Panic of 1837

MD: At MoneyDelusions, there’s a tool we use to test ideas. Ideas come up when someone thinks there’s a better way to do something. Thus, something is already being done. People resist change and they will put great energy into preserving the current process rather than trying a new process that promises improvements.

Well, what if the roles were reversed? What if the proposed process was in place and working? What if the existing process had to prevail as a “new” idea?

Let’s try it with this article. Let’s assume that the “real” money process was in effect. Would the subject of this essay, The Panic of 1837, even exist? Or if it did exist or arise, would it be as severe under the “real” money process described in the side bar? If the issues could arise, could the actual existing process deal with the issues better?

Let’s give it a try. The article we annotate here is from Wikipedia.

The Texas Handbook has many articles on this subject. We may try the tool to test ideas it presents.

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Whig cartoon showing the effects of unemployment on a family that has portraits of Democratic Presidents Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren on the wall.

The Panic of 1837 was a financial crisis in the United States that touched off a major depression, which lasted until the mid-1840s. Profits, prices, and wages went down, westward expansion was stalled, unemployment went up, and pessimism abounded.

MD: Notice the language “touched off”. We’re reading this article as if a “real” money process was in effect and efficiently operating. Could anything “touch off a major depression” with a “real ” money process in effect? Why would profits, prices, and wages go down? Why would westward expansion be stalled? Why would unemployment go up? Why would pessimism abound?

The panic had both domestic and foreign origins. Speculative lending practices in the West, a sharp decline in cotton prices, a collapsing land bubble, international specie flows, and restrictive lending policies in Britain were all factors.^[1][2]

MD: Note, none of these claimed causes exist with a “real” money process. There are “no” lending “practices” when it comes to a “real” money process. When a trader sees clear to deliver on a promise that spans time and space, he “creates” money. He doesn’t “borrow” money. Someone doesn’t “lend” him money. There is no resistance to a responsible trader (one who delivers as promised) when he makes the promise. The problems “all” happen if he fails to deliver…and those problems have a very different characteristic if “borrowing” and “lending” are not involved. The key element here is “responsibility”.

The lack of a central bank to regulate fiscal matters, which President Andrew Jackson had ensured by not extending the charter of the Second Bank of the United States, was also key.

MD: Here comes the recommended improvement…”a central bank” to regulate fiscal matters. Well, we already have a process that “regulates fiscal matters” (i.e. those related to money). (1) If the trader creating the money is not responsible, he incurs and INTEREST load. Or more correctly, a “responsible” trader never incurs an INTEREST load. If there’s a problem delivering on a promise, that problem doesn’t get smaller by imposing an INTEREST load. The argument against a central bank is obvious. A central bank can only make matters worse. In fact, it can be used…and is easily shown to be used… to cause a panic. Further (2), Andrew Jackson had experience with such solutions and rejected the charter for the Second Bank. They’re saying here that the panic would not have happened if this “new centeral bank” idea was allowed. Let’s watch them make the case.

This ailing economy of early 1837 led investors to panic – a bank run ensued – giving the crisis its name.

MD: They claim an “ailing economy”. What caused it to be ailing? Who are these “investors” who are led to panic. With a “real” money process, investors only play a role when irresponsible traders are concerned. Supposedly, such traders are higher risk and thus must pay INTEREST premiums to cover that risk. It works like “casualty insurance” where PREMIUMS = CLAIMS. With responsible traders, CLAIMS are zero…so PREMIUMS are zero.

A real money process imposes INTEREST load in direct response to DEFAULTs on trading promises. Responsible traders don’t DEFAULT, thus they bear no INTEREST load. All responsible traders a alike as far as the process is concerned. Irresponsible traders come with varying degrees of “propensity to DEFAULT”. This is also true with casualty insurance where those with greater risk of CLAIM pay greater PREMIUMS. And as with insurance claimants, filing a CLAIM is a choice. If you can resolve the issue without filing a CLAIM you can maintain a lower PREMIUM load.

And how about the “bank run”? Well, no bank exists. It only exists with the solution they propose. But its obvious here, it is their very solution that introduces this additional possible cause. And what is a bank run? It’s a case of “irresponsible banks DEFAULTING”. Their process has a 10x leverage advantage. They can “lend” 10x as much money as they have. Well, that gives them 10x the motivation to “screw” their customers…i.e. those who trusted them to keep their money safe. See how easy it is to show how defective the existing solution can be? The tables are turned. “They” must prove their case…and it obviously can’t even be argued, let alone proved.

The run came to a head on May 10, 1837, when banks in New York City ran out of gold and silver. They suspended specie payments and would no longer redeem commercial paper in specie at full face value.^[3]

MD: And here’s another claim that is easily refuted. Precious metals are “not” money. They are just stuff standing in as money. In a “real” money process, they play no role in trade. If you have surplus money and you think its safer to have gold, then buy (i.e. trade your money for) gold. That’s a choice.

Obviously the gold can be stolen as easily (or even more easily) than money. Remember, money may simply be an entry in a ledger. If that ledger is transparent for other traders to scrutinize (which the so-called financial audit does), then the money is difficult to steal.

This solution of “substituting specie for a promise” does nothing but give risk another avenue to come about. Worse, the value of the specie can change over time and space (e.g. a gold shipment can be robbed…or a new huge source can be found), and thus change in supply/demand determined value in trade. That can’t happen with money created in a “real” money process.

A significant economic collapse followed. Despite a brief recovery in 1838, the recession persisted for approximately seven years. Nearly half of all banks failed, businesses closed, prices declined, and there was mass unemployment.

MD: Look what happened! Half the ” banks” failed. With no banks to fail, there are no bank failures. You’re bank solution is openly flawed. Why? Because your solution presents a domino effect. One “borrower” DEFAULTs. If you’ve “loaned” out all your money, you can’t pay “demand” deposits. But with the “real” money process no such existing commitments are affected.

If a trader DEFAULTs on his promise, new “non-responsible” traders wishing to create money incur INTEREST load to immediately mitigate that DEFAULT. This is an automatic negative feedback mechanism. If the DEFAULT was the result of market softening (i.e. the demand prompting the promise was not as anticipated), then new traders are discouraged from making such promises too. Thus you don’t have “bubbles”. They get nipped in the bud. Further, if the demand is real, more traders move in to meet it and supply/demand imbalance is quickly corrected…thus prices remain competitive.

From 1837 to 1844 deflation in wages and prices was widespread.^[4] The lack of deposit insurance deepened the Panic. By 1850 the economy was booming again, a result of increased specie flows from the California Gold Rush.

MD: INFLATION means there is a supply/demand imbalance. This is normal for any trade…except in a “real” money process, it is not normal for money. With money in perpetual free supply, INFLATION of money is perpetually zero. This is additionally achieved by mitigating DEFAULTs immediately with INTEREST collections of like amount.

And look how they say they came out of the panic! They found more gold! With a “real” money process, finding more gold just makes gold less dear…and thus trades of less other stuff…including “real” money created by traders.

So now I suggest you go through the rest of the article. (1) Make the case that the “cause” doesn’t even exist with a “real” money process involved. and (2) Make the case that the “banking” solution just exacerbates the problems…and in fact it is to the bankers benefit to instigate such disruptions. It is their way of manipulating the market. They call it the “business cycle”

Causes

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The crisis followed a period of economic expansion from mid-1834 to mid-1836. The prices of land, cotton, and slaves rose sharply in those years. The boom’s origin had many sources, both domestic and international. Because of the peculiar factors of international trade, abundant amounts of silver were coming into the United States from Mexico and China.^{[citation needed]} Land sales and tariffs on imports were also generating substantial federal revenues. Through lucrative cotton exports and the marketing of state-backed bonds in British money markets, the United States acquired significant capital investment from Britain. The bonds financed transportation projects in the United States. British loans, made available through Anglo-American banking houses like Baring Brothers, fueled much of America’s westward expansion, infrastructure improvements, industrial expansion, and economic development during the antebellum era.^[5]

From 1834 to 1835, Europe experienced extreme prosperity, which resulted in confidence and an increased propensity for risky foreign investments. In 1836, directors of the Bank of England noticed that its monetary reserves had declined precipitously in recent years due to an increase in capital speculation and investment in American transportation. Conversely, improved transportation systems increased the supply of cotton, which lowered the market price. Cotton prices were security for loans, and America’s cotton kings defaulted. In 1836 and 1837 American wheat crops also suffered from Hessian fly and winter kill which caused the price of wheat in America to increase greatly, which caused American labor to starve.^[6]

The hunger in America was not felt by England, whose wheat crops improved every year from 1831 to 1836, and European imports of American wheat had dropped to “almost nothing” by 1836.^[7] The directors of the Bank of England, wanting to increase monetary reserves and to cushion American defaults, indicated that they would gradually raise interest rates from 3 to 5 percent. The conventional financial theory held that banks should raise interest rates and curb lending when they were faced with low monetary reserves. Raising interest rates, according to the laws of supply and demand, was supposed to attract specie since money generally flows where it will generate the greatest return if equal risk among possible investments is assumed. In the open economy of the 1830s, which was characterized by free trade and relatively weak trade barriers, the monetary policies of the hegemonic power (in this case Britain) were transmitted to the rest of the interconnected global economic system, including the United States. The result was that as the Bank of England raised interest rates, major banks in the United States were forced to do the same.^[8]

An 1837 caricature blames Andrew Jackson for hard times.

When New York banks raised interest rates and scaled back on lending, the effects were damaging. Since the price of a bond bears an inverse relationship to the yield (or interest rate), the increase in prevailing interest rates would have forced down the price of American securities. Importantly, demand for cotton plummeted. The price of cotton fell by 25% in February and March 1837.^[9] The American economy, especially in the southern states, was heavily dependent on stable cotton prices. Receipts from cotton sales provided funding for some schools, balanced the nation’s trade deficit, fortified the US dollar, and procured foreign exchange earnings in British pounds, then the world’s reserve currency. Since the United States was still a predominantly agricultural economy centered on the export of staple crops and an incipient manufacturing sector,^[10] a collapse in cotton prices had massive reverberations.

In the United States, there were several contributing factors. In July 1832, President Andrew Jackson vetoed the bill to recharter the Second Bank of the United States, the nation’s central bank and fiscal agent. As the bank wound up its operations in the next four years, state-chartered banks in the West and the South relaxed their lending standards by maintaining unsafe reserve ratios.^[2] Two domestic policies exacerbated an already volatile situation. The Specie Circular of 1836 mandated that western lands could be purchased only with gold and silver coin. The circular was an executive order issued by Jackson and favored by Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri and other hard-money advocates. Its intent was to curb speculation in public lands, but the circular set off a real estate and commodity price crash since most buyers were unable to come up with sufficient hard money or “specie” (gold or silver coins) to pay for the land. Secondly, the Deposit and Distribution Act of 1836 placed federal revenues in various local banks, derisively termed “pet banks”, across the country. Many of the banks were located in the West. The effect of both policies was to transfer specie away from the nation’s main commercial centers on the East Coast. With lower monetary reserves in their vaults, major banks and financial institutions on the East Coast had to scale back their loans, which was a major cause of the panic, besides the real estate crash.^[11]

Americans attributed the cause of the panic principally to domestic political conflicts. Democrats typically blamed the bankers, and Whigs blamed Jackson for refusing to renew the charter of the Bank of the United States and on the withdrawal of government funds from the bank.^[12] Martin Van Buren, who became president in March 1837, was largely blamed for the panic even though his inauguration had preceded the panic by only five weeks. Van Buren’s refusal to use government intervention to address the crisis, such as emergency relief and increasing spending on public infrastructure projects to reduce unemployment, was accused by his opponents of contributing further to the hardship and the duration of the depression that followed the panic. Jacksonian Democrats, on the other hand, blamed the Bank of the United States for both funding rampant speculation and introducing inflationary paper money. Some modern economists view Van Buren’s deregulatory economic policy as successful in the long term, and argue that it played an important role in revitalizing banks after the panic.^[13]

Effects and aftermath

The modern balaam and his ass, an 1837 caricature placing the blame for the Panic of 1837 and the perilous state of the banking system on outgoing President Andrew Jackson, shown riding a donkey, while President Martin Van Buren comments approvingly.

Virtually the whole nation felt the effects of the panic. Connecticut, New Jersey, and Delaware reported the greatest stress in their mercantile districts. In 1837, Vermont’s business and credit systems took a hard blow. Vermont had a period of alleviation in 1838 but was hit hard again in 1839–1840. New Hampshire did not feel the effects of the panic as much as its neighbors did. It had no permanent debt in 1838 and had little economic stress the following years. New Hampshire’s greatest hardship was the circulation of fractional coins in the state.^{[citation needed]}

Conditions in the South were much worse than in the East, and the Cotton Belt was dealt the worst blow. In Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina the panic caused an increase in the interest of diversifying crops. New Orleans felt a general depression in business, and its money market stayed in bad condition throughout 1843. Several planters in Mississippi had spent much of their money in advance, which led to the complete bankruptcy of many planters. By 1839, many plantations were thrown out of cultivation. Florida and Georgia did not feel the effects as early as Louisiana, Alabama, or Mississippi. In 1837, Georgia had sufficient coin to carry on everyday purchases. Until 1839, Floridians were able to boast about the punctuality of their payments. Georgia and Florida began to feel the negative effects of the panic in the 1840s.^{[citation needed]}

At first, the West did not feel as much pressure as the East or the South. Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois were agricultural states, and the good crops of 1837 were a relief to the farmers. In 1839, agricultural prices fell, and the pressure reached the agriculturalists.^[14]

Within two months the losses from bank failures in New York alone aggregated nearly $100 million. Out of 850 banks in the United States, 343 closed entirely, 62 failed partially, and the system of state banks received a shock from which it never fully recovered.^[15] The publishing industry was particularly hurt by the ensuing depression.^[16]

Many individual states defaulted on their bonds, which angered British creditors.^[17]^: 50–52 The United States briefly withdrew from international money markets. Only in the late 1840s did Americans re-enter those markets.^{[citation needed]} The defaults, along with other consequences of the recession, carried major implications for the relationship between the state and economic development. In some ways, the panic undermined confidence in public support for internal improvements.^[17]^: 55–57 Although state investment in internal improvements remained common in the South until the Civil War, northerners increasingly looked to private rather than public investment to finance growth.^{[citation needed]} The panic unleashed a wave of riots and other forms of domestic unrest. The ultimate result was an increase in the state’s police powers, including more professional police forces.^[18]^[17]^{: 137–138}

Recovery

Hard times token, late 1830s; privately minted, used in place of the one-cent coin during currency shortage; inscription reads “I Take the Responsibility”, showing Andrew Jackson holding a drawn sword and a coin bag emerging from a strongbox.

Most economists agree that there was a brief recovery from 1838 to 1839, which ended when the Bank of England and Dutch creditors raised interest rates.^[19] The economic historian Peter Temin has argued that when corrected for deflation, the economy grew after 1838.^[20] According to the Austrian economist Murray Rothbard, between 1839 and 1843, real consumption increased by 21 percent and real gross national product increased by 16 percent, but real investment fell by 23 percent and the money supply shrank by 34 percent.^[21]

In 1842, the American economy was able to rebound somewhat and overcome the five-year depression, but according to most accounts, the economy did not recover until 1844.^[22] The recovery from the depression intensified after the California gold rush started in 1848, greatly increasing the money supply. By 1850, the US economy was booming again.

Intangible factors like confidence and psychology played powerful roles and helped to explain the magnitude and the depth of the panic. Central banks then had only limited abilities to control prices and employment, making bank runs common. When a few banks collapsed, alarm quickly spread throughout the community and were heightened by partisan newspapers. Anxious investors rushed to other banks and demanded to have their deposits withdrawn. When faced with such pressure, even healthy banks had to make further curtailments by calling in loans and demanding payment from their borrowers. That fed the hysteria even further, which led to a downward spiral or snowball effect. In other words, anxiety, fear, and a pervasive lack of confidence initiated devastating, self-sustaining feedback loops. Many economists today understand that phenomenon as an information asymmetry. Essentially, bank depositors reacted to imperfect information since they did not know if their deposits were safe and so fearing further risk, they withdrew their deposits, even if it caused more damage. The same concept of downward spiral was true for many southern planters, who speculated in land, cotton, and slaves. Many planters took out loans from banks under the assumption that cotton prices would continue to rise. When cotton prices dropped, however, planters could not pay back their loans, which jeopardized the solvency of many banks. These factors were particularly crucial given the lack of deposit insurance in banks. When bank customers are not assured that their deposits are safe, they are more likely to make rash decisions that can imperil the rest of the economy. Economists have concluded that the suspension of convertibility, deposit insurance, and sufficient capital requirements in banks can limit the possibility of bank runs.^[23]^[24]^[25]

References

Timberlake, Richard H. Jr (1997). “Panic of 1837”. In Glasner, David; Cooley, Thomas F. (eds.). Business cycles and depressions: an encyclopedia. New York: Garland Publishing. pp. 514–16. ISBN 978-0-8240-0944-1. Knodell, Jane (September 2006). “Rethinking the Jacksonian Economy: The Impact of the 1832 Bank Veto on Commercial Banking”. The Journal of Economic History. 66 (3): 541. doi:10.1017/S0022050706000258. S2CID 155084029. Damiano, Sara T. (2016). “The Many Panics of 1837: People, Politics, and the Creation of a Transatlantic Financial Crisis by Jessica M. Lepler”. Journal of the Early Republic. 36 (2): 420–422. doi:10.1353/jer.2016.0024. S2CID 148315095. “Measuring Worth – measures of worth, prices, inflation, purchasing power, etc”. Retrieved 27 December 2012. Jenks, Leland Hamilton (1927). The Migration of British Capital to 1875. Alfred A. Knopf. pp. 66–67. Davis, Joseph H. (2004). “Harvests and Business Cycles in Nineteenth-Century America” (PDF). Quarterly Journal of Economics. Vanguard Group. 124 (4): 14. doi:10.1162/qjec.2009.124.4.1675. S2CID 154544197. Alison, Archibald. History of Europe: From the Fall of Napoleon, in MDCCCXV to the…, Volume 3. New York: Harper and Brothers. p. 265. Temin, Peter (1969). The Jacksonian Economy. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. pp. 122–147. Jenks, Leland Hamilton (1927). The Migration of British Capital to 1875. Alfred A. Knopf. pp. 87–93. North, Douglass C. (1961). The Economic Growth of the United States 1790–1860. Prentice Hall. pp. 1–4. Rousseau, Peter L (2002). “Jacksonian Monetary Policy, Specie Flows, and the Panic of 1837” (PDF). Journal of Economic History. 62 (2): 457–488. doi:10.1017/S0022050702000566. hdl:1803/15623. Bill White (2014). America’s Fiscal Constitution: Its Triumph and Collapse. PublicAffairs. p. 80. ISBN 9781610393430. Hummel, Jeffery (1999). “Martin Van Buren The Greatest American President” (PDF). The Independent Review. 4 (2): 13–14. Retrieved 2017-08-01. McGrane, Reginald (1965). The Panic of 1837: Some Financial Problems of the Jacksonian Era. New York: Russell & Russell. pp. 106–126. Hubert H. Bancroft, ed. (1902). The financial panic of 1837. The Great Republic By the Master Historians. Vol. 3. Thompson, Lawrance. Young Longfellow (1807–1843). New York: The Macmillan Company, 1938: 325. Roberts, Alasdair (2012). America’s First Great Depression: Economic Crisis and Political Disorder after the Panic of 1837. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press. ISBN 9780801450334. Larson, John (2001). Internal Improvement: National Public Works and the Promise of Popular Government in the Early United States. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. pp. 195–264.^{[page range too broad]}Friedman, Milton. A Program for Monetary Stability. p. 10. Temin, Peter. The Jacksonian Economy. p. 155. Rothbard, Murray (18 August 2014). A History of money and Banking in the United States: The Colonial Era to world War II (PDF). p. 102. Cheathem, Mark R.; Corps, Terry (2017). Historical Dictionary of the Jacksonian Era and Manifest Destiny. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield. pp. 282–283. ISBN 9781442273191; Roberts, Alasdair (2013). America’s First Great Depression: Economic Crisis and Political Disorder After the Panic of 1837. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. pp. 204–205. ISBN 9780801478864. Chen, Yehning; Hasan, Iftekhar (2008). “Why Do Bank Runs Look Like Panic? A New Explanation” (PDF). Journal of Money, Credit and Banking. 40 (2–3): 537–538. doi:10.1111/j.1538-4616.2008.00126.x. Diamond, Douglas W.; Dybvig, Philip H. (1983). “Bank Runs, Deposit Insurance, and Liquidity”. Journal of Political Economy. 91 (3): 401–419. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.434.6020. doi:10.1086/261155. JSTOR 1837095. S2CID 14214187.

Goldstein, Itay; Pauzner, Ady (2005). “Demand-Deposit Contracts and the Probability of Bank Runs”. Journal of Finance. 60 (3): 1293–1327. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.500.6471. doi:10.1111/j.1540-6261.2005.00762.x.

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MD: At Money Delusions we have come to know that neither the “Keynesian’s” nor the “Austrians” are even close to getting INFLATION right. How can you get INFLATION (or more generally economics) right when you don’t know what money is? Further, this, like government (i.e. the Republicans and Democrats) is like watching the Harlem Globe Trotters and the Washington Generals. It’s theater. But just for exercise, let’s annotate this article from that infamous Mises Monk, Bob Murphy, who has relaxing life away as a college professor (most recently at Texas Tech, my sons’ alma matre). With an NYU PhD we don’t ever expect much but a professional shill. Interestingly, not only does Murphy claim to know what money is…he’s proving he doesn’t know in his books.

