New Open Forum

Excerpt from Jeremy Grantham:

Yes, of course every country needs a basic financial system to function effectively with letters of credit, deposits, and check writing facilities, etc. But as you move beyond that it is worth remembering that every valued job created by financial complexity is paid for by the rest of the real economy, and talent is displaced from real production, as symbolized by all of the nuclear physicists on prop trading desks. Viewed from the perspective of the long-term well-being of the whole economy, the drastic expansion of the U.S. financial system as a percentage of total GDP in the last 20 years has been a drain on the health and cost structure of the balance of the real economy. To illustrate this point, in 1965 the financial sector of the economy took up 3% of the GDP pie. The 1960s were probably the high water mark (or one of them) of America’s capitalism. They clearly had adequate financial tools. Innovation could obviously have occurred continuously in all aspects of finance, without necessarily moving its share of the economy materially over 3%. Yet by 2007 the share had risen to 7.5% of GDP!

The financial world was reaching into the GDP pie and taking an unnecessary extra 4%. Every year! This extra rent is enough to lower the savings and investment potential of the rest of the economy. And it shows. As mentioned earlier, the growth rate of the GDP had been 3.5% a year for a hundred years. It had proven to be remarkably robust. Even the Great Depression bounced off it, and soon GDP growth was back on the original trend as if the Depression had never occurred. But after 1965, the growth of the non-financial slice, formerly 3.4%, slowed to 3.2%. After 1982 it dropped to 3.1% and after 2000 fell to well under 3%, all measured to the end of 2007, before the recent troubles. These are big declines. It is as if a runner has a growing and already heavy blood sucker on him that is, not surprisingly, slowing him down. In the short term, I realize that job creation in the financialindustry looked like a growth driver, as did the surge in financial profits (which we now realize were ludicrously overstated). But in the long term, like a sugar high, thisstimulus was temporary and unhealthy.

The financial system was growing because it could. The more complex and confusing new financial instruments became the more “help” ordinary citizens needed from the experts. The agents’ interests were totally unaligned with the principle/clients’ interests. This makes a mockery of “rational expectations” and the Efficient Market Hypothesis, which assumes (totally unproven, as usual) equivalent and perfect knowledge on both sides of all transactions. At the extreme, this great advantage in knowledge and information held by the financial agents has the agents receiving all the rewards, according to the recent work by my former partner, Paul Woolley, and his colleagues at the Woolley Centre for the Study of Capital Market Dysfunctionality. (With a great name like that their job is half done before they start.)

Related:
Shake the Disease
Say Goodbye to Wall Street

The New Global Reserve

Someone once asked me if all of our thoughts were on the level? Well, at a young age I often thought there was a difference between fact and opinion; then I learned that everything spoken was opinion and anything written was fact! A few years later, someone told me that anything spoken is not true and anything written is opinion! Last year I was told that everything is an opinion and nothing is true! Ha! Ha! So, today, I state for the record that all of our Thoughts are Absolute fact! (smile) -- FOA (08/06/01)

You know, I am not making this stuff up. What I write on this blog comes from journey, discovery and understanding of a train of thought that was many decades in the making. A thought process that began in the 1960's, around the time that Charles de Gaulle, president of the French Republic, began to seriously question the sustainability of the Bretton Woods system.

The process of journey, discovery and understanding of the transition we face today, on a collective scale, has taken just as long as the unfolding of time itself. Isn't this a curious thought?

Please join me on the Gold Trail and discover with me the anti-dollar train of thought that has not only been coming down the tracks of time straight at us for more than 40 years, but is bearing straight down on us today. Or, dismiss these thoughts if they make you uncomfortable because of everything the dollar system has taught you since 1971. But do so at your own financial peril.

I do not want a one world currency, and in fact, I think it is most unlikely. I am not anti-dollar. I am not anti-American. Quite the opposite! I am simply an observer, reporting what I see... from my own little perch on the poop deck of the Titanic.


A Paper for your Property

Let's start off with a fantasy visualization. Have you ever checked your coat at a show? Yes, some people still do this. And the coat check clerk will give you a small paper ticket with which you can retrieve your coat at the end of the show. No? You've never done this? Okay, then imagine the valet ticket you get when you drop your car off at the front of a nice hotel. One small piece of paper with a number on it represents your right to later retrieve your car.

Now imagine that I, a smashingly handsome salesman-type character hanging out near the valet line, offered you a very special valet ticket, one that was good for ANY car in the valet lot! How much would something like that be worth? How much would you pay for such a magic ticket? (Assume that it is totally legal.) And if you bought it from me, how long would you feel comfortable holding the ticket before you "tested it out" to make sure it was really what I said?

Now imagine that I offered you another special valet ticket. Only this one was good for any car on any valet lot anywhere in the world! Would this one be worth a little more? Assuming you redeemed the first ticket I gave you successfully, would you be willing to take this second, "global" ticket home with you? Maybe test it out somewhere else, like Italy?! On a nice Ferrari perhaps?


Now imagine that both tickets performed perfectly and legally as advertised. Can you imagine how such extremely special tickets might circulate as currency, only rarely getting turned in for a car? Especially if they cost less than the outright purchase of a car?

So now that my little experiment with special valet tickets has caught on, imagine that I start printing them wholesale and selling them far and wide. They clearly exceed the number of cars parked in valet lots around the world at this point. And perhaps at some point soon you will realize that such a wide distribution of these special tickets raises the odds of your own car being reclaimed by someone else!

You see, even if all these fantasy auto ownership transfers were somehow legal, the circulation of "universal valet tickets" would make car ownership very AMBIGUOUS. If you hold a ticket, do you really own a car? If so, what kind is it? And if you own a physical car, how long before someone takes yours?

I suppose at this point you would stop leaving your physical car with the valet! Right? With odds like this, sooner or later someone is going to take YOUR car, and perhaps it will be the last one in the lot! And as this perception spreads, less and less cars will be entrusted to young valets around the world, putting them out of work and sending them to the unemployment line. And with empty valet lots all over the world, what do you think will happen to the value of all my little paper tickets?


So... Is Gold Money or Not?

When gold was used in straight trade it was not money. It was simply gold, an item to barter with. In fact, it was the very best possible item to barter with. And because it was the very best property to own for future trading purposes, it became the wealth reserve par excellence.

The very concept of money evolved from the coinage of gold (the barter item) allowing for a numerical accounting system backed by rudimentary laws. This allowed for the emergence of great civilizations. These civilizations died off eventually when the legally enforced parity between the numerical accounting system (money/a medium/an incomplete transaction/ambiguous ownership of the physical world) and the physical market place (gold/barter/complete transactions) was stretched to the breaking point.

What we have today is a breaking point that will return gold to its ancient job, wealth reserve par excellence. In this role, gold will be revalued by the global marketplace, in its physical form only, to somewhere between one and two orders of magnitude higher than it is today!

Perception is the key. Early in the life of a currency (like my valet ticket currency or paper gold) full value parity is the perception of the masses. But there always comes a time when the masses begin to perceive that the outstanding claim checks outweigh the tangible deposits. And you can imagine what this shift in perception does to the per unit purchasing power of the paper tickets.

When we proclaim "Gold is Money!", we give the bankers full license to treat gold just like they treat money. This opens the door to AMBIGUOUS notions of ownership and lost purchasing power of the metal itself.

The best reason to pursue this concept, to cement in our minds that gold is simply property, simply the very best tradable, tangible item, is to end the misguided attempts to use gold as a currency by those who will not let gold simply be gold. So we call it "wealth", since our Western upbringing forces us to "pigeon hole it" (and "wealth" IS what is should be called anyway). But be careful calling gold money, unless you are prepared to retract your statement when unexpected wisdom visits you like puberty some fine day!

A deep contemplation of the "honest money" concept will reveal some longstanding misconceptions about gold, the physical item. Your personal journey to understanding money must *MUST* encompass two very influential factors. The first is banking. And the second is government (or law). In other words, you can't claim a full understanding of the money concept without a commensurate understanding of its defining institutions.

Banking institutionalizes the accounting of money while government, or the Rule of Law, institutionalizes the vitality of monetary contracts. How well these two operations serve a society is revealed in the value that society entrusts to its monetary unit.

Gold is the perfect physical property existing in nature, used by and passing through these evolving money systems in cyclical ways. The exchange of a lump of gold for something else of value, say a chicken, is a barter exchange. It is a full transaction of physical items. There is no "medium" in this exchange. But it was the evolution of gold from lump state into coined state that catalyzed the emergence of the money concept as a pure numerical system.

The money concept emerged as this new numerical accounting system peacefully coexisted with the physical barter exchange world of the property item gold. Together they grew and matured, because an UN-COERCED marketplace of physical exchanges (including gold) was allowed to "GEL" with the new Rule of Law and the new numerical accounting system. This symbiosis, while it lasted, allowed for great advances in human civilization!

The problem with the US dollar as a monetary concept is that it was never actually allowed to gel with an un-coerced marketplace. And the problem with gold today is that it has a low barter value because it is not free to behave like a piece of physical property. It is encumbered by the bullion banking system as a token standing behind an artificial value created by derivatives trading.

The risk that has developed is that the US dollar will collapse if this low priced gold is removed! This low priced gold is THE stabilizer in the unbacked US dollar's 38 year bid to be the world's currency. But if low priced gold becomes HIGH priced gold, then perhaps the dollar has failed in its bid to be "money par excellence".

Newer currencies like the Euro are trying not to make this same mistake. They want the marketplace to form a stable network of pricing and contracts without the false pretenses surrounding gold. They are refining the evolving money concept in the hope that it will gel with the physical marketplace. They mark their gold reserves to whatever the market says they are worth, and they don't fear a price rise because it will only make their reserves more valuable.

In fact, they even encourage the free trading of gold by making it available at common places people go! Why do you think this is not done inside the dollar's zone?

If this new and improved money concept works well throughout the transition to Freegold, currencies like the Euro that adopted this new concept may actually become the world's first full fledged money, in the most proper use of the word! In fact, by trading peacefully along side an un-coerced gold market, they could even be said to be "honest money"! At least as honest as the Rule of Law that stands behind them.

This is not an argument for saving, holding or trading these currencies for profit, but instead it is an argument for using as a medium only currencies that "gel" with gold used as a parallel reserve!

But of course, as we know, the Rule of Law can change as the hungry collective elects socialists into office. This is why we will use honest gold property as our core wealth holding! We will own it to compensate for the human inability to create PERFECT money!

In other words, because we have to settle for using, AT BEST, a system of honest money which will always be flawed by human nature, we need GOLD to return to its ancient job description as perfect property. The kind of stuff that can be OWNED, not "as money," but rather, OWNED....... (wait for it......).... UNAMBIGUOUSLY!!!!

Political Money, Political Gold

Today the ten-year-old Euro currency is not defined as any certain quantity of gold. Instead, it uses gold as a financial reserve so that each increase in the price of gold brings an increase in the Euro's reserves and thus an increase in the value of the Euro itself! This Freegold concept is closer to the tenets of Libertarianism than the gold standards of the past because of the gold exchange restrictions that always inevitably followed a gold standard.

Freegold is not a new currency. Instead, it is a completely sustainable exchange system between transactional fiat currency and gold, the wealth reserve par excellence!

On an individual level, the idea that your wealth is meant to be placed in harms way in order to earn a yield is a perpetual lie of the current inflationary system. Low risk yields cannot beat real inflation in the long run, and they often don't in the short run either. Your hard earned wealth was never meant to be risked. It only needs to be preserved!

We view the US dollar's value today through the window of the USDX, a relative comparison of the dollar with its most significant trading partners, primarily, the Euro. But imagine the situation of an exploding gold price combined with a terminal dollar. The ECB could easily use not only its dollar reserves to buy up spot gold, but it could also print Euros outright to buy any gold still offered for sale.

The dollar, on the other hand, must SELL gold if it hopes to slow its own collapse. So the dollar must sell gold to defend itself, while the Euro is free to BUY gold while defending itself from a systemic collapse!

Freegold will not compete with the Euro the way it will with the dollar. Freegold is not a competing currency to the Euro, but instead it is a wealth building asset within the Euro's monetary construct! As this transition unfolds, even the raw printing of Euros for gold, normally an inflationary event, can strengthen the Euro from within its golden asset base. Architecture! Planned, executed, now in use.

FOA taught us that clarity in understanding this new gold market comes from the understanding that there are many political factions involved in this dramatic monetary evolution. The largest pro-gold factions are actually those that want a global currency that is not subject to the health of the American economy (or ANY economy for that matter). Currently, most forex reserves held by foreign central banks are merely a debt of the US government, backed only by a properly functioning, tax-paying American economy.

You would be surprised how clearly this concept is understood outside the USA. It is quite an uncomfortable position to be in, to have your wealth's very existence depend on your neighbor's ability to produce enough income to service his unsustainable debt!

These most-pro-gold factions are not necessarily the ones you would think. They are much of Europe and the oil producing Middle East for the most part. These are the major factions that will be hurt least by a collapse of the dollar's economy, because they have been preparing for it for decades. But others, like China, are starting to come on board with this anti-dollar, pro-gold movement. (Perhaps even India too?)

