Hi Mq - the essay I linked wasn't any great part of the Magnum Opus, for that I have to gird my loins and study up on the French and the Gold Standard from 1926-1930. I've been waiting for Moure's masterful dissertation on the gold standard which has finally come out.
eh.net
www3.uakron.edu
I am afraid I have been dragging my feet while I went off on various tangents, including trying to understand what money is. I have a very hard time understanding why bills of exchange, hawala, hundi, banker's acceptances, bills of lading, and such, are not money, per se. I think they probably are, otherwise the governments wouldn't call hawala and hundi "money laundering". They're money that don't need governments.
Anyway, history tells us that really bad depressions need governments and central bankers acting in concert, screwed up foreign exchange rates, screwed up bank reserves (typically bank panics), high tariffs, and maybe some creative destruction (paradigm shift in technology) all at once. Once upon a time the onus of all this would fall on blue collar workers, but after they got the vote, the governments and central bankers had to spread the pain around in order not to lose their own heads. That's my thesis, in a nutshell. |
