The well-known German economist-analyst Kurt Richebächer has lately published on the Net a letter that markets his financial-intelligence services with the admirable title "Greenspan is Robbing You Blind!"
No blinking doubt. The Great Magoo has the look of a grifter; any cutting-edge phrenologist can see that. But what one can't see, at least I can't – and I don't know anyone else who has claimed to – is just who up there over the stage is working the Magoo's marionette strings and doing the ventriloquist number to keep those great cloudy verbal vaguenesses issuing from the Magoomouth, very like those of Withers of N.I.C.E in C.S. Lewis's That Hideous Strength.
Which leads me to the question, the one I find both endlessly fascinating and endlessly puzzling because it is so unaddressed by our wonderful Meedja, namely, "Whoinell is running this show?"
I think you have to begin with the question that is (again I think) usually credited to Lenin, late of the Great Red Experiment. Who benefits?
Not the great mass of people, surely. Not even the layabout welfare types, including us seniors, who can be shoved off the dole anytime government finds it convenient to "cut back." Not the middle class, the bourgeoisie, whose family-based life prospers only when things are relatively stable and who always take it on the chin when there is inflation and/or war. That is, take it EXTRA on the chin when there is inflation and war, since they take it on the chin all the time because they are the prime target of all governmental taxing agencies. And not the lumpeninvestoriat, who have now convincingly demonstrated they don't know anything about the market, which could have been assumed from the start of the great stock price run-up that brought them in on the party, like most unlucky schlemiels, just before the booze ran out.
No, the only people who we can be sure must like the present bellicose, inflated, arrogant, hubristic, idiotic, loony contretemps must be the Great Rich, those whose bank-based fortunes swell in bad times and good, and whose children, if they have any, are insulated from thuggish crime and war. Why can we be sure they like the present mess and that it must benefit them? Because we don't hear anything from them knocking it. And they don't tell their boy, Alan the Magoo, to do anything different than he is doing, which is just what the Federal Reserve has been doing since it was concocted, namely inflating and wrecking the currency of the United States, once the proudest in the world, paced by one of the handsomest gold coins in the history of money, the St. Gauden's design for the $20 dollar gold piece, the famous "Double Eagle."
If you google for "St. Gauden's gold piece," the first listing reads: "Gold coins, $20 Saint-Gauden's Double Eagle . . . The last gold piece struck by the US government for regular issue, it will forever remain a symbol of the emerging greatness of the United States in the 20th century. . . ."
That was then, this is now. Now you are in a position to flaunt post-1913 Federal Reserve Notes and hope by the time you pass the $20 note you got from the bank this morning it won't be worth substantially less when you spend it at Wal-Mart this evening.
One writer on money, Edwin Vieira, tried an experiment. He asked a hotel clerk if he could pay for his stay in Federal Reserve Notes. The clerk answered, No, but did he not have a credit card, a Visa or MasterCard? One of the presidential Adamses said the greatest danger to the republic was downright ignorance of money and credit. Did he have a point?
Richebächer is now advising there will be a big, long-term decline of the dishonestly named dollar. It is still on the statutes of this fair land that the dollar is a fixed amount of silver (371.25 grains of fine silver). So those paper chits we hand around can't be real dollars, but they substitute for them in the magic-bedazzled Minds of the Masses. The substitutes, I'd guess, are headed down toward their intrinsic value, which is the value of the paper they are printed on.
If you buy a ream (500 sheets) of 24 lb. laser paper, you could print maybe four-up $20 bills per sheet, which is 80 times 500 or $40,000. (Right? Check my arithmetic.) Allow a few bucks for green and black ink, and maybe you need to buy special paper, so the whole cost might (especially if you could bootleg some of that special Crane Co. greenback paper) run up a bit, toward a thousand or two. But if you just use Hammermill or the Office Depot special, you might be out $10 or $15 all told, which would mean your present $20 bill is headed for $ .005 or $.0075. Or less. Exhilarating. Wheelbarrows anyone?
Well, nobody believes this kind of TEOTWAWKI talk anymore, now that Y2K proved such a fizzle. And rightly so. Don't borrow trouble. Jeremiahs are passé. Doomsday folk should get a life, myself included. All's well. Magoo is just as great as advertised. The war in Iraq will be a piece of cake. Condoleezza Rice will be our next vice president, which Camille Paglia says would be nice because it would so aggravate Hillary. George W. will grow up. Palestine and Israel will stage a joint Olympics in Jerusalem, and Toyota will announce a car that runs on air. It's a great wide wonderful world.
February 10, 2003