These political factions are not interested in a new gold standard like the failed Bretton Woods system. No, they are seeking something far better. They no longer see any advantage in holding a Treasury promise of future payment (half a transaction) over holding physical gold as a payment in full. The fact that Treasury's pay interest has become a joke in these central banking circles. They see clearly now that economic instability and currency fluctuations can easily wipe away any interest earned, overnight!

No, the only reason left for holding these paper reserves is the futile effort to stabilize a collapsing system. You hold foreign currency today so that you can sell it to buy back your own currency if it falls. Or you buy foreign reserves to lower your own currency if that is desired. This is not a game of wealth accumulation as it has been played. And this fact is not lost on many countries outside of the dollar zone.

On the other hand, buying gold on the open market, using either your own currency or your excess Treasury's and dollars, creates a far different exchange/reserve dynamic. It takes physical gold off the market, increasing its value. Gold has always been the dollar's only competitor for global exchange reserve status. And no nation will ever run out of its own currency (which it can print) when buying gold. Of course this will drive the price of gold sky high, but from a CB perspective it is viewed as taking on reserves, not selling them off.

Basically, this is the direction the entire non-dollar world is heading. This new system is not being built on the foundation of any single nation-state or economy. In the future, any one fiat or its attached economy can fail completely without bringing down the whole system. This is what stability is all about. It is the separation of the money concept from both gold, the tangible, tradable physical wealth reserve, and from the albatross of the hungry nation-state.

Would you like to get a glimpse of the future the way the Giants see it? Pick any price for gold. Say, $39,000 per ounce. Then list out the CB reserves of each country as they are now, and also as they will be when their dollar "assets" are worth maybe a nickel on the dollar (purchasing power) and gold is $39,000. This will give you the "birds-eye view" that they have their eyes on. With this view it is easy to see why there is a movement to end the dollar standard, which is backed only by a healthy US economy. In other words, it is currently unbacked!

When you understand how it is, that it is economically (and therefore politically) undesirable for other major currencies to appreciate against their peer currencies (which is exactly what would happen to any currency replacing the dollar’s reserve status), you will subsequently know why gold shall continue to emerge as the de facto solution to the international reserve question.

And here I emphasize de facto rather than de jure because this has become a global phenomenon driven by a natural evolution (survival and ascent of the fittest) and does not require any additional international treaty or enabling legislation as a prerequisite or for motivation.

The breeze is fair and the road ahead is clear for the ascent of gold. -- Unknown (but wise) Author (11/05/09)

Sincerely,
FOFOA

Credit for elements of this Thought mash up go out especially to Aristotle and FOA, but also to Belgian, The Invisible Hand, MK, and of course Another. I stand here in full view because I stand on the shoulders of true Giants! Thank you all!

Open Forum

The last thread was getting a little full! :)

FANNIE MAE IN THE NEWS AGAIN...

News Snips:

Nov. 6 (Bloomberg) -- The U.S. Treasury rejected Fannie Mae’s request to sell $2.6 billion in low-income housing tax credits that the mortgage-finance company wasn’t likely to use.

“Every politician on Capitol Hill right now hates Goldman,” said Paul Miller, a bank analyst with FBR Capital Markets in Arlington, Virginia. “Politically, this would look really bad.”

Fannie Mae has posted $120.5 billion in net losses over the past nine quarters and requested $59.9 billion in Treasury aid.

A Goldman Sachs spokesman, Lucas van Praag, declined to comment, as did a Fannie Mae spokesman, Brian Faith.

The blocked sale illustrates the political and policy challenges facing the government as it looks to conserve both companies' capital while balancing larger policy and political goals.

The deal pitted two government agencies against each other over how best to run Fannie and its smaller rival, Freddie Mac. The government took over both mortgage-finance companies 14 months ago through a legal procedure known as conservatorship.

A Goldman Sachs spokesman declined comment. A representative of Berkshire Hathaway couldn't immediately be reached.

A Goldman Sachs spokesman declined to comment.

The sale of the tax credits would have helped stabilize Fannie Mae. The company on Thursday said bad mortgages and a federal foreclosure prevention program left it with a $18.9 billion loss, forcing it to tap a Treasury line of credit again to plug a hole in its net worth.

FLASHBACK! (14 months ago)

Freegold

Every time gold has a big up day like today I see a lot of forum comments from people that say "you can't eat gold". Or, "I'd rather buy some farm land". Or, "Gold is no different than any other commodity, why not buy silver? Look, in percentage terms silver went up twice as much as gold today!" Or, "Gold is not good for anything. It is useless. Its value is a myth!"

What all these people don't understand is that gold is truly only a wealth asset. It is a tangible, tradable wealth asset that is valued by central banks, by the elite, by the wealth giants of this world, and even by the little guy. Especially in regions outside of the US dollar currency zone. But what is so special about gold's price movement this time around is that this is the very beginning of a functional transformation for gold. Gold is right now in the process of complete demonetization. It is being set free from the dollar which has held it captive in a monetized (controlled parity) state for a long, long time. Gold is transforming into a completely demonetized wealth asset. And along with this move will come a whole new level of value, completely detached from any linear analysis of gold's dollar-based price history over the past century or two, or three.

People seem to have the most difficulty understanding how gold will have a much higher value as a pure wealth asset than it had as a medium of exchange or unit of account. As a currency circulates through the economy, productive participants squirrel away a little wealth each time the currency passes through their grasp. They do this by purchasing whatever they perceive to be the best wealth asset at that time. This wealth asset accumulation grows, over time, to be much greater in size than the whole of the circulating transactional currency. For example, the global money supply (monetary base) is around US$5 trillion. [1] Yet the global stock and bond markets are currently valued at around US$120 trillion and all the markets combined (stocks, bonds, forex, credit derivatives, hybrid securities, options, futures, forwards, swaps, OTC derivative, real estate, etc...) are currently valued at well over US$1,000 trillion. [2] [3]

Even though gold is no longer used as money, it was still confined in a pseudo-monetized state for the last few decades through the dollar system's paper gold market, which intentionally inflates the supply of paper gold beyond its underlying physical backing in order to keep the much smaller physical gold market locked in a relative parity with the dollar. Consider that all known above-ground gold (approx. 5 billion ounces) is worth only about US$5.4 trillion at today's prices. Does this sound like gold is trading at par with wealth, or with transactional currency?

What Another and FOA came forward to tell us back in 1997 was that the European architects of a new regional currency had already thought this whole debt accumulation process through to the end, and were preparing for just such an unavoidable eventuality. That structurally, the new Euro monetary system had been designed to withstand this single, inevitable event; the complete demonetization of physical gold!

Another and FOA revealed their knowledge under the cover of anonymity on an Internet forum over a period spanning four years. But other clues to this underlying design were also released through official public statements over the past decade. Please compare and contrast these statements with what you get from CNBC, the Fed, the Treasury, and everyone else who speaks on behalf of the dollar.

In July of 1998 the brand new ECB announced that gold would be included as 15% of the required foreign reserve assets behind its new currency and that the gold asset would be marked to the market price each quarter, a decidedly NON-monetary thing to do! You don't mark your "cash" to market, but you do mark your ASSETS to market.

In September of 1999 the European central banks met in Washington DC and signed "The Washington Agreement on Gold". Here was their press release after the meeting:

Press Communique - 26 September 1999
Statement on Gold

Oesterreichische Nationalbank
Banca d'Italia
Banque de France
Banco do Portugal
Schweizerische Nationalbank
Banque Nationale de Belgique
Banque Centrale du Luxembourg
Deutsche Bundesbank
Banco de España
Bank of England
Suomen Pankki
De Nederlandsche Bank
Central Bank of Ireland
Sveriges Riksbank
European Central Bank

In the interest of clarifying their intentions with respect to their gold holdings, the above institutions make the following statement:

1. Gold will remain an important element of global monetary reserves.
2. The above institutions will not enter the market as sellers, with the exception of already decided sales.
3. The gold sales already decided will be achieved through a concerted programme of sales over the next five years. Annual sales will not exceed approximately 400 tonnes and total sales over this period will not exceed 2,000 tonnes.
4. The signatories to this agreement have agreed not to expand their gold leasings and their use of gold futures and options over this period.
5. This agreement will be reviewed after five years.

It is believed by some that while this Washington Agreement was a uniquely positive event for the gold market, that the real purpose of this agreement and its public statements on CB gold sales was the cooperative and coordinated redistribution of publicly held gold in preparation for the coming revaluation that I call Freegold. That the purpose was to use market-priced transfers of gold between central banks, in broad daylight, to create a careful distribution of gold, proportional in size to other reserves held by each central bank, before the inevitable reset the entire financial system.

In 2002 in his acceptance speech for the International Charlemagne Prize which was awarded to "the Euro" that year, ECB president, the late Willem F. Duisenberg had this to say:

The euro, probably more than any other currency, represents the mutual confidence at the heart of our community. It is the first currency that has not only severed its link to gold, but also its link to the nation-state. It is not backed by the durability of the metal or by the authority of the state. Indeed, what Sir Thomas More said of gold five hundred years ago – that it was made for men and that it had its value by them – applies very well to the euro.

Why would he say it was the FIRST CURRENCY to sever its link to gold? Hadn't the dollar done that in 1971?? Perhaps he meant something deeper!


In 2004 the European central banks renewed the Washington Agreement and this was their press release:

ECB Press release
Joint Statement on Gold
8 March 2004
European Central Bank

Banca d'Italia
Banco de España
Banco de Portugal
Bank of Greece
Banque Centrale du Luxembourg
Banque de France
Banque Nationale de Belgique
Central Bank & Financial Services Authority of Ireland
De Nederlandsche Bank
Deutsche Bundesbank
Oesterreichische Nationalbank
Suomen Pankki
Schweizerische Nationalbank
Sveriges Riksbank

In the interest of clarifying their intentions with respect to their gold holdings, the undersigned institutions make the following statement:

Gold will remain an important element of global monetary reserves.

The gold sales already decided and to be decided by the undersigned institutions will be achieved through a concerted programme of sales over a period of five years, starting on 27 September 2004, just after the end of the previous agreement. Annual sales will not exceed 500 tons and total sales over this period will not exceed 2,500 tons.

Over this period, the signatories to this agreement have agreed that the total amount of their gold leasings and the total amount of their use of gold futures and options will not exceed the amounts prevailing at the date of the signature of the previous agreement.

This agreement will be reviewed after five years.

During the next five years to 2009 the central bank gold sales gradually dwindled, not reaching their prescribed limit, until finally in 2009 the central banks, as a community whole, actually became net BUYERS of gold rather than sellers! [4] [5] [6] And when the central bank gold agreement (CBGA is the same as the WA) was renewed this past August, the ceiling was lowered from 500 tonnes to 400 tonnes per year. Not that it mattered anymore with the banks being net buyers now. It was simply a formality this time. Here is the latest CBGA press release, again reaffirming the importance of gold:

PRESS RELEASE
7 August 2009 - Joint Statement on Gold
European Central Bank

Nationale Bank van België/Banque Nationale de Belgique
Deutsche Bundesbank
Central Bank and Financial Services Authority of Ireland
Bank of Greece
Banco de España
Banque de France
Banca d’Italia
Central Bank of Cyprus
Banque centrale du Luxembourg
Bank Ċentrali ta’ Malta/Central Bank of Malta
De Nederlandsche Bank
Oesterreichische Nationalbank
Banco de Portugal
Banka Slovenije
Národná banka Slovenska
Suomen Pankki – Finlands Bank
Sveriges Riksbank
Swiss National Bank

In the interest of clarifying their intentions with respect to their gold holdings the undersigned institutions make the following statement:

1. Gold remains an important element of global monetary reserves.

2. The gold sales already decided and to be decided by the undersigned institutions will be achieved through a concerted programme of sales over a period of five years, starting on
27 September 2009, immediately after the end of the previous agreement. Annual sales will not exceed 400 tonnes and total sales over this period will not exceed 2,000 tonnes.

3. The signatories recognize the intention of the IMF to sell 403 tonnes of gold and noted that such sales can be accommodated within the above ceilings.

4. This agreement will be reviewed after five years.

European Central Bank
Directorate Communications
Press and Information Division
Kaiserstrasse 29, D-60311 Frankfurt am Main
Tel.: +49 69 1344 7455, Fax: +49 69 1344 7404
Internet: http://www.ecb.europa.eu

And just yesterday, during the LMBA conference in Edinburgh, Scotland, keynote speaker Paul Mercier, 'Principal Adviser in Market Operations' and 'Chairman of the Working Group on Monetary and Exchange Rate Policy Instruments and Procedures' for the ECB said, "gold is no longer important from a monetary point, but is important as an asset."!!!

Did you catch that? Here it is again...

...gold is no longer important from a monetary point, but is important as an asset.

Here is a little more context from Dow Jones:

Gold To Remain Important Asset Of European Central Banks-ECB

EDINBURGH -(Dow Jones)- Gold will remain an important asset for European central banks as risk diversification becomes a more significant issue, the European Central Bank said Monday.

Speaking at the London Bullion Market Association conference, Paul Mercier, deputy director general of market operations at the European Central Bank, said gold is no longer important from a monetary point, but is important as an asset.

