<Greenspan against Newton will see Greenspan humbled>
Jay, yes, you are right, gold is weighty and on a see-saw balance will go up, up, up against an ever-shrinking US$.
The measuring stick's value is determined by how many people are swarming around the talisman of value. Gold is more or less of stable quantity, with new gold not adding a lot each year to the total, as you've said. The US$ is of any length Uncle Al chooses and he chooses, as all have done before him, and in all countries, all times and all currencies, to shrink it a little each year by producing more of them.
The shrinkage has been a wonderful game for the USA because they have contrived to be given the mantle of World Leader. That has enabled them to magnetize ever more pixels to satisfy the demand from the pixilated horde of people on the planet who all want a piece of the action provided by the Great Globalist [GG].
Those bonus pixels they award themselves each year are first spent by the USA government and the adulatory hordes around the world have provided them, year after year, goods and services in exchange for the freshly magnetized pixels. It is the mythical money tree. The Midas Touch. The Magic Porridge Pot. It has been a great deal of fun for Americans.
Unfortunately for them, the mantle of greatness is not one that people can take for themselves, outside activities such as boxing, where Lennox Lewis can crown himself The Greatest by the simple expedient of smashing somebody's head. The days of national greatness being achieved by smashing other people and gaining empire have long gone. Money is a world of voluntary exchange of value, other than in the world of theft and government taxation and even government taxation is essentially, for the most part, a voluntary exchange of value.
The financial mantle of greatness is a cloak given by others. It can be taken away by others.
Will they take it away? If Idol Green$pan maintains the dollar, protecting its value, as he has done, even during the screams of anger, fear and pain of the post millennial cold bath and in the face of the world's greatest-ever Wealth Effect during the era of irrational exuberance, when he asserted the value of the dollar by raising interest rates until the indebted whined like a fleet of 747s, then they will continue to back him.
But GeorgeW mustn't cause collapse by farm subsidies, steel import barriers, timber barriers, lamb and other import barriers. Nor by WATs and foolish actions against the Axis of Evil or Matrix of Malevolence. Nor by the many other confidence-destroying actions the politicians can take. Such as firing Uncle Al or replacing him with, well, almost anyone.
While bumpy, the USA and $ still have plenty going for them. Financially battered Americans are probably no longer thinking they are actually supernatural beings, though they want two human rights categories. Real people, the master race, being red-blooded Americans and the other being Alien, Enemy Combatant and Matrix of Malevolence. Oddly, they moan about human rights in China then forget all about Habeas Corpus [if they have heard of it], rule of law and universality of human rights when they decide to hold a lynching hearing with 3 soldiers deciding what to do with somebody. Heck, even the accused dirty bomber, an American citizen, is declared ipso facto to be of the Matrix of Malevolence - no trial, evidence or other niceties of the overpaid lawyers being required. The accusation is all the evidence needed. Somehow it reminds me of The Disappeared, of Chile. desaparecidos.org Not to mention Argentina and many other despotic countries. Just a small step, but as Mao said, the longest journey begins with a single step [though he probably said it in Chinese and maybe didn't say it at all - maybe it was somebody else who said something similar].
You would not be considered fully human by the USA for example. I would go direct to Guantanamo Gaol [GG] or perhaps even be given the Final Solution since I don't have the redeeming feature of close association with China, which is pretty big and could cause glitches in proceedings in the USA.
So, there are potential glitches in retaining the Great Globalist mantle. But they might succeed because they do have some fairly sound fundamental philosophies and constitutional foundations, not to mention a capital base, 200 million people and a lot of nukes.
In passing, it's funny seeing the stampeding and noise over some dumb kid, descended from Puerto Rico, whose claim to fame is Noo Yawk and Chicago street crime, because he was trying to take part in a blowing up some dirty uranium with a fertilizer bomb or some such idea. It's as though they forget that not long ago, the world was armed to the teeth with ICBMs, ready to go at a moment's notice. It's as though those hardened silos, Kursk, B52s and so on were only imaginary. There are still plenty to go around.
A few grays of radiation in Manhattan is trivial. Maybe Osama's right and there is a kind of mental debilitation taking over American consciousness. Soporific television and constant admonitions to 'take care' have depleted mental structure in too many people.
Anyway, all I was really going to say was that you left somebody out of your equation. Einstein! He's the original relativity exponent and defined shrinkage under gravitational effects, started the hunt for black holes, and calculated the effects of speed on length. The speed of light was set and the Gravitational Constant proposed.
So, it's Newton and the Au Aztecs, versus Uncle Al and Uncle Sam and the US$, versus Einstein, Irwin Jacobs and the world of Phragmented Photons and Cyberspace.
Who will the Global Gentlefolk [GG] give the mantle of value? GG [George Gilder] bet too heavily against Uncle Al and paid the price - GG was travelling faster than the speed of light and not even Phragmented Photons can do that. Though I hasten to add that can be done and I'm working on that as my GSRS project [Graviton Spin Reversal System].
I've got a bob each way on Uncle Al and Irwin Jacobs [plus a side bet hidden away from sight, on the other side of the world, far from the madding crowds]. But when the smoke clears from the current market-clearing processes, I'll be swinging it all into the CDMA and CDNA realms. [Cyber deoxyribonucleic acid] - other than the stash in Hobbitland.
But the Americans are making me [and a lot of people around the world] nervous. Many are fleeing like rats from a sinking ship [if rats actually do that]. GeorgeW has got a hard act to follow after Bill Clinton, who did what is an important job = give a lot of confidence in the leadership. So far, it's not a pretty picture. A couple of years ago I could see the writing on the wall and moved a stash of cash back to base to wait and see.
Hu Jintao might be a good idol to follow. I'll wait and see about that too. He's adopting CDMA, so it's a good start.
Mqurice |
