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Thursday, September 27, 2012

Budesbank advocates a Gold Standard:

Forbes

9/24/2012
Jens Weidmann, President of the Deutsche Bunde...
Jens Weidmann, President of the Deutsche Bundesbank.
Indeed, the fact that central banks can create money out of thin air, so to speak, is something that many observers are likely to find surprising and strange, perhaps mystical and dreamlike, too  – or even nightmarish.
— Jens Weidmann
On September 18th, the London office of Deutsche Bank  — one of the most respected banks in the world, and a bellwether of elite opinion — published a Global Markets Research paper entitled Gold: Adjusting for Zero. It was written by two esteemed, mainstream analysts Daniel Brebner and Xiao Fu:Figure 7: USD devaluation vs. gold (rebased) log scale
Gold is not really a commodity at all. While it is included in the commodities basket it is in fact a medium of exchange and one that is officially recognised (if not publicly used as such). We see gold as an officially recognised form of money for one primary reason: it is widely held by most of the world’’s larger central banks as a component of reserves. We would go further however, and argue that gold could be characterised as ‘‘good’’ money as opposed to ‘bad’ money which would be represented by many of today’s fiat currencies.
 On the very same day of the Deutsche Bank report Herr Dr. Jens Weidmann, president of the Bundesbank, gave a speech entitled Money Creation and Responsibility.  The Bundesbank is the only member of the ECB’s governing board to oppose Mario Draghi’s sovereign debt purchase policy, a policy disturbingly like that of Bernanke’s “Buzz Lightyear” monetary strategy of QE “to Infinity and Beyond.”
Weidmann stated that “Concrete objects have served as money for most of human history; we may therefore speak of commodity money. A great deal of trust was placed in particular in precious and rare metals – gold first and foremost  due to their assumed intrinsic value. In its function as a medium of exchange, medium of payment and store of value, gold is thus, in a sense, a timeless classic.”

 Green shoots of respect for the classical gold standard are beginning to pierce the decaying concrete of Neo-Keynesianism monetary theory all over the world.  The gold standard’s purpose is by no means to privilege the wealthy and prejudice workers or debtors.  The purpose of gold is to unwind the Faustian bargain throttling our economy and stifling job creation.   The purpose of the gold standard is to propel the world economy into a new era of vibrant, widespread prosperity.  And as Goethe, as if to cheer on future advocates of gold, wrote  in in the concluding pages of Faust, Part II: Whoever strives, in his endeavour,/ We can rescue from the devil.

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