"Gold makes sense as a contributor to risk diversification," Mercier said. " Even if some central banks continue to sell and there is a new potential seller with the IMF, I wouldn't conclude that gold holdings in central banks will decline in the coming years."

He said the Eurosystem holds 10,800 metric tons of gold, roughly one third of world gold reserves.

-By Devon Maylie, Dow Jones Newswires

And then of course, today we learned that the IMF has "redistributed" 200 tonnes of gold to India! Surprise surprise!! One can only wonder what message was intended with this sale. The message I take is that there is a new floor under gold now! A new put. A new bid. And clearly more than just the Chinese want it!

Nov. 3 (Bloomberg) -- The International Monetary Fund said it is selling 200 metric tons of gold to the Reserve Bank of India for about $6.7 billion...

The transaction, which involved daily sales from Oct. 19-30 at market prices, is in the process of being settled, the IMF said in the statement. The average price in the transaction with India was about $1,045 an ounce...

The lender has said it is ready to sell directly to central banks and later make transactions on the open market if necessary. The IMF official declined to say whether other central banks have expressed interest in purchases.

But what is most significant about this ongoing redistribution of gold, the "important element of global monetary reserves", in preparation for the Freegold value reset, is that in countries like India, China and in the Eurozone this redistribution is even inclusive of us little people, not just the central banks, elites and giants! In China, the government is encouraging its citizens to buy gold and silver. In fact, it only recently opened up this market! And in India the State Bank of India recently announced in its annual report:

The number of branches for retail sale of gold coins has increased from 250 in 2008 to 518 in 2009. The Scheme will be extended to cover all important centres of the country in 2009-10 by increasing the number of branches selling gold coins to about 1100.

They are trying to make buying gold coins EASIER for the people in India! And so it is in Europe as well! In the Euro currency zone, the VAT (value added tax) was removed from gold but not from silver (or anything else for that matter), and gold is now sold to the public right through the commercial banking system!

It is only here inside the wonderful dollar currency zone that we are "sheltered" and "protected" from the truth about gold! Did you notice that the UK central bank, The Bank of England signed the first Washington Agreement but not the second or third? The BOE is a staunch supporter of the Fed and the dollar system.

But outside of the dollar faction, serious preparations are underway for the end of dollar supremacy and the emergence of the completely demonetized gold wealth asset, and all that it will mean! And it will mean and reveal a whole lot of truth about the world we live in! It will reveal the end of dollar and US hegemony. And it will reveal the emergence of a de facto worldwide meritocracy. It will reveal that most of what we thought was real wealth based on an unsustainable debt pyramid was just an illusion of wealth! Gone... to where all illusions eventually go.

I read where some of you say I am wrong about Freegold. That it won't or can't happen because country A isn't ready for it, or country B doesn't want it. Or that "the elite" will never allow it. Etc... etc... Blah blah blah...

Well, Freegold, or whatever you want to call it, is kind of like a runaway freight train coming right at us. It is not stoppable and it is not controllable. It has a mind of its own and too much momentum to do anything but prepare for its arrival. It is not for any elite or any country to decide when and if it happens. It is only for them and us to be as prepared as possible when it does.

Here is one more interesting story from this week:

Saudi: dollar role 'confused' in oil pricing

KUWAIT - Saudi Arabia's top monetary official said denominating oil sales in dollars does not necessarily mean that payments from those sales are received in dollars or that investments would be done in dollars either.

"The pricing issue has no relationship with the payment issue and doesn't have a relationship with the investment issue," said Muhammad al-Jasser, Governor of the Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency, at a financial conference. "There is a big mixup between the three roles for any currency."

"The dollar is the most used currency in pricing all imports and exports, especially for commodities and not only in the Gulf -- even the Europeans still price in dollar," Jasser told reporters.

"But pricing in dollar does not necessarily mean that you receive in dollar and does not necessarily mean that you will invest in dollar," he said

"That's why I think that it is important not to confuse between the three roles for any currency, whether it is the dollar, sterling, the yen or the euro," Jasser said.

Allow me to translate this for you:

"For the time being, we will continue using the dollar in FOFOA's "pure concept of money" function, the mental unit of account, because that is what the world is used to. But soon we will no longer be using the dollar in its other functions vital to US hegemony. We are already phasing out the transactional function, the medium of exchange role, and we are no longer using the dollar in the store of value function for our wealth."

Does it strike any of you as much as it does me, how insignificant another $6.7 billion in the IMF coffers seems when compared to the quite significant 200 metric tonnes of physical gold being transferred from one single entity to another? This is the largest single publicized gold purchase in at least 30 years! When you think about the Fed literally PRINTING $300 billion for the US Treasury over the last 6 months, or the $500 billion in currency swaps, or the unknown $trillions in Fed quantitative easing, it really makes you wonder if this was the best way for the IMF to raise another $6.7 billion.

This striking paradox WILL be corrected, by the way, through Freegold.

For a bit of perspective on India's score, the heaviest load ever carried by the largest airplane in the world was 253.82 tonnes, but that was a short, low altitude test flight exceeding its rated capacity by 4 tonnes. The heaviest single job this flying behemoth has ever been hired for was a generator weighing 187.6 tonnes. It has also carried train locomotives that weighed less than India's new gold. So India's gold would certainly be considered a "full payload" for the largest plane in the world. And there is only one of them! With any other plane it would take several trips. This is the Ukraine-based Antonov An-225, which can be hired for a job like this through a broker in Beverly Hills.



So India, if you would like some help bringing your gold home, let me know. My fee will be modest. I actually have hired this plane before. It is true! Although it was not for transporting gold. So what do you say? Let's make some history, set a world record for the most gold transported on one plane, and avoid that Somali coastline in the process! You can find my email address, India, by clicking on the donate button to the right. ;)

Sincerely,
FOFOA

Money Talk Continued

We had a good discussion on the concept of money developing after the last three posts. Here are a few of my comments, re posted by request:
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This first one was a response to a question about a potential dollar rally during another global liquidity crisis...

Hello Anonymous (6:05PM),

Here are some thoughts and comments as you requested:

We need to keep a few principles in mind in order to understand what is being discussed in these confusing discussions about a liquidity crisis, currency swaps, and supposed dollar strength. My apologies if I simplify this too much for your taste, but my thoughts are simple ones...

1) First of all, what are all banks and bankers afraid of? A run!

2) Hyperinflation coincide with a multiplication of the monetary base (which is the natural response to the market devaluing "broad money", near-cash credit assets), not with the credit expansion of broad money through commercial bank lending.

3) The USDX measures the supply and demand of actual base money needed for transaction clearing, not the willingness of banks to stick their necks out further. Base money is the "reserve" in the term "fractional reserve banking". We could call it "fractional base money banking".

4) Currency devaluations are long term and permanent. USDX quotes are short term and temporary.

5) There is no difference between the $ and the $-financial industry ($-FI). What is bad for one is bad for the other. A run on the system is just as bad as a run on the banks, or a run on the dollar. Any run screws them all.

6) Much of what we all think of as money (dollars) is not really dollars in the same sense as the dollars needed in a liquidity crisis. We think of money mostly as M2. But a liquidity crisis requires MB (Monetary Base, or base money)

7) "The system", meaning the worldwide financial industry is divided into sub-systems; The Federal Reserve system, the Eurozone system, the British system, etc... What differentiates these sub-systems from one another is their own currency, which can be created on a whim by the central bank and lent to banks that need extra funds with the CB taking collateral from the borrowing bank in the form of assets denominated in that currency.

8) Each sub-system is a completely interconnected network of financial institutions, including commercial banks, investment banks, brokerages, etc... 99% of all transactions within each sub-system clear without ever having to move money (dollars). For example, within the bigger banks, most transactions clear in-house. One person might buy a house, taking out a new loan for $100,000 while some other bank customer sells his house paying off his $100,000 loan. These two transactions cancel each other out in-house. Inter-bank transactions cancel each other out as well. For the most part, finance and banking is a zero-sum game within each sub-system, from stock transactions to bond transactions to new loans to settled loans to you writing a check to your dentist. If one bank ends up with more at the end of the day and another with less, then the central bank clears the trade with a book entry transferring "reserves" from one bank to the other. Even new loans do not really create the kind of money that is needed in a liquidity crisis. They create credits issued by the bank, liabilities that are counterbalanced by the debt papers you signed. Those credits entitle the bearer to dip into the bank's actual dollar reserves, but do not create new dollars. The only new dollars that get created are when the bank must move funds to cover fractional reserve requirements. Those funds then become new monetary base. THOSE are the kinds of dollars needed in a liquidity crisis.

9) Each sub-system has a TREMENDOUS amount of flexibility since the CB acts as the ultimate clearing house between all the financial institutions in that sub-system. And since we are now on a purely symbolic fiat currency, the CB can create any liquidity the system needs. If one bank comes up so short at the end of the day, owing another bank more reserves than it has, then the CB just creates new reserves and lends them to the bank that is short and the CB takes assets (from the borrowing bank) onto its own balance sheet to counterbalance and collateralize the loan of fresh new money. This flexibility has virtually eliminated all banking liquidity problems within any given sub-system. Only an actual bank run on physical cash within a sub-system presents a real threat. And if that run happens to only one bank in that sub-system, then that bank is sacrificed. If a sub-system-wide run on cash were to happen, we would have a bank holiday while they figured out the best way to devalue the monetary base and increase it.

10) Viewing the whole worldwide financial system, in which the BIS acts as the ultimate clearing house, there is much less flexibility because the BIS does not print the currencies it clears. The BIS would prefer ITS central clearing to be done in gold bullion, stored in its vaults and moved from one countries slot to another when necessary. But the $-system doesn't want to play that game. Even still, 99% of the worldwide transactions clear without the need to transfer any funds around... as long as it is a "business as usual" day.

11) Problems start to arise in the international clearing house when daily transactions become unbalanced, meaning too many people trying to do the same thing all at once, with no one willing to do the opposite thing. The two sides of a zero-sum game are never in perfect balance, but they are usually close enough that market pricing takes care of the difference. (If there are too many sellers then the price drops until the sellers equal the buyers.) But sometimes an event happens that spooks the markets and sends everyone to one side of a trade all at once. Prices go into free fall which spooks the markets even more. Then the exchanges are shut down "to let cooler heads prevail". But this only spooks the market further. Finally, at the end of the day, the clearing house is left with a big one-sided mess to clean up.

12) Here is the big problem. Each of these sub-systems has its own currency which its CB can print at will... flexibility! But with the dollar being the global reserve currency, there are lots and lots of dollar-denominated assets held by financial institutions in many non-$ sub-systems. So when there is turmoil in the dollar-denominated markets, the non-dollar sub-systems run into a clearing problem because they can't print dollars to help banks that owe other banks more dollars than they have. So they turn to the BIS, who also can't print dollars. Only the Fed can. So the Fed ends up being the de facto CB to the world. But it is not the clearing house for the world, and it does not take assets onto its books from those foreign banks that got into trouble. Instead, it lends directly to the other CB's which print some of their own new currency and send it to the Fed in exchange. This is why it is called a "swap" instead of Quantitative Easing. They are swapping freshly printed currencies instead of assets for currencies. All base money! The same as cash. TWICE as potentially inflationary as QE on a global scale because two sides are now exposed to currency risk.

13) When the Fed makes these international currency swaps, it doesn't send pallets of hundred dollar bills on a plane. It simply makes a contract with the foreign CB and a book entry. The contract is a two-way promise to later provide pallets of physical cash if anything goes wrong and cash is needed. And with this promise in hand, the foreign CB makes a similar contract (promise) with the European bank that got in trouble. The foreign CB promises to later provide physical cash if necessary (if something goes wrong), and the bank submits assets to the CB as collateral. Next the troubled bank passes those dollar promises (IOUs) on to the bank it owes the dollars to and that bank credits its customer's account with dollars it doesn't have, but now has indirect access to (if needed). The idea is that as things return to normal and transactions start clearing in a more balanced state that ultimately the dollars that were needed will be able to be gotten on the open market without causing a spike in the price and they can work their way back to the foreign CB. The troubled bank, for example, can later trade assets for dollars and pay back the foreign CB which will then pass those physical dollars on to the bank holding the IOU. And now that the European problem has been cleared, the foreign CB can cancel that portion of the two-way swap agreement with the Fed. And no physical dollars need cross the ocean. And that portion of the currency risk is eliminated.

14) Base money is either physical cash or a liability (IOU) that traces directly back to the Fed, which includes reserves held at the Fed. In other words, it is physical cash, or the promise of physical cash from he who can print physical cash. The Fed is willing to issue these promises willy nilly but hopes it doesn't actually end up having to do the printing.

15) The USDX is a measure of dollar exchanges with other currencies that happen on the open market. The Fed can counteract a rise in open market dollar demand by providing a supply of dollars directly to banks within its own sub-system, or indirectly to foreign banks through swaps with other CB's. Last year the Fed had a lot of practice doing this fast. I am sure the contractual transaction with the foreign CB's took several hours and included recording video teleconferences in which the agreements were legally bound. But now that they have experience doing this in a crisis, next time it will probably be almost instantaneous.