Understanding Money Mechanics

https://mises.org/library/understanding-money-mechanics-0

MD: Let’s get started.

04/18/2022Robert P. Murphy

Listen to the Audio Mises Wire version of this article.

The government’s latest report puts the twelve-month official consumer price inflation rate at 8.5 percent, the highest since December 1981:

MD: Of course we at MoneyDelusions know INFLATION cannot be measured. We also know with a “real” money process, it is guaranteed to be perpetually zero…we don’t need to measure it. But look at the time series below. Notice, it starts its abrupt ramp up at the end of 2021…when the SSA had to finally admit they had been lying about INFLATION for fully 20+ years. In January, 2022, annuitants got a 5% raise. That’s not the 7% average inflation that we provably had since 911…but it’s 5x the less than 1% they claimed we had. The numbers are pure fiction. So why try to tell a story about what they mean?

As economists debate the causes of, and cure for, this price inflation, it’s worth recounting which schools of thought saw it coming. Although individuals can be nuanced, generally speaking the Austrians have been warning that the Fed’s reckless policies threaten the dollar. In contrast, as I will document in this article, two of the leaders of the Keynesian and market monetarist schools didn’t see this coming at all.

MD: Notice Mises Monks like to refer to “price” inflation…as if there was any other kind. What we have had for the last three or four generations is government counterfeiting. They claim to be doing it at 2%…but on average have been doing it at 4% … since 1913.

My Worst Professional Mistake

Before diving into it, I need to address a problem: my hands-down worst professional mistake occurred during the early years of the Fed’s “QE” (quantitative easing) programs, when I made bets on (consumer price) inflation with two economist colleagues. I ended up losing those bets and thereby gave Paul Krugman the opportunity to lecture me on my intellectual dishonesty because I clung to my (ostensibly falsified) Austrian model even after my prediction blew up in my face. Indeed, if you check out my Wikipedia entry, you’ll see that apparently my life story is that I was born, got my PhD, and lost an inflation bet—in that order. (For those interested in the details, I summarize the episode with relevant links in this postmortem blog post. I also participated in a 2014 Reason symposium along with Peter Schiff and others, commenting on the lack of inflation.)

MD: Now come on Bob! Do you really think giving everyone 1 weeks rent as a stimulous is going to do anything different than buying them beers for a week?

Ever since the rounds of QE failed to yield surging consumer price inflation at the scale some of us warned of, the Keynesians and market monetarists understandably ran victory laps, saying that they were to be trusted over those permabear Cassandra Austrians. (To be sure, the market monetarists were far more civil about it than the prominent Keynesians.) So it is not with gloating or vindictiveness that I write the present article, but rather I do it to set the record straight and document for posterity that the leading Keynesians and market monetarists totally missed this bout of price inflation.

The Keynesians Camp: Paul Krugman and Klaus Schwab

Let’s do the fun one first: Paul Krugman has not fared well in light of our current inflationary experience. As late as June 2021, Krugman wrote an article in the New York Times titled “The Week Inflation Panic Died.” Here are some key excerpts, with my bold added, and keep in mind that when Krugman wrote this, the most recent Consumer Price Index (CPI) inflation rate was only 4.9 percent:

Remember when everyone was panicking about inflation, warning ominously about 1970s-type stagflation? OK, many people are still saying such things, some because that’s what they always say, some because that’s what they say when there’s a Democratic president….

MD: Even if they were able to measure INFLATION, the disruptions caused by a two year shut down would make their numbers useless.

But for those paying closer attention to the flow of new information, inflation panic is, you know, so last week.

Seriously, both recent data and recent statements from the Federal Reserve have, well, deflated the case for a sustained outbreak of inflation … [T]o panic over inflation, you had to believe either that the Fed’s model of how inflation works is all wrong or that the Fed would lack the political courage to cool off the economy if it were to become dangerously overheated.

Both beliefs have now lost most of whatever credibility they may have had….

The Fed has been arguing that recent price rises are similarly transitory … The Fed’s view has been that this episode, like the inflation blip of 2010–11, will soon be over.

And it’s now looking as if the Fed was right …

…. Monetary doomsayers have been wrong again and again since the early 1980s, when Milton Friedman kept predicting an inflation resurgence that never arrived. Why the eagerness to party like it’s 1979?

To be fair, government support for the economy is much stronger now than it was during the Obama years, so it makes more sense to worry about inflation this time around. But the vehemence of the inflation rhetoric has been wildly disproportionate to the actual risks—and those risks now seem even smaller than they did a few weeks ago.

MD: Really? Remember all the vaccinations? Who paid for those? Government you say? With money they counterfeited into existence? And who got the money? Drug companies and medical delivery plants like hospitals? As far as the economy was concerned, all that money went down a rat hole. But in reality, it went into government, and government dependants pockets.

Of course, Krugman’s confident dismissal of those Biden-hating doomsayers blew up in his face, as CPI inflation kept ratcheting higher and higher. In a December 2021 NYT column, Krugman threw in the towel and admitted he had been wrong, but in his own special way (again, with my bolding):

The current bout of inflation came on suddenly…. Even once the inflation numbers shot up, many economists—myself included—argued that the surge was likely to prove transitory. But at the very least it’s now clear that “transitory” inflation will last longer than most of us on that team expected….
… I believe that what we’re seeing mainly reflects the inherent dislocations from the pandemic, rather than, say, excessive government spending. I also believe that inflation will subside over the course of the next year and that we shouldn’t take any drastic action. But reasonable economists disagree, and they could be right….
The latest projections from board members and Fed presidents are for the interest rate the Fed controls to rise next year, but by less than one percentage point, and for the unemployment rate to keep falling.
MD: So how does the Fed control interest rates? Don’t they sell their counterfeit money at auction? And don’t they use that to pay back the counterfeit money they sold at earlier auctions? And don’t they guarantee their member banks 10x leverage regardless?
Perhaps surprisingly, my own position on policy substance isn’t all that different from either Furman’s or the Fed’s. I think inflation is mainly bottlenecks and other transitory factors and will come down, but I’m not certain, and I am definitely open to the possibility that the Fed should raise rates, possibly before the middle of next year….
Maybe the real takeaway here should be how little we know about where we are in this strange economic episode. Economists like me who didn’t expect much inflation were wrong, but economists who did predict inflation were arguably right for the wrong reasons, and nobody really knows what’s coming.

For those keeping score at home, remember that when I pointed out that Keynesians Christina Romer and Jared Bernstein had been notoriously wrong in their forecasts of unemployment following the Obama stimulus package, Krugman told us that “some predictions matter more than others.” So this time around, Krugman can’t argue that his botched inflation predictions are irrelevant. Instead, as we see above, he’s claiming that his opponents were right but for the wrong reasons. Even when Krugman is wrong, he’s still better than his enemies!

And for the sake of completeness, let’s reproduce this quotation from Klaus Schwab (who has doctoral degrees in both economics and engineering) and Thierry Malleret in COVID-19: The Great Reset. Writing in July 2020, Schwab and Malleret claimed:

At this current juncture, it is hard to imagine how inflation could pick up anytime soon…. The combination of potent, long-term, structural trends like ageing and technology … and an exceptionally high unemployment rate that will constrain wages for years puts strong downward pressure on inflation. In the post-pandemic era, strong consumer demand is unlikely. (p. 70)

So when he’s not plotting to take over the world, Klaus Schwab is making erroneous inflation predictions.

MD: Earth to economists! The jig is up. We have a Wiemar, Zimbabwe, and Venezuela moment at our doorsteps. And there’s nothing they can do about it. Why do I get a dozen calls each day from so-called investors wanting to buy my real property for cash? Because they know the counterfeiting that produced the cash they think they have has yielded it worthless.

The Leader of the Market Monetarists, Scott Sumner

As I said earlier, the market monetarists are far more civil than Krugman, Brad DeLong, and some other leading Keynesians. (And as far as I know, they’re not bent on world domination either.) But to repeat myself: since 2008, the one trump card the market monetarists had in their rivalry with the Austrians was that many of us prematurely warned about consumer price inflation à la the 1970s, whereas the market monetarists relied on TIPS (Treasury inflation-protected securities) yields and other market indicators to reassure their readers that inflation wouldn’t be a problem.

In that context, then, it’s very interesting that Scott Sumner, founder and leader of the market monetarists, wrote a blog post entitled, “Fed Policy: The Golden Age Begins,” in January 2020. Here are the key excerpts, with my bold:

We are entering a golden age of central banking, where the Fed will become more effective and come closer to hitting its targets than at any other time in history. Over the next few decades, inflation will stay close to 2% and the unemployment rate will generally be relatively low and stable. And this certainly won’t be due to fiscal policy, which is currently the most recklessly pro-cyclical in American history.
… Fed policy is becoming more effective because it is edging gradually in a market monetarist direction….
If they continue moving in this direction, then NGDP [nominal gross domestic product] growth will continue to become more stable, the business cycle will continue to moderate, inflation will stay in the low single digits, and unemployment will stay relatively low and stable.
It won’t be perfect; the business cycle is not quite dead. There will be an occasional recession. But the business cycle is definitely on life support….
As an analogy, when I was young I would frequently read about airliners crashing in the US…. My daughter is a junior in college and doesn’t recall a single major airline crash in the US, excluding a couple of small commuter planes in the 2000s…. After each crash, problems were fixed and planes got a bit safer.
Recessions and airline crashes: They are getting less frequent, and for the exact same reason.

Before closing, let me deal with the obvious response from the market monetarist camp: They could defend Sumner’s claims by arguing that the Fed only strayed from the ideal path because of covid. Well, sure, but Sumner was still wrong for placing so much faith in central bankers and their “independence.”

Furthermore, as I explain in my chapter on market monetarism in this book, Sumner’s criterion of “NGDP growth” as a measure of tight or loose policy is almost a tautology. It is close to me arguing, “We will continue to see rising prices because of the Fed’s reckless policies, unless demand growth subsides, in which case we won’t.”

MD: When will the day come that Bob Murphy gets a clue?

Author:

Contact Robert P. Murphy

Robert P. Murphy is a Senior Fellow with the Mises Institute. He is the author of numerous books: Contra Krugman: Smashing the Errors of America’s Most Famous Keynesian; Chaos Theory; Lessons for the Young Economist; Choice: Cooperation, Enterprise, and Human Action; The Politically Incorrect Guide to Capitalism; Understanding Bitcoin (with Silas Barta), among others. He is also host of The Bob Murphy Show.

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May 30, 2022September 10, 2022

Money Is A Shared Delusion: Why How We Think About Money Matters

MD: Quickly scanning this article it appears this writer does not get it. Let’s dissect it and see.

https://explorewhatworks.com/money-shared-delusion-why-how-we-think-about-money-matters/Money Is A Shared Delusion: Why How We Think About Money Matters

Feb 10, 2022 | Mindset & Identity, Money & Life, Productivity

Tara McMullin is a writer, podcaster, and producer who explores what it takes to navigate the 21st-century economy with your humanity intact. Click here to support this work.

“Time is money.”

MD: A common provocative phrase. Money is an “in-process promise to complete a trade over time and space.” Well, substituting this provable definition for the “money” in the phrase, we essentially get “time is an in-process promise”. Obviously, it is not. Rather it is a fourth dimension defining “when” something is located “where.” Further we know that money is “always and only created by traders like you and me.” Well, you and I don’t create time. So how can time be money. The real principle is the “time value of money”. Does money today have a different value than money last year…or money a year from now. The simple answer: In a “real money process”, the value of money never changes…not over time…not over space. Thus, we can’t say it has time value.

It’s a phrase you’ve heard before. And probably a phrase you’ve accepted as truth. And it’s certainly true that there are plenty of ways that time and money relate to each other.

But a few months ago, I started to wonder: Is time really money? And if not, how does that change the way I think about my time and my money?

MD: Shouldn’t you begin by defining both “time” and “money”?

Today begins a series exploring those questions. I’ll tackle them from different angles and different aspects of entrepreneurship so that we can make more intentional decisions about how we spend our time and our money.

MD: How we “spend” our time and our money? That’s like “making more intentional decisions about how we trade.” There are only two ways: (1) Simple barter exchange in the here and now. (2) Exchange spanning time and space.”

First, a little context.

“Remember, time is money” is a line from Benjamin Franklin’s 1748 essay, “Advice to a Young Tradesman.” He encourages the reader to consider the money they might spend if they take a day off, as well as the money they’d lose for not working. I don’t know about you, but I feel like I’ve been running that calculation on repeat since I was sixteen years old! At least in the US, it seems we’re born with this idea already encoded into our brains.

MD: This is kind of a false choice. When you’re working, you’re in the process of making a trade. Not all work results in useful gain. Further, when you’re idle you’re in the process of doing something besides trading your “time and effort” for something. “Rest” is just such a thing…and if you don’t make that trade regularly you will die of exhaustion. Regardless, this has nothing to do with money.

Max Weber cites this aphorism repeatedly in his book, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. He sees it as a sort of semiotic turning point—a shift from the godly ethic of vocation to the secular ethic of capitalism. And remember, this phrase dates back to at least 1748. That’s 274 years of cultural indoctrination to this idea.

Now, if all of that sounds like I’m firmly against considering time as money (or money as time), I’m not. But I do think it’s an incredibly complicated truism that’s worth interrogating instead of merely accepting as immutable.

To kick off this deep dive into the question of whether time is actually money, I wanted to talk about money. And what money actually is, how we think about it, why the way we think about money matters. So I called up Paco de Leon, who just released a fantastic new book called, Finance For The People. She’s also the founder of The Hell Yeah Bookkeeping, which serves production companies and creative agencies. Paco knows more than a thing or two about money. But I wanted to start with the basics:

https://bookshop.org/widgets/book/book_featured/17354/9780143136255

This article is also available as Episode 382 of What Works.
Click here to find it on your favorite podcast player.

MD: Well, let’s see if Paco does indeed know a thing or two about money.

What is money?

At its most fundamental level, Paco told me, “Money is a shared delusion.” Money is valuable because we believe it’s valuable, not because it has inherent worth. If you’ve ever heard the term “fiat currency,” this is what it refers to: money that’s based on an agreement rather than an intrinsic value.

MD: Does a promise have value? Yes…of course it does. We value promises continually throughout our lives. And some promises we come to “not” value…because we know they won’t be kept. But knowing “all” promises creating money “will” be kept, either by the creator of the promise (and thus the money), or by the process that “guarantees” that the promise is delivered…and thus has value.

How is this guarantee accomplished? Well, it’s a lot like “casualty insurance”. You can send a ship of goods half way around the word. You can buy an insurance policy to guarantee “you” get paid for those goods and your ship returns. This is called a “PREMIUM”. And if your ship doesn’t return, you make “CLAIM” on the insurance provider. And in the insurance business, the operative relation is: PREMIUMS = CLAIMS. The money is made on the “investment income” from the PREMIUMS.

The operative relation for money is INFLATION = DEFAULT-INTEREST =zero. If the promise is not delivered, that is DEFAULT. Mitigating DEFAULTs with immediate INTEREST collections of like amount “guarantees” zero INFLATION. The crucial issue is “how” do you collect INTEREST and who do you collect it from?

That answer is you put the INTEREST load on irresponsible traders who have a non-zero propensity to DEFAULT. This is the same as the actuarial process of insurance: those who have the most CLAIMs pay the HIGHEST premiums.

About 10 or 11 years ago, I went to a lecture on money & meaning at my alma mater. Yes, I am that kind of nerd. That was the first time I was introduced to this idea—this fact, really. Money becomes valuable because you and I (and millions of other people) believe it is valuable. We believe it strongly enough to use money as a means of exchange and pay taxes and wages. The government incentivizes us to believe that—but ultimately, without the trust of US consumers, the dollar just wouldn’t be as valuable.

MD: So the lecture didn’t tell you that government is a dead-beat trader? If someone repeatedly lies to you, does that incentivize you to believe them? Of course not. You are admitting…you are deluded by government. A “real” money process gives money value buy guaranteeing the completion of a trading promise spanning time and space. It doesn’t require government. In fact, government behavior precludes it from creating money…i.e. a promise it is known never to deliver…but rather to just roll over with a new promise…to deliver on a failed promise with a new promise, also guaranteed to fail.

Further, this lecturer explained money exists to make exchanging goods—buying and selling—easier. Instead of every trade being a negotiation of how many eggs are worth a pound of wheat, we can assign a monetary value to each product and then independently decide whether we want to trade our money for the eggs or the wheat or a new phone.

MD: The common unit of measure is only part of the story. Our current money process gives a name to a certain amount of gold and/or silver. That name is the “dollar”. It assumes that the value of gold and silver never changes. That assumption is a delusion. If they had chose the name HUL (standing for Hours of Unskilled Labor), that would have been better. A HUL trades for the same size hold in the ground over all time.

We’re seeing this play out in real-time right now with cryptocurrency, my current research obsession. What do people believe bitcoin or ether is worth? And how does that value fluctuate based on the number of people who believe in its value? How is a quote-unquote currency impacted if few sellers accept it as payment from buyers? If you’re curious about how this “money is a shared delusion” thing plays out practically, learn about crypto and all the wild things happening in that market. (Hint: it’s not great.)

MD: Crypto (specifically Bitcoin) claims a solution to the “byzantine general’s problem”. Basically it tries to guarantee truth. It does this with a concept it calls “proof of work” and therefore proof of value. It’s another delusion. You don’t create value by digging a hole and then filling it in again. But you do expend work. A real money process makes no claims whatever about the value of the “promise” (i.e. money). It just guarantees that is ultimately delivered on…and destroyed. In the interim it trades as the most common object in simple barter exchange.

Back to the kind of money we have a stable agreement about. It can be hard to integrate the idea that money is a shared delusion because it’s so integral to the way we navigate the world. Our survival, in many ways, depends on how we earn and spend money. Paco was fascinated with that duality; money is both imaginary and key to our contemporary existence. She said, “Once we start to examine what [money] is at its core, we can start to ourselves, ‘If this thing is based on belief, well, how else is the way I interact with it based on beliefs?’”

MD: Do you describe “insurance” as a “shared delusion”…because it’s so integral to the way we make promises? Our survival depends on being of value. And that means trading our time for sustenance. Paco evidently failed in her examination of what [money] is at its core. You plant seeds with the belief that they will grow into a plant that you can eat. If you have a brown thumb like I have, you don’t believe it. But you can see skilled farmers making things grow. For me, I choose not to trade my time in planting. Rather, I trade it for something the farmer wants…and I trade that for the fruits of “his” planting. Don’t make this more complicated than it is.

What we believe about money impacts how we interact with it.

It’s the reason you and I can make drastically different money decisions, and they’re still the right decisions for us. Money isn’t an immutable, universal Truth—but a fluid, relative representation of value, which is always individual. What I value is not what you value. What you value is not what I value. What we each value will be decided by our circumstances, values, personal preferences, and priorities. And even within that relativity, there’s also the question of how value is related to available resources. For instance, I might understand and appreciate the value of investing in a house in Montana right now. It’s where we plan to move in about five years. But saying the market there is volatile would be an extreme understatement. Could I put together a down payment to buy property there? Sure. But I have to weigh the value of that money against the potential risk of buying now versus purchasing a few years from now.

Money isn’t an immutable, universal Truth—but a fluid, relative representation of value, which is always individual.

Paco gave me an even better example. Imagine you’re at a restaurant with a friend, and the Happy Hour special is $1 oysters. If you’re not an oyster fan, know that that price is a steal. You say to your friend, “I love oysters! Let’s get a dozen—that’s such a good price.” But your friend is dubious. “$1 oysters?” they say, “That’s… suspicious.” Maybe they are old. Perhaps the restaurant got them from an unscrupulous purveyor. Maybe they’re just not very good. You and your friend are working with the same financial information on the surface. It’s Happy Hour, and the oysters are $1 each. But you bring your beliefs about money and value to the table, and your friend brings theirs. The result is two drastically different approaches to the potential purchase.

MD: But none of that has to do with money. That has to do with trade. Trade has three stages: (1) Negotiation; (2) Promise to deliver; (3) Delivery as promised. In simple barter exchange, (2) and (3) happen simultaneously in the here and now. Money enables (2) and (3) to happen over time and space. And money has nothing to do with “belief”. That’s all taken care of in stage (1)…and it only applies to the two parties involved.

Our values, personal histories, upbringing, geographic location, culture, class… all these things and more influence the way we approach the proverbial $1 oyster. So do the beliefs that we have about ourselves. Paco told me that many of her original stories about money were informed by her belief that she wasn’t good enough. It might be easy to write it off as a “money mindset thing.” Yet, her anxiety about not being good enough was based on real experiences. She told me, “Being queer and a woman of color has not been a nice day at the beach. I’ve heard family members talking about so-and-so being gay. I remember hearing that story and being like: okay, noted, not okay to be gay.” She also picked up the “not good enough” message from thirteen years of Catholic school—a privilege in many ways, but also a daily immersion into a story about being fundamentally flawed.

MD: If Paco was this easily conflicted about money, what did she have to say about trade? Could she compare and contrast the two? I think you were wasting your time with Paco. In the land of the blind, the one eyed person is most value. In the land of the queer, the straight person has a value deficiency in at least one category of trade…that being an inter-personal relationship…which is the most equitable trade possible.

