This page has been archived and commenting is disabled.
Jim Grant Explains "Our" 3 Biggest Financial Mistakes
Submitted by Michael Ide via Valuewalk.com,
Speaking at Russell Napier’s Library of Mistakes in Edinburgh earlier this month, Jim Grant of Grant’s Interest Rate Observer asked what financial mistakes we’re making today that future generations will regard as the most ridiculous.
If you’re familiar with Grant’s writing the short answer won’t surprise you...
“I am going to put discretionary monetary rule by former college professors at the head of the list of errors over which our descendants will roll their eyes. Deflation-phobia and inflation-philia come next, followed by a general willful ignorance of financial history,”
...though the speech itself delves into the debate surrounding the UK’s decision to resume the gold standard.
Keynes, Churchill debated the gold standard in the 1920s
While the UK didn’t officially leave the gold standard during WWI, it stopped exchanging pounds sterling for gold, which amounts to the same thing.
John Maynard Keynes opposed returning to the gold standard of course, while then-Chancellor of the Exchequer Winston Churchill argued in favor of returning to the pre-war exchange rate.
Jim Grant recounts one of Churchill’s retorts (new to me) to opponents who worried that the gold standard would shackle the pound to the US dollar: “I will tell you what it will shackle us to. It will shackle us to reality.” You can imagine Grant delivering a similar line when explaining his views on the price mechanism and money as a unit of measure.
Failed 1925 policy discredited ‘true-blue gold standard’, says Jim Grant
But the pre-war rate was too high, and in 1931 the Bank of England refused to export gold. The difference is that while this is often seen as proof that the gold standard no longer works, Jim Grant argues that the problem lies not with the gold standard but with the details of its implementation.
“The failure of the half-baked gold exchange standard discredited the true-blue gold standard. The failure of the successor, the post-WWII monetary system known as Bretton Woods, discredited the very ideas that currency values should be fixed or anchored,” said Jim Grant.
* * *
So even though Keynes didn’t get his way in 1925, Jim Grant argues that mistakes in the gold exchange system allowed Keynes ideas to win the longer debate, leaving us with the monetary system that we currently have – and which Jim Grant quite vocally opposes.
He has no faith in what he often calls the ‘PhD standard’ and hopes that a revised study of financial history will convince people to go back to the gold standard.
»
- 67288 reads
- Printer-friendly version
- Send to friend
- advertisements -
- A private central bank
- Fiat money
- No rule of law
- Fractional banking
- CDS
- Unlimited gambling with people's savings accounts
Easy.
Could we please merge Jim Grant, Peter Schiff, and Ron Paul into ONE Superdude who would roll-back all laws going back to the pre-Aldrich era? ;-)
Looney
Former Professor = Hired-Gun Spinner.
"Hey four-eyes, just talk echo-nommix at'em. They won't see nuttin commin!"
Oh I don't know. I'd put a "willful ignorance of financial history" kinda' at the front of the boat.
Sorry. Echo.
My last pay check was $9500 working 12 hours a week online. My sisters friend has been averaging 15k for months now and she works about 20 hours a week. I can't believe how easy it was once I tried it out. This is what I do... http://bit.ly/1LCjofJ
Wow, Little Doll! You can make that much making porn? Whodda' thunk...
Reality? We want to be shackled to reality?
How can Wall Street get filthy rich on reality?
Trickle down...
Right down our lower backs.
and then down your inner thighs
Why is it always yellow?
shut up..
..and eat your porridge
I remember in the 60's a Coke was a dime. A pack of baseball cards was a dime. Candy was a penny and people didn't drink bottled water. Water was free.
And Warren Buffet et al took a ten percent position in the Company which he still owns and collects billions in divedend payments from every year.
"People still buy Coke and Coke still makes huge profits." So much so that Wall Street will lend 200 plus billion in order to take the Brand private if the Board desires it.
It's not like business model is complicated.
"Free energy makes for cheap soda sold at premium prices"...even if that price is a dollar.
And yes they CAN "make it up" (meaning profits) "on volume."
Yes THEY CAN create "Coke Premium" which uses real cane sugar and is sold in a bottle instead of plastic...
At about a buck, a Coke is still about a dime today, a pre-65 dime.
It's funny how that works.
http://www.coinflation.com/silver_coin_values.html
So where is the fucking video? Why did you write an article about a video and not include a link?
You paid your subscription to the site with a check, didn't you?
Hasn't cleared yet.