16) So as long as there is more demand for dollars than supply, the Fed can control the price of the dollar on the USDX by its own willingness to lend dollars at zero interest with toxic assets or foreign currency as collateral. This costs the Fed nothing, except currency risk and bad PR at blogs like mine. But where the Fed loses control is when there is more supply than demand. And that is what is coming because of this very inflationary policy of providing dollars to save the system at any cost.

17) The problem is with the assets that are being swapped around for dollars, whether with the Fed or with the foreign CB's. These assets are becoming less and less liquid because they are not valued correctly. If they were valued correctly, the banks would be insolvent and have to file bankruptcy. They wouldn't even have enough assets to settle their debts by swapping with the CB's. This is why the assets need to remain marked to myth. But this makes the assets only sellable to the CB's. The open market doesn't want them. So the clearing mechanism that is needed to reverse the flow of supposedly temporary base money into the system is breaking down. The Fed tells us with a straight face that it can reverse everything it has done so far. But that is only the case if the free, open market is willing to take up all the slack the Fed put out there by private investors buying toxic assets at marked to model prices.

18) So the next time the Fed has to create a trillion new dollars of liquidity, it is likely going to stick in the system as base money that cannot be removed. Ultimately the Fed will be contractually obligated to print actual bills and supply them to the banks and CB's that hold the contract for them. And this is what devalues the dollar.

Conclusions: The USDX is a rather poor metric by which to judge the dollar, even in the short term. As long as there is a demand for base dollars, like there is in a panic or a crisis, the Fed has total control over whether it wants to let that demand bid the dollars on the open market, or provide them itself. And the Fed cares more about the financial system than the value of the dollar, so it will surely provide any liquidity that is needed.

The next crisis, if it is mainly in the US financial system, will likely not spike the dollar because the Fed has total control and flexibility within its own system. If it is spread throughout the world it may spike as foreign banks bid up dollars on the exchange, but the Fed is now more experienced than it was a year ago and will likely put a lid on it very quickly.

But this next dollar shock will probably be irreversible, unlike the last. And in such, it will increase the global supply of dollar monetary base by a large percent. Perhaps by 100% or more. This alone will devalue the dollar and be the cause of the next shock which will require a similar response by the Fed, perhaps increasing the base by another 50% as China and others dump the last of their bonds onto the open market in a highly one-sided transaction sending the value of the bonds to zero, US interest rates to something so high they are non-existent, and the purchasing power of the dollar down into the stinky, Zimbabwe dirt.

So in short, I guess I agree with David Bloom. Of course it COULD rally, but I don't think the Fed will let it (unless it happens to have some T-bonds to sell that week!). Letting it rally too high would crush the financial system (by driving asset values into the dirt) which the Fed wants to save at any cost. Even though the cost will be the crushing of the system. The ol' Catch-22.

Sorry if this seemed a bit simplistic or a little elementary. Of course there are more complicated issues involved, like the $ carry trade and cross-currency investments. Derived foreign exchange activities become very complicated very fast! Too complicated for the banks, obviously! But I hope I at least covered the basics of the problem, enough to explain my answer. You all will be sure to let me know if I got something wrong... I am sure of that! ;)

Sincerely,
FOFOA

PS. This is the big secret that George F. Baker didn't want to tell Congress in 1913. That most all of what we think is money is really just promises issued by banks to supposedly credit-worthy entities giving them the right to withdraw value from a small reserve of actual money, but at the same time praying to God that they don't! It's like saying, "here you go, it's all your's, whenever you want it come and get it" with their fingers crossed behind their backs hoping you won't ever actually "come and get it".

But whatever happens in the short term, the USDX will ultimately collapse just as Jim Sinclair says because ultimately is DOES represent a preference of currencies for use in international trade. And we know where that is heading, especially while the Fed hyperinflates the MB trying to save its own precious global $-FI!

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And in response to "Then why is the FDIC closing so many banks?"...

Hello Allen,

The FDIC is closing banks because they are insolvent. This is actually a system-wide problem as so much of the asset base is built upon the housing and commercial real estate sectors. But the bigger banks are being protected by accounting rules that let them lie about the value of their complex derivatives.

The smaller banks still hold a lot of raw mortgages, not yet securitized. These losses are harder to conceal. Many banks are still lying by not foreclosing even on badly delinquent homeowners. But this is only making the problem worse and "kicking the can down the road".

These smaller banks don't have the assets to acquire the loans they need to cover their liabilities. They are insolvent, just like the big banks, but they can't hide it anymore, thus they get closed.

This is what people mean when they say, "this is not a liquidity crisis, it is an insolvency crisis". "Liquidity" means being able to get money for your assets from the CB (or from the open market). "Insolvency" means you don't even have the asset values to do that!

Sincerely,
FOFOA
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Some comments on Fekete's latest...

Wouldn't it be great if they just did away with all legal tender laws? Perhaps they could just keep one stating how they want you to pay your taxes. But let the courts defend any and all contractual agreements no matter what they are denominated in. And open the mint to free coinage! Of course this is all part of the world that SHOULD be, not the one that WILL be. So it doesn't give us much guidance for preserving (and increasing) the purchasing power we have NOW.

Isn't it interesting that the legal tender laws came out in 1909, just two years after the panic of 1907? As Fekete says, they led to the governmental ability to finance the world wars. But is legal tender really the problem? Or is it that the people continued to confuse the store of value function with the other monetary functions? If we now return back to the system of 1906, are we not returning to a system that has already reached a less than ideal end several times? Perhaps it would be better to embrace the separation of monetary functions as this will take away the ability to finance wars the same as a new gold standard would. Right?

Is it really the forcing of paper to be used as money (medium of exchange/unit of account) that allows the collective to rob the citizens? Or is it the conning of people into holding said paper as a store of value?? I think it is the latter much more than the former. Both to some extent, but more so the latter.

If people only hold the currency for the short time period of the medium of exchange function, then there is much less for the inflation tax to tax. The higher they turn up the inflation tax, the shorter the time people will hold the paper. In this case, the inflation tax would only be on the difference between your work contribution to the economy and what you could buy with your paycheck two weeks later. And the tax base would be limited to the amount of currency in circulation. But if people hold paper as wealth, the taxable base is orders of magnitude larger, and the inflation tax can be administered more slowly and surreptitiously because of the larger "tax base".

Imagine if every saver in 1909 started holding only gold coins in his possession as soon as they passed the legal tender laws. The parity between paper and physical gold would have snapped long before even the roaring 20's. Roosevelt would have confiscated gold valued in the many hundreds. But people trusted their governments back then. So it was easy to CONvince people that it was better to hold paper with a "yield"!

Fekete notes that no one hoarded gold until AFTER war started in 1914, at which time gold "went into hiding". But imagine if gold went into hiding in 1909 right after the legal tender laws were introduced. Perhaps then, there would not have been war at all. Or at least it would not have been so well funded!

It would sure be nice if Fekete would apply his brilliant mind to this Freegold concept! But alas, he is advocating for a new gold standard. A non-inflationary system, so we can all hold the same money we use in trade as a store of value.

Perhaps the next step in monetary evolution after a period of Freegold will be the elimination of legal tender laws in certain zones in order to gain economic advantage. This would likely be followed by the re-emergence of Fekete's "real bills". Of course I am only speculating way out into the future.

My point is that I like Fekete's analysis. It has great value! Hopefully he can help steer the direction that economic study turns as we pass through this crisis. But what are the odds that the governments of the world will suddenly listen to Antal Fekete and reverse the course of the Titanic in time? Zero perhaps? And even if they did, what would be the immediate consequences? The unintended ones?

My only point is that any superficial differences between Fekete and this blog boil down to the perspective with which we attack the problem. As you say, Shanti, "another angle"!

Fekete takes an activist approach while I take a passive one. Fekete would like to fully remonetize gold, locking it into all monetary functions. I, on the other hand, can see that we are already in the process of fully DEmonetizing gold, which will unlock a tremendous hidden value that is desperately trying to bust out of its shell. In the end, Fekete says that he wants people to have "the right to park their savings in gold coins, as they did before 1909." But they DO have that right already! They just haven't realized how good it will be... yet!

Sincerely,
FOFOA
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On "is it possible that most of what we think of FED is mistaken?"...

Hello Anon,

You are inching closer to the truth than you may think. The whole system is an elaborate, global illusion. The money itself is an illusion. Why do you think banks are now offering CD's with no early withdrawal penalty? It is a gimmick. It is a carefully constructed illusion. The main goal is to keep people from withdrawing their perceived value from the system. And to create a believable illusion, they have to say, "look, you can withdraw it whenever you want". Study the logical reasoning behind Certificates of Deposit and you will see that a CD that you can close at any time is an oxymoron. It is a new gimmick for desperate times. The whole system and all Fed statistics are a gimmick now, to keep you in their system.

FOFOA
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And finally, a little bit from FOA...

It is the dollar and all of its flaws that have led us to this place in history. Because of the dollar's obsession with gold, we are now entering a period where for the first time the monetary functions will separate out of necessity. It didn't have to be this way, but now it is. As FOA said,

"To their amazement, it turns out today, that digital use demand was the best function that supported their efforts all the while; by increasing the world's use and need for currency. Had they understood this modern economic function early on, they could have somewhat printed the currency outright with almost the same result while arriving at today's destination. They could have let gold float, not to mention they could have skipped a large portion of the debt build up that will now end the dollars timeline."

What he meant was that the post 1971 "purely symbolic dollar" architects thought they needed to cap the price of gold in order to keep the dollar in use. But in fact, it was the dollar's ease of use in the trade function that kept it in demand. Not its illusion of being a store of value. And had they realized this concept then, we could have had freegold soon after 1971 and the dollar would have lasted well beyond 2010. But instead, they set in motion a sequence of events that could only end one way, in the permanent backwardation of the gold market, meaning the emergence of a physical-only gold market at a much, much higher price, and also the end of the dollar's use in global trade.

This is where we are today. And as you watch the volatility in the markets (look a the Dow over the last few days!) think about this statement FOA made eight years ago...

""""""It's not that price inflation may erupt --------- It's not that the massive dollar debts won't be paid--------The risk is; that our money system requires dollar (goods prices) and debt stability -------- so without said stability the currency system fails""""""

Without an international floating gold reserve pricing, to balance against their devaluing debt reserve, the entire dollar banking system can only rely upon extreme dollar inflation to float it's accounts. Price inflation will have to be ignored. To this end the group of dollar supporting countries, we refer to as the dollar faction, has locked itself into a box. It must find a way to float gold prices"

"The entire dollar banking system can only rely upon extreme dollar inflation to float it's accounts."!!! It must ignore the (hyperinflationary) consequences of this policy and just do it. This is what S(herlock Holmes) uncovered!

Sincerely,
FOFOA
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Please continue discussing.... :)

Happy Halloween

Gold is Money - Part 3

Allow me to start by beating a dead horse. There is a vital difference between what may in fact be the ideal, perfect monetary system and what are the real monetary changes we are heading straight into today. My purpose for writing this blog is to share with you, and in return to receive your feedback on my own discovery and understanding of the latter. There are plenty of other sites that discuss the former.

If we can discover together where we are heading financially, economically and monetarily, and why we are heading there, then perhaps we can know, in advance, how the understanding of the global consciousness will evolve and unfold in the coming weeks, months and years. And, with this understanding, hopefully we can gain a certain peace of mind with regard to our own financial decisions, positions and future as we head into very stormy waters.

I know from my own experience that a little peace of mind is a priceless asset. It is one worth sharing, and one worth growing. Sharing and growing this asset together with you is my goal. Onward...

Our Understanding of Money

Let us quickly run through an assortment of common understandings of the term 'money'. The most common, mainstream understanding of money is that of a device bearing three functions. The three functions are 1) medium of exchange, 2) unit of account and 3) store of value.

A more purist understanding states that money is only a medium of exchange. And that the usability of money in other roles flows from its declared form. For example, if our common medium of exchange is physical gold only, then it is also an excellent store of value.

In fact, as a medium of exchange, money is only one half of a full barter exchange. The other half is when you change your money into that item you desire. But when physical gold is the common medium of exchange, then it is possible that the concept of a "medium" (or middleman) is incorrectly applied, because if gold was what you were after (for its store of value function), then the exchange is completed in only one step! Direct barter!

Finally, there is our new understanding of "the pure concept of money" which is our innate human ability to associate relative values. And within this understanding of 'money', it became clear that in order for our ability to function properly and efficiently in the way it has evolved over millennia, gold must be free for each of us to impute value to it.

Gold Exchange Standard

Our most recent experiment with gold as the conceptual medium of exchange ended badly. The purist understanding of money, the common medium of exchange, longs for it to be a real commodity, or at least linked to a commodity so that the actual medium can have a relatively stable value and double as a store of wealth. But when we lock a finite commodity into a parity relationship with an inflating paper currency, we only drag down that commodity's relative value compared to the rest of the real world as the related currency is inflated.

Over time, pressure builds up in this relationship set at par, the same as pressure builds between two business partners where one is lazy and unproductive and the other must carry the business through hard work. Sooner or later some of that pressure must be released and parity must be broken. Perhaps the lazy partner's equity position in the business is cut or reduced to reflect his lack of contribution, buying the ill fated relationship a little more time. This is what Roosevelt did with the dollar/gold relationship in 1933. But eventually these mismatched partners will have to part company once and for all. Just as gold and the dollar did in 1971.