The worry about not being good enough coalesced into a story that she should take what she’s given and be grateful for it, grateful to be included, to belong. But eventually, she started to shift that story—and decided to go out on her own in order so she could take control of the value of her work on the open market. And… still, she was undercharging for bookkeeping services and consulting. “I was that $1 oyster,” she said. So the work continued. She pursued therapy and other ways of processing her beliefs and experiences to unpack why she was perennially coming up short on decisions about price.

MD: Again, this has nothing to do with money. She is addressing the (1) Negotiation state of trader.

This is what we mean when we talk about understanding your money mindset. It’s not about “charging what you’re worth” or investing in yourself. It’s really a process of unpacking unconscious stories, weighing them against cultural conditioning, and finding ways to resource yourself to shift your thinking. “Thinking bigger” is just a bandaid over a much bigger issue. If you try to cover your money wounds with “charge what you’re worth,” you won’t get very far without bleeding out. This is why so much money mindset advice feels like a panacea. Before we can write a more effective money story, we actually have to root out and process the old one.

Before we can write a more effective money story, we actually have to root out and process the old one.

“The quality of your thinking impacts the decisions you make,” Paco told me. That’s why she cares about really getting to the heart of how we think about money, rather than trying to plaster over it with affirmations and financial advice. When you say something like “charge what you’re worth” to cover over feelings of inadequacy, the inadequacy is going to leak through. Those unexamined feelings influence your decision-making. So you find a way to rationalize a decision prompted by your original, negative money story rather than the one you think you’re telling. Paco says:

“Just feel your damn feelings on the upfront! Recognize that you’re an emotional creature. Sometimes your feelings are going to get in the way. Feel them and manage them and regulate your nervous system.”
MD: Again…is irrelevant to money.
The Moral Quality of Money

When we start talking about how our beliefs impact our decisions with money, we inevitably land on assumptions about the moral quality of money. Money and what we do with it seem to signal whether we’re a good or bad person, a good citizen or a bad citizen.

MD: This is nonsense. If you have grapes and you want strawberries money gives you an option. You can “sell” your grapes for some number of HULs …hours of unskilled labor. You know a HUL value because you traded in them at some point in your life…usually a job during high school. You then take those HULs and find someone with strawberries. And you negotiate that trade. Using money you have two negotiation steps. (1) grapes for HULs; (2) HULs for strawberries. If you make a bad trade on you grapes, you still have a chance of correcting it on your trade for strawberries. Or you can gain on both trades or you can lose on both trades. It’s about your ability to trade. It’s not about money.

The messages around this can come from the oddest places—or, maybe, the most predictable least helpful places. For instance, in an interview on cable news, former Labor Secretary Elaine Chao said that low-wage workers had a patriotic duty to get back to work. Prosperity gospel preachers tell you that wealth is a sign of god’s favor. And the vast majority of the political machine in the US has been touting the welfare queen as the ultimate moral villain since Reagan.

MD: And again, be that as it may, it has nothing to do with money.

These messages aren’t the whole of the moral lessons we learn about money—they’re just the tip of the iceberg. They’re signposts of a pervasive, inescapable message about money; having money is good and, if you don’t have it, you better work your ass off for more of it so you can be good.

Paco said:

“We are overly focused on our own personal shortcomings, right? You did this wrong. You are bad. You are not disciplined. But what I really think what we need to focus on when we feel these negative feelings of shame and guilt is exploring and understanding where they came from. Who taught you that you should be ashamed of this? Where did you pick that up? Was it a move? Was it a song? Was it your grandparents?”

MD: I wonder what Paco would have to say about trading for art?

She said we pick up these expectations from family, friends, and society. When we violate that behavior, we feel bad. The answer? Paco says that financial pros need to help people heal the parts of them that are broken to help the people they serve to heal.

MD: And don’t forget the things we pick up from advertising and other forms of information and/or brainwashing.

Nowhere is moralizing more prevalent than in discussion about debt. But as Trump and other billionaires have proved repeatedly, debt only seems to be bad when you’re the wrong kind of person with that debt on your balance sheet. So I asked Paco: what’s the deal with debt?

MD: While you were at it did you ask her “what the deal with a promise”? Is a promise a debt? Of course it is.

As is her gift, Paco gave me a great analogy. Debt is like fire, she said. Fire has benefits—it lets us cook our food, for instance. But if that fire gets out of control? Well, then there’s a problem. Debt has significant benefits. Without the invention of the 30-year mortgage, many of us would not be able to own real estate. Without a loan or a business credit card, we might not be able to make investments in the growth of our companies. But debt can quickly get out of control. And that’s when it becomes a problem. “We shouldn’t look at things with this tunnel vision of ‘debt is bad,’” Paco said. Black and white thinking rarely (maybe never?) benefits us.

MD: The “30 year mortgage” illustrates the scam that is our existing money system. (1) It assumes someone is “lending” you the money when in actuality, “you” are “creating” it. (2) It assumes you must pay “interest” on the money you have still not returned. Both are false in a “real” money process. In a “real” money process, money is in perpetually free supply. It never changes its value. And it imposes no resistance to trading (e.g. interest load).

Is time money?

As I mentioned, I’m really interested in exploring the maxim, “time is money.” In what ways is that true? In what ways is it not true? And how might a fundamental, unexamined belief that time is money benefit or harm us and our work? So I asked Paco for her thoughts. She told me that there was a long time where she definitely ascribed to this philosophy. She’d make calculations about what she wanted to buy and whether the price was worth the amount of time it would take to earn that amount. She said it wasn’t a horrible way to think about money—but it’s certainly not the only way to think about the relationship between time and money.

MD: You took time to write this article. I took time to make these annotations. I received nothing in trade for my effort. That makes me a fool. What did you receive for writing the article?

For instance, when she started hiring, she realized that she could create leverage with other people’s time. As a business owner, she could use their work to earn more. She also thinks about how money can buy time, “Time is a non-renewable resource. Money is a renewable resource.” And, of course, she’s very interested in investing in a way that produces more money without more time spent on work.

MD: “Money is a non-renewable resource”: Try this? You can make money writing this article. You can obtain a hole by digging. If you need a hole, would you choose to spend your time writing this article for money…then trading that money for a guy to dig your hole? What if it takes twice as long to dig the hole yourself than to have the guy do it. Did you “reclaim” some non-renewable time? You know the old axiom: work smarter, not harder.

Paco and I agree that the danger in believing “time is money” is that it often reinforces conditioning around productivity and usefulness. We learn at an early age that the goal is to get as much done in a certain period of time as possible—the more ways we can hack our time to produce more, the more we’re rewarded. We’re also taught to evaluate our worth to society from the perspective of productivity. Taking time off, therefore, risks getting you labeled as lazy. And that brings us back to the core belief Paco (and I) have had to wrestle with: Am I enough? Am I doing enough?

MD: And again, that’s all irrelevant.

“Am I deserving of the space to just be a human appreciating the sunshine on my face? I want to normalize wanting to chill,” she told me.

“To me, money is freedom and it’s power. It allows me to live a life of dignity.”

MD: And if sea shells were money does that make picking up sea shells bring you more freedom and power? You know it doesn’t. You can’t just call something money and make it be so. It’s the process that brings the value.

As we started to wrap things up, Paco told me that she really wants people to be able to live a life of dignity. Yes, we need to concern ourselves with our own personal finances. But we should also be concerned about the public policies that would allow all people to live dignified lives. She said, “let’s just solve that problem first. And then luxury will follow.”

MD: If “all” people just took care of themselves “all” would be fine. That’s everyone’s first task…take care of yourself.

I’ve been rolling the idea of “dignity” around in my mind since I talked to Paco. Who is denied dignity? What are the mechanisms that enforce that denial? What does a dignified life look like, and how much does it cost?

Paco does such a great job of addressing the things we can control about money. And she also does a great job acknowledging that there is much that’s out of our control. This is certainly true when it comes to dignity, as well. We can do a lot for ourselves to ensure a dignified life. But for many of us, factors out of our control make it incredibly difficult. So, what policy changes could we advocate for so that all people could have access to a dignified life? What community care projects could help more people live with dignity?

MD: If you have money and you created it, you must eventually return it as you promised and it is destroyed. If you obtained your money in trade, it’s no different than grapes you obtained in trade…except for the process. With a “real” money process, you can put your money under a rock for 10 years…then take it out and trade it for the same size hole in the ground as you could 10 years ago. With grapes…well, they rotted 10 years ago. And with our counterfeit dollar, you can trade for a hole that is 2/3rds as big…assuming 4% inflation caused by government counterfeiting.

We all have room to work on our beliefs about money, and many of us have enough space to start changing the larger conversation, too.

MD: Actually, everything in your article is about “trade”…not “money”.

May 23, 2022May 9, 2023

Five Warning Signs The End Of Dollar Hegemony Is Near… Here’s What Happens Next

Five Warning Signs The End Of Dollar Hegemony Is Near… Here’s What Happens Next

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/five-warning-signs-end-dollar-hegemony-near-heres-what-happens-next

by Tyler DurdenSaturday, May 21, 2022 – 01:30 PM

Authored by Nick Giambruno via InternationalMan.com,

MD: This article is so typical of what we see coming out of ZeroHedge.com. These people actually believe what they write. As usual, we’ll dissect the article in place and expose the delusions. We’ve done it repeatedly before. The trouble is, they either will never get it…or the are an active part of the scam.

It’s no secret that China and Russia have been stashing away as much gold as possible for many years.

MD: And if they had a clue they wouldn’t be doing that. At the point where gold can have meaning in economics, the game is already over. There is only enough gold on the planet for each person to have less than 2 ounces…less than $4,000. If gold were actually the media of exchange, it would have to trade for a few orders of magnitude greater than that. And if it did, people would be digging up their own back yards looking for the stuff. It’s beyond stupid. Miners who actually know how to find and refine gold would become enormously wealthy, but could never create enough for the rest of us to use it in trade…i.e. as money.

China is the world’s largest producer and buyer of gold. Russia is number two. Most of that gold finds its way into the Russian and Chinese governments’ treasuries.

MD: Where it does absolutely nothing for the benefit of anyone.

Russia has over 2,300 tonnes—or nearly 74 million troy ounces—of gold, one of the largest stashes in the world. Nobody knows the exact amount of gold China has, but most observers believe it is even larger than Russia’s stash.

MD: Ok. Take that number. 74,000,000 ounces. Divide that by the 7 billion people on the planet. That comes to about 0.01 ounces per person on the planet. Times $4,000 per ounce you have $40. That’s 4 trips to McDonalds. Now what?

Russia and China’s gold gives them access to an apolitical neutral form of money with no counterparty risk.

MD: Counterparty risk? What does that have to do with anything. Money is an “in-process promise to complete a trade over time and space.” It is always, and only, created by traders like you and me. And it is always properly destroyed when we deliver as promised. In the mean time it circulates as the most common object of every simple barter exchange. It’s a record keeping problem…and a discipline problem if the trader fails to deliver as promised.

Remember, gold has been mankind’s most enduring form of money for over 2,500 years because of unique characteristics that make it suitable to store and exchange value.

MD: This stupid argument won’t even play in Peoria… let alone throughout the world.

Gold is durable, divisible, consistent, convenient, scarce, and most importantly, the “hardest” of all physical commodities.

MD: And here we have an open admission of ignorance about money. Durable isn’t an issue. An open record keeping system (e.g. ledger) is durable. Divisible? You can divide a number to any number of pieces you choose. If you buy a car by creating $70,000 in new money, that money can circulate as any denomination the marketplace requires. In the USA the smallest denomination is one cent…and most people won’t bend over to pick one up. Consistent? What does that mean? A promise is a promise. Delivery is delivery. What’s to be inconsistent? Convenient? What in the world is more convenient than a record keeping system? Create checks, currency, coins, … they’re just convenient place holders for what is recorded in the ledger. Scarce? This is the one that gets me most. The media of exchange should never be scarce. Quite the contrary, it should be in perpetual free supply. It should resist trade not at all. Hardest? As in harder than a Hershey bar? How ridiculous! And the one they left out…which is historically the biggest problem with any substitute for “real” money…it must be non-counterfeitable! And who is the biggest counterfeiter in “all” cases? Government!

In other words, gold is the one physical commodity that is the “hardest to produce” (relative to existing stockpiles) and, therefore, the most resistant to inflation. That’s what gives gold its superior monetary properties.

MD: Another open admission to stupidity. The money relation is: INFLATION = DEFAULT – INTEREST. Counterfeiting, the biggest cause of default not mitigated by interest collection, is the biggest source of inflation. It’s a very small fraction of traders who don’t deliver as promised. And when that happens, a “real money process” makes an immediate and equal interest collection of like amount. This guarantees that inflation will be perpetually zero.

Russia and China can use their gold to engage in international trade and perhaps back the currencies.

MD: Only as long as ignorance regarding real money prevails.

That’s why gold represents a genuine monetary alternative to the US dollar, and Russia and China have a lot of it.

MD: And of course there is no shortage of “stupid” people who think that matters. Real traders will “create” a “real money process” every time if not conflicted by the money-changers and the governments they institute. I’m now going to let him spew on as long he purveys the same ridiculous fiction. If he comes up with some new nonsense I’ll break back in.

Today it’s clear why China and Russia have had an insatiable demand for gold.

They’ve been waiting for the right moment to pull the rug from beneath the US dollar. And now is that moment…

This is a big problem for the US government, which reaps an unfathomable amount of power because the US dollar is the world’s premier reserve currency. It allows the US to print fake money out of thin air and export it to the rest of the world for real goods and services—a privileged racket no other country has.

Russia and China’s gold could form the foundation of a new monetary system outside of the control of the US. Such moves would be the final nail in the coffin of dollar dominance.

Five recent developments are a giant flashing red sign that something big could be imminent.

Warning Sign #1: Russia Sanctions Prove Dollar Reserves “Aren’t Really Money”

In the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the US government has launched its most aggressive sanctions campaign ever.

Exceeding even Iran and North Korea, Russia is now the most sanctioned nation in the world.

As part of this, the US government seized the US dollar reserves of the Russian central bank—the accumulated savings of the nation.

MD: Oh I would so like to have Putin’s ear here. The best thing he could do is institute a “real money process” and use his gold to allay his doubters…he’d never have to touch any of it. In fact, I would like to see Elon Musk do it, rather than buy Twitter (that will bury him in criminal lawsuits should he succeed there).

It was a stunning illustration of the dollar’s political risk. The US government can seize another sovereign country’s dollar reserves at the flip of a switch.

MD: …until its counterfeiting is so obvious and egregious it deals itself out of the game all together.

The Wall Street Journal, in an article titled “If Russian Currency Reserves Aren’t Really Money, the World Is in for a Shock,” noted:

“Sanctions have shown that currency reserves accumulated by central banks can be taken away. With China taking note, this may reshape geopolitics, economic management and even the international role of the U.S. dollar.”

MD: Is anyone getting the dozen or so calls a day that I’m getting…from so-called investors who want to trade dollars for my real property? Why do that unless you know the dollars you hold are about to be worthless.

Russian President Putin said the US had defaulted on its obligations and that the dollar is no longer a reliable currency.

The incident has eroded trust in the US dollar as the global reserve currency and catalyzed significant countries to use alternatives in trade and their reserves.

China, India, Iran, and Turkey, among other countries, announced, or already are, doing business with Russia in their local currencies instead of the US dollar. These countries represent a market of over three billion people that no longer need to use the US dollar to trade with one another.

The US government has incentivized almost half of mankind to find alternatives to the dollar by attempting to isolate Russia.

MD: I vote for a competitive HUL (Hour of Unskilled Labor) based “real money process”. The HUL is valued today (i.e. trades for the same size hole in the ground) as it has for all time…recorded or otherwise.

Warning Sign #2: Rubles, Gold, and Bitcoin for Gas, Oil, and Other Commodities

Russia is the world’s largest exporter of natural gas, lumber, wheat, fertilizer, and palladium (a crucial component in cars).

It is the second-largest exporter of oil and aluminum and the third-largest exporter of nickel and coal.

Russia is a major producer and processor of uranium for nuclear power plants. Enriched uranium from Russia and its allies provides electricity to 20% of the homes in the US.

Aside from China, Russia produces more gold than any other country, accounting for more than 10% of global production.

These are just a handful of examples. There are many strategic commodities that Russia dominates.

In short, Russia is not just an oil and gas powerhouse but a commodity superpower.

After the US government seized Russia’s US dollar reserves, Moscow has little use for the US dollar. Moscow does not want to exchange its scarce and valuable commodities for politicized money that its rivals can take away on a whim. Would the US government ever tolerate a situation where the US Treasury held its reserves in rubles in Russia?

The head of the Russian Parliament recently called the US dollar a “candy wrapper” but not the candy itself. In other words, the dollar has the outward appearance of money but is not real money.

That’s why Russia is no longer accepting US dollars (or euros) in exchange for its energy. They are of no use to Russia. So instead, Moscow is demanding payment in rubles.

MD: Bingo. Game over for the Earth’s, and History’s, most egregious counterfeiter.

That’s an urgent problem for Europe, which cannot survive without Russian commodities. The Europeans have no alternative to Russian energy and have no choice but to comply.

European buyers must now first buy rubles with their euros and use them to pay for Russian gas, oil, and other exports.

This is a big reason why the ruble has recovered all of the value it lost in the initial days of the Ukraine invasion and then made further gains.

In addition to rubles, the top Russian energy official said Moscow would also accept gold or Bitcoin in return for its commodities.

“If they want to buy, let them pay either in hard currency—and this is gold for us… you can also trade Bitcoins.”

Here’s the bottom line. US dollars are no longer needed (or wanted) to buy Russian commodities.

Warning Sign #3: The Petrodollar System Flirts With Collapse

MD: I’m really skimming now. This guy is so far off the tracks there’s no hope of bringing him back. I think I’ll quit here.

Oil is by far the largest and most strategic commodity market.

For the last 50 years, virtually anyone who wanted to import oil needed US dollars to pay for it.

That’s because, in the early ’70s, the US made an agreement to protect Saudi Arabia in exchange for ensuring, among other things, all OPEC producers only accept US dollars for their oil.

Every country needs oil. And if foreign countries need US dollars to buy oil, they have a compelling reason to hold large dollar reserves.

This creates a huge artificial market for US dollars and forces foreigners to soak up many of the new currency units the Fed creates. Naturally, this gives a tremendous boost to the value of the dollar.

The system has helped create a deeper, more liquid market for the dollar and US Treasuries. It also allows the US government to keep interest rates artificially low, thereby financing enormous deficits it otherwise would be unable to.

In short, the petrodollar system has been the bedrock of the US financial system for the past 50 years.

But that’s all about to change… and soon.

After it invaded Ukraine, the US government kicked Russia out of the dollar system and seized hundreds of billions in dollar reserves of the Russian central bank.

Washington has threatened to do the same to China for years. These threats helped ensure that China cracked down on North Korea, didn’t invade Taiwan, and did other things the US wanted.

These threats against China may be a bluff, but if the US government carried them out—as it recently did against Russia—it would be like dropping a financial nuclear bomb on Beijing. Without access to dollars, China would struggle to import oil and engage in international trade. As a result, its economy would come to a grinding halt, an intolerable threat to the Chinese government.

China would rather not depend on an adversary like this. This is one of the main reasons it created an alternative to the petrodollar system.

After years of preparation, the Shanghai International Energy Exchange (INE) launched a crude oil futures contract denominated in Chinese yuan in 2017. Since then, any oil producer can sell its oil for something besides US dollars… in this case, the Chinese yuan.

There’s one big issue, though. Most oil producers don’t want to accumulate a large yuan reserve, and China knows this.

That’s why China has explicitly linked the crude futures contract with the ability to convert yuan into physical gold—without touching China’s official reserves—through gold exchanges in Shanghai (the world’s largest physical gold market) and Hong Kong.

PetroChina and Sinopec, two Chinese oil companies, provide liquidity to the yuan crude futures by being big buyers. So, if any oil producer wants to sell their oil in yuan (and gold indirectly), there will always be a bid.

After years of growth and working out the kinks, the INE yuan oil future contract is now ready for prime time.

And now that the US has banned Russia from the dollar system, there is an urgent need for a credible system capable of handling hundreds of billions worth of oil sales outside of the US dollar and financial system.

The Shanghai International Energy Exchange is that system.

Back to Saudi Arabia…

For nearly 50 years, the Saudis had always insisted anyone wanting their oil would need to pay with US dollars, upholding their end of the petrodollar system.

But that could all change soon…

Remember, China is already the world’s largest oil importer. Moreover, the amount of oil it imports continues to grow as it fuels an economy of over 1.4 billion people (more than 4x larger than the US).

China is Saudi Arabia’s top customer. Beijing buys over 25% of Saudi oil exports and wants to buy more.

The Chinese would rather not have to use the US dollar, the currency of their adversary, to buy an essential commodity.

In this context, The Wall Street Journal recently reported that the Chinese and the Saudis had entered into serious discussions to accept yuan as payment for Saudi oil exports instead of dollars.

The WSJ article claims the Saudis are angry at the US for not supporting it enough in its war against Yemen. They were further dismayed by the US withdrawal from Afghanistan and the nuclear negotiations with Iran.