The "debates" that go on by public figures are all simply a contrived event. The decisions have already been made. All discussion in the main public forum is simply disinformation to provide an illusion that the decision is still up in the air. http://www.thetruthaboutthelaw.com/they-promote-every-side-to-constantly...
"...hopes that a revised study of financial history will convince people to go back to the gold standard."
Hope all you want, it won't happen. The current system is a conduit for theft and corruption. No man in a position to benefit personally from such a system will opt out of the system. Nor would others in the system allow him.
This system will only continue to get worse until the men who benefit from it are destroyed in such a complete and public way no one would dare rebuild it.
LYNCHING LAMPOSTS Milestones
"We were not foolish enough to try to make a currency [backed by] gold of which we had none, but for every X that was issued we required the equivalent of a X's worth of work done or goods produced. . . .we laugh at the time our national financiers held the view that the value of a currency is regulated by the gold and securities lying in the vaults of a state bank."
He missed the BIGGEST MISTAKE of all:
https://biblicisminstitute.wordpress.com/2015/06/25/warmongering-vs-econ...
"Our 3 Biggest Financial Mistakes"
Greenspan
Bernanke
Yellen
"You cannot solve a debt crisis with MOAR Debt."
Zero Hedge dictum.
(Disabledvet addendum: you cannot solve it with trillions in private sector LIQUIDITY or zero down financing. YOU HAVE TO GROW THE ECONOMY!)
So we are at the "you can't get there from here" point in the "recovery meme." Time to pay the Piper (meaning the G-man) and yes that includes me too.
"Economics" (doing more with less) still churns on.
One thing I can say for certain is a dollar standard is a lot better than a gold one however.
Better for who? Not joe six pack, that is certain.
All members of the cabal. Coincidence? Hardly.
Three biggest mistakes
Allowing centralized control of the money and media by a privately owned malevolent criminal Khazar cabal who think they are gods on earth and we are all sub human animals put here for their exclusive pleasure and utility.
pick any other two
To say that what we have is a monetary system is not factual.
We have a counterfeiting system.
To say that a counterfeiting system is a monetary system is a contradiction in terms.
What Grant refers to as the true blue gold system could have been a monetary system.
No durable commerce can exist where there are no standard weights and measures to assure the purchaser of the quality and integrity of a seller's product. Likewise only through enduring relationships can buyer and seller come to reliable expectations of exchange and a reputation of honor and honesty be established. Fiat money allows for the evil "action at a distance" whereby instead of tampering with the weights-and-measures of physical goods, Keynesians may dilute and arbitrarily diminish the values of material life, skimming and clipping portions for themselves from nothing. Eventually these alchemical or priestcraft-like privileges always insinuate themselves into the governing body and can rarely be evicted. Virus-like, these methods spawn many clones which multiply unchecked as corrupting influences until all the populace either actively or carelessly participate.
It is a balance sheet issue. Once more hearts and minds are converted over to the darkside (preferring a meal of pottage to any higher moral order) than there exists of the lightside, the cruelties of the dark devils of man's nature are unleashed. Never is a golden age defined by an era such as this. One cannot conduct oneself in any exchange, but particularly in that which furnishes material comfort, without supping at a cup of corruption. We drink deeply from a bowl of filth and marvel when we then experience disease, distress, and demoralisation.
Very close. However your use of the term Fiat Money is indicative of a much larger problem that makes the counterfeiting possible at all. Fiat Money is a contradiction in terms and therefore not factual. The larger problem outside of the general subject here, which is the monopoly of the "banking" system, is indoctrination vs education. This is to say, what to think versus how to think.
The key to removing the organized criminal activities which have usurped what used to be a banking system is to think and reason properly. The only way to do this is to use our tools of thought, concepts, in a manner such that they never contradict the percepts from which they were induced.
The easiest way for an authority to control their subject's actions is to control their thoughts, i.e., the concepts they use to think. By having their subjects thinking that organized crime is banking, counterfeit is money, theft is bad investment, that productive work is managed by policy, and that slaves are hard working citizens, then authority's subjects will always be authority's subjects.
Were ever one genuinely interested in knowing how to sever themselves from authority, then they would begin by openly rejecting the false use of language that constantly, repeatedly, has their thoughts corrupted.
The real questions is, "Do you know what you think, when you think it and why?"
