Showing posts with label Monetary History. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Monetary History. Show all posts

Thursday, October 20, 2011

Dual Entry Accounting - Man’s Greatest Innovation, Modern Central Banking – Man’s Greatest Catastropche - Part IV – The Catastrophe at Hand

10/20/2011 Portland, Oregon - Pop in your mints…

For those of you who have missed Part I, Part II, and/or Part III, you may read them by clicking on the following links:

Dual Entry Accounting - Man’s Greatest Innovation, Modern Central Banking – Man’s Greatest Catastrophe - Part I

Dual Entry Accounting - Man’s Greatest Innovation, Modern Central Banking – Man’s Greatest Catastrophe - Part II - Irony

Dual Entry Accounting - Man’s Greatest Innovation, Modern Central Banking – Man’s Greatest Catastrophe - Part III – Money or Credit?

Again, for those of you who are too lazy to click the links, here we offer a brief summary to get you up to speed:

Central Banking is the physical expression of Man’s need to safeguard his wealth and to increase trade.  A Central Bank’s usefulness and scope were greatly increased when dual entry accounting could be employed to manage a Central Bank’s accounts.

The Central Bank’s role as a storehouse of wealth has generally attracted the attention of the Government, which is the physical expression of Man’s need to protect his life.  The Government, in this capacity, does not generate wealth and must maintain itself either by taxing its subjects or borrowing funds.

The Central Bank, as the repository of wealth and facilitator of trade, by default creates a majority of the banknotes which circulate in a society.  As such, the Central Bank becomes the natural creditor of the Government.  Whether it lends funds directly to the Government or indirectly, the result is the same.  That result is that the use of its subject’s wealth by the Government is greatly facilitated by the existence of a Central Bank.

Having established the fact that some form of both a Government and a Central Bank will naturally, in some form, come into existence and become increasingly interdependent, the only question is one of the size and scope of such entities.

Today, that the scale of modern Central Banking is excessive and that the potential for catastrophe is unprecedented.

The reason for the unprecedented scope of Central Banking is that money, as it is widely understood today, does not really exist.  Rather, banknotes issued by Central Banks, which are by definition credit instruments, are misunderstood to be money proper by a majority of the people in the developed and semi-developed world.

This misunderstanding flies in the face of 9,000 years of human history, in which Gold and Silver in bar and coin form have been tacitly used as money proper.  It is this misunderstanding which has set the stage for the greatest catastrophe in history to occur.

Federal Reserve Notes Begin to Replace Gold and Silver as the concept of Money for a Generation
 The misunderstanding of money and credit began, like many experiments, in Northern Europe with the establishment of the Bank of Amsterdam.  Established in 1609, the Bank of Amsterdam is widely recognized as at least a precursor to modern central banks.  For over 400 years since it was established, the use of banknotes issued by a Central Bank which are not directly convertible to coin has slowly but steadily increased.

Modern Central banks issuing banknotes were subsequently formed in Europe, England, and Japan.  As these Central banks and their successors began to slowly absorb the true money supply and issue banknotes in their place, man began to slowly transfer the concept of money proper from Gold and Silver and attribute the qualities of money to the banknotes issued by the Central Bank.

This process of wealth absorption greatly accelerated in 1913 when the United States of America granted a 100 year charter to its third Central Bank, the Federal Reserve.  The FED, as it is commonly known, was to act primarily as a reserve and to create "money" (read banknotes) as necessary.  At the advent of World War I, the FED stepped in and issued bonds to finance the war and after the war the FED was granted exclusive control of the money supply in the United States.

In 1933, in the midst of what was to be the great depression in the US, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 6102 which required citizens to deliver all but a small amount of gold coin and bullion held by them to the FED in exchange for $20.67 worth of Federal Reserve notes (the banknotes issued by the FED) per ounce.

Naturally, most citizens with large quantities of gold at the time had it transferred to Switzerland.
Then, by decree, the Government raised the price of redeeming gold from the FED to $35 per ounce.  Redemption could only be made by Foreign parties as, naturally, it was now illegal for US Citizens to own gold.

Federal Reserve notes were now the only form of "money" that an entire generation of Americans were likely to handle.  However, foreigners could still redeem the Federal Reserve notes for gold, though they rarely did, at $35 per ounce.

After World War II, the US emerged as the most powerful nation on earth.  It was only natural that the western governments would peg their currencies at a fixed exchange rate to the US dollar (Federal Reserve Note) which was redeemable in gold at $35 per ounce.  This is commonly known as the Bretton Woods system.

The system held together for around 20 years, accepting that $35 US Dollars were as good as gold until 1968, when things began to get dangerous...

Stay tuned and  Trust Jesus.

Stay Fresh!

David Mint

Email: davidminteconomics@gmail.com

P.S.  For more ideas and commentary please check out The Mint at http://www.davidmint.com/

Key Indicators for October 20, 2011


Gold Price Per Ounce:  $1,622 PERMANENT UNCERTAINTY
M1 Monetary Base:  $2,056,000,000,000 RED ALERT!!!
M2 Monetary Base:  $9,570,500,000,000 YIKES UP $1 Trillion in one year!!!!!!!

Friday, January 21, 2011

Oil, Oozing Out of the Ground into Every Consumer Good On the Planet

1/21/2011 Portland, Oregon – Pop in your mints…
Today we are taking a short break from our usual rant/commentary.  As long as governments see fit to tinker with the economy and trade, there will be no shortage of fallacies to refute, advice to give, defeats to lament, and victories to cheer.  We see it as our duty to add a voice to the cause of Liberty, no matter how weak and crackled that voice may be.  However, here at The Mint, apart from bombarding our readers with seemingly incessant yet strangely entertaining commentary, we endeavor to go a step further and attempt to educate.  By educate, we mean assist you, fellow taxpayer, in cutting through the onslaught of data to pick out important trends.
As we have mentioned before, at the bottom of every Mint, we provide data on eleven metrics that we have given the title "Key Statistics."  We follow these Key Statistics daily in order to understand what is broadly happening to the economy within the confines of the US Dollar system which has come to dominate world commerce.  Please note that we define the US Dollar as a system, and we must emphasize that this system, which is often mistaken for Money, is in fact a large fishing net, one that is cast over the world in an attempt to measure every activity under the sun.
With all of that said, we will now move on to our educational Mint of the day, the topic of which is oil.

Monday, November 15, 2010

Anyone Want a Buck?

11/15/2010 Portland, Oregon – Pop in your mints…
The world left off Friday with gold taking a $38 drop and the world markets worried that China is worried about inflation.  At the Mint, however, we left off by coming to an even more astounding conclusion.  One that has far reaching implications not only for misguided Keynesian school economists but for every dollar denominated bond and bank account holder.  It also applies to those of us dinosaurs who still use dollars in its cash and coin form as much as possible.
The astounding conclusion is that the world, after nearly a century of increasing demand for dollars as a medium of exchange, is slowly turning towards other mediums of exchange to replace it.  For those of you who missed it Friday, we put it this way: