BTW, something about gold coconuts and 5,000 ... timesonline.co.uk
The Times December 05, 2005
It's all nuts to me, Mr Bush
William Rees-Mogg
An elementary lesson in supply and demand, from the fruit of the palm to the soaring price in gold
MONEY IS ONLY a specialised form of barter. In the middle of the 19th century, Mademoiselle Zélie, a singer of Théâtre Lyrique in Paris, made a professional tour around the world and gave a concert in the Society Islands in French Polynesia. In exchange from an air from Norma and a few other songs, she was to receive a third part of the receipts.
“When counted, her share was found to consist of three pigs, 23 turkeys, 44 chickens, 5,000 coconuts, besides considerable quantities of bananas, lemons and oranges.” In Paris, these goods would have been worth about 4,000 francs, generous remuneration for half a dozen songs.
Mademoiselle Zélie’s experience was told and retold by 19th-century economists to illustrate the principle that currencies operate like any other form of exchange. What matters is relative scarcity; in her case the relative scarcity of popular songs and coconuts, in present day usage, the relative scarcity of different currencies, such as the dollar and the euro. Or, indeed, the relative scarcity of gold, the one definition of value that stands outside the fluctuations of national paper currencies. One could say that gold provides the coconuts of our monetary system.
On January 22, 2001, two days after George W. Bush was inaugurated as President of the United States, the price of gold was $265.90 an ounce. Last week the gold price broke through the $500 dollars an ounce level; that means the dollar has been devalued in terms of gold by almost 50 per cent in the four years and ten months of this presidency.
That does not reflect well on Gordon Brown, who as Chancellor sold a large part of Britain’s gold reserve at a price that was way below the present level. It reflects even worse on President Bush. He is ultimately responsible for the management of the dollar. It has halved its gold value on his watch.
The rise in the gold price does not come as a surprise. Many commentators, including myself, had forecast that gold would rise to these levels. My forecast was that gold would reach $500, and when it broke through $500 would move on towards $1,000 an ounce. It would now require a radical change in US financial policy to stabilise the dollar; I do not think such a change is at all likely. So far, President Bush has been very reliable as an agent of dollar devaluation.
There are technical reasons, both on the supply and demand side, that make it probable that the gold price will continue to rise. Yet it was not these technical market reasons that led some of us to forecast the higher price, but the underlying weakness of the financial policy of the United States.
Alan Greenspan, the retiring Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, deserves his own considerable share of responsibility, all the more so because he saw the risks of combining large budget deficits with growing trade deficits and loose monetary conditions. That is a classic recipe for depreciating a currency. From time to time Alan Greenspan has sounded a warning; he has been willing to blow the whistle, but he has never been willing to pull on the brakes.
Last week, he made his farewell speech to the G7 finance ministers in London, and gave another belated warning. “If the pernicious drift towards fiscal instability in the United States and elsewhere is not arrested, and is compounded by a protectionist reversal of globalisation, the adjustment process could be quite painful for the world economy.”
The phrase “pernicious drift towards fiscal instability” is an amazing statement of any chairman of the Fed about any president, all the more extraordinary when it comes from as cautious a man as Alan Greenspan about a President whom he still serves. Incidentally, it applies just as much to Gordon Brown as to George Bush. “And elsewhere” refers to the “pernicious drift” in UK policy.
No doubt the fall of the dollar could have been matched by a rise in the euro; it is possible for people to switch between currencies, rather than into gold. But the euro itself is now a suspect currency. Many people doubt whether it will be possible for Italy to remain inside the euro straitjacket. Gold is better than the dollar, and better than the euro as well.
The rise in the gold price is a natural consequence of the inflationary fiscal and monetary policies of the United States. That has produced a very widespread inflation in the value of real assets, an inflation that is apparent in the global housing market, most of all in the British and American housing markets.
Gold is a natural alternative investment for the Asian countries, particularly China, India and Japan. These countries have a stronger tradition of investing in gold; their economies are growing much faster than those of the West. They already have more dollars than they really want. It has been probable for a long time that they would increasingly invest their surplus dollars in buying gold. That must make sense for them. Now there is far more private wealth in China and some of that is being invested in gold. Central banks may have a reason for supporting the dollar. Asian billionaires want profits.
One can go back to the basic logic of exchange markets, to Irving Fisher’s equation of exchange, or to Mademoiselle Zélie’s experience in Polynesia with coconuts. The US has created too many dollars; the twin US deficits are pumping out more of them all the time.
The wise virgins still have gold, but the foolish virgins, like our own Chancellor, sold most of it years ago. The age-old discipline of supply and demand leaves the dollar with only one way to go. Gold will continue to rise in value so long as the United States is at war, the US budget is in deficit, the US trade account is in deficit and George Bush is in the White House. You can bet 5,000 coconuts on that.
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