Sunday, 20. July 2008, 05:41:45
Chile once heralded as The Economic Miracle by the neoliberal Milton Friedman, who touted
floating exchange rates, is now having serious economic problems.
Drew Benson and Lester Pimentel of Bloomberg report that: “Chilean central bank President Jose de Gregorio may have to abandon his plan to boost exports by weakening the peso after inflation accelerated to the fastest pace in 14 years. The peso has become the world’s worst performing currency, tumbling 11.8% in the three months since de Gregorio told traders at Banco Central de Chile to buy $50 million a day. Annual inflation soared to 9.5% in June, the highest since 1994 ... ‘They have a very serious inflation problem,’ said Igor Arsenin, an emerging-markets strategist at Credit Suisse ... ‘The next step for them is to scrap those dollar purchases.’”
A review of history, provides insight into the value of gold and the underlying issue facing Chile today.
A. The Federal Reserve System was created in 1913.
Bill Paatz
relates that on December 22, 1913, with the prospect of the Christmas holiday pressuring the Congress into final action before the session closed, the House voted 298 to 60 in favor of the new Federal Reserve System, and the Senate passed it 43 to 25.
Perhaps without quite realizing it, the Congress had created a powerful engine of private central banking which was given the power to indulge the bankers' voracious appetite for boom-and-bust economics, confiscatory taxation, smothering national indebtedness, and the promotion of war on a worldwide scale. No one suspected that this power would be used to confiscate the people's gold, diminish their savings with inflation, erode the value of insurance policies and fixed incomes, destroy the stability of the dollar, and eventually engulf the nation in a miasma of foreign entanglements which would threaten the very existence of the United States as a nation of free and independent people.
In 1916, just three years after the Federal Reserve System went into operation, President Wilson seems to have suddenly realized what a virtually uncontrollable power monopoly had been vested in the nation's Federal Reserve System. He wrote: 'A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is concentrated [in the Federal Reserve System]. The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men....We Have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated governments in the civilized world - no longer, a government by free opinion, no longer a government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a government by the opinion and duress of small groups of dominant men.' (Quoted in "National Economy and the Banking System," Senate Documents Co. 3, No. 23, Seventy-sixth Congress, First session, 1939).
President Wilson's protest against the 'duress' of a few dominant men is especially interesting in view of the dozens of articles he had written, as head of the political science department at Princeton, criticizing the thinking of the Founding Fathers and calling for stronger centralized power in Washington.
In fact, these men from whom President Wilson was feeling such duress and domination in 1916 were the very ones he had been praising a few years earlier.
It would seem that the superior wisdom of the Founding Fathers had become increasingly apparent, even to Wilson.
B. The real center of economic power is the Federal Reserve's Federal Open Market Committee, FOMC.
Mr. Paatz continues: When is comes to controlling the money supply, the interest rates, and the purchase or sale of securities, the real foot on the throttle and toe on the brake belong to the Open Market Committee. It makes all of the important decisions and meets in Washington, D.C. behind closed doors every three weeks.
The open Market Committee consists of the seven members of the Board of Governors and five of the board chairmen selected from the twelve district banks. One of these will always be the chairman of the New York Bank. The others rotate in turn. Although the chairman from all twelve districts may attend these meetings, only the five who serve on the committee can vote.
The Congress originally intended this powerful committee to be under the close supervision of the non-banking members of the Board of Governors, but it is recognized today that this is strictly a banking-fraternity committee operating completely outside the control of the President, the Secretary of the Treasury, the Comptroller, or the Congress. As of this writing (February 1982) the Open Market Committee operates just like any of the privately-owned central banks of Europe. Dr. Milton Friedman, a most astute student of the Federal Reserve, and also William Simon, former Secretary of the Treasury, consider this Open Market Committee a dangerous threat to the economic stability of the United States and recommend that it be terminated.
C. The World accepted Milton Friedman's principle of floating exchange rates.
Subroto Roy writing in Independent Indian
states: In a pure gold standard, gold is money ~ interchangeable in the sense the central bank guarantees it will exchange gold for the paper it issues at an announced price. If that price changes up or down, there is devaluation or revaluation of the currency with respect to gold, depending on how you count it.
A gold exchange standard is similar except gold is not used as money and central banks of nations guarantee the announced prices of their paper moneys with respect to gold in transactions with one another. In the dollar exchange standard, or Bretton Woods system from 1944 to 1971, the US Government alone and uniquely undertook to guarantee the price of the dollar at $35 a troy oz of gold in transactions with all other central banks. That was the underpinning of the international financial system until Richard Nixon “closed the gold window” on 15 August 1971 because the US had largely financed the Vietnam War through money-creation, and other countries’ central banks, like France, had accumulated large dollar-balances. (The military industrial complex generated Vietnam war bankrupted the United States).
