“You can always fool every one of the people who feel that your lies encompass their pre-conceived foolish notions and presumed (but irrational) best interests.” Rajjpuut
"Gold is not necessary. I have no interest in gold. We will build a solid state without an ounce of gold behind it." - Adolf Hitler
"I find myself more and more relying for a solution of our problems on the “invisible hand” which I tried to eject from economic thinking twenty years ago." John Maynard Keynes (nearing his death) in 1946
Ben Bernanke, Barack Obama
Inflating Our Dollars in Hopes
of Avoiding Double-Dip Recession
It’s a monstrous game of “Hot Potato.” The winner of the “Biggest Fool Trophy” for economics’ “bigger fool theory of market crashes and bubbles” is right now being fought out among three extraordinary combatants . . . a) the Chinese and other nations’ government officials hoping to avoid collapse of their own economies b) Barack Obama and the congressional Democrats and c) the American public. All parties, though they may not yet realize it, are faced with the disaster of being the last one holding more and more worth less and eventually worthless American dollars. Let’s examine the battlefield they’re contesting upon.
The history is brief but poignant: the oldest continuing currency in the world is the British Pound Sterling (BPS) first minted in 775 A.D when "sterlings" or silver pennies were the main currency; 240 sterlings or “pence” weighed one pound. Silver is relatively heavy so you can imagine how small these sterlings were: just 1/15 of an ounce each. Their earliest common use was to bribe the Viking invaders with so-called danegeld and that money became the currency of many
Scandanavian nations as well as England.
Scandanavian nations as well as England.
For over two hundred years between the early 18th and middle 20th Centuries, the BPS was esteemed as the world’s reserve currency (a currency from one country held in substantial quantities by a significant amount of the world’s other nations whose leaders believe this “hoarding” of the originating country's currency as a “reserve” was in the best interests of their countries and the leaders themselves).
Before World War I the BPS was clearly and easily the most important international currency with London the world's most important financial hub. Over 60% of global trade was financed, invoiced and settled in sterling, and the largest proportion of official reserves owned by the world’s nations, apart from silver and gold, was found in BPS notes. Although not even all the territories within the British Empire itself used the BPS as their local currency, most of those that did NOT, pegged their local currency at a fixed rate to sterling, as did many foreign countries outside the Empire including virtually every advanced and important country in the world. But this two-century old revered status for the BPS was soon to end . . . .
After World War I, the two greatest economies of the planet (America and Britain) had long based their economic thoughts and actions on the hero of the Scottish Enlightenment Adam Smith, author of . . . the Wealth of Nations (1776) a long-titled book that profoundly motivated our American Founding Fathers when they started drawing up a Constitution eleven years later. Smith who had referred to the idea of “the invisible hand” in his books History of Astronomy and The Theory of Moral Sentiments, eventually found his real niche and talked about “the invisible hand” of the marketplace; and laissez-faire capitalism as the foundation of sound economics. And England and America as a result of common sense and listening to Adam Smith found themselves prospering mightily. Smiths' fundamental tenet was this: free market economies are more productive and beneficial to their societies and both England and America largely practiced what Smith preached and prospered mightily over the next century and a half. But something new was very rotten in England . . . .
England’s own John Maynard Keynes became one of the world’s most trusted economists and Keynes believed that gold and silver and currencies pegged to precious metals were holding back economic growth around the world. Keynes’s two-volume economic idiocy* Treatise on Money, was published in 1930** and Britain left the gold standard in 1931^^, and many foolish countries that had pegged their currencies to gold and kept reserves in the BPS went along with the nonsense, most especially those countries within the British Commonwealth of Nations. These countries and others around the world became known as the "sterling bloc".
After World War II ended, the ungrateful British citizens ousted Winston Churchill and welcomed in the progressives (the Labor Party) who began to immediately and seriously inflate the British Pound. In response most countries outside the Commonwealth quickly began jettisoning the pound in droves. The world faced economic chaos. The natural action of the wise countries was to put their reserves in gold or silver; but they also wanted a more flexible currency as part of their reserves. Since that time, the American Dollar has been the world’s reserve currency and has dominated the international scene for over sixty years.
However, all has not been peachy keen for dollar holders . . . .
1) Richard Nixon in the midst of a pervasive and lengthy American stock market crash (it ran from 1969 with a brief hiatus in ’70-’71 to become a full-fledged meltdown in 1973-74) sabotaged many of them when he let the dollar float against gold. Nixon's and his second vice- president Gerald Ford's and especially the actions of President Jimmy Carter (inflation briefly reached 21% near the end of his single-term presidency) caused much consternation among dollar-holders.
2) About late 1998, many worldwide holders of the dollars again began to feel serious misgivings about the effect of sub-prime home lending policies festering in America and began ridding themselves of dollars. In the decade between 1999 and 2009, many began putting their reserves into other currencies (most notably the Euro). The peak dollar holdings in 1999 at 70.9% plunged to 62.2% in 2009; while the Euro became the 2nd favorite reserve currency going from 17.9% to 27.3% holdings. Since mid-2009, serious discussions have been taking place about replacing the dollar as the world’s reserve currency and now the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has made a recommendation to that effect while countries like China and Russia and Brazil and India are exploring conducting trade among themselves in their native currencies (Yuan, Ruble, Real and Rupee), while buying gold and silver and lowering their dollar holdings.