It is an interesting riddle for which I offer the following remedy. Let us define what it means to think. Think about what? We think about the what meets our senses. What meets our senses? Direct contact with the facts meets our senses. When someone else tells us their opinion of the facts are our senses in direct contact with the facts or in direct contact with the opinions?
A defender of the faith will side with the opinion without further interrogation as long as they are the unquestioning subject to the authority of the opinion.
A defender of the fact will not side with the opinion but resort to identifying the basis of the opinion as being factual or contrary to the fact.
Therefore, the answer to the last question of the first paragraph here is that "to think" is to volitionally affirm an opinion as being in accord with the fact or to deny it as being contrary to the fact.
For example, Copernicus was confronted by defenders of the faith (literally, in this case!). Their opinion was that earth was the center and that everything revolved around earth. Upon reading Virgil's Aneid one passage never left Copernicus' mindset, , maybe not verbatim but from my memory, "We set forth from the harbor and the land and cities fell behind." Although the ship was moving and the land was not, it appeared to those on the ship that they were at rest and the land was moving. In defense of the facts, Copernicus proceeded to invalidate the opinion and verify the facts. In this respect, he was thinking.
Another example. You are alone tinkering with a mechanical device and attempting to fix it and there are no opinions to wrestle with in your mind. You must identify the facts in order to fix the device. Your identification of the facts and then what to do with that information is you in the process of thought.
So the answer to you question is yes I do know what I think, when I think it, and why. So I ask, "Do you?"
Always after the facts.
We’re 2 minutes away from a crash and now they’ll be allover tv telling the world that they where warning and telling people all along.
The problem with the "Eurozone" is that it is a "closed" (meaning mercantilist) system. In short while the system over all functions (trade surpluses for example) as an "economic unit" the euro-zone is quite small which makes it hard to lend into.
Indeed few if any European Banks in fact do that.
The United States certainly isn't. "They have their eye on creating an additional fifty States to their so called "Union.""
"...what financial mistakes we’re making today that future generations will regard as the most ridiculous"
It would seem, if our morally corrupt bankers and high financiers, along with the dumbed down masses, continue on their present downward trajectory, future generations will be regarded as most ridiculous.
What's really idiotic is that we have a debt free fiat currency, and with the exception of the illegal drug trade and the off books labor pool, hardly anybody uses it. There is absolutely no valid reason for any government issuing a fiat currency to be in debt to anyone. That don't have to borrow or tax.
The Fed was set up to manage a gold standard money and it promptly blew that system up with an over expansion of credit. In 1933 they removed the gold standard, switching to a Fiat Legal Tender Money, but kept the gold standard accounting and applied it to the fiat, which kept the gold standard government debt bondage in place. 82 years later, and they're still accounting Fiat as if it's gold, keeping governments and the populations in debt, and no one questions it.
I don't understand why deflation would be a bad thing - I mean within some sort of reasonable limit. A net importer all around the bend.. middle class that is getting jacked via creeping inflation {and less product for more $} and being saddled with obamacare and medicare subsidies for the poor, old, and illegal.
Deflation, seems to me, again, I'm not a guy with an econ background so I expect to step in it now and then, but seems good for everyone who gets a paycheck, while the fear of it seems to be necessarily tied to the money-as-debt, for the economy to grow, there must always be loans paradigm.
but banks should sometimes fail, prices on houses in Detroit should come down even more until the begin to patrol those streets of wild dogs with Robocops, and you have to be fairly stupid to think an "economy" - by which is *merely* meant perpetually expanding interest payments to banks and related entities - can, or should - always expand.
If this makes any sense, why isn't there a real world, practical economics - being talked about by the economic chattering class - in which prices fall due to either weakening demand, or increased efficiency?
Prices should go down. Efficiency should, at least, tend to put pressure that way at all times. To have a model that "builds in" the artificially steady increase in prices is just another way of saying that through loans and interest [and new fiat] anyone who works for a living is living in a world where they can buy less and less with their labor, even as stores of capital yield more and more for doing nothing.
Yeah yeah, capitalism is great, and we must not criticize any aspect of it - unless, of course, you view life, and humanity, as more than a homo economicus where all that is valued is based on economics. It's one thing to mostly keep what you earn, another thing to have billionaires able to manipulate markets with play money they'd have a hard time spending in 10 years, and people starving due to famine, war, and massive misallocation of basic resources.
I support a heavy tax on anyone with a net worth over 100 million to go to finance public schools, public works, science research {selfishly} including space-related and energy-related projects.