In 1971 official parity was broken, but not forgotten. In the years since, an unofficial parity of sorts has been maintained through the paper gold market. Paper gold, like dollars, can be expanded and inflated while being locked at a par with the real thing. This is still going on today. But the pressure has been building for a long time now. This pressure held in the parity relationship between paper and physical gold is about to blow.


Gold Coin Standard

Even the gold coin standard we had leading up to the creation of the Federal Reserve System ended badly. You see, people put their gold coins into the banks and the banks lent them out. And then when confidence suffered a shock and the banks faced a run on gold, the system collapsed, many banks failed, and people lost their gold.

Human people want to be able to borrow money in the present that they plan to earn in the future. Not all people want to do this, but enough to influence the system certainly do. And this practice, by its very nature, expands the money supply beyond its physical commodity limits, even in a pure gold coin standard.

During the late nineteenth century, all the major nations of the world moved toward a gold coin standard, wherein the gold coin itself was the common currency and medium of exchange. Between 1873 and 1912 some forty nations used it. [Answers.com]

The following is a post by Randy (@ The Tower) describing the end of the gold coin standard and the dawn of the Federal Reserve System (in blue).

Continuing our investigation into the meaning/essence of "money"... In 1907 America was on the Gold standard and WITHOUT any central bank. Many modern goldbugs might be inclined to yearn for those "good ol’ days" when "money was money and banking was as it should be!"

However, that year is best known by the Panic of 1907 in which the people's economy was plagued by runs on trust companies, banking panics, and a bear market in stocks. Across the nation, banks were unable (and refused) to deliver gold coins and currency to satisfy the requests of depositors for withdrawals of money from their own accounts -- and 246 banks collapsed. It is not difficult to see how the frustration of depositors unable to obtain currency from banks (even solvent ones!) holding their deposits would lead to pressure for political intervention and change.

For a quick exercise in perspective, imagine what you would do today if faced with the same situation in which your bank could not give you any currency ($1s, $5s, $10s, $20s $50 or $100s) to carry away with you as a representation of the money residing in your bank account. No problem. You would simply write a personal check to meet your spending needs, or perhaps ask for a bank draft, or wire the money wherever it needed to go. Amazing! What IS money??? How did you get yours; where did it come from? How do you know what its value is?? Ponder that, and now we return to our glimpse at history...

In the wake of this banking panic, a National Monetary Commission was formed to undertake a scholarly look at the failings of America's financial system. Of these, the four major flaws cited were that the banks were decentralized, clearing methods were inefficient, the huge cash holdings of the federal government were not distributed where most needed, and the currency supply was inelastic. (Please ponder for a moment how or why the CURRENCY supply would ever be an issue if the amount of MONEY found in banks were at a one-to-one ratio with the currency (gold) that represented it. Surely, in this absence of a central bank there couldn't be more money than gold coin! That's impossible!! ) By 1911, the Commission had recommended a plan for a "Reserve Association of America" as the solution to these defects, giving rise two years later to what became our central bank -- The Federal Reserve System. However, that's another story for another time.

Through the coordinated stabilizing actions of three prominent NY bankers to arrest the banking panic [J.P. Morgan, George F. Baker (First National Bank), and James Stillman (National City Bank / Citibank)], their wealth and power was perhaps made more conspicuous in the eyes of the nation than perhaps it would otherwise have been. A prominent Wall Street lawyer named Samuel Untermyer suggested that there was a "Money Trust", and The Wall Street Journal also took notice of affairs and wrote, "So long as Congress will not give us what every other civilized country possesses, a central bank, it forces Wall Street to improvise something of the kind itself."

The House Banking and Currency Committee formed an investigative subcommittee to determine whether a Money Trust existed in NY. The chief counsel was Sam Untermyer, and I think you might gain some insights about the true nature of money from the testimony delivered by Morgan and Baker before the committee in Washington DC at the beginning of 1913.

In questioning Baker about the proposal for banking reform regarding expanded disclosure of bank assets and investments, Untermyer probed, "Why should not the assets, and the detailed assets, be a matter of public knowledge?"

Baker replied, "Business would come to rather a standstill."

Untermyer demanded, "I want you to explain to the committee why."

Baker declined, "I can not explain it."

Untermyer pressed further, "You mean you can give us no reason?"

Baker admitted, "It would be exposing all the details of that business to the whole world."

After following a sidetrack in questioning, Untermyer returned to this issue, asking, "Why should the public do business on confidence when it can get the facts?"

To which Baker proclaimed, "Mr. Untermyer, THE FUNDAMENTAL PRINCIPLE OF BANKING, perhaps more than some others, is CREDIT." [emphasis added]

It seems that George Baker sensed (rightly?) that the public, familiar with their Currency being a tangible asset (gold coin), would NOT be readily comfortable with the truth about Money. That is to say, that they might struggle to accept the reality that their Money Supply, as represented on the books of the bank, was created by credit, and existed through the grace of confidence. In effect, the tangible Currency had become a mere symbol for the Money (credit) it represented while circulating outside of bank account ledgers.

If you don't care to believe my assessment, I have another point for you. When Untermyer had J.P. Morgan on the witness stand, he asked him, "Is not commercial credit based primarily upon money or property?" [In this exchange, it appears that Untermyer ignorantly used the word "money" as equivalent to gold coin, a usage which Morgan plays similarly until his concluding point about granting CREDIT.]

Morgan responded, "No, sir, the first thing is CHARACTER." [emphasis added]

Untermyer, shocked, reiterated, "Before money or property?"

Morgan reassured, "Before money or anything else. Money cannot buy it. [credit]"

Untermyer remained obstinate against this notion, as though there were communication difficulties, and pressed again on this point.

Morgan then conclusively stated his conviction on the point that commercial CREDIT is based on character: "Because a man I do not trust could not get MONEY from me on all the bonds in Christendom."

From two eminent bankers who surely knew their business, you now have it that the creation or granting of Money (the extension of Credit) has more to do with the creditworthiness of the borrowers than the collateral that secures against possible default. And recall, these comments occurred while on a gold standard AND in total absence of a government-sponsored central bank -- which was authorized (against Baker's preference) a year later.

As you come to understand how Money and Credit are interrelated, the more you will understand the separate Wealth of gold and why you need it now more than ever.

The point here is that our modern understanding of money, or any money concept for that matter, combined with our modern taste for borrowing, lending and trading of credit and debt, may not NECESSARILY be a perfect fit with a pure gold standard. Even a gold standard, with gold as the actual currency, is manipulated by the banks through confidence-based lending schemes. Sure, a gold standard somewhat limits the collective in its more nefarious pursuits, but it also has flaws that always seem to lead to the same conclusion... failure.

Perhaps it is time for us to consider another alternative, even a natural one that is happening whether we like it or not. How about a new, de facto, free market-driven stasis instead of the old de jure (rigged) false parity relationship... how about Freegold?


The Fourth Dimension: Time

At any given moment, a snapshot of our world appears to be only three dimensions; left/right, backwards/forwards, up/down. But with the passage of each and every moment, the world changes. Values change! People change. Everything changes. And all of these changes happen as we move through the fourth dimension, time.

This fourth dimension is very important as we consider the pure concept of money. For it is in this fourth dimension that our pure concept of money resides!

If time was not a factor, then anything accepted as a generic medium of exchange could perfectly perform all the functions commonly linked to the term 'money'. You do your work (somehow without the passage of time) and get paid, and then spend your money on anything within that same moment in which your work's value was judged against the entire universe of real things. A perfect stasis of values would exist everywhere, all at once.

But here in the real world we must be concerned about how far we carry our money through the fourth dimension. Without this vital consideration, we stand to lose everything!

Breaking the Triangle

In part 1 of this series I used a diagram I created called The Modern Money Triangle. The three corners of the triangle represented the three primary functions of our modern understanding of money.


But as we pass through the coming phase transition in which the parity between paper gold and physical gold will be broken, cracks will start to form in certain parts of the triangle.


The fractures you see in this diagram are time related. On a short timeline [length of time is the key variable: "t"] fiat currencies will perform our necessary monetary functions, medium of exchange and unit of account. But at some point on the x-axis, 'length of time', we will switch to a different medium, gold.

On a long timeline, gold will perform our necessary monetary functions perfectly, store of value and long term unit of account. By the way, there is no upper limit on the x-axis of 'length of time' when it comes to gold. If plotted out it runs to infinity!

The outcome will be my new Freegold Quadrangle!


The "x-axis" represents the amount of time you are willing to hang onto the fiat currency you either earn or receive in payment. If the monetary authority is printing money, "t" will be shorter and shorter. In a hyperinflationary situation "t" will slide all the way to the left with a value close to zero. [1]


As the new Freegold system of natural, pristine balance emerges, the fiat monetary authority will find its wisest move is to keep the money supply under control. And with a "wise" CB, gradually the "t" value will shift back to the right, little by little.

The further "t" moves to the right, meaning the longer people are willing to hang on to their fiat, the more investment will flow into new businesses in that currency zone, and the more tax the greedy collective can grab. This is how it will work.

But even MORE interesting to us physical gold advocates is how we will get there!

In part 2 of this series I explained that "they" will save the system at any cost. And that this stance presented them with a dilemma. You see, if they don't save the system then "all paper will burn" and gold will "shoot the moon" as the wealth reserve par excellence. But if they DO save the system, "the cost" will be the devaluation of the dollar along with all fiat currencies... and gold will "shoot the moon" as the wealth reserve par excellence.

Q.E.D. [quod erat demonstrandum].

The Catch-22 of Modern Paper Wealth

The phrase "Catch-22" is common idiomatic usage meaning "a no-win situation" or "a double bind" of any type. [Wikipedia] "The catch" in our modern concept of paper wealth is that on one side it is collapsing from its own unsustainable debt service making it, in fact, a non-wealth. But on the other side, if we rescue it from its own un sustainability by guaranteeing or propping up the debt service, we collapse the very denominator of the wealth itself, the currency, and make it a non-wealth. It is a lose-lose situation... a Catch-22!

Do you remember the 1985 movie Wall Street? In it Gordon Gekko liked to buy whole companies through the stock market, shut them down, break them up, and then sell off the pieces. He had figured out that the pieces were more valuable than the whole. Remember in the end of the movie he went after Blue Star Airlines? My, how things have changed in 24 years.

On Friday we learned that Japan Airlines is now completely worthless. Its net worth is now NEGATIVE $8.8 billion!

JAL faces $8.8 billion excess debt if liquidated: source

TOKYO (Reuters) - Liabilities at Japan Airlines Corp (Tokyo:9205.T - News) would exceed its assets by as much as $8.8 billion if Asia's largest airline by revenues were liquidated, a source with direct knowledge of the matter said on Friday.

The estimate of JAL's negative net worth, calculated by a government-led task force in charge of its restructuring, underscores the depth of the problems facing the airline as it seeks aid from banks and the state to avoid bankruptcy.

Did you know that on Friday people were still buying JAL at a market capitalization price of $3.4 billion even though it was worth [NEGATIVE] -$8.8 billion? One thing I know for sure; Gordon Gekko would NOT have been interested in this one.

Which begs the question, how is the rest of the (publicly traded) economy doing after 24 years of debt accumulation?

This is where the $-debt regime has left us. With empty, hollow shells of corporate entities enslaved to produce revenue only to service their unsustainable debt. What if the owners of JAL decide to leave their vacuous corporate shell behind like a hermit crab abandoning his home, for the greener pastures of a fresh start? That debt hole, the $8.8 billion, is what we hold today as wealth!... inside the financial system! It is gone, not there, if they walk away. Just like an underwater homeowner walking away from his home. If the debt-slave quits, the value illusion is gone!

The entire financial industry today is marked to model, myth, illusion, whatever... just not reality. It is amazing that we even got a story like this, exposing a small portion of the gap between reality and "high finance". JAL is a dead man walking.

At least we are getting some honesty with regard to the real value of JAL. How about the rest of them? How about the banks? Who's debt do YOU hold as wealth? How is THEIR balance sheet doing? Do you have any idea?

Gold is pure equity... no one's debt. No one to walk away. No one to default in bankruptcy. Nothing to liquidate in an attempt to recapture 10 cents on the dollar.

The entire US banking system today is built upon the idea that debt-slaves will continue servicing their debt on millions of underwater houses marked to mythical values at which the loans were established. If you hold your wealth within this freakish system... all I can say is good luck!

The knowledge of the difference between principle and interest must be dead. Everyone is chasing an imaginary yield from entities with negative equity today... with their hard earned principle savings. Can you believe it?

But don't worry about JAL. It won't be quitting. It has been deemed too big to fail! This means that the printing press will guarantee not only its debt-slave service, but its executive bonuses as well (to keep the slaves in the field)!

Next up, the idiotic concept of too big to fail is set to bring down all the imaginary currencies, and with them, the system itself. And once again, gold is not only immune but highly levered in the OPPOSITE direction.

