, when we go round to celebrate his spread bet victory.

Hope springs eternal.

Strawberry Fields forever

Although I will to have to watch Quantum of Solace about ten more times on the DVD, plus carry out further research on Wikipedia, to figure out what the heck the plot was all about, I found it almost as good as Casino Royale. It is on a par with any of the Brosnan films (with the possible exception of Goldeneye), though perhaps it headed a little too closely into Jason Bourne territory, which is understandable due to its use of the same film editor as the latest Bourne series outing.

The dreadful day when an American is cast as Bond, thus marking the final takeover of the British Empire by the Americans, will still be delayed as long as we can find actors of the stature of Daniel Craig, but with Quantum of Solace we are a quantum closer. The human need to observe and celebrate the eternal Man-God of Hercules, as portrayed by Bourne and Bond, and a myriad of others, is blending into a sameness, but I suppose that the market will have its way, even if I, as an individual, prefer my Bond heroes to be a little less "Man" and a little more "God".

Yes, it's more human that Bond these days bleeds a little more for Blighty than he used to, but I still miss Roger Moore's solution of difficult situations via the wry lifting of his eyebrow to summon the other powers on Olympus to rise from their gilded ambrosial slumber, and to help him a little more energetically, especially Tyche, the Goddess of Luck.

But no matter. A fine film, which will no doubt be all the finer once I have drunk it in enough to work out the point of the plot, where the two bullets came from at the end, and whatever it was Mathis said in the key scene at the centre of the movie.

What was best about the film, however, was not Craig's portrayal of Hercules, but the fun the scriptwriters had with the Quantum organisation; the chief Quantum villain of the film sported the marvellously environmentalist name of 'Greene', plus a career as a major player in the environmentalist movement.

Thus, the new Bond villains set to replace the communists are, wait for it, the environmentalists! Superb. One might have even suspected that a certain Jack Maturin had earned himself an uncredited screenplay debut! Marvellous.

And of course, who else in real life could be the shadowy Quantum group of international crooks, financiers and politicians, other than the shadowy Bilderberg group of international crooks, financiers and politicians? I suspect a few alarm bells will have rung for this bunch of mafiosi gangsters and banksters, when its individual members saw the film. It certainly looked a pretty close fit to me, particularly during the Opera scene. But I desperately don't want to end up in the furry undergrowth territory of David Icke and his conspiracy theorist friends, so I'll leave it there for the moment. (I prefer to think of our ruling overlord masters as being merely lizards and slime balls, in the sense of Douglas Adams, rather than actually being reptilian humanoids).

However, if you are unsure about the interconnected tendrils of this disgusting organisation, and its related "friends" in Chatham House, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Trilateral Commission, the best place to get started is Uncle Murray's incredible series of pieces describing the links between all of these Quantum-like groups, as marvellously posited in Quantum of Solace by the links between the CIA and Quantum; read them all, especially the first one, and weep:

Wall Street, Banks, and American Foreign Policy

Rothbard on Greenspan

The Conspiracy Theory of History Revisited

Swan Song of the Old Right

The Reagan Phenomenon