Oh, and fuck Ayn Rand. Her Objectivism is for simpletons who never read anything else. It is absurd, as a species, to have Rothschilds and Lazars and British Royalty having absurd amounts of currency as people starve.
It's not like Her Majesty and the Barons are intellectually superior - they don't have extra value because they have lots of fiat. In fact, their bad qualities, their stupidity and crass utilitarianism becomes much worse for the potential of everyone else - magnified by the artificial power having lots of tokens of exchange value allows.
Sorry, rambled a bit.
There's nothing really wrong with steady deflation, or steady inflation, or steady currency. Swingy currencies cause destruction though ... some would argue only when it's necessary.
Good rant.
On your tax on the rich, you should simplify as a tax on all wealth. No tax on income, but a tax on existing wealth. Wick makes sense, as the military and legal system exists to help you protect your property, so you should pay a fee for that.
The odds of that every passing are slightly lower than the odds of Obama outlawing buggery.
Deflation only matters in a debt-based system, with everything as collateral. If everyone who participates in the value chain owns his link, then deflation would not have such a disasterous effect.
The Delicate Genius - People should be able to make as much as they want, the real issue is lobbying to prevent competition and politicians willing to be bought. At the conceptual level we're talking about the concept of justice. Systems have brakes like a car.
A gold system slows down the corruption but isn't the complete solution. For a Republic to survive and thrive has to rid itself of the corruption or at some point someone will do it the hard way which becomes world wars. We're going to have another one.
Maybe after that kind of pain that effects everyone and not just the plebs we'll make lobbying punishable by death. As an additional brake, increase representation into the thousands so it becomes prohibitively expensive to buy the government.
So close to the end of our evolution and the instinctual chains that bind us but yet so far...
TDG
Real prices do fall; it is nominal prices that constantly rise. And our economic dictators need rising nominal pricing to confiscate all gains in productivity for the benefit of themselves and parasitical government mandarins.
Unfortunately for much of the Western world and the U.S. in particular, the abdication of wealth creation/productivity to Central Counterfeiters has resulted in further division between the haves and the have-nots. The so-called "wealth effect" has only been enjoyed by those closest to the printing press.
Good, in the short run, for those whose snouts are closest to the trough but devastating for countries who continue lying to the rest of their jaded citizens who know in their guts that something is terribly wrong.
Regards
K
Second part of your post doesn't make any sense at all. How do you get from explainig deflation as a natural phenomenon to that nonsense about capitalism? Are you suggesting that capitalism means to have "billionaires able to manipulate markets", "perpetually expanding interest payments to banks", "middle class that is getting jacked via creeping inflation" ...?
What we have is not a capitalism. It is a crony capitalism or a socialism for the rich, where few rich are privileged to commit legalized crimes at the expens of all productive people. This can not be solved by taxes indiscriminately imposed on everyone who makes money without considering if it was made in honest way or by fraud.
Elect me and I will not raise taxes. I will take you to a few wars and still not raise taxes. I will extend government benefits to anyone with a limp for lifetime and still not raise you taxes. Got billions? Their yours! Just fund my campaign and I will not raise your taxes. Got nothing? Go on government assistance and let your grandkids pay for your meal ticket because fools, I WILL NOT RAISE YOU TAXES even if it means collapsing your nation. JUST ELECT ME GODDAM IT. You can't go wrong.
This is why we are here. No one wants to pay taxes. see: The Fall of the Roman Empire for Children
The problems that led to the fall of the Roman RepublicThe Roman Republic was in trouble. It had three major problems. First the Republic needed money to run, second there was a lot of graft and corruption amongst elected officials, and finally crime was running wild throughout Rome.
http://rome.mrdonn.org/republicfails.html
1. Money
2. Corruption
3. Crime
Caesar was becoming impatient with the Senate. He had his own army. Even thought it was against the law for anyone to bring their private army into the city of Rome, he did just that. The people cheered. They were saved. Caesar was going to solve all the problems of Rome. The senate plotted. They planned and then they acted.
Sixty members of the Senate concluded that the only resolution to the problem was to assassinate Caesar.
http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/caesar2.htm
no one trusts finance, is that a mistake?
and the deportment and profile of the people,
it has all gone to shambles for the most part.
what is finance when you don't know anything
or have a basic unit of measure? crazy pills
man, that is all that is left. crazy pills and dealers
slinging shite.
but i have faith in the pups, not as feed stock,
but, as human sentient beings.
.