Consider this: You may not fully understand where we are heading. You may be figuring it out at your own pace. But the millions of ungodly fortunes in the world (yes, there are millions of fortunes) don't have that luxury. They must figure it out FAST... or die.


Survival of the Fittest

Try to imagine each and every fortune that exists today as a distinct animal. These "fortunes" can be held by individuals, organizations, by funds, or even by sovereign collectives. They can also be held in any number of vessels at this current time. For instance, the Saudis' fortune is largely held underground in oil deposits. Other fortunes are in paper financial products, like your pension fund, and others are already in gold.

As we move forward, the law of nature, the survival of the fittest will come more and more to the forefront. The wholesale creation of new digits is one way that some of the more inbred fortunes are trying to survive. Will it work? Others, with a deeper gene pool, are fleeing to the safety of gold.

Imagine this world of TOO MANY "fortunes" vying for survival in the limited landscape of the real world which is actually too small for them all to survive. The fortunes that have moved entirely into physical gold have already staked out their claim to a specific volume of real estate that is needed to survive in this brutal world. They now own their own territory, a true slice of the real world pie, on which to live and thrive.

Those that are still trying to increase their claim size by inflating paper digits may miss out because the landscape of reality is quickly being bought up by the more clever and observant animals. Survival of the fittest! Those fortunes that make the right moves in these trying times will be the ones to survive and thrive. The rest will die.

These "fortunes" are the giants. Their titanic battle for survival in the limited real world is what will take us where we are going. They need to figure things out quickly if they want to survive. Natural selection will pick the winners and kill off the losers. Today this epic battle nears its climax.

Stake out your own claim today before this final act unfolds. Then spread the word to as many people as possible. This is the best we can do, Lilliputians that we are.

Sincerely,
FOFOA

[1] No, the y-axis is nothing but a perpendicular connecting line to a parallel function. I am making a point with the help of visual aids and common understanding. I am not making a mathematical proof. Sorry if I offended any mathematicians with my terminology. :)

Gold is Money - Part 2

In our last discussion we distilled the pure concept of money down to the innate human ability to mentally associate relative values. Today we will expand this thought in order to apply it to some very different functions we associate with our modern, common understanding of money. Hopefully this exercise will help to reveal a deeper understanding of where we are heading.

Confusing the Human Instinct of Value Association

Taking the pure concept of money further, we can say that money is the range of numbers that we hold in our memory, or numbers that we write on paper in a bookkeeping account, for the purpose of value association.

Imagine an ancient barter system, where one cow trades for two goats. And one goat is worth five chickens. In our mental association of values we might use the chickens as the primary basis and attach a value of 1 to a chicken, to make trading a little easier. So a chicken is 1, a goat is 5, and a cow is 10. We now have a simple monetary system of 1 through 10 in which the numbers themselves are our money, and an object of wealth, the chicken, is our unit of account.

So if I have two cows, three goats, and 25 chickens to trade, I might calculate in my head that I have a total trading value of 60 monetary units with which to trade. That number 60 is my primitive concept of money. But I wouldn't say that my money account was only in chickens. I would have to say that I have a total value of 60, but my money account is in chickens, goats and cows.


Over time it was discovered by early man that gold was the most accepted tradable wealth of all, and soon almost everyone was accounting for their wealth using gold as the basis for the mental unit of account. Gold was better than chickens for many reasons, not the least of which that sometimes chickens died. Also, gold could be divided into smaller and smaller pieces. When you did this with chickens, again, they died. This was certainly acceptable at meal time, but not out on the road, traveling the trade routes.

So the pure concept of money was the account, the rating system for value, the worth association in your head. Physical gold became the main wealth object used in that bookkeeping practice. This is how it was for at least a thousand years. But as all things evolve, man eventually became accustomed to speaking of gold in the context of money accounting. Even as languages evolved the concept of money accounting and the physical wealth holding of gold became mingled as one and the same.

This transition was subtle and unnoticed, an evolution transcending generations and even civilizations. But it has led to what has become a major conflict in the money affairs of our modern world. As gold receipts took over as the concept of money accounting (the mental value association role), man became confused as he now had to value his cows and goats against chickens that were never there in the first place. Receipts for chickens that far exceeded the actual chicken count. And how to value real chickens in this case? One imaginary chicken receipt = 1 real chicken??

You see, man has not changed as much as we might think since his barter association days. We freely exercise our skill at the value associations of all real things. Real things must remain free to float up and down as the reality of supply and demand dictates in order for our innate skill to be most efficient. Our inherent need to constantly change valuations as we see fit is what is driving physical gold to break free from its modern monetary attachment.

We inherently want to use gold as a wealth item par excellence. We want to trade its changing value within the same universe of floating values that all other tangibles trade. But for the benefit of the bankers and the US Govt, in the pursuit of stable credit and debt values, we have tried to fix gold's value to our "pure concept of money" so that banks can lend THE MONEY CONCEPT ITSELF, in lieu of lending real things, or real gold. Gold cannot be rigidly fixed to any money concept that must constantly inflate in order to survive, as any lendable and borrowable fiat currency must do, because physical gold is in finite supply.

Lending a Mere Concept

Today's dollar is a purely symbolic currency. It is not officially attached to anything. Our modern money system, like those in the past (even ones attached to gold), is built upon the notion that a mere CONCEPT can be lent in lieu of actually having to lend (temporarily part with) something of real value. The banking system wants to lend us 'the number 10', and have us pay it back, with interest, in chickens, goats and cows. They literally want to have their cake and eat it too.

This system of lending a purely symbolic monetary CONCEPT instead of lending real wealth requires the perceived value of that CONCEPT to remain relatively stable or else the entire banking system will collapse. It is to this end that bankers, governments, politicians and economists always try to entangle (think: forced quantum entanglement) gold into the money system and control its value in order to keep their CIRCULATING DEBT CONCEPT viable and valuable.

This is the problem with the architecture of the dollar, versus how all non-reserve fiat currencies will work in a free gold environment. The dollar must cheat in order to retain any illusion of stability. There are other ways for a fiat to remain stable. Responsible currency management is one. And in a system where the value of all real things (including gold) float freely against the parallel universe of fiat currencies, this will be how they will work.

When the dollar became a mere concept in 1971, so did all fiat currencies in the world. Their only value lies in the tradable value associations we give them, based on what can be purchased in the parallel universe of real things. But because we have been encouraged to save these symbolic debt concept units in lieu of anything with real value, a mismatch has grown to epic proportions whereby not even a fraction of these debt units can be traded back into the real economy at anywhere near today's prices.

We have lent, borrowed, saved, sliced, diced, sold, resold and insured so many units of a mere CONCEPT while neglecting to pay attention to the comparative size of the real economy with which the CONCEPT must run in parallel.

Our political drive, our collective spirit, and our American lifestyle has encouraged the near-exponential growth of this system so that we could buy real goods from others without sending them real wealth in return. So that we could grow and expand our great nation on a CONCEPT alone! We have proclaimed a strong dollar for the past 15 years, promoted it to be "as good as gold" and not only a perfect substitute, but a much better substitute for real wealth holdings... "because you must earn a YIELD". The dollar is even held as a "hard money" wealth reserve behind other currencies!

And over this period of the last 38 years, while our dollar perfected its role as a medium of exchange, it also left in its wake a world chock full of worthless CONCEPT-denominated paper wealth that people and nations bought and held in lieu of anything real. Today we are in a transition that will take us out of this jumbled mess and, in the process, will destroy much of our wealth illusion as it appears to simply evaporate away. But the truth is that it was never there to begin with!

Saving the System - Not its Value


It was said, many years before Paulson, Bernanke and TARP, that the financial system will be saved at any cost! Apparently this statement has proven to be true. But at what cost?

You see they are now faced with a dilemma they will not discuss publicly. On one side is their product, the conceptual unit of credit account, their currency. And on the other side is their offspring, the financial system, Wall Street. What saves one will kill the other. They can save the present value of their product and kill their offspring through starvation. Or they can save their offspring by delivering what it desperately needs to survive... a constant expansion of credit (aka monetary inflation). But this will, of course, kill the value of their product, the currency.

They can save one or the other, but not both. And it was always known, but has now been proven, that the system will be saved at ANY cost. (Unfortunately for them, they did not think it through far enough to realized that the cost of saving their offspring will also kill it and a whole lot more. But that line of Thought is straying a little too far from the topic of this post.)

In order to survive, the system, the financial industry, Wall Street NEEDS a constantly increasing supply of CREDIT! If the population won't give their own blood to save this dying Frankenstein monster, then the CB's and governments WILL! It is happening now. Right under our noses. For more than a year now!

This is why it is SO important that we hold only physical gold in our own personal possession in order to escape this tangled mess. Only touchable, graspable physical gold metal under full ownership conveys ALL of the properties that have come to be attributed to this kingly wealth asset. By contrast, financial contracts denominated in gold as facilitated by bullion banks, gold derivatives, gold loans, gold depositories, gold pool accounts, gold ETF's, or known by any other name, are all at their core pure and simple... (wait for it)... CREDIT. And what feeds the monster?? All together now... CREDIT EXPANSION!!


And because the underlying potential for depositors to exercise their claim on the gold metal within the system poses a constant threat (to pull the rug out from under the confidence in this particular variety of credit) which grows as the credit expands, a limit is eventually reached where the participants will tolerate no further expansion. And guess what? We may have just reached that limit!

The bottom line is that the banking system will be "saved" at the expense of sacrificing the market value of every last credit instrument they have created. Anyone and everyone with their savings inside the system will take a serious purchasing power haircut. The only people that will enjoy the full value of their wealth (and more) are the ones who hold it outside of the imploding system. Inside the system, credit of any color, green OR yellow, is only credit.

Long versus Short

Today's paper currencies are not just a medium of exchange, but they are still a pretty good store of value in the short term. The greater the rate of price inflation, the shorter the term that you will want to be holding the actual currency. Wealth assets, on the other hand, are the store of value for the long term. This differentiation is understood by almost everyone today. And it is so close to the concept of Freegold that it will not be "a giant leap for mankind" to get there.

The only difference is that right now, most of the public has come to believe that wealth is simply paper ownership of wealth producing industries and paper claims on real assets that can never be recovered at today's values. This is true for most all items, not just gold. And as we hold these paper documents for the long term, understanding them to be better than holding the actual currency because they provide a "yield", the recoverability of the underlying real asset is being constantly eroded away. In other words, we are unknowingly losing principle at the same time as we think we are gaining a yield!

From 1980 to 2001, the expansion of the financial industry far beyond the means of its parallel real world counterpart was a signal that our human instinct to buy things, or assets (even if only paper debt assets), rather than to hold the actual currency, was still intact. But the fact of the matter was that the dollar currency itself was expanding during this time period at a furious pace to meet its global usage demand WITHOUT causing the price inflation that should have accompanied such an expansion.

This strange "pseudo-deflationary" signal (versus gold) during a time of high currency inflation might have told the people that it was okay to hold the currency itself during this period. That something odd was afoot. As the currency was expanding with such ease, but at the same time gaining purchasing power especially against gold and oil. But the people only spent their currency, which demonstrated their natural inclination. To spend currency, and to buy real wealth assets for the long term (even if those assets were little more than a value illusion).

But today a totally different signal is being broadcast loud and clear, and being equally ignored. That gold is now about to resume its historic role and value as a wealth asset, long suppressed by its troubled association with inflating transactional currencies.


Ever since our dollar became a mere concept in 1971 it has required the illusion of a stable gold price in order to remain viable in its various roles. And a stable gold price it has had! Yes, even with the spike in 1980 and the quadrupling in price of the last 8 years, gold has remained relatively stable and locked into its confusing association with inflating currencies, mainly with the help of the inflating paper gold market, but also through anti-gold propaganda.

If gold had truly abandoned its currency role in the 1970's, and taken on the unfettered role of wealth reserve par excellence, we would have seen prices in the many thousands even before the 1980 price spike. The dollar and its insidious wealth-derivative offspring had multiplied that much even before the official link with gold was finally broken.

Half versus Whole

Our ancient instincts have not gone away. We have not "advanced" as much as we think. Our use of "the pure concept of money" has not changed since the days when we engaged in direct barter trade. We still want to accumulate wealth item along side and separate from our transactional "pure concept of money" which is really just a number in our mind, or marked down on paper. We know that this "number" is not something to be saved, except perhaps for as long as it takes to arrive at the next transaction. (See: Fekete's A ‘fairy’ tale)

You see our modern money concept has been surreptitiously eroded into only one half of our ancient barter understanding of the money concept, and one half does not equal a whole. Most of today's money, other than the monetary base, is borrowed into existence. It represents a debt, and a debt is an incomplete transaction. It is only one half of what our instincts require as a wealth reserve, which is a fully completed transaction resulting in an accumulation of hard value. And yet we still buy these "wealth assets" denominated in only "half a concept", half of the monetary concept that our mind intuitively understands.

This is a flaw! It is a big one, especially now as "the other half" is waving the white flag of surrender and default. Some very smart analysts see this as deflationary. They truly believe that the waving of the white flag will make this "half a concept" actually rise in value against its parallel real world economic counterpart. But that is not what will happen.

