Jay, at 7.41am, I came into this spare bedroom and looked outside because a beautiful day was dawning and the sun was just coming over the horizon and I love sunrise. I love it much better than I love the smell of gunpowder in the morning.
Sunrise is full of optimism and renewal and hope and opportunity and pleasure. Peace, light, harmony, happiness, health, prosperity, longevity, fun and love are expressed in sunrise almost as well as they are produced by those wonderful [I must repeat it yet again] CDMA phragmented photons suffusing the aether.
Then, I flicked open the notebook computer, having snuggled into bed for a little while before getting up to go for a walk down the driveway with the cat to get the newspaper and then run back, the cat likes a race back, to make a cup of tea and enjoy a read and breakfast with the sun on my back. The cat gets breakfast first [weird, but cats seem to have worked that magic on humans].
After reading a couple of nondescript things, I click on BBR [nee The Great Financial Collapse, which didn't happen, though the crowd is still perched on top of the mountain, certain that The Rapture will arrive any day now, if only the housing bubble will do the right thing]. After a couple of nondescript posts, there's Jay misquoting me on gold as money.
I idly figure I should correct him, just for good form, and no doubt to throw in a couple of baiting words. Then I think I should after all click on the link he provided, just to see what the heck he's on about, in case my reply missed some point.
Well, that decision spoiled my morning. Okay, it hasn't totally spoiled it, but it confirmed yet again for me that I am not in awe of our great and illustrious leaders around the world who contrive with grim determination to wangle their way to power by any means possible [or even impossible]. Ironically, it confirmed for me what I was going to write, which is that of course gold is money, in a narrow Aztecian sense.
Unfortunately, it confirmed for me that gold is still more strongly money than I wish was the case. It confirmed I am still up to my waist in crocodiles, alligators and swamp and that gold has still got a place to secure oneself against the financial MADness of those ruling the swamp. It's not really as though I don't know that, I just like to emphasize the progress we are making and reminders are salutary.
The first couple of paragraphs read to me like the record of a convocation of insanity and superstition.
<By Sumeet Desai
VATICAN CITY, July 9 (Reuters) - UK Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown on Friday called on the International Monetary Fund to revalue its gold reserves as a way of releasing more money for debt relief for the world's poorest countries.
Brown, who is also chairman of the International Monetary Committee, the IMF's policy-setting group, told a seminar organised by the Catholic church in Vatican City that debt relief is a both a moral and economic issue.
"While 100 percent of bilateral debt of the poorest countries is cancelled by many donors, in practice only 50 percent or less of multilateral debt is being cancelled," he said.
"So to do more to complete the process of debt relief, we propose to the international community that we consider anew all options to finance further debt relief for the poorest countries, including making better use of IMF gold."
Most of the IMF's gold is valued at $40 an ounce under a 1971 agreement, though some was revalued at market prices in the late 1990s to finance the Highly-Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) debt relief initiative.
That delivered more than $2.5 billion of debt relief through off-market gold transactions.
Treasury officials said the proposal was to adjust the paper value of the IMF's gold to current market prices of around $400 an ounce to generate more funds for debt relief.
Britain was not suggesting that the IMF sell its gold-- something which could push the market price down and hit poor countries that depend on gold exports.
Brown also used the seminar to raise pressure on the U.S. and Germany in particular to back his idea for an International Finance Facility.
He said the creation of the IFF could double aid to the world's poorest countries to $100 billion a year by issuing bonds in the international capital markets using donor countries' long-term commitments as collateral.
Brown said this money was urgently needed if the Millennium Development Goals of halving world poverty were to be met by 2015.
"The IFF will enable us to deploy the critical mass of predictable, stable and co-ordinated aid as investment over the next few years when it will have the most impact on achieving the targets -- saving lives that would otherwise be lost," he said.
More than 50 countries, including France, are supporting the creation of the IFF but the U.S. and Germany have so far not given the plan their full backing at Group of Seven meetings.>
I know it's nothing to do with the article, but Desai [the writer] is perhaps a relative of the PM Desai who not only failed to do anything I can recall to free India from poverty, but daily drank a glass of his own urine. Somehow, that's a fitting idea for the rest of the article. Humans are quite mad!
Let's all sell our gold, or revalue it, print a bunch of money and give it away to people who don't pay their debts, but drink their own urine, thereby devaluing the money holdings of those who created all the wealth in the first place. MAD as hell! This is not an intelligent approach to life.
Churches are superstitious bodies and the Vatican is apparently a good place to adopt the Moslem idea of no interest loans. Not repaying the loans is taking the idea even further.
Religious people seem to have fixations on money and sex! So do others, but being so metaphysical, one would think that they'd raise their sights somewhat. But let's face it, blokes dressing in weird ladies' clothes and acting as though they have got special connection to some supernatural deity have obviously got no idea what's going on and are likely to think and do very perverse if not perverted things.
If Chancellor Brown is going there to make such announcements, maybe he has got the same problems. Maybe it's something in the water.
Anyway, it makes me think I need a gun and some gold after all. Trusting in the goodness and sense of humanity is perhaps ahead of its time. Look at Yiwu for example, right here in this stream, gung ho for some blood and guts of Taiwanese who don't do what she says.
Debt relief is easy and doesn't need any gold. The creditors just need to write off their money. Brown is just trying to come up with a way of pretending that's not what they are doing. Personally, I don't see why creditors need to write off their money.
Of course, if they've loaned it to "Iraq", but they really loaned it to Saddam and his gang, then they should not expect repayment by his victims. Loans to "countries" are not really loans as a country is just a bunch of people who have contrived to gain control for a while. Anyone silly enough to give them money is asking for trouble.
Countries should just repudiate the loans if they don't like them. Loans to individuals or corporate entities are a different matter. Of course they should repay their loans.
Anyway, gold is still money Jay. I haven't denied that. It is just a very expensive, inconvenient, insecure form of money. People have to do about $230 of work to get an ounce of the stuff. That's very expensive. It's cheaper just to pixelate another phragmented photon and call that money. Managing the pixelation process is the tricky part. Pixelation is almost a zero cost activity. The marginal cost of pixelating another photonic money is as close to zero as it gets.
Okay, the sun is well up on a beautiful midwinter day. I'm off down the driveway!
Have a nice day, as they say.
Mqurice
Q 707
G 407 |