In short, the Saudis don’t think the US is holding up its end of the deal. So they don’t feel like they need to hold up their part.

Even the WSJ admits such a move would be disastrous for the US dollar.

“The Saudi move could chip away at the supremacy of the US dollar in the international financial system, which Washington has relied on for decades to print Treasury bills it uses to finance its budget deficit.”

Here’s the bottom line.

Saudi Arabia—the linchpin of the petrodollar system—is flirting in the open with China about selling its oil in yuan. One way or another—and probably soon—the Chinese will find a way to compel the Saudis to accept the yuan.

The sheer size of the Chinese market makes it impossible for Saudi Arabia—and other oil exporters—to ignore China’s demands to pay in yuan indefinitely. Moreover, using the INE to exchange oil for gold further sweetens the deal for oil exporters.

Sometime soon, there will be a lot of extra dollars floating around suddenly looking for a home now that they are not needed to purchase oil.

It signals an imminent and enormous change for anyone holding US dollars. It would be incredibly foolish to ignore this giant red warning sign.

Warning Sign #4: Out of Control Money Printing and Record Price Increases

In March of 2020, the chair of the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, exercised unfathomable power…

At the time, it was the height of the stock market crash amid the COVID hysteria. People were panicking as they watched the market plummet, and they turned to the Fed to do something.

In a matter of days, the Fed created more dollars out of thin air than it had for the US’s nearly 250-year existence. It was an unprecedented amount of money printing that amounted to more than $4 trillion and nearly doubled the US money supply in less than a year.

One trillion dollars is almost an unfathomable amount of money. The human mind has trouble wrapping itself around such figures. Let me try to put it into perspective.

One million seconds ago was about 11 days ago.

One billion seconds ago was 1988.

One trillion seconds ago was 30,000 BC.

For further perspective, the daily economic output of all 331 million people in the US is about $58 billion.

At the push of a button, the Fed was creating more dollars out of thin air than the economic output of the entire country.

The Fed’s actions during the Covid hysteria—which are ongoing—amounted to the biggest monetary explosion that has ever occurred in the US.

When the Fed initiated this program, it assured the American people its actions wouldn’t cause severe price increases. But unfortunately, it didn’t take long to prove that absurd assertion false.

As soon as rising prices became apparent, the mainstream media and Fed claimed that the inflation was only “transitory” and that there was nothing to be worried about.

Of course, they were dead wrong, and they knew it—they were gaslighting.

The truth is that inflation is out of control, and nothing can stop it.

Even according to the government’s own crooked CPI statistics, which understates reality, inflation is rising. That means the actual situation is much worse.

Recently the CPI hit a 40-year high and shows little sign of slowing down.

I wouldn’t be surprised to see the CPI exceed its previous highs in the early 1980s as the situation gets out of control.

After all, the money printing going on right now is orders of magnitude greater than it was then.

Warning Sign #5: Fed Chair Admits Dollar Supremacy Is Dead

“It’s possible to have more than one reserve currency.”

These are the recent words of Jerome Powell, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve.

It’s a stunning admission from the one person who has the most control over the US dollar, the current world reserve currency.

It would be as ridiculous as Mike Tyson saying that it’s possible to have more than one heavyweight champion.

In other words, the jig is up.

Not even the Chairman of the Federal Reserve can go along with the farce of maintaining the dollar’s supremacy anymore… and neither should you.

Conclusion

It’s clear the US dollar’s days of unchallenged dominance are quickly ending—something even the Fed Chairman openly admits.

To recap, here are the five imminent, flashing red warning signs the end of dollar hegemony is near.

Warning Sign #1: Russia Sanctions Prove Dollar Reserves “Aren’t Really Money”
Warning Sign #2: Rubles, Gold, and Bitcoin for Gas, Oil, and Other Commodities
Warning Sign #3: The Petrodollar System Flirts With Collapse
Warning Sign #4: Out of Control Money Printing and Record Price Increases
Warning Sign #5: Fed Chair Admits Dollar Supremacy Is Dead

If we take a step back and zoom out, the Big Picture is clear.

We are likely on the cusp of a historic shift… and what’s coming next could change everything.

* * *

The economic trajectory is troubling. Unfortunately, there’s little any individual can practically do to change the course of these trends in motion. The best you can and should do is to stay informed so that you can protect yourself in the best way possible, and even profit from the situation. That’s precisely why bestselling author Doug Casey and his colleagues just released an urgent new PDF report that explains what could come next and what you can do about it. Click here to download it now.511

April 19, 2022August 20, 2023

Robobank: We Won’t Get Bretton Woods 3…

Rabobank: We Won’t Get Bretton Woods 3 But What We Do Get Won’t Be Peaceful Or Painless

by Tyler DurdenMonday, Apr 18, 2022 – 07:25 PM

By Michael Every of Rabobank

Bancor, Rancor, and Rancour

MD: Having a total and universal misunderstanding of what money is, we get myriad articles telling how money is being manipulated…or should be manipulated. From the title we expect this is just such an instance. We’ll look…and annotate in place.

What lies beneath

As usual, just over two weeks into the new quarter, and well in advance of the developed economies, GDP-giant China told us exactly what happened there in Q1. When I say ‘exactly’, I mean to the usual degree of decimal-place detail, but the same lack of any useful breakdown: and despite lockdowns so hard that China’s Weibo is allegedly censoring the first line of the Chinese national anthem (“Stand up! Those who refuse to be slaves”) after it was used to vent frustrations.

MD: What a bazaar opening salvo!

Somehow, the expectation was for a 0.7% q/q GDP print, 4.2% y/y, up from 4.0% in Q42021: we got a far stronger print to show Covid, and Chinese data, don’t matter – GDP rose 1.3% q/q and 4.8% y/y.

Does one celebrate the resilience of the economy?

MD: How can one separate the economy from the manipulation of its money?
Does one ask how that was possible when March data saw retail sales -3.5% y/y, below consensus of -3.0%, down from 1.7%… and yet higher than expected at 3.3% y/y year-to-date (YTD) vs. a 6.7% print in February that already did not match what *any* retailer is seeing? When fixed asset investment, albeit above consensus, slowed to 9.3% from 12.2% y/y even as property investment was weaker than seen at just 0.7% from 3.7% y/y? And industrial production rose to 5.0% from 4.3% y/y – which must have been via net exports… despite port closures!

MD: Does anyone ask why behavior of an economy should be sensitive to a calendar?
Does one ask why monetary policy was eased last week anyway, with the reserve requirement ratio cut 0.25% again? (That’s a move which will be as ineffectual for the real economy as all the previous cuts were: the only thing it perks up is enthusiasm from analysts who don’t understand how the real economy works.)
MD: Does anyone ask why there should be such a thing as a “monetary policy”? Does anyone ask why anyone…or any small group…should have such a knob to manipulate?
Does one ask why China just announced details-free economic stimulus measures? (e.g., “Reform will be deepened to remove consumption constraints. Sound and steady development of consumption platforms will be advanced.” How so, when rumours are that we are soon to see bank deposit rates cuts to make room for lower lending rates, which follows the same financial-repression/demand-destruction path seen in the ‘new normal’ elsewhere?) Probably not.
MD: When it is provable that everyone acts in their own self interest, why does not everyone’s self interest have equal weight? Why do we have banks screwing with lending rates when we know it is “traders”, not banks or the governments they institute, that create and destroy money?
Does one ask how local-government debt to build more infrastructure is ‘consumption’? (e.g., “consumption-related infrastructure development may be funded by local government special-purpose bonds, to leverage the catalytic role of investment in expanding consumption.”)
MD: Why do we allow something claiming to be government…why do we allow it to control something like infrastructure development…but not manufacturing development? We shouldn’t even have government. What’s it good for?
Does one note an easily achievable stimulus floated is a de facto export subsidy? (e.g., “Export rebates will be better utilized as an inclusive and equitable policy tool that is consistent with international rules, and the business environment for foreign trade will be improved on multiple fronts.”) Yet if China thinks it can grow its way out of a structural crisis by flooding the world with more goods *again*, then it is in for a real shock.
MD: Do traders need stimulus? What’s keeping traders from naturally making trades they can see clear to deliver on? Why do people allow a money-changer creation like government to even exist?

Making that point, Bloomberg warns: ‘Global Investors Flee China Fearing That Risks Eclipse Rewards’. All the more reason for a 1.3 % q/q print then(?) The article notes, “Russian sanctions raise concerns the same could happen to China… a growing list of risks is turning China into a potential quagmire for global investors. The central question is what could happen in a country willing to go to great lengths to achieve its leader’s goals.” This is hardly news to those who wanted to see it: but a South China Morning Post politics podcast this weekend in which one of their correspondents stated he had heard directly from an EU source that in recent discussions over Russian sanctions, US officials stated they are already gaming-out the same measures for China – and using language such as “when we sanction China”, not “if”.
MD: Sanctions are a siege tactic. And siege is an act of war. Who is conducting this warring aggression…and why? Why does an entity capable of mounting such an attack even exist? Who needs it?

Imperialism and realism: Bancor and Rancor

Meanwhile, in Ukraine, hopes of peace talks appear forlorn: Mariupol appears close to falling, as the city of 400,000 stands in ruins; and despite talking of risks of a Russian tactical nuke, President Zelenskiy defiantly states his country won’t give up the Donbas and can keep fighting for 10 years, if needed. If supported by the West, perhaps it can – and the EU’s Von der Leyen is pushing for Europe to accelerate arms shipments to Kyiv, talking about an oil boycott, again, and sanctioning Russia’s largest bank, Sberbank. Markets were thinking 10 days and none of the above when this all started.
MD: Why doesn’t this paragraph state it was Zelenskiy whose artillery caused the ruin of Mariupol?

On another front, as Finland and Sweden race towards NATO membership, Russia is moving forces towards the Baltic. Is this a bluff, as some felt it was over Ukraine? Or is Moscow going to engage in some form of limited confrontation with either or both Scandinavian states to ensure that if they enter NATO they do so already in a conflict with Russia?
MD: Why do these countries want NATO membership? What’s in it for them? What do they lose by ostracizing NATO? What if Russia’s movements are totally defensive…or protective of the innocent…which of course they are?

Taking things to a more meta level, last week I argued ‘Bretton Woods 3’ (BW3) — a new global FX and financial architecture– is a fancy name for militarized mercantilism; that the West used to be good at it; that it will be again, even if it means lots of neoliberal norms have to go; and anyone who thinks a BW3 emerges painlessly hasn’t read any history. Usefully, one of the key proponents of ‘anti-American imperialism’ just made the point for me in depth.
MD: If you argued for any kind of “global FX and financial architecture” you are stupid beyond belief. At the very least, you are clueless about what money is…where it comes from…and where it goes. Mercantilism is government imposed monopoly. Eliminating government is the solution.

(NB For these thinkers, American imperialism is the only imperialism: everything else is ‘realism’. That was underlined by humanist and coffee-table intellectual’s intellectual —and long-time believer that the auto-genocidal Khmer Rouge get a bad press— Noam Chomsky, who explained this weekend that Ukraine should surrender, because that’s ‘just the way the world is’.)
MD: There should be a vaccine against morons like Chomsky.

In an interview, Russian politician Sergey Glazyev talks about “the imminent disintegration of the USD-based global economic system, which provided the foundation of the US global dominance… the new economic system [unites] various strata of their societies around the goal of increasing common well-being in a way that is substantially stronger than the Anglo-Saxon and European alternatives. This is the main reason why Washington will not be able to win the global hybrid war that it started. This is also the main reason why the current dollar-centric global financial system will be superseded by a new one, based on a consensus of the countries who join the new world economic order.”
MD: The fact that such a thing as “the USD-based global economic system” even exists or should be tolerated is admission of zero understanding of money. They can change the money system all they want. Until they understand what money is…where it comes from…and where it goes, they’ll keep getting the same result. And of course they want that result. This leopard doesn’t change its spots.

So far, so gold-bug, crypto-nite, Chomskyite, Russian/Chinese nationalist, US billionaire hedge-fund manager, or general Down With This Sort of Thing. But we get details:
MD: Such nonsense!

“In the first phase of the transition, these countries fall back on using their national currencies and clearing mechanisms, backed by bilateral currency swaps. At this point, price formation is still mostly driven by prices at various exchanges, denominated in dollars.”
MD: Open admission of money manipulation. A “real money process” cannot be manipulated in any fashion whatever.

That’s what I have been flagging: things remain priced in USD and, for a few, at the margin, and inefficiently, USD are netted out via bilateral, geopolitical barter. However, “This phase is almost over.” That seems ambitious: it isn’t even a month old! Regardless, next comes “a shift to national currencies and gold,” and then:
MD: A problem that does not…and cannot exist with a “real money process”.

“The second stage of the transition will involve new pricing mechanisms that do not reference the USD. Price formation in national currencies involves substantial overheads, however, it will still be more attractive than pricing in ‘un-anchored’ and treacherous currencies like USD, GBP, EUR, and JPY. The only remaining global currency candidate –CNY– won’t be taking their place due to its inconvertibility and the restricted external access to the Chinese capital markets. The use of gold as the price reference is constrained by the inconvenience of its use for payments.”
MD: A “real money process” cares nothing about pricing mechanism. That’s up to supply/demand balance of objects being traded. All the “real money process” is concerned with is guaranteeing perpetual perfect supply/demand balance of the money itself.

So, as I pointed out, nothing really works; which, alongside final consumption being in the West, and lots of aircraft carriers, is a strong argument for the USD status quo, imperialist or not. But not to worry if you disagree, because after that:
MD: When “it’s broke”, it a good time to “fix it”. You don’t fix something by changing it’s name. This will get fixed when a “real money process” is available for traders to choose. Once that is done, all these broken processes will wilt on the vine. No trader in his right mind would ever use one.

“The third and the final stage on the new economic order transition will involve a creation of a new digital payment currency founded through an international agreement based on principles of transparency, fairness, goodwill, and efficiency.” Which the international community is of course famous for. “A currency like this can be issued by a pool of currency reserves of BRICS countries, which all interested countries will be able to join.”
MD: This is like religion…constantly trying to deal with knowledge that encroaches on its myths. They just create new myths…and change the wording of the old myths. It’s pretty disgusting.

Except India is questionable, and even Brazil might be shaky given where it sits geographically, near the source of all those aircraft carriers. And so we have Russia, China, and South Africa. That doesn’t even make a good acronym, let alone bloc.

“The weight of each currency in the basket could be proportional to the GDP of each country (based on purchasing power parity, for example), its share in international trade, as well as the population and territory size of participating countries.” So, it will be dominated by China; and so India is definitely out. “In addition, the basket could contain an index of prices of main exchange-traded commodities: gold and other precious metals, key industrial metals, hydrocarbons, grains, sugar, as well as water and other natural resources. To provide backing… relevant international resource reserves can be created in due course. This new currency would be used exclusively for cross-border payments and issued to the participating countries based on a pre-defined formula. Participating countries would instead use their national currencies for credit creation, in order to finance national investments and industry, as well as for sovereign wealth reserves. Capital account cross-border flows would remain governed by national currency regulations.”
MD: If the currencies in the basket were using a “real money process”, their weight would not be relevant. The exchange rate would be constant…and one to one…at all times. This is a problem created by, and moved around by, money changers and the governments they institute. If you turn back the history of these governments you always find “one individual” who got control of a military and directed it to his own ends…and then took charge of the territory it acquired. This typically spans no more than 10 or 20 years in the first instance. And if he’s successful in creating a religion in that period, that religion passes to his heirs…until the people being dominated pull back the curtain and expose the scam. In the case of Britain, the people are so stupid it spans a period going back beyond useful records. That, folks, is perfect stupidity.

So, he is talking about a new ‘gold standard’ based on everything from precious metals to base metals, to water, to one of the key ingredients for cakes, to the GDP of China, questionable data and all. Somehow these back a new global reserve currency which somebody will manage, and provide emergency liquidity in, despite *ALMOST EVERYONE IN THE NEW BLOC RUNNING TRADE SURPLUSES* – and most so with the West, who are not going to join. As such, this is not so much a proposed Bancor, as Keynes floated at the original Bretton Woods before the US insisted on the global role of the USD; nor a monstrous Rancor to devour Wall Street; it’s just plain rancour (“bitterness or resentfulness, especially when long standing”). Indeed, here is the coup de grace:
MD: Anyone talking about a standard that changes value with time, is talking nonsense. And gold is anything but constant in value. We can now create new gold at a fraction of earlier costs…except where a new discovery is found … and then you can just pick up nuggets off the ground creating fictitious wealth. Changes like that…or large quantities going down with a sinking ship…create great disruptions. And such disruptions are totally unnecessary…actually impossible…if a “real money process” is in effect.

“Transition to the new world economic order will likely be accompanied by systematic refusal to honor obligations in USD, EUR, GBP, and JPY. In this respect, it will be no different from the example set by the countries issuing these currencies who thought it appropriate to steal foreign exchange reserves of Iraq, Iran, Venezuela, Afghanistan, and Russia to the tune of trillions of USD…. Even if they were to default on their obligations in those currencies, this would have no bearing on their credit rating in the new financial system. Nationalization of extraction industry, likewise, would not cause a disruption.”
MD: An open admission to traders that they are…and will continue to be…dictated to by the money-changers. How is it that the real producers in the world (i.e. the traders) can be so totally dominated by the absolute non-producing slugs of the world (i.e. the money changers)?

In other words, adopt the new world order and you get to default on all your FX debt and nationalise all your foreign-owned businesses! That is precisely what I also argued: bet on the new and bet on the default of the old. That is not going to be peaceful or painless – and it will be vigorously resisted.
MD: This “new world order” thing is just the new “war monger”. The latest weapons of these war mongers is immigration and virus creation and spread…and they are essentially the same thing.

You want to ensure that even vampire-squid on Wall Street and global-not-local US billionaire hedge-fund managers agree to dump neoliberalism for Western mercantilism and a bifurcated Cold War world of tariffs, capital controls, and naval blockades? Keep talking about mass nationalisations and organised debt defaults in the Eurodollar markets.52,222109
MD: These articles just continue to be less and less interesting…more and more stupidity revealing. Such is life…and then you die.

April 15, 2022April 16, 2022

The commodity currency revolution

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The commodity currency revolution

MD: I tripped over the following YouTube propaganda and thought I should warn you about GoldMoney.com. Macleod gave a link to this article which I will now annotate.

MD: First, I’ll relate my story. Then I’ll annotate this article by Macleod. Neither Turk nor Macleod have a clue about what money is. It is obvious from this YouTube discussion and will likely be evident from this article as well. You can see other reactions to his nonsense by searching for “Macleod” or “GoldMoney” at the end of this article.

First, my story. Over 10 years ago I was buying gold because I was convinced the financial system was going down the toilet. GoldMoney.com had this value proposition: If I bought “gold grams” from them, they would store the gold in secure vaults around the world. They claimed to be governed by the Isle of Wight I think. At the time, gold and silver were going up quite aggressively against the dollar.

First, I dipped my toe in. I sent them about $1,000, let it sit in the account for a little while, then asked them to send me the $1,000 plus the appreciation back. They did it without a hitch. Next, I sent them quite a bit more money from my retirement fund. And I ran an experiment. I asked them to send me some gold. They did this…but there was a hitch. I had to pay “import duty” on the gold. The round trip “load” was 10% so I decided as long as gold was diving, I’d wait until it hit bottom to ask for my delivery. At least the import duty would be lower.

Anyone who has watched gold knows it has been a poorly performing asset. The cement blocks I’ve bought over that same period have done much better than my gold at GoldMoney.com. Every few months I would do my reconciliation of my account so I could update my own records.

All of a sudden I couldn’t get into my account. At the time I was busy with other things and procrastinated. But when I finally raised the issue with them they claimed their “regulator” needed additional information. I said “no problem”. Just close my account under our original terms and send me the gold.

They refused. But they said they would send me dollars to my bank account. I had to close my bank account some years earlier because my money proved not to be safe there. They said I had no recourse but to do as I was told. I went to the “WayBack.com” archive and gave them a link to our original agreement…which specifically said they weren’t regulated by any financial regulator…and that was part of their “value proposition”.

As of this writing the issue is still not resolved. They owe me a response in our dialog. I told them I was under no illusion that this matter would be resolved “legally” as the legal process is corrupt beyond hope.

Now…on to Macleod’s nonsense.

By Alasdair Macleod Goldmoney Insights April 07, 2022 We will look back at current events and realise that they marked the change from a dollar-based global economy underwritten by financial assets to commodity-backed currencies. We face a change from collateral being purely financial in nature to becoming commodity based. It is collateral that underwrites the whole financial system.

MD: Right now, as I noted, I’m looking back and seeing that Goldmoney is not to be trusted.

The ending of the financially based system is being hastened by geopolitical developments. The West is desperately trying to sanction Russia into economic submission, but is only succeeding in driving up energy, commodity, and food prices against itself. Central banks will have no option but to inflate their currencies to pay for it all. Russia is linking the ruble to commodity prices through a moving gold peg instead, and China has already demonstrated an understanding of the West’s inflationary game by having stockpiled commodities and essential grains for the last two years and allowed her currency to rise against the dollar.

MD: Note, with a “real” money process, geopolitics can play no role at all. Of course, Macleod is clueless about that.

China and Russia are not going down the path of the West’s inflating currencies. Instead, they are moving towards a sounder money strategy with the prospect of stable interest rates and prices while the West accelerates in the opposite direction.

MD: Notice he uses the term “stable” for interest rates and prices. We know that prices will do what they will do. It “is as it is” they say. But with a “real” money process, we know INTEREST is zero for responsible traders like you and me. And we know prices are not influenced by the money at all. Money is guaranteed to have perfect supply/demand balance throughout its life…and thus zero inflation and deflation.

The Credit Suisse analyst, Zoltan Pozsar, calls it Bretton Woods III. This article looks at how it is likely to play out, concluding that the dollar and Western currencies, not the rouble, will have the greatest difficulty dealing with the end of fifty years of economic financialisation.

MD: We know that any regulated money scheme will eventually blow up. If they can envision a Bretton Wood III, they can envision a XVIII…it’s like the Superbowl. And he needs to learn how to spell “ruble”. I wish he could help me with “dealing” with GoldMoney.com. Oh…and with a “real money process”, there is no such thing as financialisation…or backing for that matter.

Pure finance is being replaced with commodity finance

It hasn’t hit the main-stream media yet, which is still reporting yesterday’s battle. But in March, the US Administration passed a death sentence on its own hegemony in a last desperate throw of the dollar dice. Not only did it misread the Russian situation with respect to its economy, but America mistakenly believed in its own power by sanctioning Russia and Putin’s oligarchs.

MD: The USA has had its death sentence my whole life…nearly 80 years. When I started my career, about 1/4th of my income went to government…and about 1/4 of the citizens were dependent on government. By the end of my career 50 years later, both those ratios have increased at an exponential rate to over 3/4…and we know even they can’t go past 4/4ths.

It may have achieved a partial blockade on Russia’s export volumes, but compensation has come from higher unit prices, benefiting Russia, and costing the Western alliance.

The consequence is a final battle in the financial war which has been brewing for decades. You do not sanction the world’s most important source of energy exports and the marginal supplier of a wide range of commodities and raw materials, including grains and fertilisers, without damaging everyone but the intended target. Worse still, the intended target has in China an extremely powerful friend, with which Russia is a partner in the world’s largest economic bloc — the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation — commanding a developing market of over 40% of the world’s population. That is the future, not the past: the past is Western wokery, punitive taxation, economies dominated by the state and its bureaucracy, anti-capitalistic socialism, and magic money trees to help pay for it all.

MD: Maybe we should remember that only the USA congress can declare war. Sanctions are a siege tactic…and a siege is an act of war. Congress just declares war on inanimate things like “drugs”…they don’t want the competition. I wish they could declare war on “stupidity”…but of course that would be shooting themselves in the foot. For a long time I have realized that Britain and Israel were our worst enemies. But government is now eclipsing them.

Despite this enormous hole in the sanctions net, the West has given itself no political option but to attempt to tighten sanctions even more. But Russia’s response is devastating for the western financial system. In two simple announcements, tying the rouble to gold for domestic credit institutions and insisting that payments for energy will only be accepted in roubles, it is calling an end to the fiat dollar era that has ruled the world from the suspension of Bretton Woods in 1971 to today.

MD: And again remember the latency. In 1971 when the USA formally renegged on their guarantee of $35/ounce for gold (after confiscating all their citizens gold at $28/ounce)…in 1971, the real price of gold was over $70/ounce. France demanded a debt payment in gold and the jig was up. But it had obviously been up for some time at that point.

Just over five decades ago, the dollar took over the role for itself as the global reserve asset from gold. After the seventies, which was a decade of currency, interest rate, and financial asset volatility, we all settled down into a world of increasing financialisation. London’s big bang in the early 1980s paved the way for regulated derivatives and the 1990s saw the rise of hedge funds and dotcoms. That was followed by an explosion in over-the-counter unregulated derivatives into the hundreds of trillions and securitisations which hit the speed-bump of the Lehman failure. Since then, the expansion of global credit for purely financial activities has been remarkable creating a financial asset bubble to rival anything seen in the history of financial excesses. And together with statistical suppression of the effect on consumer prices the switch of economic resources from Main Street to Wall Street has hidden the inflationary evidence of credit expansion from the public’s gaze.

MD: We should remember, in 1964 we could buy a gallon of gas for a quarter dollar…which was 90% silver. In 1965 they quit minting silver into the coins…but the 1965 quarters still traded for a gallon of gas. This proved beyond all doubt that the silver had nothing to do with the trade. It implicitly demonstrated that money “represented” an in-process promise to complete a trade over time and space. And coins and currency were just tokens representing that promise. Why doesn’t Macleod make note of that?

All that is coming to an end with a new commoditisation — what respected flows analyst Zoltan Pozsar at Credit Suisse calls Bretton Woods III. In his enumeration the first was suspended by President Nixon in 1971, and the second ran from then until now when the dollar has ruled indisputably. That brings us to Bretton Woods III.

MD: And as I noted, even if you believe Macleods nonsense about commoditisation, don’t resort to Goldmoney.com for your commodity. They can’t be trusted.

Russia’s insistence that importers of its energy pay in roubles and not in dollars or euros is a significant development, a direct challenge to the dollar’s role. There are no options for Russia’s “unfriendlies”, Russia’s description for the alliance united against it. The EU, which is the largest importer of Russian natural gas, either bites the bullet or scrambles for insufficient alternatives. The option is to buy natural gas and oil at reasonable rouble prices or drive prices up in euros and still not get enough to keep their economies going and the citizens warm and mobile. Either way, it seems Russia wins, and one way the EU loses.

MD: What’s good for the goose is good for the gander. We played that card with the middle eastern nomads in the 1930s. They must accept only dollars for their oil. Write all you want Macleod. Theirs no end to their ability to rig any game.

As to Pozsar’s belief that we are on the verge of Bretton Woods III, one can see the logic of his argument. The highly inflated financial bubble marks the end of an era, fifty years in the making. Negative interest rates in the EU and Japan are not just an anomaly, but the last throw of the dice for the yen and the euro. The ECB and the Bank of Japan have bond portfolios which have wiped out their equity, and then some. All Western central banks which have indulged in QE have the same problem. Contrastingly, the Russian central bank and the Peoples Bank of China have not conducted any QE and have clean balance sheets. Rising interest rates in Western currencies are made more certain and their height even greater by Russia’s aggressive response to Western sanctions. It hastens the bankruptcy of the entire Western banking system and by bursting the highly inflated financial bubble will leave little more than hollowed-out economies.

MD: Wouldn’t it be neat if this Bretton Woods III thing actually fixed the problem once and for all by instituting a “real money process”? There would be no such thing as a central bank…anywhere on the planet. In fact, banks would probably cease to exist as well. And of course Goldmoney.com wouldn’t exist either.

Putin has taken as his model the 1973 Nixon/Kissinger agreement with the Saudis to only accept US dollars in payment for oil, and to use its dominant role in OPEC to force other members to follow suit. As the World’s largest energy exporter Russia now says she will only accept roubles, repeating for the rouble the petrodollar strategy. And even Saudi Arabia is now bending with the wind and accepting China’s renminbi for its oil, calling symbolic time on the Nixon/Kissinger petrodollar agreement.

The West, by which we mean America, the EU, Britain, Japan, South Korea, and a few others have set themselves up to be the fall guys. That statement barely describes the strategic stupidity — an Ignoble Award is closer to the truth. By phasing out fossil fuels before they could be replaced entirely with green energy sources, an enormous shortfall in energy supplies has arisen. With an almost religious zeal, Germany has been cutting out nuclear generation. And even as recently as last month it still ruled out extending the lifespan of its nuclear facilities. The entire G7 membership were not only unprepared for Russia turning the tables on its members, but so far, they have yet to come up with an adequate response.

MD: Earth to Macleod…oil doesn’t come from fossils. It abiotic. And further, planet Earth loves CO2. It basks in CO2. The global warming nonsense is just that…nonsense!

Russia has effectively commoditised its currency, particularly for energy, gold, and food. It is following China down a similar path. In doing so it has undermined the dollar’s hegemony, perhaps fatally. As the driving force behind currency values, commodities will be the collateral replacing financial assets. It is interesting to observe the strength in the Mexican peso against the dollar (up 9.7% since November 2021) and the Brazilian real (up 21% over a year) And even the South African rand has risen by 11% in the last five months. That these flaky currencies are rising tells us that resource backing for currencies has its attractions beyond the rouble and renminbi.

But having turned their backs on gold, the Americans and their Western epigones lack an adequate response. If anything, they are likely to continue the fight for dollar hegemony rather than accept reality. And the more America struggles to assert its authority, the greater the likelihood of a split in the Western partnership. Europe needs Russian energy desperately, and America does not. Europe cannot afford to support American policy unconditionally.

That, of course, is Russia’s bet.

MD: Imagine if Russia and China adopted a “real money process” and quit counterfeiting money. Then the whole world would have to follow suit. And governments couldn’t create money to wage wars. They couldn’t counterfeit money to buy citizen’s support. They would be less than 1/10th the size they are now.

Russia’s point of view

For the second time in eight years, Russia has seen its currency undermined by Western action over Ukraine. Having experienced it in 2014, this time the Russian central bank was better prepared. It had diversified out of dollars adding official gold reserves. The commercial banking system was overhauled, and the Governor of the RCB, Elvira Nabiullina, by following classical monetary policies instead of the Keynesianism of her Western contempories, has contained the fall-out from the war in Ukraine. As Figure 1 shows, the rouble halved against the dollar in a knee-jerk reaction before recovering to pre-war levels.

MD: Imagine the chart below if Russia (and the USA) had instituted a “real ” money process. That chart would be a straight horizontal line at 100. It wouldn’t wiggle at all. Now how could that be bad?

The link to commodities is gold, and the RCB announced that until end-June it stands ready to buy gold from Russian banks at 5,000 roubles per gramme. The stated purpose was to allow banks to lend against mine production, given that Russian-sourced gold is included in the sanctions. But the move has encouraged speculation that the rouble is going on a quasi- gold standard; never mind that a gold standard works the other way round with users of the currency able to exchange it for gold.

MD: With a real money process you have none of that nonsense.

Besides being with silver the international legal definition of money (the rest being currency and credit), gold is a good proxy for commodities, as shown in Figure 2 below.[i] Priced in goldgrams, crude oil today is 30% below where it was in the 1950, long before Nixon suspended the Bretton Woods Agreement. Meanwhile, measured in depreciating fiat currencies the price has soared and been extremely volatile along the way.

MD: Macleod doesn’t seem to realize that the changing supply/demand for gold and the changing supply/demand for oil…and for virtually all commodities will always dictate price. But with a real money process, a perpetually perfect balance of supply and demand for money is “guaranteed” and thus plays no role in pricing at all. It doesn’t need to be as complicated as these dolts are making it folks.

MD: It’s interesting that the curve above for goldgrams is a constant “zero”. That’s what your gold is worth to you if you bought it from Goldmoney.com…absolutely zero. They say “the regulators made us steal it from you”.

It is a similar story for other commodity prices, whereby maximum stability is to be found in prices measured in goldgrams. Taking up Pozsar’s point about currencies being increasingly linked to commodities in Bretton Woods III, it appears that Russia intends to use gold as proxy for commodities to stabilise the rouble. Instead of a fixed gold exchange rate, the RCB has wisely left itself the option to periodically revise the price it will pay for gold after 1 July.

MD: Is it just coincidence that “Pozsar” looks a lot like “Ponzi”? And earth to Pozsar, money is always and only linked to one thing…a responsible traders promise to complete a trade over time and space. The only reason we have all the nonsense that this article pontificates about is because moneychangers (and the governments they institute) counterfeit money at will. Stop that and bingo…problem solved.

Table 1 shows how the RCB’s current fixed rouble gold exchange rate translates into US dollars.

MD: Need to add cement blocks to the above chart. They did better than gold.

While non-Russian credit institutions do not have access to the facility, it appears that there is nothing to stop a Russian bank buying gold in another centre, such as Dubai, to sell to the Russian central bank for roubles. All that is needed is for the dollar/rouble rate to be favourable for the arbitrage and the ability to settle in a non-sanctioned currency, such as renminbi, or to have access to Eurodollars which it can exchange for Euroroubles (see below) from a bank outside the “unfriendlies” jurisdictions.

The dollar/rouble rate can now easily be controlled by the RCB, because how demand for roubles in short supply is handled becomes a matter of policy. Gazprom’s payment arm (Gazprombank) is currently excused the West’s sanctions and EU gas and oil payments will be channelled through it.

MD: With a real money process governing all nations money, exchange rates between the various currencies would be constant. In time they would all adopt the HUL (hour of unskilled labor) as the unit of measure. Since that never changes in value…i.e. always trades for the same size hole in the ground…exchange rates would be perpetually 1.0000 for all nation’s money. There would be no need for nations.

Broadly, there are four ways in which a Western consumer can acquire roubles:

By buying roubles on the foreign exchanges.
By depositing euros, dollars, or sterling with Gazprombank and have them do the conversion as agents.
By Gazprombank increasing its balance sheet to provide credit, but collateral which is not sanctioned would be required.
By foreign banks creating rouble credits which can be paid to Gazprombank against delivery of energy supplies.

MD: Be careful. That’s like Goldmoney.com saying a way to acquire gold is by sending money to them. But when you ask for your gold they say net not, nay, nope, nix, n’t;

The last of these four is certainly possible, because that is the basis of Eurodollars, which circulate outside New York’s monetary system and have become central to international liquidity. To understand the creation of Eurodollars, and therefore the possibility of a developing Eurorouble market we must delve into the world of credit creation.

MD: Macleod. Everyone here are MoneyDelusions knows that the Euro is pure nonsense…like all government managed (distorted and misguided) money…like putting lipstick on a pig.

There are two ways in which foreigners can hold dollar balances. The way commonly understood is through the correspondent banking system. Your bank, say in Europe, will run deposit accounts with their correspondent banks in New York (JPMorgan, Citi etc.). So, if you make a deposit in dollars, the credit to your account will reconcile with the change in your bank’s correspondent account in New York.

MD: But if the USA government claims you owe them money, they grab it right out of your bank. Your bank does nothing to defend you. And you “won’t” get your money back. You will die first. And of course the government is faceless…so there’s nobody for you to kill in return. They call it civilization.

Now let us assume that you approach your European bank for a dollar loan. If the loan is agreed, it appears as a dollar asset on your bank’s balance sheet, which through double-entry bookkeeping is matched by a dollar liability in favour of you, the borrower. It cannot be otherwise and is the basis of all bank credit creation. But note that in the creation of these balances the American banking system is not involved in any way, which is how and why Eurodollars circulate, being fungible with but separate in origin from dollars in the US.

MD: In a real money process, there is really no reason for loans. Only deadbeat traders (i.e. those who default on their promises need ever resort to loans.

By the same method, we could see the birth and rapid expansion of a Eurorouble market. All that’s required is for a bank to create a loan in roubles, matched under double-entry bookkeeping with a deposit which can be used for payments. It doesn’t matter which currency the bank runs its balance sheet in, only that it has balance sheet space, access to rouble liquidity and is a credible counterparty.

MD: The solution doesn’t lie in creating new government entities to do the counterfeiting. The solution is to take the money process out of the hands of “all” governments. Let it rest with the traders like you and I.

This suggests that Eurozone and Japanese banks can only have limited participation because they are already very highly leveraged. The banks best able to run Eurorouble balances are the Americans and Chinese because they have more conservative asset to equity ratios. Furthermore, the large Chinese banks are majority state-owned, and already have business and currency interests with Russia giving them a head start with respect to rouble liquidity.

MD: Remember when we did it to the Japanese in the late 30’s. We restricted their trade. And we enticed (forced) them to attack us (yes…our government was fully aware of Pearl Harbor and the war it would enable them to start.)

We have noticed that the large American banks are not shy of dealing with the Chinese despite the politics, so presumably would like the opportunity to participate in Euroroubles. But only this week, the US Government prohibited them from paying holders of Russia’s sovereign debt more than $600 million. So, we should assume the US banks cannot participate which leaves the field open to the Chinese mega-banks. And any attempt to increase sanctions on Russia, perhaps by adding Gazprombank to the sanctioned list, achieves nothing, definitely cuts out American banks from the action, and enhances the financial integration between Russia and China. The gulf between commodity-backed currencies and yesteryear’s financial fiat simply widens.

MD: And Goldmoney.com will claim some government is prohibiting them from delivering your gold to you. See how easy that works?

For now, further sanctions are a matter for speculation. But Gazprombank with the assistance of the Russian central bank will have a key role in providing the international market for roubles with wholesale liquidity, at least until the market acquires depth in liquidity. In return, Gazprombank can act as a recycler of dollars and euros gained through trade surpluses without them entering the official reserves. Dollars, euros yen and sterling are the unfriendlies’ currencies, so the only retentions are likely to be renminbi and gold.

In this manner we might expect roubles, gold and commodities to tend to rise in tandem. We can see the process by which, as Zoltan Pozsar put it, Bretton Woods III, a global currency regime based on commodities, can take over from Bretton Woods II, which has been characterised by the financialisation of currencies. And it’s not just Russia and her roubles. It’s a direction of travel shared by China.

MD: This is like your wife always claiming to have a yeast infection. Pretty soon you find a way around that.

The economic effects of a strong currency backed by commodities defy monetary and economic beliefs prevalent in the West. But the consequences that flow from a stronger currency are desirable: falling interest rates, wealth remaining in the private sector and an escape route from the inevitable failure of Western currencies and their capital markets. The arguments in favour of decoupling from the dollar-dominated monetary system have suddenly become compelling.

MD: When does the obvious cease to be a belief?

The consequences for the West

Most Western commentary is gung-ho for further sanctions against Russia. Relatively few independent commentators have pointed out that by sanctioning Russia and freezing her foreign exchange reserves, America is destroying her own hegemony. The benefits of gold reserves have also been pointedly made to those that have them. Furthermore, central banks leaving their gold reserves vaulted at Western central banks exposes them to sanctions, should a nation fall foul of America. Doubtless, the issue is being discussed around the world and some requests for repatriation of bullion are bound to follow.

There is also the problem of gold leases and swaps, vital for providing liquidity in bullion markets, but leads to false counting of reserves. This is because under the IMF’s accounting procedures, leased and swapped gold balances are recorded as if they were still under a central bank’s ownership and control, despite bullion being transferred to another party in unallocated accounts.[ii]

MD: Actually there is no end to the money-changers creativity in cheating you. Deal them out of the game. Institute a real money process. There’s really no use in reading this nonsense further. I’m tired…and throwing in the towel. Just one parting comment: Do business at Goldmoney. com at your own risk A word to the wise is sufficient.

No one knows the extent of swaps and leases, but it is likely to be significant, given the evidence of gold price interventions over the last fifty years. Countries which have been happy to earn fees and interest to cover storage costs and turn gold bullion storage into a profitable activity (measured in fiat) are at the margin now likely to not renew swap and lease agreements and demand reallocation of bullion into earmarked accounts, which would drain liquidity from bullion markets. A rising gold price will then be bound to ensue.

Ever since the suspension of Bretton Woods in 1971, the US Government has tried to suppress gold relative to the dollar, encouraging the growth of gold derivatives to absorb demand. That gold has moved from $35 to $1920 today demonstrates the futility of these policies. But emotionally at least, the US establishment is still virulently anti-gold.

As Figure 2 above clearly shows, the link between commodity prices and gold has endured through it all. It is this factor that completely escapes popular analysis with every commodity analyst assuming in their calculations a constant objective value for the dollar and other currencies, with price subjectivity confined to the commodity alone. The use of charts and other methods of forecasting commodity prices assume as an iron rule that price changes in transactions come only from fluctuations in commodity values.

The truth behind prices measured in unbacked currencies is demonstrated by the cost of oil priced in gold having declined about 30% since the 1960s. That is reasonable given new extraction technologies and is consistent with prices tending to ease over time under a gold standard. It is only in fiat currencies that prices have soared. Clearly, gold is considerably more objective for transaction purposes than fiat currencies, which are definitely not.

Therefore, if, as the chart in the tweet below suggests, the dollar price of oil doubles from here, it will only be because at the margin people prefer oil to dollars — not because they want oil beyond their immediate needs, but because they want dollars less.

China recognised these dynamics following the Fed’s monetary policies of March 2020, when it reduced its funds rate to the zero bound and instituted QE at $120bn every month. The signal concerning the dollar’s future debasement was clear, and China began to stockpile oil, commodities, and food — just to get rid of dollars. This contributed to the rise in dollar commodity prices, which commenced from that moment, despite falling demand due to covid and supply chain problems. The effect of dollar debasement is reflected in Figure 3, which is of a popular commodity tracking ETF.

A better understanding would be to regard the increase in the value of this commodity basket not as a near doubling since March 2020, but as a near halving of the dollar’s purchasing power with respect to it.

Furthermore, the Chinese have been prescient enough to accumulate stocks of grains. The result is that 20% of the world’s population has access to 70% of the word’s maize stocks, 60% of rice, 50% of wheat and 35% of soybeans. The other 80% of the world’s population will almost certainly face acute shortages this year as exports of grain and fertiliser from Ukraine/Russia effectively cease.

China’s actions show that she has to a degree already tied her currency to commodities, recognising the dollar would lose purchasing power. And this is partially reflected in the yuan’s exchange rate against the US dollar, which since May 2020 has gained over 11%.