The “gold standard”, “gold exchange standard”, and “dollar exchange standard” are all examples of “fixed” exchange rate systems which came to end in 1971-1972. The price of gold at $35 an oz was obviously unrealistically low, and it shot up at once, and has even reached $1000 an oz recently.
Since 1972, the Western world has been on “floating exchange rates” where currencies find their own values and gold is merely one asset among many. (Floating exchange rates being held forth by Milton Friedman).
D. Milton Friedman received his training from the Rothschild's Alfred Marshall.
Arthur Topham of The Radical Press provides the Eustace Mullins the historical account of the training of Milton Friedman from The Rothschild's, The World Order, A Study in the Hegemony of Parasitims:
The career of Lord Alfred Milner (1854-1925) began when he was a protégé of Sir Evelyn Baring, the first Earl of Cromer, partner of Baring Bros., bankers, who had been appointed Director General of Accounts in Egypt. Baring was then the financial advisor of the Khedive of Egypt. Since 1864, Milner had been active in the Colonial Society, founded in London in that year. In 1868, it was renamed the Royal Colonial Institute, and was heavily financed by Barclays Bank, and by the Barings, Sassoons and Jardine Mathieson, all of whom were active in founding the Hong Kong Shanghai Bank, and who were heavily interested in the Asiatic drug traffic. The staff economist of the Royal Colonial Society was Alfred Marshall, founder of the monetarist theory which Milton Friedman now peddles under the aegis of the Hoover Institution and other supposedly “right wing” think-tanks. Marshall, through the Oxford Group, became the patron of Wesley Clair Mitchell, who then taught Burns and Friedman.
E. Neoliberalism And Neoconservatism have risen to control, the Federal ReserveMilton Friedman, was a pioneer and leading proponent of laissez faire economic policies, and he gave approval to things such as tax cuts for the wealthy, trade deficits, and use of a voucher in the
privatization of education as well as privatization of any national industries such as the postal service.
Milton Friedman was a Professor at the University of Chicago at the same time as
Leo Strauss, who taught from 1949-67.
Friedman promoted the Chicago School of Free Market Economics; and Leo Strauss the Chicago School of Neocon Politics: these two developed neoliberalism and neoconservatism. Their students rose to become neoliberal leaders in banking, and neocon leaders in the White House, with the result that neoliberalism and neoconservatism are the economic and political principles governing US society and in numerous other countries of the world today, notably, Great Britain, Chile, Canada, and Australia.
President Reagan awarded him the Presidential Metal of Freedom.
Friedman visited Iceland in the autumn of 1984, met with prominent Icelanders and
gave a lecture at the University of Iceland on the Tyranny of the Status Quo. He participated in a lively television debate on August 31, 1984 with leading socialist intellectuals, including President Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson. When they complained that a fee was charged for attending his lecture at the University and that hitherto lectures by visiting scholars had been free-of-charge, Friedman replied that previous lectures had not been free-of-charge in a meaningful sense: Lectures always have related costs. What mattered was whether attendees covered those costs, or those who did not attend. Friedman thought that it was fairer that only those who attended, paid.
Friedman's speech was impetus for the financialization of Iceland's economy: Friedman
made a great impact on a group of young intellectuals in the Independence Party, including Davíð Oddsson who became Prime Minister in 1991 and began a radical program of monetary and fiscal stabilization, privatization, tax rate reduction (e.g., lowering the corporate income tax rate from 45% to 18%), definition of exclusive use rights in fisheries, abolition of various government funds for aiding unprofitable enterprises and liberalization of currency transfers and capital markets. In 1975, Iceland had the 53rd freest economy in the world, while in 2004, it had the 9th freest economy, according to the Economic Freedom of the World index designed by Canada’s Fraser Institute. According to the index designed by the Heritage Foundation, Iceland as of 2008 has the 5th freest economy in the world. Davíð Oddsson was Prime Minister for thirteen and a half years, to 2004. The present Prime Minister, Geir H. Haarde supports similar policies.
The super wealthy for decades have contributed to right wing think tanks and media, which further promulgate the principles of these two men; these include the Hoover Institution, the Cato Institute, the Fraser Institute, and media pundits such as radio station herald Bill Kristol, and Fox television commentator Karl Rove; and in turn thees shape the mind of
the Sheeple, dumbing them down to sound economic, political, investment and wealth management principles.