Paradigm Shift

What will happen is a paradigm shift. The paradigm shift will be the sudden planetary recognition that the global debt(concept)-based paper investment pyramid is collapsing from its own weight and size. And that the best safe haven retreat is physical possession of the one and only hard asset that is globally recognized as an official monetary wealth reserve, an officially recognized hard collateral asset, a true national treasure, and an historic denominator of wealth with a history longer than recorded history itself!

As I see it, we are running out of time... fast! All it takes is for one event to destroy global confidence. One event. Maybe the current rumors will turn out to be just that, rumors. I hope so, because the dominoes that would fall will stretch all the way to empty shelves at your local grocery store. But even if the current rumors are a dud, how many other explosive probabilities are lurking in the murky swamp of banking, finance, money, and paper gold?

Clear anecdotal and circumstantial evidence is emerging that some sort of a squeeze is underway against institutions that might be short gold. A PR battle royale is also underway in the media to counter the effects. It is amazing to me that we can still walk into our local coin dealer and buy gold at a small premium to the paper price. But this, too, is probably part of the confidence battle that is being waged. Someone may be going to great lengths to ensure that the shortage at the top is not visible at the bottom.

The mint has already canceled certain gold coins because of too high of a demand. We have gold hitting all time record highs. Yet the mainstream media think it is most important that you understand the solid fundamentals behind each down-tick in gold.

I hope you can see what is happening. The giants are battling it out like Greek Titans while the masses are being subjected to an anti-gold propaganda machine of unthinkable proportions. All I can say is don't delay if you are still planning to move your savings out of the Frankenstein feeding tube and into the safety of gold. If you are waiting for a dip or a correction, you may just miss the greatest transfer of wealth the world has ever seen. Any price within $2,000 of today's gold price is a steal. Forget about corrections, even if they come. It is only a matter of time until physical gold runs dry, the paper markets suffer "an event", and the value of physical gaps up higher than ANY of the analysts have predicted. Don't miss this one time event!

Sincerely,
FOFOA

THOUGHT, concept and some writing credit goes out to Randy (@ The Tower) circa 2001, and of course to my Trail Guide! Thank you for your priceless guidance!

Gold is Money - Part 1

Does this strike you as a curious title for an FOFOA blog post? I'll bet some of you are saying yes while others are thinking "huh? What kind of a stupid question is that?" Onward...

One of the greatest compliments I receive is when people say that I write in a way that anyone can understand. But one of the reasons my posts come across this way is that I really try to avoid stereotypical and dogmatic words. I especially try to avoid words deeply embedded in our elite academia. The problem is that these words carry so much baggage. They carry a standardized mental picture that is often wrong. In fact, some words carry multiple images specific to different factions of belief.

This "word problem" creates confusion and often stirs misguided debate founded on different definitions. "Inflation" versus "deflation" is a perfect example. So to avoid misunderstandings, I try to explain my Thoughts through descriptions rather than dogmatic words.

Hyperinflation, however, is one word I do use, because I think it portrays the best visualization I can deliver as to how the dollar's collapse will unfold. At the same time, I am careful to explain that I believe gold's price explosion is a totally separate event that is coming. It is not DEPENDENT on hyperinflation. In fact, hyperinflation could theoretically be avoided while gold's price explosion cannot.

Along these same lines, explaining myself descriptively, I state that my position is "deflation in real terms"... in terms of gold! What makes it so difficult for traditional "deflationists" to grasp this concept is that deflation (my description of deflation) will end in hyperinflation! "Hyperinflation", as I have shown, has much more in common with their understanding of "deflation" than it does with the common understanding of "inflation". As I like to say, the only thing hyperinflation and inflation have in common is nine letters. And I also like to say that in the end we will have hyper-DE-flation in all things measured against gold, and hyper-IN-flation in all things measured against dollars.

I am opening with this long prelude only to demonstrate my "descriptive" intentions as I now tackle the most dogmatic and divisive word of all... MONEY! What is money? Answer this question honestly and I think a lot of what I write may suddenly come into clearer focus.

Gold is Money

This is the dogma among most in our crowd, is it not? Gold is money! Who on earth can dispute this (practically) divine statement? Well, I'm not here to stir up trouble, so I will leave this one alone for the moment. But I hope we can all agree on at least one thing for the moment. How about this one?... "Gold is a form of wealth!" Hopefully we can at least agree on this statement as we proceed. Gold is a form of wealth.

Functions of Money

"Money", as it is understood today, has three main roles. The late Dr. Willem F. Duisenberg, former President of the ECB, in his famous acceptance speech for the International Charlemagne Prize in 2002 stated it well...

What is money? Economists know that money is defined by the functions it performs, as a means of exchange, a unit of account and a store of value.

Our modern understanding of money is that it has three roles or functions: 1) A medium of exchange, our TRANSACTIONAL currency, 2) a unit of account, a "number" used for comparing relative values, held in each person's memory AND on paper for bookkeeping (and legerdemain), and 3) a store of value, or wealth.

What I would like to do now is to take a broader view of money. A thought experiment that will transcend the last 38 years of our monetary experience. I hope to transcend even the last century, the last 233 years of our United States, perhaps even the last millennium. Let us think about money in terms of the last 2,500 years. And perhaps then we can gain a new perspective that yields a fresh understanding of what the heck is going on right now!

Etymology

Etymology is the study of the history of words. Now I am no expert, but I would like to point out what the dictionary says about 'money' and 'currency'. From my post, On Hyperinflation:

Two definitions are important in this discussion. These are from Webster’s Dictionary:

Currency (1699) 1 a: circulation as a medium of exchange b: general use, acceptance, or prevalence 2 a: something (as coins, government notes, and bank notes) that is in circulation as a medium of exchange b: paper money in circulation c: a common article for bartering d: a medium of verbal or intellectual expression

Money (13c) 1 : something generally accepted as a medium of exchange, a measure of value, or a means of payment

Note that the first known use of the word Money in the English language was in the 13th century. The word Currency didn't make it into the English language until more than 400 years later.

Note also that the appearance of the word 'money' in the English language came 800 years after the fall of the Roman Empire.

Thought Experiment

Now on to our Thought experiment. This comes to us courtesy of FOA on The Gold Trail. I have edited the length of FOA's presentation for the purpose of this post, but will keep it in blue to differentiate the source. The entire post can be found at the link above.

Owning wealth aside from official money units is nothing new. Building up one's storehouse of a wealth of things is the way societies have advanced their kind from the beginning. What is new is that this is the first time we have used a non wealth fiat for so long without destroying it through price inflation. Again, a process of using an unbacked fiat to function as money and building up real assets on the side. Almost as if two forms of wealth were circulating next to each other; one in the concept of money and the other in the concept of real wealth.

This trend is intact today and I doubt mankind will ever pull back from fiat use again. Fiat used solely in the function of a money concept that I will explain in a moment.

Understanding all of this money evolution, in its correct context, is vital to grasping gold's eventual place in the world. A place where it once proudly stood long ago.

All of this transition is killing off our Gold Bug dream of official governments declaring gold to be money again and reinstitution some arbitrary gold price. Most of the death, on that hand, is in the form of leveraged bets on gold's price as the evolution of gold from official money to a wealth holding bleeds away any credible currency pricing of gold's value in the short run.

To understand gold we must understand money in its purest form; apart from its manmade convoluted function of being something you save. Money in its purest form is a mental association of values in trade; a concept in memory, not a real item. In proper vernacular; a 1930's style US gold coin was stamped in the act of applying the money concept to a real piece of tradable wealth. Not the best way to use gold, considering our human nature.

By accepting and using dollars today that have no inherent value, we are reverting to simple barter by value association. Assigning value to dollar units that can only have worth in what we can complete a trade for. In effect, refining modern man's sophisticated money thoughts back into the plain money concept as it first began; a value stored in your head!

So you think we have come a long way from the ancient barter system? Where uneducated peoples simply traded different items of value for what they thought they were worth? Crude, slow and demanding, these forms of commerce would never work today because we are just too busy, right? Think again!

Lean back and think of all the items you can remember the dollar price for. Quite a few, yes? Now, run through your mind every item in your house; wall pictures, clothes, pots and pans, furniture, TVs, etc... Mechanics can think about all the things in the garage, tools, oil, mowers. If one thinks hard enough they can remember quite well what they paid for each of these. Even think of things you used at work. Now try harder; think of every item you can remember and try to guess the dollar value of it within, say, 30%. Wow, that is a bunch to remember, but we all do it!

I have seen studies where, on average, a person can associate the value of over 1,000 items between unlike kinds by simply equating the dollar price per unit. Some people can even do two or three thousand items. The very best were some construction cost estimators that could reach 10,000 or more price associations!

Still think we have come a long way from trading a gallon of milk for two loves of bread? In function, yes; in thought no! Aside from the saving/investing aspects of money, our process of buying and selling daily use items hasn't changed all that much. You use the currency as a unit to value associate the worth of everything. Not far from rating everything between a value of one to ten; only our currency numbers are infinite! Now, those numbers between one and ten have no value, do they? That's right, the value is in your association abilities. This is the money concept, my friends.

Unlike the efficient market theory that was jammed down our throats in school, we all still use value associations to grasp what things are worth to us. Yes, the market may dictate a different price, but we use our own associations to judge whether something is trading too high or too low for our terms. We then choose to buy or sell at market anyway, if we want to.

In this, we have moved little from basic barter. In this, we are understanding that an unbacked fiat works because we are returning to mostly bartering with one another. A fiat trading unit works today because we make it take on the associated value of what we trade it for; it becomes the very money concept that always resided in our brains from the beginnings of time.

In this, a controlled fiat unit works as a trading medium; even as it fails miserably as the retainer of wealth the bankers and lenders so want it to be.

So how did your Thought experiment go? Did you come to the conclusion that the concept of "money" in its most pure and primal form is the mental association of values in trade? That it is the actual thought process inside of our minds that we use to associate the relative value of real things? "Money is just a book keeping accounting of real wealth!" "Why do we need to save this stuff anyway?"

So, to assign this concept to one of the three "functions" of modern money, the pure money concept fits best within the unit of account function.


Modern fiat currency, our modern physical transactional medium fits best in the means of exchange function. And real wealth, with gold as the most liquid, durable and portable example par excellence, fits best in the store of value function.

History

Now let us take our Thought experiment back in time, before the words money and currency entered the lexicon. In those times, gold was just another form of wealth that was traded in simple barter. But gold had certain qualities that made it especially convenient to trade. And it also had qualities that made it especially good to hold as wealth! For one thing, it was not needed for other functions, so one could hold as much as possible without infringing on anyone else!

A hat was also wealth. So was a pig. A hat could be traded for a pig just as easily as a piece of gold. But pigs were for eating and hats were for wearing. And if one man became wealthy enough to hoard all the hats, there might have been an outbreak of sunburned heads! :)

The point is that gold was not "the pure concept of money" any more than hats were, or any more than paper dollars are "the pure concept of wealth"! When the ancients stamped gold into coins, they were simply making a true barter item, a wealth item more recognizable and easier to use. Even without any legal tender laws, this barter item, coined or not, still carried its value in its weight.

But as "the pure money concept" (the unit of account function) crept in and attached itself to the numbers stamped on gold coins, the door was opened to the debasing of wealth and public theft through the clipping and diluting the metal content of the coins. Enter the appearance of Gresham's Law!

Even still, was gold really what we think of as "money" back then? According to FOA, the answer may well be no:

We were first alerted to the "gold is money" flaw years ago. When considering the many references to gold being money in ancient texts, several things stood out. We began to suspect that those translations were somewhat slanted. I saw many areas in old texts where gold was actually referenced more in a context of; "his money was in account of gold", or; "the money account was gold", or; "traded his money in gold". The more one searches the more one finds that in ancient times gold was simply one item that could account for your money values. To expand the reality of this thought; everything we trade is in account of associated money values; nothing we trade is money!

Well, I put it off at the beginning of this post, but I'll ask it again now... Gold is money! Who on earth can dispute this (practically) divine statement?

I ask this again only as a rhetorical question. Because as I pointed out in my long prelude, this post is all about confusing and misleading dogma presented through the use of stereotyped words. Money being the worst of all!

Are we using Wim Duisenberg's definition of money, consisting of three roles? Or are we using our own newly discovered "pure concept of money" definition, consisting of only one of those roles? Or are we suggesting, when we say "gold is money", some NEW definition based on a hybrid role assignment? What is "honest money"? And what does someone mean when they say "gold is money"?

Can you see how common words that different people define differently can cause great confusion and disagreement, even when it is not really warranted?

And can we now agree on these three statements at least? 1) Gold is a form of wealth. 2) The pure concept of money fits best within the unit of account function. 3) The word currency best describes what we currently use in the medium of exchange role.

Okay, with this newfound partial agreement in place, let us take a look at where we are heading. And let's see if we have gained any new understanding. Here is a little more from FOA:

Today's talk is, once again, a more detailed continuation of our theme: the evolving message of gold. I'll begin now.

