TheBlackSheep » Fri Feb 28, 2014 7:27 am wrote:I'm really not familiar with economics, it's one of my biggest blind spots I think. I have a question, I'm reading through Tragedy and Hope and according to Quigley, the international bankers were highly in favor of a gold standard for currency. I am pretty sure that at leas Ludwig von Mises advocated that, and I'm not sure becuase I haven't read the books, but it seems like Anthony C Sutton might have written books advocating the gold standard.
Am I wrong about these things? Has something changed in the banking/international banking industry. I will continue to read on and see if it is mentioned in Tragedy and Hope, but since this book is huge and the amount of information available out there is endless, and because I have a restless curiousity, I was wondering if anyone could give me some info on this.
Doubt you're still around but i can answer this, as i was perplexed by exactly the same thing after reading the book. Why would those who benefited from a gold standard work to destroy it?
And Tragedy & Hope was censored likely to remove the explanation for this. As Quigley explains it in the final lecture he ever gave before retirement, and death shortly after.
You can listen to it here:
http://www.carrollquigley.net/audio/Car ... ecture.mp3Below are sections of the transcript for the above recording, where he explains exactly how the international banking industry adapted to a post gold standard inflationary environment, and how it benefited them:
To-day we have a totally different kind of a crisis, much worse. For one thing, it is an inflationary crisis. You can see that. The reason is that banks have changed totally their rôle. Back in that period banks had a creditor status, i.e., money was owed to them. Creditors like low prices. Inflation injures creditors, because it make the value of the money owed to you greater [actually, lesser]. You have to understand these principles, either through economics or by from what you've read in my book Because of the fact that bankers were deflationary here, they held only credit and any organization they controlled held only credit. For example, they controlled insurance companies. Insurance companies invested their money often entirely in bonds They controlled various other banks. These various other banks invested their money only in bonds.
Now, this then is a totally different system. All the universities were, endowments were in bonds, not in stock. Not in equity. They set up foundations. Foundations were invested in bonds. If you are in bonds, then you want deflation, because you are interested in the value of money. But if you leave bonds, and cease being a creditor, and become an owner, then you have everything that you want in, what you call, equity. And if you are in equity, you want inflation. To-day all the banks, all of the endowments of the old universities, and all of the holdings of the Rockefellers are in equity.
But what I'm concerned with, however, is not the fact that middle class people bought mutual funds and get [just] part of the returns from the shares that the corporation bought using the money to pay for this. What I'm concerned with is: who votes those shares? Who voted XXXX. Because that is what you gave up. How conveniently XXXX they voted XXXX knock out. They voted for them, no matter what they're doing. But these same banks vote the shares. This means that if you are a very, very big shot banker, you will not control just the corporations that you have invested in. You control those corporations that you can vote the shares that are being held by the trustee. Now, who is the trustee? The trustee is the trust company that was given control of the shares by this corporation and who guarantee the payments will be made. And these are the biggest four or five commercial banks in this country, including Morgan Guaranty, First National City, Chase Manhattan, it's the three of them, and a couple of others. So they can control every significant corporation in the United States. Thousands of people. Now, now savings are part of.... Oh, suppose the government has not balanced the budget? This means that the government is putting into savings, in spending here more than it's taking from people in taxes there. They have to get that from the banks. When I drew the diagram here, I put the banks up here, but it became too complicated. In other words, if the government needs money it has to come down to these bankers and borrow from the banks.
The result is that the whole system to-day is inflationary. It's inflationary because that is what the small group of people who really dominate the system want. And they want it because they are in equity. Now, the real reason they want that is not just because they value their equity so much, every piece of land they own, every security they own and control, including XXXX. It's that, is that having pushed credit to the absolute limit in everything they control, including everything in the United States, to-day every significant entity in the United States, and that includes corporations, is technically bankrupt. By "technically bankrupt" I mean that their assets are less than their debts. Now, you know a lot of these. And they'll always tell you it's crookedness. Well, sure, it's crookedness. Even the ones that didn't go bankrupt are run crookedly. But you know Boeing, Penn Central, New York City, Lockheed, Pan American (I said that, didn't i?), in England, Rolls Royce, Chrysler of England, which is now pulling out of England. All these are bankrupt. They are all bankrupt because they borrowed more money than they possible could ever pay [back]. All right, what you do is exactly what the Germans did in 1923. That is, you deliberately inflate. If you can double prices, you cut the burden of your XXXX debt in half. Because if you double prices, you can sell, if you're making Quaker Oats,.... If you double the prices,.... And they certainly did double it. Now it's 110. That's $1.10 for two pounds of Quaker Oats to-day. Even though you can buy it in health stores for 29 cents a pound. But they got some nice XXXX, you see. And so forth. It has gone up from 59 cents to $1.10 in little over a year, they doubled it. So this means, they sell, if they sell the same amount of [Quaker] Oats, they take in twice as much money. And it means that the burden of their debt has been cut in half.
Anyway, for anyone who reads this, what is going to happen is that once the current US stock market bubble collapses, all the stimulus credit which has been hiding in it will flood into the commodities market and the US dollar will begin a period of hyperinflation. This period will extend until the dollar is worthless and the $28 trillion in US debt is wiped away. A currency reset will then take place and Central Banking Digital Currency will be fixed to the US dollar at a disparity of something like 1 CBDC: 1,000,000,000 US dollars or something like that. All new credit will cease in US dollars and will only be available in CBDC. All debt in US dollars, mostly government bonds, will be paid off easily assuming people still want to collect them. Of course they won't because that process will cost more than the debt is worth.
Of course no one can believe this will happen until it does. So until then I acknowledge it's fair to view me as a wackjob. But was it not strange that Wiemar Germany enjoyed an economic boom in the early 1920s, during a period they were supposedly burdened by reparation payments? And is it not also strange we enjoy an economic while right now, in the early 2020s, during a period we are supposedly burdened by economic repercussions of a global pandemic.
History is destined to repeat itself.
As above, So below.