Implications for the dollar, euro and yen

In this article the close relationship between gold, oil, and wider commodities has been shown. It appears that Russia has found a way of tying her currency not to the dollar, but to commodities through gold, and that China has effectively been doing the same thing for two years without the gold link. The logic is to escape the consequences of currency and credit expansion for the dollar and other Western currencies as their purchasing power is undermined. And the use of a gold peg is an interesting development in this context.

We should bear in mind that according to the US Treasury TIC system foreigners own $33.24 trillion of financial securities and short-term assets including bank deposits. That is in addition to a few trillion, perhaps, in Eurodollars not recorded in the TIC statistics. These funds are only there in such quantities because of the financialisation of Western currencies, a situation we now expect to end. A change in the world’s currency order towards Pozsar’s Bretton Woods III can be expected to a substantial impact on these funds.

To prevent foreign selling of the $6.97 trillion of short-term securities and cash, interest rates would have to be raised not just to tackle rising consumer prices (a Keynesian misunderstanding about the economic role of interest rates, disproved by Gibson’s paradox[iii]) but to protect the currency on the foreign exchanges, particularly relative to the rouble and the yuan. Unfortunately, sufficiently high interest rates to encourage short-term money and deposits to stay would destabilise the values of the foreign owned $26.27 trillion in long-term securities — bonds and equities.

As the manager of US dollar interest rates, the dilemma for the Fed is made more acute by sanctions against Russia exposing the weakness of the dollar’s position. The fall in its purchasing power is magnified by soaring dollar prices for commodities, and the rise in consumer prices will be greater and sooner as a result. It is becoming possible to argue convincingly that interest rates for one-year dollar deposits should soon be in double figures, rather than the three per cent or so argued by monetary policy hawks. Whatever the numbers turn out to be, the consequences are bound to be catastrophic for financial assets and for the future of financially oriented currencies where financial assets are the principal form of collateral.

It appears that Bretton Woods II is indeed over. That being the case, America will find it virtually impossible to retain the international capital flows which have allowed it to finance the twin deficits — the budget and trade gaps. And as securities’ values fall with rising interest rates, unless the US Government takes a very sharp knife to its spending at a time of stagnating or falling economic activity, the Fed will have to step up with enhanced QE.

The excuse that QE stimulates the economy will have been worn out and exposed for what it is: the debasement of the currency as a means of hidden taxation. And the foreign capital that manages to escape from a dollar crisis is likely to seek a home elsewhere. But the other two major currencies in the dollar’s camp, the euro and yen, start from an even worse position. These are shown in Figure 4. With their purchasing power visibly collapsing the ECB and the Bank of Japan still have negative interest rates, seemingly trapped under the zero bound. Policy makers find themselves torn between the Scylla of consumer price inflation and the Charybdis of declining economic activity. A further problem is that these central banks have become substantial investors in government and other bonds (the BOJ even has equity ETFs on board) and rising bond yields are playing havoc with their balance sheets, wiping out their equity requiring a systemic recapitalisation.

Not only are the ECB and BOJ technically bankrupt without massive capital injections, but their commercial banking networks are hugely overleveraged with their global systemically important banks — their G-SIBs — having assets relative to equity averaging over twenty times. And unlike the Brazilian real, the Mexican peso and even the South African rand, the yen and the euro are sliding against the dollar.

The response from the BOJ is one of desperately hanging on to current policies. It is rigging the market by capping the yield on the 10-year JGB at 0.25%, which is where it is now.

These currency developments are indicative of great upheavals and an approaching crisis. Financial bubbles are undoubtedly about to burst sinking fiat financial values and all that sail with them. Government bonds will be yesterday’s story because neither China nor Russia, whose currencies can be expected to survive the transition from financial to commodity orientation, run large budget deficits. That, indeed, will be part of their strength.

The financial war, so long predicted and described in my essays for Goldmoney, appears to be reaching its climax. At the end it has boiled down to who understands money and currencies best. Led by America, the West has ignored the legal definition of money, substituting fiat dollars for it instead. Monetary policy lost its anchor in realism, drifting on a sea of crackpot inflationary beliefs instead.

But Russia and China have not made the same mistake. China played along with the Keynesian game while it suited them. Consequently, while Russia may be struggling militarily, unless a miracle occurs the West seems bound to lose the financial war and we are, indeed, transiting into Pozsar’s Bretton Woods III.

[i] Chart kindly provided by James Turk from his recent book, Money and Liberty (pub. Wood Lane Books)

[ii] See Treatment of Reserves and Fund Accounts — Balance of Payments Division IMF Statistics Department.

[iii] Gibson’s paradox showed that the price correlation with interest rates was with the general price level, not with the rate of price changes. Because Keynes and others failed to explain it, modern economists ignore this relationship with respect to monetary policies. See https://www.goldmoney.com/research/goldmoney-insights/gibson-s-paradox

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author(s) and do not reflect those of Goldmoney, unless expressly stated. The article is for general information purposes only and does not constitute either Goldmoney or the author(s) providing you with legal, financial, tax, investment, or accounting advice. You should not act or rely on any information contained in the article without first seeking independent professional advice. Care has been taken to ensure that the information in the article is reliable; however, Goldmoney does not represent that it is accurate, complete, up-to-date and/or to be taken as an indication of future results and it should not be relied upon as such. Goldmoney will not be held responsible for any claim, loss, damage, or inconvenience caused as a result of any information or opinion contained in this article and any action taken as a result of the opinions and information contained in this article is at your own risk.

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MoE As a Unique Type of Economic Good

David Lawant this is my bio More posts by David Lawant.

MD: This blog named MoneyDelusion.com (note singular, not plural like this one) I tripped over. It was created in 2020. MoneyDelusions.com (note plural…was created three years earlier in 2017). This David Lawant is likely a Mises Monk. He’s posted three articles to his blog…one each day for three days…and then nothing. I wonder what he thinks he’s up to. Let’s see if he knows anything about money. If he does he’ll be the first Mises Monk I’ve found who does…and wouldn’t that be exciting!

David Lawant

28 Oct 2020 • 7 min read

A Medium of exchange (MoE) is an economic good that is used in exchange for other goods. Money is nothing more than a special case of media of exchange that happens to be universally accepted through a process that has already been well described elsewhere. Under this definition Bitcoin is not money because it’s not commonly accepted (yet), but it certainly is a MoE. For this text you can read these two concepts as synonyms, as everything here about money can be generalized to media of exchange without any loss in meaning.

MD: Right off the bat it looks like he doesn’t get it. A “medium” is the environment (control) within which “media” exists. It’s a minor point…unless his confusion goes deeper. Nope: Second sentence his thinks “money” is a special case of “media”. This is wrong. Money “is” the media. Different “cases” would be like ledger entries, demand deposits, coins, currency, etc. And what is this “universally accepted process described elsewhere”? Now he swerves into correctness…Bitcoin “is” not money…but it looks like it’s “acceptance” that is not mature enough…and thus will eventually be money. He’s wrong. It’s not created correctly. That’s what keeps it from ever being money. That’s what makes it just being stuff of simple barter exchange like gold and silver. And read that last sentence again. He is “money deluded”…that’s for sure.

Media of exchange are not a payment system, as Pierre Rochard correctly and insistently emphasizes. Although a payment system might be a nice-to-have feature to transfer a MoE form one hand to another, it is important to understand that these are completely orthogonal concepts. The channel through which a good is exchanged is not important for the economic analysis of a MoE. What matters is that the good is primarily used to be exchanged for other goods. Ludwig von Mises traced this confusion to a juridical view of money:

…the principal, although not exclusive, motive of the law for concerning itself with money is the problem of payment. When it seeks to answer the question ‘What is money?’ it is in order to determine how monetary liabilities can be discharged. For the jurist, money is a medium of payment. The economist, to whom the problem of money presents a different aspect, may not adopt this point of view if he does not wish at the very outset to prejudice his prospects of contributing to the advancement of economic theory.

MD: See…I told you he was a Mises Monk…and his brain is thoroughly contaminated. We here know that money is “an in-process promise to complete a trade over time and space.” It is always, and only, created by traders like you and me. It may never circulate as an object of simple barter exchange…but virtually always does. And when it does, it trades like any other object that two traders are willing to exchange. But its process is what makes it special. Real money has zero intrinsic value. But when properly protected from counterfeiting, it is the most efficient and most trusted of any object of simple barter exchange. This is because its value never changes over time and space. This is because there is no interest load associated with using it. And it is because the “process (e.g. medium) guarantees this to be so. It cannot operate any other way.

Some Bitcoiners question whether it makes sense to stress so much the MoE aspect of money if it is only a stage in the evolutionary process brilliantly depicted by Nick Szabo (collectible, store of value, medium of exchange, and unit of account). The point, as Szabo points out, is that something special happens when an economic good becomes a medium of exchange.

MD: Here you see a very common attribute of the Mises Monks…that is worship of other Mises Monks. They’re truly a mutual admiration society. It is a religion…and misguided like all religions. But the key thing to note here: An economic good does not “become” a medium of exchange (or even properly a “media” of exchange). Money is not an economic good…it is a “promise”. And “real” money is a promise that is guaranteed to be kept. It’s designed into the process. The sidebar explains it in very simple terms.

Categorization of Economic Goods

One of the most basic distinctions in economics is the one between consumption and production goods, usually called by Austrian economists as first-order and higher-order (second-order, third-order, etc…) goods. We can get away for now with the following simplified definition: first-order (consumption) goods satisfy direct human needs and higher-order (production) goods are used to produce lower-order goods.

MD: Money has no interest in what it is being traded for or how it will be used…or why it is being traded. Why should it? Why do they make this complicated? If I trade money for a hammer, do I care if it’s used to pound nails or to blacksmith wrought iron…or just to hang on the wall? If this article tells us why “he” cares we’ll correct him at that instant.

There’s nothing intrinsic about whether a good is first or higher order. For example: I can consume a certain amount of water to satisfy my thirst (i.e., water as a first-order good) or alternatively I can provide this same amount of water to cattle which I will ultimately consume as food (i.e., water as a second-order good and cattle as a first-order good).

First- and higher-order economic goods, albeit ultimately connected to a fundamental theory of value, are different enough to be treated separately in many instances. As Jesus Huerta de Soto puts it: “this classification and terminology were conceived by Carl Menger, whose theory on economic goods of different order is one of the most important logical consequences of his subjectivist conception of economics”.

Peter Paul Rubens’ representation of an altcoiner trying to spin up a monetary system (c. 1614–1616)

MD: More praise for fellow Mises Monks. Look how far we are into this article and he still has said nothing that has to do with money. He’s just tried to act like an intellectual. We know that as “double talk”. And watch out for creation of a new “..ist”…in this instance “subjectivist”. Does the world really need any more “ists”?

We have thus defined that media of exchange are goods that have no real “utility” aside from being exchanged for other goods, which in turn have real “utility” of their own. So how do we classify media of exchange? Are they first-order (consumption) or higher-order (production) economic goods? Is there anything especial about media of exchange that warrants a special analysis of them?

MD: When you realize that it’s the entire trading universe that is the “medium” of exchange, you don’t have to classify anything. In trading, those who prefer to trade for gold know its value. If they trade in silver, they know its value. What is different about “real” money is “its value never changes.” This can’t be said for any other object of simple barter exchange.

MD: The preferred unit for money is the HUL (Hour of Unskilled Labor). For all time in the past it has traded for the same size hole in the ground. And in a “real” money process, it will trade for the same size hole in the future. It is the traders who decide in their personal trades how many HULs is being traded.

MD: And this is a great simplification over the complicated process he alludes to. In his process you have to know the changing value of every good and service …in your mind. But when it comes to “real money” as one of the exchanged objects, you always know its value. When you were in high school (i.e. unskilled labor) you knew exactly what people were willing to pay for it. With the improperly managed dollar, people were willing to pay me $1.50 for a HUL. Today they are willing to pay $8.00. Why? Because the improper “dollar process” has allowed counterfeiting. They have allowed the supply/demand balance to change over time…and it is with supply continually outstripping demand through government counterfeiting (i.e. making promises they never keep)…counterfeiting “inflates” the supply. It’s just that simple.

Media of Exchange Are a Sui Generis Type of Economic Good

The number of economists who don’t have good answers to these questions is astounding. Most simply classify media of exchange as a higher-order good by exclusion. They don’t have direct “utility”, so they cannot be first-order economic goods.

MD: Here we see the pot calling the kettle black. I’m going to just let him spew on here. To put what he writes in context, he thinks gold is money. He thinks money “always” has intrinsic value. Gold thus gets its value by digging dirt and refining it. But dirt in your back yard isn’t going to give you any gold…no matter how much you refine it. And you can argue until you’re blue in the face that you put as much work into your backyard dirt as the gold professional put into his. He got gold…you didn’t. He got something to trade for his HULs…you didn’t. But when you know money is a promise, and you know “real” money comes from a process that “guarantees promises”, you don’t need to screw around with things like gold. I’ll let you read on yourself for a while. These guys make me tired..

Austrian economists think this approach is simplistic and inconsistent. They defend a three-fold categorization of economic goods: first-order (consumption) goods, higher-order (production) goods and media of exchange. This is a key proposition in Ludwig von Mises’ indispensable Theory of Money and Credit. He even criticizes his master Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk and defends the position of Karl Knies, economist of the rival German historical school, in this respect:

Production goods derive their value from that of their products. Not so money; for no increase in the welfare of the members of a society can result from the availability of an additional quantity of money. The laws which govern the value of money are different from those which govern the value of production goods and from those which govern the value of consumption goods.

The peculiarity of media of exchange, and by extent of money, as economic goods is clearly exposed by a simple conundrum. We know intuitively that every economic good can command a price because it has “utility”. If the “utility” of a MoE is to have purchasing power (i.e., a price), how to we get out of this circular reference to understand how money has value? Mises derived his famous regression theorem to solve this apparent circularity by introducing the time element, but this is outside the scope of this text. What matters for us is that media of exchange are unique because their “utility” and purchasing power coincide. As Murray Rothbard puts it:

Without a price, or an objective exchange-value, any other good would be snapped up as a welcome free gift; but money, without a price, would not be used at all, since its entire use consists in its command of other goods on the market. The sole use of money is to be exchanged for goods, and if it had no price and therefore no exchange-value, it could not be exchanged and would no longer be used.

MD: Here is a good time to comment on this thing they call “price”. It’s how much of the stuff you have and are willing to trade for how much of the stuff your trading partner has and is willing to trade. If the “stuff” is real money, you both know exactly what is being traded…one hour of unskilled labor…and it’s guaranteed. You can convert that to dollars, marks, franks, ounces of gold, or pork bellies. It’s up to you to decide on that conversion. But one thing you don’t have to do with “real” money. You don’t have to decide what a HUL is worth. You always know, because at one point in your life your were one…an hour of unskilled labor. So if you’re using “real” money, your trade just got less risky by a factor of two (i.e. one of the objects being traded is “guaranteed” not to change over time and space). Let’s let him blab on further for a while..

This special relationship between “utility” and price for media of exchange makes its analysis unique and leads to conclusions that might seem counter-intuitive compared to the analysis of typical commodities. As Mises points out: the real problem of the value of money only begins where it leaves off in the case of commodity-values. Rothbard agrees with Mises on this point:

In the case of consumers’ goods, we do not go behind their subjective utilities on people’s value scales to investigate why they were preferred; economics must stop once the ranking has been made. In the case of money, however, we are confronted with a different problem. For the utility of money (setting aside the nonmonetary use of the money commodity) depends solely on its prospective use as the general medium of exchange. Hence the subjective utility of money is dependent on the objective exchange-value of money, and we must pursue our analysis of the demand for money further than would otherwise be required.

MD: This is a lot like hearing someone quote bible verses isn’t it.

This is the first stepping stone to intellectually justify why immutability and censorship resistance are such important concepts for media of exchange. As we will see in future texts, it will lead to the Austrian view that, contrary to other types of economic goods, increasing the supply of a MoE will only benefit some at the expense of others. On the other hand, reductions in the supply of a MoE do not make society worse off. The purchasing power that is hoarded is transmitted to others in the exact same proportion.

MD: So what do you think it will take for these “intellectuals” to grasp the concept of perpetual supply/demand balance…guaranteed? They’re beating a dead red herring…to mix a metaphor.

B2C, B2B and… B2MoE?

The singularities of different types goods are not just an abstraction — the business and investing communities also understand this well. The contrasts any executive or investor sees between business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) companies are too obvious to state here. Financial professionals are also familiar with the division between retail and wholesale banking. It is very to easy to understand that these are fundamentally different businesses that have unique challenges.

One of the reasons why Bitcoin is so novel is that companies and investors have never dealt directly with media of exchange before, but only with services built on top of an established MoE. These services are just typical consumer or production goods, not media of exchange. Trying to fit the standard toolkit to such a unique type of economic good without first considering its idiosyncrasies might lead to expensive mistakes.

Bitcoiners, possibly due to their Austro-Hungarian DNA traces, understand these concepts fully. Still, it is important to be mindful of them and make them explicit, especially as more new people start to get involved with Bitcoin. Most arguments against Bitcoin can be traced down to a misunderstanding of how media of exchange actually work. Traditional economists are generally not better positioned to understand this either, as monetary economics has been reduced to reading FOMC tea leaves and computing econometric analyses.

The next time someone points a laughable obsession over the 21 million hard cap or satellite dishes, try to gauge his understanding of some basic monetary concepts like the ones discussed here. Then think again about what is actually laughable. The next time someone tries to shill another “blockchain” that optimizes for a number of features, or for any specific feature, at the expense of immutability and censorship resistance, try to understand whether this person has considered the fact that media of exchange work under different rules.

MD: Do you think he could be more clueless? I ask you, as a trader and given the choice of an inflating money, a deflating money, or a money guaranteed to have zero inflation or deflation, which would you choose? Now that you have chosen, would your trading partner make the same choice as you in this instance? For both trading partners to be on an equal footing as far as money is concerned, the money itself must “never” change value. Does the dollar have this attribute? The Zimbabwe or Weimer Germany money? How about gold? How about cement blocks? My cement blocks have held their value better than gold.

The positions of Bitcoin proponents are usually grounded on air-tight logic and sound economic theory that extends back for a long time. This is neither dogmatism nor tribalism. Contrary to what many believe, the Austrian School of Economics does not take individual freedom and property rights as an axiom, but it arrives at those ideals through rigorous deductive logic. It certainly is a longer route to appreciate the free market system, but it might be the only one that does not lead one astray over time.

PS: An upcoming text in this series will delve deeper into the concept of utility and will probably be a required companion to this text. For now, I’m working with the oversimplified concept of utility as the satisfaction of someone’s needs. For that reason, “utility” is used in quotes throughout this text.

In that sense, a more rigorous way to transmit the main message of this text is (to paraphrase Mises): “In the case of money, subjective use-value and subjective exchange-value coincide. Both are derived from objective exchange-value, for money has no utility other than that arising from the possibility of obtaining other economic goods in exchange for it”.

MD: As always, I couldn’t be more relieved to have reached the end of this article. And look at the help from his Mises Monk pals and scrutiny he got. Pretty scary isn’t it.

Acknowledgements

A draft of this text was improved on by invaluable feedback from Saifedean Ammous, Michael Goldstein, Shaine Kennedy, Stephan Livera, Acrual and Sosthéne. Stay toxic, friends!

References

Theory of Money and Credit by Luwig von Mises
Man, Economy and State by Murray Rothbard
Money, Bank Credit and Economic Cycles by Jesus Huerta de Soto (2006).

Free Post Projection and Throwness Bitcoin’s 10x Advantage Over Gold Might Not Lie Where You ThinkI have been thinking for a while about why sound money survived for thousands of years but was quickly

David Lawant

David Lawant 29 Oct 2020 • 7 min read Free Post Institutions Versus Organizations Governance by Laws Without LegislationCarl Menger, the founder of the Austrian school of economics, is a remarkably popular economist in crypto twitter because Bitcoin builds on so many of his

David Lawant

April 6, 2022April 6, 2022

If The Fed Starts A Digital Currency, It Had Better Guarantee Privacy

If The Fed Starts A Digital Currency, It Had Better Guarantee Privacy
Tyler Durden’s Photo
by Tyler Durden
Tuesday, Apr 05, 2022 – 08:00 PM

MD: As always, Money Delusions will use the true definition of “real” money to annotate this article. The article appear in ZeroHedge.com as “If the Fed Starts A Digital Currency, It Had Better Guarantee Privacy”. And the title itself reveals confusion about what money is…and what its characteristics are. This begins by knowing what money is (i.e “an in-process promise to complete a trade over time and space”); how money is created (i.e. transparently in plain view by traders like you and me); how money is destroyed (i.e. also transparently by the trader delivering as promised); what happens if the trader “defaults” (i.e. “interest” of like amount is immediately collected); and how money trades in the interim (i.e. anonymously as any other object of simple-barter-exchange). Let’s get started:

Authored by By Andrew M. Bailey & William J. Luther via RealClearPolicy.com,

President Biden’s latest executive order calls for extensive research on digital assets and may usher in a U.S. central bank digital currency (CBDC), eventually allowing individuals to maintain accounts with the Federal Reserve. Other central banks are already on the job. The People’s Bank of China began piloting a digital renminbi in April 2021. India’s Reserve Bank intends to launch a digital rupee as early as this year.

MD: They immediately exhibit that they don’t know what money is. “Banks” have nothing to do with “real” money at all. It is the most obvious corruption of real money. And “digital” is just one of many forms of money.