Our modern gold market price illusion is little more than a product of the fiat dollar system; a design that denominates gold credits in a contract form. Is it a free market? Why yes, very free. But... TOO free, in the sense that contract supply is totally unlimited. Investors bought into this market even though they fully well knew 90% of the volume was represented by only cash equity on the other side. Knowing that, they somehow expected that those contracts were limited in creation by the fixed amount of gold in the world. Their mistake, not the market's.

Clearly, anyone schooled in classic hard money Thought should have known that this was just another gold inflation; a transitory era between money systems. This was a time to gather gold over the years, not invest in the leveraged aspects of gold's new fiat versions. Nor, to buy into the gold industry that owed its life and cash profits to the maintenance of such a system; transitory as it was. The expanding fiat universe was best used to gather real wealth each time the transactional fiat currency cycled through your domain.

Anyone that understood this knew that this is how you handle an evolving process. For myself and others, knowing that gold's inherent value could not change much and was historically undervalued in its comparative value to all things, we bought gold in quantity. We tossed aside Western concerns about shifting currency prices of gold.

This entire paper-gold trading realm represents the conclusion of a convoluted, decades long attempt by mankind to tie his fiat money concepts to physical gold. These centuries of gold/money tie-ins will end in a colossal breakup of the entire fiat money-plus-gold concept; leaving gold and fiat to trade independently of each other.

Unfortunately, it's on the dollar's watch this will all end as this gold failure is running in parallel to the dollar ending its position as a world reserve currency.

The above is a good summary of FOA's message. I am sure that some of you have read The Gold Trail, but I'm curious if you felt a slightly deeper meaning in it now that we have discussed the pure concept of money. And if so, you should try reading the whole of A/FOA again! It can be found at the top of my favorite links to the right.

You know, I often visit websites and forums that proclaim, "Gold is Money!" I have no argument with them. Obviously they are talking about the store of value function in Wim Duisenberg's definition of money. I mean, clearly gold is not our currency nor unit of account. And sometimes I visit sites that proclaim "We must return to honest money!" And again I have no argument. I understand that they are simply fed up with the built-in inflation in our modern medium of exchange that infringes on their store of value concept. I couldn't agree more.

Yet here I am to tell you that gold is now becoming completely demonetized! That the odds of us going back on the old gold standard are right around zero! That the inflating paper gold contract market has kept gold in a monetized state, even though we left the gold standard. But that is now coming to an abrupt end. I am here to tell you that even if we get some sort of new super sovereign global reserve currency with a certain "portion" held in gold, this will not mean the remonetization of gold!

Look no further than the political stylings of the Euro to see how this new super sovereign currency would work. Gold may be a portion of its reserves, just like the Euro. But also, just like the Euro, that gold will be marked to market! (See: Your Own, Personal, Freegold)

Indeed, Duisenberg also had this to say in his famous speech:

[The Euro] is the first currency that has not only severed its link to gold, but also its link to the nation-state. It is not backed by the durability of the metal or by the authority of the state.

Yet somehow its required 15% gold reserves have risen to 55.6% in ten years! And for some reason its gold reserves are still on LINE 1 of its financial statement! Hmm...

But current global confidence is too shaken for a new reserve currency to work just yet. Gold may end up being the single object that restores confidence enough for a new reserve system shared by many nations, but not at today's gold price. Not anywhere even close to it!

The human concept of money is changing whether we like it or not. It is being torn apart. Gold, as a wealth reserve and wealth asset, will exist and trade parallel to the world of fiat, the world of credit and debt. Producers and savers will finally have the option to switch tracks so to speak. To get on a parallel track that avoids the inevitable collision with the debt-hungry collective their savings have always faced.

And as we pass through this phase transition, as gold switches from the transactional track to the wealth-reserve track, it will take on a whole new meaning... and a whole new value! The non-dollar part of the world already knows this. This is why they are buying gold now! You see, as a truly demonetized wealth asset, gold has a much much higher value to mankind than it does as a transactional money. To get an idea of the difference, just compare the basic transactional money supply with the vast quantity of so-called "paper wealth dollar derivatives". This should give you an idea of what is coming!

Sincerely,
FOFOA

Fair Value Gold?

I was asked by email today what would be my counter-argument to this new piece by Paul van Eeden. I thought I would share it with you. But first, here is a snip from Paul's article, "Gold is over $1000 an ounce - Now what?"

Given that the gold price is trading at a 25% premium to its fair value and that we can imagine several scenarios whereby the US dollar could rally and the gold price could fall, it seems to me that betting on a higher gold price right now is merely a bet on the Greater Fool Theory. That is not to say that the gold price could not continue to rally - markets can remain irrational far longer than rational people ever imagine they would. Personally, though, I have no interest in buying an over-priced asset in the hope that it will become even more over priced - not even gold.

Here was my reply...

The dollar is so much more than just its quantitative body, its size. If it was not, it would have surely collapsed back in the 1970's after being set free from gold. But something else developed, an insatiable demand for dollars that allowed for the supply of money to be increased time and time again with little inflation showing up in prices and almost a negative affect on gold over a 20 year period. How was this possible in a world that was supposed to actually perform under Austrian principles of monetary inflation?

Obviously the printing of money and the expansion of credit had little to do with gold price inflation, at least from 1980 through 2001. 1971 to 1980 and 2001 to 2009 were different, but what was happening? Was it a shift back and forth between a quantitative monetary effect or something else entirely?

What changed in our first and only 38-year experiment with a completely symbolic, unbacked fiat currency was that, from an Austrian perspective, we were shocked and surprised to find such a tremendous demand for such a singularly worthless currency.

This demand came from its ease of use and from the ease of credit creation and international transactions. We got little plastic cards and key fobs that could pay for anything from gas to groceries. The banks got the equivalent of the Midas touch when it came to credit expansion. And the globalization movement got the most liquid capital movements ever imagined.

Perhaps it took 9 years for all this new demand to mature, but once it did, we got the 1980's!

But did you notice something about all the demand developments I listed? The were all based on the dollar's ease as a transactional unit. None of them were based on its intrinsic value. None were based on its store of value function. None were because of its superior use as a denominator of debt. Only for its ease in issuing debt.

But for hundreds if not thousands of years these two separate functions of money have been ingrained into our human psyche as one and the same. Money, as we know it, is both a transactional medium and a store of value.

So in the 1970's, we watched as acceptance of this new symbolic transactional unit grew. In the 80's and 90's we watched as the dollar exploded in quantity and global use, with relatively little inflationary impact. And then in the new millennium, we are seeing another shift: the recognition that the dollar is really only good for its transactional use. But quite poor as a store of value.

So gold's price rise is not a function of inflation, as van Eeden says, but is instead a function of a global sea change away from using the dollar as a store of value. When viewed from this perspective, gold's rise has only just begun.

What do you think allowed for 20 years of dollar expansion with no gold price inflation? It was the soaking-up of newly created dollars as people all over the world held them as a store of value. Wall Street exploded as the enabler of this misguided demand, while the real demand was for the dollar's transactional ease. China followed, as did much of the developed world. But now this trend has reversed.

This is why van Eeden's money supply analysis is meaningless. I fully expect transactional dollar demand to swell from time to time as large holders of debt liquidate into a new form of savings. This is because that fading value must pass through dollars to get where it is going. But you must understand that whatever the USDX does, it does not represent new savings flowing in.

The transactional money supply is tiny compared to the supply of dollar-denominated savings. It is a bottleneck that must be traversed to get into gold. So the USDX is a misleading metric for those of us watching gold rise in value. Jim Sinclair will be right in the end, but the path there may still hold some confusing hiccups along the way.

The quantity theory of money DOES apply, but in a much more complex way than van Eeden shows. Too complex, in fact, for anyone to fully understand. The QUALITY of money also applies, alongside the quantity.

For this reason, my personal focus on the quality and quantity of money revolves around hyperinflation, a currency event that is separate from the rise in gold which is driven by the first ever separation of monetary functions. The various qualities of modern money can be simply viewed as M0, and then M1, M2, and then M3 and broader. My argument is that only M0 matters once hyperinflation takes hold. And that all of the money creation over the last year has been M0. I argue that large swaths of wider money have been converted to M0 by the Fed, like turning a living creature into stone. I also argue that guarantees foreshadow future M0 conversion, and that guarantees are being handed out like candy on Halloween. For all these reasons I see the tinderbox of hyperinflation being rained down upon by hot embers from the forest fire of burning dollar-denominated derivatives and other Ponzi paper.

It is the principles above that must be understood because any quantitative analysis in today's rigged financial environment will deliver dubious results.

I notice that van Eeden focuses on the collapse of credit money but discount's the Fed's current monetization as being "only" $900 billion of base money (M0). Then he says,

And while the increase in the US money supply as a result of the Fed's priming is material, and has maintained US monetary inflation at historically high levels, it is nowhere near hyper-inflationary rates, nor is there any reason to believe that hyperinflation is remotely likely in the US.

Here is where Richard Maybury's description of "velocity" (as opposed to money supply) comes into play. Velocity, as Maybury says, can turn on a dime, and has the same effect as increasing the supply!

Hyperinflation begins as the dollar is first repudiated as a store of value (a reversal of velocity), and second as an international transactional unit. Hyperinflation does not begin with the printing of million-dollar-notes. That comes later as the government responds to the failing dollar value in the way we all know it will. Iceland's government did not have this option last year. But the US does. It will print to "slow the pain". But in reality it will be causing long term pain that will be felt by the whole world, especially us in its legal tender zone.

To make the kinds of quantitative conclusions that van Eeden makes is to assume that free market adjustments to the real value of the dollar are fully up to date. This is the wrong assumption, as the dollar's (non) value has been masked for 38 years by both willful acts of the Fed, and also an irrationally exuberant market for Ponzi paper.

In 1971 the dollar became intrinsically worthless. But the advent of computers made this symbolic currency explode in value as a transactional unit. Only now, 38 years later, are we starting to realize that transactional value and time-store-of-value are not the same thing.

So to assume, as van Eeden does, that gold's value should simply counter-lever the supply of worthless dollars completely ignores the global separation of monetary roles that is happening today. This is NOT simply a figment of Another's imagination. You can see it on all scales from individuals on up to the CBs if you bother to look outside of the United States.

From a quantitative perspective, like van Eeden takes, we could be looking at something on the order of a $60 Trillion flow that will move from symbolic-idea-denominated savings into hard gold savings, when all is said and done. And as this happens, the very denominator of the former will explode numerically so that the final outcome will appear much different than any quantitative analysis could even deliver at this point in time.

On the issue of interest rates, the dollar is only as valuable as what it can purchase either inside the US or outside. The outside is now working on other forms of pricing, so the dollar's only future value must be juxtaposed against what it can purchase inside the US, even for those holding dollars on the outside. And any increase in interest rates, whether market-driven or Fed-driven, will have a decidedly negative affect on an already failing economy. In other words, 'not much to purchase here'. This is why, and how, an increase in interest rates this time around (unlike 1980) would only exasperate hyperinflation and send the price of gold into the outer solar system.

The dollar is in a serious Catch-22 this time around, which is why I say my conclusions are unavoidable.

Van Eeden assumes that gold is always going to be the inverse of the dollar. But even Another and FOA said that, in the end, the dollar and gold will rise together. I have been saying this for a while too. It will be the final exit from paper into gold that must pass through the bottleneck of a few trillion transactional dollars. But this belief that van Eeden and so many others have will cause them to miss out on the greatest transfer of wealth ever.

In this same vein, technical analysts and Elliot-wave deflationists will also sell gold as it hits $1,300, the worst trade in the history of planet Earth!

Regarding China: China is in a badly manipulated and rigged position right now as well. Only its position is the inverse of ours. In my last post I said that (Savings) = (Production) minus (Consumption). The Chinese people are in a position of forced savings by their communist collective. They are being forced to produce, but not to consume the fruits of their own labor while it is being shipped to the USA. And the communist collective is stockpiling this windfall profit by printing local currency like it's going out of style, stealing purchasing power from its own people as it forces them to save.

But as trends reverse, which they are now, these same people who have been forced to delay consumption will suddenly find themselves supporting their own economy as they use their savings to purchase a higher standard of living. On top of this, they are now starting to save gold! Which will only AMPLIFY this effect as we transition to Freegold!

Another concept that van Eeden ignores is that at the same time as the dumping of the dollar in international transactions is being discussed, China is signing new international deals for the renminbi. I don't believe that China wants to print the new global reserve currency. But this new usage demand for the renminbi will have the de facto result of soaking up some of this Chinese inflation. And as this slow, global process moves forward, I think a lot of people (including the Chinese themselves) will be surprised at the result.

I do not believe that Chinese communism has created a great economy. I only believe that the mistakes they have made simply happen to be the inverse of ours. Dumb luck! And that everyone will be surprised how things actually play out.

I believe that we are witnessing a market-driven global shift to meritocracy; economic power based on merit and credibility. I believe Martin Armstrong nailed it when he said this will be the end of socialism. And honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if the transition to Freegold signals the beginning of the end for Chinese communism. I'm not predicting this (it would take 20 years or more), I'm just saying I would not be too surprised!

Given that the gold price is trading at a 25% premium to its fair value

Fair value against what? A piece of paper? Or fair value against the REAL wealth of the world?

In my opinion, time will reveal who was "the Greater Fool".

Sincerely,
FOFOA