Blondie's View

I thought Blondie's excellent comment was just about good enough to be a post. And when RJ called it Sermon on the Mount material, that tipped the scale. But be careful not to miss the forest for the trees, or the fractal for the chaos, because Blondie pretty much nails it. It's all in the view—the perspective. And even though you may not be a giant, you can still learn to view the world as a giant with a little practice. It's easier than you might think. All you have to do is gently set your shrimp baggage on the ground and walk away.

Blondie on the Mount

Another said:
"Gold! It is the only medium that currencies do not "move thru". It is the only Money that cannot be valued by currencies. It is gold that denominates currency. It is to say "gold moves thru paper currencies"

If this statement appears the least bit cryptic, if it does not make 100% crystal clear sense, then little else written on this blog by either the contributors or the scant few commenters who do understand it will make complete sense to you, despite your best efforts.

You see, my friend, in this world there are two types of people: those who PRODUCE, and those who consume. YOU consume.

Those who PRODUCE, and there is perfectly good reason why it is written in caps, are giants. Everyone else, including YOU, is a shrimp.

Another’s statement above is the perspective of the giants, not the shrimps. So don’t feel bad if its inherent truth is not self-evident, you have simply never directly experienced life as a giant. No shame in that! That in itself means nothing at all.

Except that you don’t have the perspective from which to understand gold. So you'll have to build it from scratch.

In this case actually understanding gold means firstly having to discard an awful lot of fundamental beliefs about the way things work. This is also the single biggest barrier to discussing gold with anyone else… they will never understand without ditching some of what they hold as fundamental beliefs, so you may as well not bother. If you win anyone over it is ultimately only because of their faith in you and your perceptions, not their own understanding. But I digress.

You may appreciate that we need gold to fix our monetary system, but that does not mean you actually understand how gold really functions.

Gold functions as the ultimate store of value. Nice words, nice idea, but you are a shrimp. You’ve never had value in a quantity that needed storing. Sure you may have “savings”, but you’ve never personally experienced diminishing marginal utility to the degree that gold’s function becomes apparent, so it remains a theory. There is a monumental difference between mere theory and theory corroborated by experience. The latter has graduated from theory to fact.

This is the basis of my previous comment about ‘new money’ and the fact that it does not necessarily understand gold. New money for the most part believes it has its surplus value securely stored in various financial instruments. Old money (real giants) knows better. This perspective is also why the idea that Oil would not require physical gold for their surplus is preposterous.

Another told you that you could follow in the footsteps of giants, and you can, but if you want to see their perspective there’s a bit more involved.

Newsflash: $US HI already happened. That’s what the ‘structural support’ since the early ‘80s has been in aid of, to avoid the conclusion of this process. As FOFOA has pointed out so clearly, as long as the marginal flow of excess dollars emitted by the US is absorbed into the market the dollar can continue to function. The devaluation of the currency is a market driven event, the final stage of every HI, but it does not occur as long as the excess currency is absorbed. Some entities have not wanted it to occur until they were better prepared, so they have, at no small cost, supplied the structural support to delay the denouement. Obviously they felt the costs were outweighed by the benefits.

The revaluation of gold is a distinctly separate though concurrent event.

If you understand how gold works you will appreciate that the giants have no incentive to directly trigger either of these separate but simultaneous events… they already have their gold, and they already know its value (and who wants to be blamed for something that was completely unavoidable?). If you don’t need to access the value you have stored in gold, then it is really irrelevant to you what the market currently values gold at. They don’t need the shrimps to tell them anything; rather it is the shrimps who need to wise up. Shrimps are the same ones objecting to “austerity” aka living within one’s means. Doesn’t occur to them that the fantasy may have been the time when they lived over and above their means, does it?

I got a good laugh from this article, particularly the opening paragraphs:

"So what is it about money that the leaders of the eurozone don't get?

Money has been around for a while, and it's not terribly complicated.

The key element is trust. That was true when money was a piece of metal that you could bite or bounce. Now that money is just a piece of paper, it's even truer. Today's money is nothing but trust.

That's why the euro crisis is so bizarre. The euro is, in theory, one of the world's great currencies. And yet, as this crisis has demonstrated, nobody actually stands behind it. There is no lender of last resort. There is no "full faith and credit." There's nobody on the other end of the promise.

And it's as if the leaders of the eurozone wanted to go out of their way to prove it. They've taken us up to the velvet curtain and then themselves, with a self-satisfied smile, pulled it aside to show us that there is no Great Oz.

And in the process they've done major, and perhaps irretrievable, damage to their own currency and to the very idea of money in our time. If you can't trust the euro, what paper can you trust?"

Looks to me like the “leaders of the eurozone” get it fine… the author is simply under the presumption he understands money. Doesn’t seem to have occurred to him that he may not.
He’s definitely not alone.

FOFOA:
"It's just a shift in the perception of savers. Can't change that."

“Savers”: those producers who currently do not understand gold.
Consumers (shrimps) are just along for the ride.

As I said at the top, if Another’s statement is not crystal clear you don’t understand gold, so don’t delude yourself that you do, and bear this in mind when you compose a comment.

I've no doubt my comments will upset some people. That doesn't mean they're not correct, just that some people don't like them. A bit like "austerity" perhaps.

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milamber said:

"... to this western shrimp’s mind, there is a whole lot of unlearning that I have had/am having to do!"

I appreciate that, having been there too. To be honest, it's not as difficult as it appears. Like many others, it became clear to me a few years ago that big things were going down. I felt compelled to find out what. It wasn't a big step to see that this was entirely a monetary issue. When I thought about it, I couldn't produce a really good definition of money, so ... I had some work to do. Build yourself a good definition and Another's perspective, not to mention the world at large, start making a lot more sense.

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