Most commonly, money is just an entry in a ledger. In some cases it is in the form of coins and currency…both carefully designed to resist counterfeiting. In some cases it is in the form of a check (i.e. against a demand deposit). And we already have a fairly digital form of money in “debit cards”…a link to your ledger records that you carry in your purse. “Credit cards” are not an example of money. Rather, they are an example of “money creation”.

When you charge something on a credit card, “you” are creating money…a promise to complete a trade over time and space. When you use a “debit card” you are merely submitting proof that you hold some previously created money.

A CBDC may upgrade the physical cash the Federal Reserve already issues – but only if its designers appreciate the value of financial privacy.

Cash is a 7th century technology, with obvious drawbacks today. It pays no interest, is less secure than a bank deposit, and is difficult to insure against loss or theft. It is unwieldy for large transactions, and also requires those transacting to be at the same place at the same time — a big problem in an increasingly digital world.

MD: And before cash we had the tally stick…which claims to be the best implementation of money. And tally sticks were “real” money. They represented a promise to complete a trade over time and space. They worked better than gold. In fact, they could claim any kind of “backing” the trader’s agreed to (e.g. pork bellies). But nobody “traded” tally sticks. Thus, in that respect they weren’t money at all. They really were close to “crypto” in that respect…but much cheaper to create. You could create a tally stick with a twig and a knife. Today’s crypto requires insane amounts of electricity waste to create. They call it “proof of work”…which of course is nonsense.

Nonetheless, cash remains popular. Circulating U.S. currency exceeded $2.2 trillion in January 2022, more than doubling over the last decade. The inflation-adjusted value of circulating notes grew more than 5.5 percent per year over the period. And U.S. consumers used cash in 19 percent of transactions in 2020.

MD: Actually, the money changers are revealing the imminent collapse of cash. They hold lots of cash (counterfeited by government) and are doing everything they can to exchange it for real “property”. I get a dozen calls a day from “so-called investors” who want to “buy” my property. It’s a game of musical chairs. They don’t want to holding it when the “reset” comes as they know it will be instantly worthless. And also note, with “real” money, inflation is perpetually zero. No adjusted valuation is ever necessary.

Why is cash so popular, despite its drawbacks? Cash is easy to use. There are no bank or merchant terminal fees associated with cash. And, most importantly, it offers more financial privacy than the available alternatives.

MD: In actuality, cash is “not” easy to use. You almost never see it being used…even in restaurants and bars. I use it in bars just to keep score. I take a certain amount of cash, which when I’ve used it up I know I’m about to have had too much to drink. I spend lots of time explaining to other patrons why I can’t let them buy me a beer.

When you use cash, no one other than the recipient needs to know. Unlike a check or debit card transaction, there’s no bank recording how you spend your money. You can donate to a political or religious cause, buy controversial books or magazines, or secure medicine or medical treatment without much concern that governments, corporations, or snoopy neighbors will ever find out.

MD: With a “real” money implementation, there is no need for banks to be involved. All that is necessary is a “block chain” like implementation that resists the “three general problem” and counterfeiting. And when properly implemented, the “block chain” implementation is cost free. It has no use for “proof of work”. It “knows” it’s keeping track of performance on promises.

Privacy means you get to decide whether to disclose the intimate details of your life. Some will happily share. That is their choice. But others will prefer to keep those details private.

MD: But keep in mind, while “real” money used in trade is “always anonymous”, it’s creation is always “open and transparent”. Awareness of this distinction is crucial.

In a digital world, personal information can spread far and wide. And it can be used to exclude or exploit people on the margins. The choice about what information to share is important. For some, flourishing depends on carefully choosing how much others know about their politics, religion, relationships, or medical conditions.

Financial privacy matters just as much as privacy in other areas. What we do reveals much more about who we are than what we say. And what we do often requires spending money. In many cases, meaningful privacy requires financial privacy.

MD: Again, keep in mind that money is only concerned with the problem of “counterfeiting”. It cares not at all who is using it and for what. But people using it must know and expect it is genuine…i.e. not counterfeited. And of course we all know the principal counterfeiters of money are governments. For a “real” money process to exist, it’s operation must be transparent and impervious to any attempts to control or to counterfeit it. It is simply about record keeping.

Privacy also operationalizes the presumption of innocence and promotes due process. You are not obliged to testify against yourself. If law enforcement believes you have done something unlawful, they must convince a judge to issue a warrant before rifling through your things. Likewise, financial privacy prevents authorities from monitoring your transactions without authorization.

MD: Law doesn’t apply to a “real” money process. But open communication and mitigation is crucial. Again, it’s about making counterfeiting impossible. And when detected it must reveal who did the counterfeiting; see that the counterfeiting doesn’t happen again; and treat the counterfeiting for what it is… a “default”. And thus it immediately mitigates it with “interest” collection of like amount. This must be totally transparent…so the marketplace can ostracize the perps. Who pays the interest? Other irresponsible traders.

The recent executive order, to the administration’s credit, notes that a CBDC should “maintain privacy; and shield against arbitrary or unlawful surveillance, which can contribute to human rights abuses.” But a reasonable person might worry that the government is paying lip service to privacy concerns.

MD: A principle “axiom” must be observed at all times. If you are considering a government solution to any problem, you are still looking for a solution. Government is “never” the solution to any problem. It is just a magnifier of the problem.

A recent paper from the Fed, offered as “the first step in a public discussion” about CBDCs, suggests the central bank has no interest in guaranteeing privacy at the design stage. Instead, it maintains that a “CBDC would need to strike an appropriate balance […] between safeguarding the privacy rights of consumers and affording the transparency necessary to deter criminal activity.” The Fed then solicits comments on how a CBDC might “provide privacy to consumers without providing complete anonymity,” which it seems to equate with “facilitating illicit financial activity.” A U.S. CBDC, in other words, will likely offer much less privacy than cash.

MD: No central entity (especially a central bank) is ever involved in a “real” money process. Rather, it is the “process” that is the entity. As such, the process is universally used and totally transparent to all traders at all times.

We do not deny that financial privacy benefits criminals and tax cheats. Such claims tend to be exaggerated, though. In reality, it is a small price to pay for civil liberty. That due process applies to everyone — criminals included — is no reason to scrap the Fourth or Fifth Amendments.

MD: Taxes implies government…so it is a non-starter. If government participation was ever a valid option, it would be the “only” viable option. You would pay taxes (and only taxes) for everything. Your gasoline, your groceries, your clothing…all would be free. You would just pay tax and it would be covered out of that. Some people call this communism. Some call it insurance. It’s all nonsense.

Policymakers may be tempted to compromise on financial privacy when implementing a CBDC. Instead, they should attempt to replicate the privacy afforded by cash. Like non-alcoholic beer, the Fed’s “digital form of paper money” would superficially resemble the real McCoy while lacking its defining feature.

MD: Policy is the the marker here. No process is every properly governed by policy. The closest we should ever come to adopting policy is the “golden rule”. Policy is different from process. Money is a “process”. It cares nothing about policies like full employment and setting inflation at 2% (while continuously failing by a factor of 2).

January 1, 2021

What is an “improved currency”? (A Quora question)

What is an ‘improved currency’? – Quora

There is only one “currency” that can’t be improved upon. That is a currency that is the product of a “real money process”. Once this currency is instituted, no further improvement is possible. It begins with knowing what money is.

Attributes of this “perfect” currency, all the time and everywhere are:

Free supply of money
Perpetual zero INFLATION
Zero INTEREST load on responsible traders
Perpetual 1.0 exchange rate among currencies
Zero time value of money

Why don’t we have this perfect money? Because bankers don’t allow it.

First, they claim 10x leverage over you and me. You “save” a dollar with them, they “loan” out ten dollars. Thus, if you make 4% on your money, they make 40% on your money. That’s a pretty big deal. To do this they put in a dollar of capital and get certified by the state (that they create). Their money doubles in just 2 years. Your money takes about 17 years to double. They call that “capitalism”. Neat, huh? Look mom, I’m a capitalist.

They arbitrarily collect tribute (they call it INTEREST). They allow the state (which they create) to counterfeit (states call it Roll Over) the money resulting in higher prices (they call it INFLATION). And they never report DEFAULTs. That’s like an insurance company arbitrarily setting PREMIUMS; never reporting CLAIMS.

Money is provably “an in-process promise to complete a trade over time and space.” It is always, and only, created by traders like you and me. For example, when we buy anything on “time payments”, we are creating money. And as we make those payments were are destroying money.

The proof is in examining trade. Trade happens in three steps: (1) Negotiation; (2) Promise to Deliver; (3) Delivery as promised.

In simple barter exchange, (2) and (3) happen simultaneously…on the spot. With money, (2) and (3) happen over time and space.

For example, we buy a car with 60 monthly payments. We create the $30,000 and give it to the seller…and he gives us the car. Then, each month we recover (earn) and destroy $500. After 60 months, we have recovered and destroyed the full $30,000. We have kept our promise.

But what if we fail to keep our promise? What if we miss a payment or two? This is where the “real money process” comes in. The process perpetually monitors everyone’s performance on money-creating-transactions like this. Missing a payment is known as a DEFAULT. You are now an “irresponsible trader”. That DEFAULT is immediately made up by an INTEREST collection of like amount. Who pays the INTEREST? Irresponsible traders (according to their propensity to default) do. If you make up the DEFAULT, you get the INTEREST back.

Immediately mitigating this DEFAULT guarantees perpetual perfect supply/demand balance of the money itself…i.e. zero INFLATION. Thus, there is no domino effect when you DEFAULT. There is just the automatic negative feedback mechanism of increased INTEREST load.

The operative relation is: INFLATION = DEFAULT – INTEREST = zero.

You are familiar with all these terms. However, you have been taught to believe that INTEREST is the “time value of money”.

Bankers claim that when there is “too much money in circulation”, they can claim higher INTEREST “tribute” from you. And when there is too little, they can claim less. Looking at the relation you quickly see there is no justification for this whatever. This allows them to manipulate the money…they call it the “business cycle”. And they make no mention of DEFAULTs at all. That’s like reporting COVID “cases” and not mentioning COVID “deaths”…which of course government is doing right now!

You can see from the relation that the “time value of money” is perpetually zero. A dollar today is worth exactly the same as a dollar 10 years from now. It trades for the same stuff.

The so-called “sound money” people claim gold (or something rare) is the basis of sound money. Others claim proof of work (Bitcoin…proof of wasted electricity) is the basis of sound money. You are learning here how foolish they are.

Let’s consider the unit of money to be a HUL (Hour of Unskilled Labor)… not a Dollar or Mark or Yen or Euro…or any other arbitrary and meaningless unit. We choose this HUL unit because we are all implicitly aware of its value. It’s what we, as high school students, typically traded for money. It trades for a certain size hole in the ground…regardless of when a high school student digs it.

Contrast that with the dollar. In 1960 when I was in high school, a HUL was worth $1.50. Today it is worth about $15.00 (minimum wage). However, with a “proper money process” we don’t want this to ever change…a HUL is a HUL is a HUL…anytime and anywhere.

Further, in 1964 a quarter contained 90% silver and traded for a gallon of gasoline. In 1965 a quarter contained 0% silver…and still traded for a gallon of gasoline. Obviously, the silver played no role in the trade. And today, you need 10 quarters to trade for a gallon of gasoline. No quarters traded today contain silver. The “sound money” people have hoarded all those. And the government loves it. All those quarters were retired…and they didn’t have to pump any gasoline in exchange. They do the same thing now with “collector” quarters (different stamping for each state). They’ve done it with stamp collecting. And they do it with the lottery…prey on the stupid.

Our HUL can only trade for the same size hole in the ground if we “guarantee” perpetual perfect balance of supply and demand for the HUL itself. And the process guarantees that.

Before you make your car-buying-promise, no money exists for that promise. After you deliver on your promise, no money exists for that promise. In the interim, the HUL you create goes into the mass of HULs we call the marketplace. It is the most common object of simple barter exchange. It enables us to make trades over time and space.

And obviously “all” those HULs represent a “promise to complete a trade over time and space”. And obviously “all” of them are created by traders like you and me.

December 18, 2020June 19, 2022

“Crony Capitalism” Is In Fact Fascist-Socialism

Ulrich Jurgens
·
Tue
Businessman, expert on governments and politicians.
“Crony Capitalism” Is In Fact Fascist-Socialism

[MD] This is an article I tripped over in Quora. As I scanned it, it seemed to be an example of how a false premise can get a pontificator out of control. Let’s see how this article stands up against what we know money to be.
As usual I will intersperse my comments so the context will not be lost. My comments will take on this general unformatted font.

To begin I’ll define the terms:
Capitalism: The root of this word it “capital”. The antonym is “labor”. Capital is a substitute for labor. I can make a shovel (create capital) as a substitute for labor (digging with my hands). I can then make the choice to substitute some capital for some amount of labor. I can dig with the shovel. The result is an improvement of both labor and capital…I can produce a hole faster this way. It’s a synergism.

Crony: Crony to me means “privilege”. A common definition is “a close friend or companion.” As it relates to capitalism, I prefer the “privilege”. A banker, in our economy has a 10x leverage privilege over the rest of us. He is a crony capitalist. He’s not employing capital…he’s employing privilege. I’m not privilege after I create my shovel. However, I do have a “fair” advantage. A mortgage banker once said to me: “All I want is a fair advantage.” What he really wanted was a “legal privilege”.

Fascism: Fascism is private ownership of the means of production with government control over this ownership.

Socialism: “To each according to his need; from each according to his ability”. In practice this is a “planned/controlled society”. How the planners are chosen is not very important.

Money: Follow the link above “what we know money to be” for this one.

Now, on to the article.

When Milton Friedman said that the companies’ goal must be exclusively to generate profit (as long as they playing by the rules (meaning, they aren’t scammers)), illiterate people instantly accused him for being greedy, not caring about the nature, the planet, the poor people, etc., aka the usual propaganda.

[MD] Friedman, like all economists, are easily proved wrong. However, like all economists, they will never agree on what constitutes a proof. So here we must resort to “demonstration” and “illustration”. Let the reader decide. I submit that a companies goal is to gain leverage over a problem. It can do this in a number of ways: It can convert labor into capital. It can borrow capital and/or labor and control its production. It can form a collective by giving away or granting a share in the enterprise. And it can do any combination of the above. But it’s about trading. And if you make these tradeoff and don’t come out ahead (i.e. make a profit) as a result, you will fail in whatever proposition you are trying to accomplish. Like money, profit is not a bad thing. But unlike money, profit is essential to survival. You “must” increase your value through trade or you won’t survive.

His statement was the answer to the question whether or not a company should take responsibilities for the community, the society it is in, like “supporting poor people”, “giving charities” or organizing specific events out of the profit territory (because remember kids, profit is EVIL in our new, all-equal commie hellhole).

[MD] What someone does with their excess value has nothing to do with this subject. But when some entity takes control of a portion of your value, what is done with it “is” of importance. For example, government takes 3/4ths of what we earn. With it, it has been able to make 3/4ths of us dependent on government. How? By claiming to be benevolent. If you choose government as the solution to any problem, you are still looking for a solution.

To understand the issue, we must examine what is the economical definition of profit, because many peoples’ understanding is that profit is simply “gaining money”.

[MD] This is the first mention of that magic word “money”. I’ll predict that Ulrich is clueless about money. Let’s see.

But this is only one side of the coin.

[MD] Interesting choice of words (coin). It is, after all, just money in a durable form. I doubt Ulrich will tell us where coins come from. Hint: They trade labor for capital and then have value imposed upon them. Ideally, as regards money, coining consumes no labor or capital.

Suppose you’re a scammer, like Jordan Belfort (I mention him many times simply because he’s famous), only, you’re doing it on a much greater scale, like George Soros.

Now what do you do?

[MD]
Jordon Belfort: Jordan Ross Belfort is an American author, motivational speaker, former stockbroker, and convicted felon. In 1999, he pled guilty to fraud and related crimes in connection with stock-market manipulation and running a boiler room as part of a penny-stock scam. Belfort spent 22 months in prison as part of an agreement under which he gave testimony agains…

George Soros: George Soros, Hon FBA is a Hungarian-born American billionaire investor and philanthropist. As of May 2020, he had a net worth of $8.3 billion, having donated more than $32 billion to the Open Society Foundations

I submit that both of these gentlemen accumulated their so-called wealth through trading. I submit that that wealth came predominately through trading for “leverage”. A person running a restaurant trades for leverage with his first hire.

You technically rob people by the means of lying. You gaining money without giving anything in exchange.

[MD] By definition, a trade is a perfect exchange. Both parties benefit by exactly the same amount or the trade doesn’t take place.

It is essentially a money transfer and nothing else.

[MD] It “is” something else. Money need not be involved at all. We who know what money is see “money transfer” as simply “simple barter exchange”. It is value for value. And we know “creation of money” is different. That is making a promise spanning time and space. See how easy it is to discriminate meaning when you know true meaning?

The important thing is that no value has been created through the process, except that your victims now became a little bit more wiser, preventing further scams in their own lives.

[MD] Is Ulrich disproving his own postulate?

Now take it to the extremes: you are the ultimate scammer of the world, there is no limit on how much people you can scam, so you transfer money from millions upon millions of people to your own bank account.

[MD] Taking it to even greater extreme, you get people to “die for their country”. We know money acquired in this fashion (i.e. trade rather than creation of counterfeiting) is just simple barter. Some people are better traders than others. But all trades are perfect…value perceived for value perceived.

Suppose you scammed an entire country, and you wiped off everybody’s bank account, but let’s suppose you live in the same country. People are bankrupted, the economy has been destroyed, nobody produces anything, essentially the whole country is just a big BLM / Antifa protest now.

So you have a big pile of money, only, you cannot buy anything with it, so at the end, you successfully scammed yourself.

[MD] An interest characteristic of money: If you have all of it, you have none of it…your money is worthless.

This is because money consists of two things: the body of it, and the goods and services you can buy with it, in other words: its buying power.

[MD] Here is direct and open evidence that Ulrich is clueless about what money is. If we had a “real money process” and the money was denominated in HULs (Hours of Unskilled Labor), this would be easier for Ulrich to understand…and it would be unnecessary for him to write about it.

Having said that, what profit can you have when you destroyed the buying power of the money you scammed out of the people? Can having a huge pile of colorful papers be considered as “profit”?

I don’t think so.

[MD] Think again Ulrich: In a “real money process”, money never loses (or gains in) its value…INFLATION of the money itself is zero.

So what is profit?

Profit is having the “complete” money, meaning, its body and also its buying power (which emerges from our social law, which many so called “economist” and self-proclaimed “economist” busily ignoring).

[MD] Profit means being able to take the result of a trade and trade it for more value (value as perceived by you…the value to your trading partner is immaterial).

This means you can’t have real profit by scamming the people, only when you provide values in exchange for values. You help me, I help you, because two working guy can achieve more than twice as much as one. This is how the economy works in a nutshell.

[MD] What Ulrich refers to here is “synergism”. An economy is viewed as more efficient the more it involves synergism…that is until it collapses by no longer being an economy. A good way to look at issues is by examining the limits: no synergism…no economic efficiency but a stable economy; maximum synergism…no economy at all.

Now of course the ultimate scammers of this planet are the politicians, and this alone is the reason why they constantly have to print money: because the buying power of money is just constantly has been damaged by them over and over. The economical fallout due to this covid-scam is a fine example of this.

Tell this to anybody who thinks that politicians are useful, and the economy is “more complicated than that”.

[MD] Alternatively, “know what money is”. Institute a “real money process” and this condition cannot exist.

It isn’t. They just pretend that it’s complicated to scare you away from learning it, and if you try, you going to face the government’s “Keynesian”, shaman-economics, which is really more complicated than anything, simply because it’s a scam.

[MD] Keynes was clueless about money… as were Mises, Friedman, von Hayek, Samuelson, and all other economists. What would you expect?

Again, you don’t generate profit while you destroy the buying power of your own money. You just collect colorful papers. This isn’t profit. So the only way to go forward is to generate value through the process, to produce something for which the people pay for you voluntarily. This way, you collect the body of money (colorful papers), and you also collect the buying power of it.

[MD] The only “involuntary” trade is a trade with government. No such trade has been described here.

The reason why so many people have hard time to understand the money concept is because they ignore the idea of buying power. It is because they can only touch the buying power when they exchange money for goods and services, but not before, thus their mind is in the “can’t see, doesn’t exist” mode.

[MD] Anyone who has followed “MoneyDelusions” at all knows that the “use of money” is simple barter exchange; that the “creation and destruction of money” is always done by traders (like you and me buying a house or car on time…or objects with a credit card). The idea that someone can hold “all the money” is not possible with a real money process. Any trader can create new money at any time. And money supply is in perpetual perfect balance with demand for money.

But it is more than obvious that buying power exists, otherwise nothing what the humans make could exist around you.

Now what is crony capitalism?

[MD] We know what crony is … a friend. And we know what capitalism…substituting capital for labor. So crony capitalism is choosing capital over labor among friends. I see nothing wrong here. Let’s see what Ulrich sees.

They say crony capitalism is when the CEO bribes politicians to fuel himself by tax money (which appears to be free money to him), simply because this is one way to gain more profit. But as we said, this is money transfer, so it hurts money, therefore it isn’t profit (or at least, not on the long term).

[MD] “All” tax money goes to the money changers in the form of INTEREST payments. Governments (instituted by money changers for their own protection) are sustained by counterfeiting (i.e. INFLATION). With a real money process, this isn’t possible.