Dollar holders face another serious threat in the Obama era. Neither the IMF nor the many foreigners and foreign nations holding American Dollars already . . . and especially not those foreign governments most-willing in the past to loan money to Americans (by buying our Treasury Notes and other debt instruments) . . . are enthused by the deliberate and egregious inflationary actions of Obama and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke.
C) Bernanke has been running the money printing presses full-time for over thirty months right now. Currently, if mathematics alone (and not pure trust and tradition) were the telling factor in how much the 2011 American dollar should be worth, it would weigh in about 1/30 of the value of the October, 2008 American Dollar.
D. In February, 2011, President Barack Obama’s feeble attempt at a national budget showed willful refusal to deal with our nation's and the world's "dollar problem." Obama, Pelosi, Reid, the vast majority of Democrats and Union leaders and Michael Moore go so far as to deny any debt crisis exists. It seems you can always fool every one of the people who feel that your lies encompass their pre-conceived notions and presumed (but irrational) best interests. Obama and the progressive are now threatening even greater American deficits and national debt. This shows the world that unless the Republican House of Representatives can change the nation’s direction . . . loaning America money and holding American dollars is one of the stupidest actions anyone can make. This brings us back to paragraph one above, where we (presuming that the Republican efforts to eliminate the debt and balance the budget fall short of success) said:
It’s a monstrous game of “Hot Potato.” The winner of the “Biggest Fool Trophy” for economics’ “bigger fool theory of market crashes and bubbles” is right now being fought out among three extraordinary combatants . . . a) the Chinese and other nations’ government officials hoping to avoid collapse of their own economies b) Barack Obama and the congressional Democrats and c) the American public. Who will be the sucker left holding the American Dollar?
Unless the G.O.P. can work a miracle . . . who will be the biggest fool of all still holding onto American dollars rather than using them as toilet paper by 2013? One world famous economic theorist once said, “"Gold is not necessary. I have no interest in gold. We will build a solid state without an ounce of gold behind it." On the theory that you can’t go too far wrong doing precisely the opposite of whatever Adolf Hitler would recommend, a lot of the “contestants” will undoubtedly opt-out of the contest and buy gold and silver. Another man finally wised up at the very end . . . "I find myself more and more relying for a solution of our problems on Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’ which I tried to eject from economic thinking twenty years ago," said John Maynard Keynes nearing his death in 1946 just before the BPS lost its place as the world’s reserve currency.
Isn’t it funny how the wisest words spoken by some of the world’s most influential progressives are totally ignored? FDR and labor leader George Meany and Jimmy Carter, for example, all agreed that allowing labor unions among government employees is a horrible idea. The founder of Keynesian economics, John Maynard Keynes himself, admitted that Adam Smith had been right and he’d been mistaken . . . but the progressives remember only their nonsense and, indeed, come to worship it. In all this talk about “millions” as “chump change” and “billions” as “insignificant,” let’s examine what they really mean. Politicians love the public’s inability to deal with large amounts of money, since it frees them to do just about whatever they please . . . think of this: we are currently $14.1 TRillion in debt so paying off the debt at $1 per second means that . . .
1 million seconds = approximately 12 days to pay off $1 million
1 billion seconds = 32 years to pay off $1 Billion
1 trillion seconds = 32,000 years to pay off $1 Trillion
14.1 trillion seconds = 451,000 years to pay off $14.1 TRillion
Now let’s get back to that game of Hot Potato. Rajjpuut encourages you NOT to be the last one holding dollars in serious quantities when inflation rears its ugly head. Good luck!
Ya’all live long, strong and ornery,
Rajjpuut
^^ Influenced also by Keynes, FDR confiscated all non-numismatic American gold in 1933 giving the holders of the coins $20.76 per ounce of gold. He then pegged the value of gold at $35.00 an ounce thus within months inflating American paper currency by 68.6% and robbing the people, to enrich the federal government – a move that turned the depression with a little ‘d’ into the 12.5 year long Great Depression. Compare the dealings of progressive presidents Woodrow Wilson and FDR to Harding (and his vice president Calvin Coolidge who succeeded Harding when he died in office) in dealing with the “Invisible Depression,”(see the next footnote) should you ever get confused about what’s best for the people and how the purported best-interests of the nation almost always amount to out-and-out theft from hard-working and thrifty individuals.
** Keynes’ “thinking” in 1930 deliberately ignored the fact that the American resurgence (“The Roaring 20’s”) from the “Invisible Depression of 1920” came almost immediately on the heels of the policies of President Warren G. Harding who cut government spending by 48%; cut federal taxes by 49% and paid down the national debt by 30% ending Woodrow Wilson's depression in fifteen months. Perhaps Keynes believed that the progressive policies of Wilson that created the debacle were responsible for the greatest single-decade jump in prosperity the world has ever known? In any case like many English Fabian-Socialists, Keynes embraced and encouraged progressivism. His ideas fitting right in with the demands of totalitarian states and wannabes everywhere have been thunderously applauded for 80 years but never once worked satisfactorily . . . hmmmm.
