The Ascent of Money has been one of the key factors in human progress, an extraordinary story of innovation, intermediation and integration that has done as much as anything to help people escape from the drudgery of subsistence agriculture. And yet Planet Finance can never quite escape from the gravitational force of Planet Earth. Because the Quants can never take full account of the human factor – our tendency to underestimate the probability of black swans. Our propensity to veer from euphoria to despondency. Our chronic inability to learn from History. ibid.
Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the capitalist system was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and, while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some. The sight of this arbitrary rearrangement of riches strikes not only at security, but at confidence in the equity of the existing distribution of wealth. Those to whom the system brings windfalls, beyond their deserts and even beyond their expectations or desires, become ‘profiteers’, who are the object of the hatred of the bourgeoisie, whom the inflationism has impoverished, not less than of the proletariat. As the inflation proceeds and the real value of the currency fluctuates wildly from month to month, all permanent relations between debtors and creditors, which form the ultimate foundation of capitalism, become so utterly disordered as to be almost meaningless; and the process of wealth-getting degenerates into a gamble and a lottery.
Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose. John Maynard Keynes The Economic Consequences of the Peace VI: 235-236 1919
We are staring into the abyss ... Anybody who believes the Euro can survive is living in loo-loo land. Ian R Crane, interview On the Edge, AlexG
The purpose of the government is to depreciate the money. Celente & Schiff & Paul & Faber & Rogers & Woods, Melt Up: The Beginning of a US Currency Crisis, Ron Paul
Our currency is not recovering ... Our currency is currently experiencing a Melt-Up ... Wall Street paying out record bonuses ... 39.4 million Americans on food stamps ... The government will pay out more in benefits … ibid.
43% of Americans now have less than 10K saved for retirement. ibid.
Retirement will become a thing of the past ... Social security won’t be there ... Retirees will soon be forced to re-enter the workforce. ibid.
1.2 million temporary workers ... The average federal worker now earns twice as much as the private worker. ibid.
Besides the Department of Energy our country also needs to abolish the Department of Education. ibid.
Inflation is currently that last thought on American minds. ibid.
The Federal Reserve created the real estate bubble. ibid.
They build nothing other than profits. They’re junkies. They’re addicts ... They can’t get enough ... Billionaire bonuses for what? ... Bigger than the GDPs of many nations ... Here’s more money, junky. ibid.
Eventually we will have much higher inflation. ibid. Faber
Gold is the most stable asset the world has ever seen. ibid.
Morgan Stanley wasn’t physically storing their gold at all. ibid.
Real American tax receipts will decline this decade. ibid.
Wholesale food prices have risen six months in a row. ibid.
Right now there are food riots going on in India. ibid.
The last real audit of the US gold reserves took place in 1954. ibid.
The US dollar would have to be devalued 98% for our gold reserves to be worth enough to pay off our national debt. ibid.
One world currency and one world financial system is the end-game. Glenn Beck
I do not like to think that any law can be passed that will make it possible to submerge the gold standard in a flood of irredeemable paper currency. Henry Cabot Lodge senior 1913
Today has been an extremely difficult and turbulent day. Massive speculative flows have continued to disrupt the functioning of the Exchange Rate Mechanism. Norman Lamont, former Chancellor of the Exchequer
In April 2000 the Brazilian government issued bank-notes made of plastic! Ripley’s Believe It Or Not! 2006
If we keep stimulating, if we keep printing and bailing out, within a couple of years we’re going to have a currency crisis ... The dollar is gonna collapse and the cost of living is just gonna run out of control. Peter Schiff
We had a fairly strong sense that we were on the kill. George Soros, currency speculator
Wilson was a great one who believed in Sterling. Sterling was the centre of everything. And he always said he would defend the pound and we’d have a place East of Suez and it was a sort of nationalism of a kind. Tony Benn
From now the pound abroad is worth 14% or so less in terms of other currencies. It does not mean, of course, that the pound here in Britain, in your pocket or purse or your bank, has been devalued. Harold Wilson
Hey, you can’t take all those notes with you. You can take your holiday or business allowance in traveller’s cheques. But not more than £5 in sterling notes. Do you know that? Pathé News, Massingham public information film
What Mr Rothschild had discovered was the basic principle of power, influence, and control over people as applied to economics. That principle is, When you assume the appearance of power, people soon give it to you.
Mr Rothschild had discovered that currency or deposit loan accounts had the required appearance of power that could be used to induce people (inductance, with people corresponding to a magnetic field) into surrendering their real wealth in exchange for a promise of greater wealth (instead of real compensation). They would put up real collateral in exchange for a loan of promissory notes. Mr Rothschild found that he could issue more notes than he had backing for, so long as he had someone’s stock of gold as a persuader to show his customers.
Mr Rothschild loaned his promissory notes to individuals and to governments. These would create overconfidence. Then he would make money scarce, tighten control of the system, and collect the collateral through the obligation of contracts. The cycle was then repeated. These pressures could be used to ignite a war. Then he would control the availability of currency to determine who would win the war. That government which agreed to give him control of its economic system got his support.
Collection of debts was guaranteed by economic aid to the enemy of the debtor. The profit derived from this economic methodology made Mr Rothschild all the more able to expand his wealth. He found that the public greed would allow currency to be printed by government order beyond the limits (inflation) of backing in precious metal or the production of goods and services.
In this structure, credit, presented as a pure element called ‘currency’, has the appearance of capital, but is in effect negative capital. Hence, it has the appearance of service, but is in fact, indebtedness or debt. It is therefore an economic inductance instead of an economic capacitance, and if balanced in no other way, will be balanced by the negation of population (war, genocide). The total goods and services represent real capital called the gross national product, and currency may be printed up to this level and still represent economic capacitance; but currency printed beyond this level is subtractive, represents the introduction of economic inductance, and constitutes notes of indebtedness.
War is therefore the balancing of the system by killing the true creditors (the public which we have taught to exchange true value for inflated currency) and falling back on whatever is left of the resources of nature and regeneration of those resources.
Mr Rothschild had discovered that currency gave him the power to rearrange the economic structure to his own advantage, to shift economic inductance to those economic positions which would encourage the greatest economic instability and oscillation. Bill Cooper, Top Secret: Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars, Operations Research Technical Manual TM-SW7905.1
The pound had another very bad day – closed at only 2.4 against the Mataguly gumbo-bean. The Two Ronnies sketch, Barker
The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists. Ernest Hemingway
The best way to destroy the capitalist system is to debauch the currency. Vladimir Lenin
Believe me, the next step is a currency crisis because there will be a rejection of the dollar, the rejection of the dollar is a big, big event, and then your personal liberties are going to be severely threatened. Ron Paul
Until the control of the issue of currency and credit is restored to government and recognized as its most conspicuous and sacred responsibility, all talks of the sovereignty of Parliament and of democracy is idle and futile. William Lyon Mackenzie King
A disordered currency is one of the greatest political evils. Daniel Webster