Willy DeVille - Gunslinger
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fq08W3zGEgQ
.
grant is the guy.
the medium makes no difference. whole hierarchical system is barbaric, preposterous, and absurd from top to bottom and always has been. animals have a better system than human beings. fuck civilization.
/denzel
"My nigga."
/denzel
"the medium makes no difference. whole hierarchical system is barbaric, preposterous, and absurd from top to bottom and always has been. animals have a better system than human beings. fuck civilization. "
What civilization?
I cannot discern one.
For almost six years, this commentary has been available at http://GreatRedDragon.com
Scroll down and click on "07/23/2009 - Proof of Lying-By-Omission." The title of this eight-page pamphlet is "The Struggle of Labor with an Inflated, Unredeemed Currency and Its Paupering Results," published in 1878!
You would think we would have learned by now if such knowledge wasn't kept from us. If a nobody like me without ivy-league credentials can come across such information, god knows it's been hidden at higher levels."
Copy the pages for your own purposes and pass them on. "Truth, like gold, is to be obtained not by its growth, but by washing away from it all that is not gold." -- Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910)
Jim Grant is a brain
More like a oligarchy-controlled mousepiece.
I just clicked on the link to see if he was still wearing that ridiculous bow-tie.
The tie comes in the package with the argyle socks.
You know Jimmy loves chicks that love guys that wear argyle socks.
-& He can't bear to just throw the ties out, so...
While the UK didn’t officially leave the gold standard during WWI, it stopped exchanging pounds sterling for gold, which amounts to the same thing.
Lincoln was wrong. You can fool all the people all the time ... when it comes to money.
But just in case someone out there has an ability to reason: You can't base your MOE on a commodity ... period ... especially one like gold where there is only 1oz of the stuff for each person on Earth ... less than $2,000. Petty cash.
You sir are an idiot
Each time I hear of that "argument," I know the person making it hasn't the monetary background to know he's become a parrot for the orginal shill he saw on television. Open access to information apparently isn't enough to make a Democratic Republic work. This never really occured to me until the Internet revealed the thinking of so many people that otherwise wouldn't be within reach of my consciousness.
Each time I make that statement I get equally elucidating (i.e. not at all) replies as these . Notice I'm an idiot. I haven't done my homework. I'm merely regurgitating propaganda.
I haven't had TV for 20 years so perhaps my knowledge is 20 years old. But I still cling to "the obvious is timeless".
These are obviously replies from Mises Monks. You only get reading assignments from these people. And when you do read their tripe you see their arguments are never even made ... let alone supported.
I'll reissue the challenge: If what I said in one sentence is wrong, make it right. Take as many sentences as you like.
Why go back to a gold standard when the club members can rent dollars at the discount window at 0.25 percent and then sublet those USD to the treasury (US taxpayer) at 2.25%, 800 percent mark up! Ever wonder why the US 10 is at 2.25 and the JPG is at sub 1%?? Ever wonder why the treasury doesn't just borrow from the discount window at 0.25% like the member banks do?? It's so Wall St. banks can rake in 800% profit monetizing the US deficit. Shame not one representative of the US taxpayers say a word about this.
Grant and his high paying subscription service for billionaires have been wrong so many times one would be insane not to question his (pre-planned) rhetoric or plain not go full reverse of what he is touting publicly.
But then again, even a broken clock can be right at times.
1. 1913 removing the power of the treasury to coin its own money and giving it to a central bank
2, 1971 "temporarily" going off the gold standard
3. 2008 using 800 billion in public funds to bail out bankrupt private banks instead of letting the system clear.
and then the million other little stupid moves like abandoning glass stegal, the uptick rule Nafta, fatca, TPP
The results? speak for themselves .
$16tn, not $800bn.
Close enough for govt. work though.
history will show in 1913 elected politicians advocated their constitutional oath, the fed was born, and the American holocaust started, and every 4 years since 1913 the fed changed the political guards, through the illusion of elections.
how many 100's of milliions of ameriacan lives have been lost through, through deflation, inflation, resccessions, depressions, world , regional, forgiegn, and politically motivated wars, in order to keep ,and advance the fed's, (the bis),financial, and political power?
hell will be full of politicians, and bankers.
Even if a gold backed financial system existed I don't think banks would give up their ability to control people's money. I believe we have to arrest them and imprison them, then prosecute them. all of them.
I Blinked Once - Steve Forbert
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ok8TjUU1ml8&list=RDoyACfkQSEZ0&index=2
.