Has value been generated through the money exchange? No? Then it’s robbery, not capitalism.

[MD] Counterfeiting is essentially robbery. In a real money process, when detected, counterfeiting (purposeful DEFAULT) is met immediately by INTEREST collections of like amount. It is immediately exposed and the perp is ostracized.

Is the whole thing voluntarily? No? Then the same holds true.

You don’t really generate profit when you accept tax money. You cannot hurt money for profit, because it is like saying you have to wreck your car to make it better. It is insane.

[MD] In a real money process, government “must” be sustained only by fees and taxes. Fees are direct payment for services received (with government usually with no competition and no alternative). Taxes are trades demanded by government for the general good. I can think of very few general goods. But I do view recording (and protection of such records) of property ownership to be a general good. Interestingly, while county clerks and courthouses have this duty, it is really effected through private title companies. The old method of “abstracting” became unworkable long ago. Traders created an alternative to which the government could not compete. The same is true of “a real money process”. Government cannot compete real money processes.

Therefore those companies whose goal exclusively is to generate profit are the only companies who helping to the economy. Those who offering free stuff by the means of charity are damaging themselves, thus their profit making ability, therefore at the end, the economy. Why would you give money to charities when you can make more money with that money which going to help everybody on a level when you inject it into the economy?

[MD] Companies have a perpetual profit motive. It’s like running downhill. Once you start, it takes “work” to stop. But virtually all companies trip and fall eventually. It usually happens when they get so top heavy they can no longer stand.

I mean what can be a bigger charity than producing buying power?

The answer is: nothing.

[MD] Does Ulrich’s meaning change if we say “trading” power instead of “buying” power? I submit that your sole purpose for living is to “be of value”…i.e. to have something to trade and be able to trade. Without that, “you cannot live!”

By making new goods and services (or making the same in new places where they don’t existed before), you upgrade the money, because that money now can buy more things, thanks to you. This is what we refer to when we say “you making money”. In reality, you make the buying power of money.

[MD] This is very sloppy use of the word money. “Making money” comes from the misunderstand of what money is. To “make” is to “create” and to “unmake” is to “destroy”. Money is never everlasting. It is perpetually being created and destroyed. If you “make the buying power of money”, what do you do when you destroy money (i.e. deliver on your promise that created the money in the first place). Know what money is and the above paragraph is silly.

And guess what? How many people have money in their pockets? Well, almost all of them. And you just upgraded their money with them having nothing to do with it. They didn’t help you, yet, you helped them, since they can now use another goods and services, thanks to you.

[MD] Is this the tail wagging the dog? With a real money process INFLATION is perpetually zero. You can trade it now for a certain size hole in the ground. Or you can hold it and trade at any later time for a hole in the ground of exactly the same size. What others do with their money matters not at all.

Charity – compared to this – is an amateur approach.

[MD] There is no such thing as “altruism”. Thus, there is no such thing as charity. All traders are making perfect trades (in their own eyes) at all times.

So there is no such thing as “crony capitalism”. That is socialism, because it’s a mandatory money transfer without creating value.

But it’s still not the whole truth.

Have you ever wondered why already successful people need government (tax payer) founding? I mean, why would already billionaire companies need free money, like Google, Twitter and Facebook? They are on the top already. And it is not as if they can’t make more money on their own.

[MD] There are conflicting issues here. “Government founding” is done by money changers for their own protection and advantage (e.g. 10x leverage). With a real money process there is no reason to found government. With a real money process “all money is free…any responsible trader can create it any time he sees clear to completing a trade over time and space”. In actuality, in a real money process, the larger the entity, the more difficulty they would have “creating” money. Further, the more difficulty they would have becoming large. A level playing field for money creation would contain them through natural competition.

Now let’s get back to the profit making business-approach for a moment.

If you create a social platform like Twitter for profit, your goal is to have there as much people as possible. You want them to have conversation with each other, and it absolutely doesn’t matter what kind of conversation is that. You just want people to talk on your platform about anything. This will attract companies who can advertise through your platform, thus you going to gain profit.

[MD] It’s a well known axiom: If a product is free, “you” are the product.

The more the people, the more the profit.

So what is the point of censoring or banning them in your platform? You make them to stop having conversations, thus you loosing money.

Having said that, Twitter’s goal is not purely to make profit, and we explained why it is a bad thing.

Banning somebody is an important feature on a platform. But it has to be executed by individuals, not by the company. If you don’t like what somebody says, you can ban him or her from your account, so YOU don’t see him or her anymore. But what if others are still want to see it? Nothing. It is their business.

[MD] Thought experiment: A competitor to all the entities you deplore exists. The reason you deplore them is not found in the competitor. Who are you going to trade with? Let the traders make the rules. And remember, laws won’t fix what troubles you. Laws merely dilute principles…and that’s not a good thing.

Suppose there is a group on Twitter which is openly advocating ritual sacrifice.

If you ban them, you just simply not going to see what they’re doing, but they going to do it anyway.

On the other hand, if you let them to do whatever they want to do in your platform, you expose them to the whole world, so the world has a chance to take them down.

[MD] Ulrich finally gets something right. Congratulations!

This is why censorship is meaningless.

Are they Nazis? Good. See, there are a bunch of Nazis, and you can check who’s with them, and therefore you can avoid them and / or attack them. But silencing them only makes them hidden from the public view, which is a bad thing, since you don’t want Nazis to lurk around you without you knowing it.

[MD] The Nazis were revered…until they were ganged up on. History was rewritten and they are now reviled.

So it is not just bad in terms of profit, but also bad in regards to the society we live in.

[MD] A company as a societal object is a figment of your imagination…planted their by someone gaining in that initiative.

Do you really think that such an intelligent person like the CEO of the Twitter who made such a giant company, can’t figure this on his own already? It is not me who has to explain this to him. He already knows it.

So why he’s doing it?

[MD] It’s very simple. He’s making a trade which he sees as benefiting himself. However, his trading partners don’t see the benefit in his censoring them. So what will they do? They’ll trade with the competition.

Now back to the track: why an already billionaire company would need free (tax) money? It is because they are that greedy, right? It is “easy” money.

[MD] A company is made up of many individuals being leveraged by a smaller collection of individuals being leveraged by yet a smaller collection of individuals. Everyone in the company is making trades in their own best interest. The higher you move up the food chain, the greater the leverage. Wealth is about gaining “leverage”, not money.

Well, no. As we said, this way they damaging the economy, thus their own money. And they are pretty awesome in making money, so they don’t need anything for free. It is entirely the unskilled slackers who constantly need free money, not the millionaire and billionaire entrepreneurs.

[MD] With a real money process, all responsible traders (those who don’t DEFAULT) can create money freely. That makes them all equally powerful in that regard…and thus not powerful at all.

So what really happens is that it is the government who blackmails the company when they reach a certain amount of power (influence).

[MD] Remember, government is “of the money changers, by them, and for them.”

Think about it: government takes money from the people by force, giving nothing in exchange but the illusion if civility.

[MD] The people are like sheep. They have no illusions. And the Ulrichs of the world aren’t much help. They are clueless…but loud.

On the other hand, companies producing stuff for which the people pay voluntarily, because that good or service is just awesome.

So companies and the government are two completely opposite things. In fact, they are each others enemies. The more buying power you have, the less you need “free stuff” from the government, so the government becoming more and more “obsolete”. And this is exactly why the government are trying to stop the company.

[MD] As an exercise to the reader: Knowing what you know about “money” and a “real money process”, dissect the above paragraph.

It does it by offering the company an ultimatum: you either work for us, or we drive you out of business.

And they can do it, because they are the lawmakers.

[MD] And a move to the “rule of principles” rather than the “rule of law” dilutes that advantage by 40,000 each year. That’s how many laws are created to define the only real principle needed…that being the golden rule.

Companies don’t need governments, but governments need companies to stop being free because they need you to need them.

So it is like saying that Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot were all controlled by the super rich people in the shadows, whereas in reality, THEY were the people who controlled and / or destroyed the companies.

[MD] This is easily proven empirically to be wrong. It just takes time and examination of the “real” history to see where power originates and hides.

And what about kings and queens? What about the emperors? Were they all subject of capitalist manipulation? Where they in the hands of the “oil interests”?

[MD] Read about Genghis Kahn for the answer. He just went from day to day and dealt with his issues. He built an organization from scratch.

In reality, nobody has more money than the government. They have that much tax income that they can spend $50 million in every seven seconds, not to mention their infinite ability to print money (no, the FED is not a different institution than the government, they just pretending to be).

[MD] And so the enterprising will find ways to be a part of government. And they will find ways to be at a higher and higher level of government. And they will actively fight those who suggest alternatives to government. With 3/4 your earnings taken by government and 3/4ths of us dependent on government, we are past the tipping point. Let those ratios grow to 100% and government self destructs.

Do you really think you can bribe key politicians with your ridiculous billions in these circumstances?

[MD] As everyone knows, everyone has their price.

Oh come on now..

[MD] The version I get was “taxes are the price we pay to be civilized”. I am over civilized.

So essentially governments are gaining control over the company by blackmailing them, thus they don’t have to be afraid of them anymore.

[MD] It’s interesting. The further and further you go the less you know who “them” is. Those who many regard as “them” weren’t even born when I recognized this problem. How did they become “them”?

The biggest mistake these entrepreneurs making is that they let this to happen. Except in the Atlas Shrugged novel, they hardly do anything against politicians. This is because they are businessmen, and not some kind of freedom fighters. They don’t have the intention, nor the guts to do it. They just enjoying their money, and surrender to the forces of government when the time is coming.

[MD] Everyone is a trader. Everyone always acts in their own self interest.

The other big problem they face is that the public aren’t on their side. Criminals like AOC, Sanders and all the communists are doing everything to make you believe that rich people are greedy robbers, Christianity helps you to understand that they going to the hell anyway, and the Greenpeace explain to you that they destroying the planet completely, whereas nobody can be more greedy than who asks for money which isn’t theirs, poor people are already in the hell of poverty on Earth, and nothing can be more polluting than the cheap Chinese garbage the world’s poor people buy which ends up in the trash days after.

[MD] Remember, all religions are just forms of government. And remember, all things lead toward globalization (and maybe later solar systemization). The antidote is always “iterative secession”. A real money process is the only process I know that has a natural negative feedback mechanism. That’s what keeps things from blowing themselves up.

Who would stand up for them in these circumstances? That’s why Ragnar Danneskjold in Ayn Rand’s novel described himself as the friend of the friendless.

Sad, very sad, but true.

[MD] Just another trader acting in his own self interest. It’s interesting that Ayn Rand had so little control over her own behavior.

I often wonder if the world ends before the people realize that capitalism is the one and only way to live, and rich people are their biggest friends, instead of their biggest enemies as the scammers claim. Because believe it or not, our entire future as human species are depending on this simple realization.

[MD] People can’t tell you what capitalism is, let alone that is is the “one and only way to live”. Think about it. Capitalism is choice of a trade between a machine and labor. That’s a very wide spectrum of trades. Socialism is making the same trade. There is no difference.

If the government control the companies by force, this is called fascist-socialism. This is exactly what Hitler did in his time, using the very same methods as the politicians nowadays.

[MD] Brilliant. Ulrich understands the meaning of fascism. But socialism is different from fascism. In a commune, socialism is a choice. Taken globally that choice disappears.

Thomas E. Woods: Hitler’s Economics:

[MD] I have had written debates with Woods. They’re very short. He runs away.

It is so sad that even bright-minded people like Yaron Brook who openly advocates Ayn Rand’s ideas are fail to notice this. He says Twitter has a right to do anything on his platform, because it owns it.

[MD] Which begs the definition of a “right”. I submit that a right is a “defended claim”. Make no claim, you have no right. Make a claim and fail to defend it, you have no right. That’s why I think things like “god given rights” and “human rights” are on very shaky grounds. I don’t recognize either of them. And the Constitution gave up total defense of it’s Bill of Rights with its “commerce clause”. Some defense!

Well, if they are fueled by tax money, then Twitter isn’t really owns itself. It is more likely YOU who have a share of the company, like it or not.

[MD] … reinforcing the reality: If a product is free, YOU are the product.

Again, a capitalist doesn’t want to censor his own platform. And what Twitter does is that it let anybody to talk about killing police, being a pedophile, being racist against white people, looting and killing, if they’re Antifa or BLM members. So their censorship is highly selective.

[MD] Earth to Ulrich: “All” censorship is highly selective.

[MD] I keep wondering what gives white people this huge advantage. Africa was once populated exclusively by black and dark brown people (we are all people of color) with nappy black hair and full lips. Alternatively, Scandinavia was populated primarily by fair complected people with blue eyes and straight blond hair. On average, Africa has more abundant resources and bountiful environment than Scandinavia. Conjecture leads me to believe strength (and superiority) comes from adversity. Empirically, it is obvious to me that we are not all created equal. I am white and given a choice would choose to be. Is that not the case for these so-called people of color? And shouldn’t we be allowed to choose to live together…or chose to live separately and trade together…or choose not to trade with each other at all? Shouldn’t the golden rule apply universally?

This creature has more than 100k followers and probably never going to be suspended ever, despite the craziness he or she advocates.

[MD] Is not the number of followers a measure of value? I have just a couple of followers. My source of value is different than this “creature”s.

[MD] Start your own Twitter and make your own rules. Personally, I don’t even understand Twitter. I therefore don’t use it.

Check this article for similar things.

The other insanity is when they say the owner has the right to require its customers to wear masks.

Sure, except if he says you can enter without masks, his shop going to be closed tomorrow, probably forever, by the very same fascist-socialist methods.

[MD] As I’ve noted before, a “right” is a defended claim. I claim masks don’t work and I don’t wear one. If someone disputes that I say the mask is for my protection (and thus my choice). I tell them they are safer if they wear two. A mask is to a virus as chicken wire is to a mosquito. I choose not to be openly stupid. But if I need to buy food, in most places I “must” wear a mask. But in these same places I may call my order in and they pick it…I have an alternative to wearing a mask. You might be interested to know: when I started my life, this is how “all” grocery stores worked. There were no “super markets”. Things change. Work with these changes. Embrace them or resist them as you choose. In some places religion is a choice…in others are requirement. Nowhere is it non-existent…ridiculous as the concept is. If I had my way all religion (and government) would be banned. I will never have my way as I will never embrace banning of anything.

Football and politics never mix well. Shirts emblazoned with ‘Black Lives Matter’ legitimise the movement’s extreme aimsEnglish football is right to tackle racism. But by endorsing the controversial manifesto of BLM, it’s upset some fans and breached FIFA’s own guidelines on politicizing the sport.https://www.rt.com/op-ed/492340-football-politics-blm-mix/

[MD] Matter to whom?

I’m sure that the budged not going to like this.

[MD] Frankly, discrimination is a key component to my being able to survive. If I can’t distinguish between a poisonous snake and a non-poisonous on, I stay away from all snakes. And when I can’t do that I kill them.

Think about how many people consider BLM as an aggressive Marxist, anti-Trump, anti-capitalist organization. Apart from corrupt politicians (all of them) and rotten rulers, conservatives are the wealthiest people of the planet. And they are those who not going to buy Lo’real products anymore. As a “for profit” capitalist, do you think this is the proper way to raise your gains?

[MD] It’s all about leverage. Most people are influenced by someone standing on a stump yelling through a megaphone. A few of us (including the yeller) are not.

Isn’t so interesting that these companies doing nothing when taxes are rising, for instance?

[MD]As I’ve said, 3/4ths of your earnings goes to government…and that ratio is rising exponentially. Any taxes companies pay is in the price of the goods and services they sell. They don’t care as long as they can trade their stuff for your stuff. If they can’t do that they try a different angle (e.g. bribe a politician). With a real money process this all becomes more difficult. Governments are ostracized by traders and thus can’t exist.

Someone should tell them that Trump supporters also use tires. And probably the more expensive ones.

[MD] Remember. Companies are just traders with lots of leverage. They maximize their leverage by maximizing their markets. In this instance, someone coming up with anti-gravity puts them out of business.

Oh wait, looks like somebody already told them:Here’s How Goodyear Responded To Backlash Over Anti-Conservative Bias Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company is trying to pull itself out of the hole it finds itself in after implementing company policies that are decidedly anti-conservative. On Monday, an employee…https://redstate.com/jeffc/2020/08/19/heres-how-goodyear-responded-to-backlash-over-anti-conservative-bias-n251696

[MD] Large companies have lobbyists and PR departments because they work. Without them they are not competitive and likely will be driven out of business or eaten up by other, more compliant companies. But Chick Filet still has their religious rule closing them on Sundays. And they are thriving. There are alternatives. There are choices.

But there are many, many more:The Full List – Here Are The 269 Companies Who Are Supporting BLM & Antifa Riots – Conservative USAntifa is an umbrella term to describe radical left-leaning militant groups that typically confront neo-Nazism and white supremacists at demonstrations.https://conservativeus.com/the-full-list-here-are-the-269-companies-who-are-supporting-blm-antifa-riots/

So what do you think why companies doing things which causes them losses?

[MD] Because they also cause them gains…and the gains they expect to be greater. Try opening a hot dog stand and sell your “Nazi Franks” product today. Try it in 1937. Big difference. No distinction in the product.

Simply because they forced to do it!

Do you think productive companies support looting, killing, and Marxist ideas which eventually leads to the collapse of the economy, thus their businesses, as it happened always, without exception through the history of communism?

[MD]For the most part, what you see as an economy, these companies see as an obstacle. When people don’t have choices, marketing costs can be cut dramatically.

Someone builds a huge company, then risking it entirely by supporting people who are completely out of their mind, and who are the puppets of some shady powerful people behind the scenes?

[MD]The people who build these companies typically don’t have any control over them at this point. Some like Sam Walton gave positive direction…his surviving family, not so much. Some like Jack Dorsey march to a different drummer. So be it. Some like JD Rockefeller openly broke the golden rule and benefitted. You might be surprised to know his personal contribution to that wealth spanned only about 10 years. His brother ran the company.

Well, yes, because the company ALSO the puppet of the same shady people. It is either you do it, or we collapsing your business. And if you do it, your business going to collapse on the long run anyway.

[MD] To this day NYC operates under heavy mob influence. The mob couldn’t survive in a small town like Plantersville, TX. If you don’t like the mob, move to a small town.

But as Keynes said, on the long run we are all dead, so who cares?

[MD] I do. I’m not religions. This is all I get. I’m not into wasting it because of Keynes’ stupidity. Ignorance is a choice. Stupidity is a defect.

These companies are fueled by tax money (your money) as long as possible, then they going to collapse with the economy, and this is exactly what fascist-socialism is.

[MD] By now you should recognize that assertion as openly false and stupid. Companies are fueled by trading. Stop trading and begin consuming the fruits of earlier trades…until they consume themselves out of existence.

Yet, some people still think that communism and fascism are two opposite things.

[MD] Because they are. Fascism has private (i.e. no government) property. Communism, as it has been described to me, does not. I include that caveat for those who say “Communism is the right process. It just fails because they’re not doing it right.”

So at the end of the day, companies are really should care about profit, and profit only, otherwise they should be considered as corrupt, evil institutions in the hands of corrupt, evil people.

[MD] Companies should care about their own survival. Many companies sell at a loss and try to make it up with volume…that is many “no longer in business” companies.

Funny how the people think the exact opposite, right?

[MD]Some of us are actually able to think.

Well Ulrich, I think I’ve gotten through it. It’s not worth review and checking for typo’s. I’m open to your rebuttal if you see this. You are likely to be the only one to have read this far.

Panic of 1837

Contents

Causes

Effects and aftermath

Recovery

See also

References

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Keynesians and Market Monetarists Didn’t See Inflation Coming

My Worst Professional Mistake

The Keynesians Camp: Paul Krugman and Klaus Schwab

And it’s now looking as if the Fed was right …

The Leader of the Market Monetarists, Scott Sumner

Stay Connected

https://explorewhatworks.com/money-shared-delusion-why-how-we-think-about-money-matters/Money Is A Shared Delusion: Why How We Think About Money Matters

“Time is money.”

First, a little context.

What is money?

What we believe about money impacts how we interact with it.

Is time money?

“To me, money is freedom and it’s power. It allows me to live a life of dignity.”

Five Warning Signs The End Of Dollar Hegemony Is Near… Here’s What Happens Next

Warning Sign #1: Russia Sanctions Prove Dollar Reserves “Aren’t Really Money”

Warning Sign #2: Rubles, Gold, and Bitcoin for Gas, Oil, and Other Commodities

Warning Sign #3: The Petrodollar System Flirts With Collapse

Warning Sign #4: Out of Control Money Printing and Record Price Increases

Warning Sign #5: Fed Chair Admits Dollar Supremacy Is Dead

Conclusion

Rabobank: We Won’t Get Bretton Woods 3 But What We Do Get Won’t Be Peaceful Or Painless

Pure finance is being replaced with commodity finance

Russia’s point of view

The consequences for the West

Implications for the dollar, euro and yen

What to Read Next

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Categorization of Economic Goods

Media of Exchange Are a Sui Generis Type of Economic Good

MD: So what do you think it will take for these “intellectuals” to grasp the concept of perpetual supply/demand balance…guaranteed? They’re beating a dead red herring…to mix a metaphor.

B2C, B2B and… B2MoE?

Acknowledgements

References