The Federal Reserve is the dominant economic force governing the US economy. It has a companion in political rule coming through the Council On Foreign Relations, the CFR, which is a David Rockefeller sponsored organization.
In 1971, Murray Rothbard wrote a lengthy article for The Individualist which heavily criticized several of Friedman's viewpoints as totalitarian and statist. In particular, Rothbard criticized Friedman's viewpoint that the micro and macro spheres are entirely separate with the government needing to take an active role in the macro-sphere as false and dangerous, the view that it is beneficial for the government to control currency to maintain constant price levels as bogus and harmful, and the viewpoint that nonpaying benefiters positive externalities created by various services should be taxed to pay producers of that service as an absurd position that opens the door for the most ridiculous forms of totalitarianism. More generally, he criticizes Friedman's efforts to make the government more efficient as highly detrimental to individual liberty, and concludes that "And so, as we examine Milton Friedman’s credentials to be the leader of free-market economics, we arrive at the chilling conclusion that it is difficult to consider him a free-market economist at all", as originally published in 'Milton Friedman Unraveled', 1971 in The Individualist, which was reprinted in the Journal of Libertarian Studies, Fall 2002.
In Friedman's last
emai interview in 2006, as reported by Tunku Varadarajan in the Wall Street Journal, when asked: "What is the biggest risk to the world economy: America's deficits? Energy insecurity? Environment? Terrorism? None of the above?", he responded "Islamofascism, with terrorism as its weapon".
F. The Federal Reserve actions have destroyed traditional investment opportunities.
The JPM Buyout Of BSC was the 911 of capitalism: a state corporate combine of government, and investment banking exists with JP Morgan as seignior.
Said another way investment banking and lending have been nationalized; and with the provision of TAF, TSLF, and PDCF, where AAA rated US Government bonds and CDOs, CLOs, illiquid debt of all kinds being transferred to the Treasury, the losses and of the banks and investment bankers has been socialized, that is, transferred to the tax paying public.
The failure of the eight week long rally on May 19, 2008, means stocks and bonds going into the abyss; and gold, although it could easily fall lower somewhat, has arisen as the defacto means of garnering and accumulating wealth.
G. The investment demand for gold has risen yet again and is easily documented in ratios and in charts::
The investment demand for gold can be seen in the following ratios:
Gold relative to stocks:
GLD:VTIGold relative to commodities:
GLD:RJIGold relative to oil:
GLD:USOGold relative to Treasuries: GLD:TLT
The chart of gold relative to the overall stock market,
GLD:VTI weekly, is my all time favorite investment chart as it shows gold booming as the Federal Reserve started to reduce interest rates in 2007: the Federal Reserves actions have continually debased the US dollar and inflated the price of gold. The chart shows that the one on December 11, 2007 was the kindest cut of all.
VI. My concluding thoughts today have to do with freedom.
I ask a number of questions like: Is one "free to choose"?, and "Am I more or less free", since I got emancipated from high school in 1969?, and "Is freedom desirable"?
And I ask where are we headed? We are headed into state corporate rule, where the global governance principles of security and prosperity, will be enforced by the North American Competitiveness Council, the NACC, the three leaders of the North American, and their appointed stakeholders to oversee the natural resources of the continent, as well as the institutions of finance, commerce, investment, and trade.
The Federal Reserves' initiatives as well as
similar initiatives by Freddie Mac have brought us to the precipice of disaster: society is going to become all the more pyramid in shape, with a wealthy elite and a broad base of pauperized at the bottom.
I do not have any right to do anything about the coming catastrophe; as Jan Allen writes,
I choose to exercise 'the only right there is' -- the right to manifest as a child of God.
The Milton Friedman question is: Am I 'free to choose'?
The people of Iceland, choose: they sold their country, their way of life, their fishing rights, and even themselves to become the worlds' bank, now paying 6% interest. And for what? They pay a seigniorage levy, that is a top-dog excise tax, to the currency traders for their baseless deeds in yielding to usurper Milton Friedman.
The way I see it,
God choose me, and purposed me from before the foundation to be in Him, so therefore, I walk in the good works he planned for me from eternity past. I don't want freedom, it doesn't do me any good, it can't do me good: I am a
love slave of Jesus Christ.
Related ReadingLibor System Fails Destroying Neoliberal Maxim Of Floating Interest RatesPaper Tiger Preying on Gold Bugs by Antal E. Fekete
Where Friedman Went Wrong by Antal E. Fekete
Keywordssystemic risk event, system wide financial collapse,
