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Strategies & Market Trends : 2026 TeoTwawKi ... 2032 Darkest Interregnum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TobagoJack who wrote (66120)	9/17/2010 4:16:22 AM
From: elmatador	Respond to of 217619

The Death of Paper Money As it happens, another book from the 1970s entitled "When Money Dies: the Nightmare of The Weimar Hyper-Inflation" has just been reprinted. Written by former Tory MEP Adam Fergusson -- endorsed by Warren Buffett as a must-read -- it is a vivid account drawn from the diaries of those who lived through the turmoil in Germany, Austria, and Hungary as the empires were broken up. Near civil war between town and country was a pervasive feature of this break-down in social order. Large mobs of half-starved and vindictive townsmen descended on villages to seize food from farmers accused of hoarding. The diary of one young woman described the scene at her cousin’s farm. "In the cart I saw three slaughtered pigs. The cowshed was drenched in blood. One cow had been slaughtered where it stood and the meat torn from its bones. The monsters had slit the udder of the finest milch cow, so that she had to be put out of her misery immediately. In the granary, a rag soaked with petrol was still smouldering to show what these beasts had intended," she wrote. Grand pianos became a currency or sorts as pauperized members of the civil service elites traded the symbols of their old status for a sack of potatoes and a side of bacon. There is a harrowing moment when each middle-class families first starts to undertand that its gilt-edged securities and War Loan will never recover. Irreversible ruin lies ahead. Elderly couples gassed themselves in their apartments. Foreigners with dollars, pounds, Swiss francs, or Czech crowns lived in opulence. They were hated. "Times made us cynical. Everybody saw an enemy in everybody else," said Erna von Pustau, daughter of a Hamburg fish merchant. Great numbers of people failed to see it coming. "My relations and friends were stupid. They didn’t understand what inflation meant. Our solicitors were no better. My mother’s bank manager gave her appalling advice," said one well-connected woman. "You used to see the appearance of their flats gradually changing. One remembered where there used to be a picture or a carpet, or a secretaire. Eventually their rooms would be almost empty. Some of them begged -- not in the streets -- but by making casual visits. One knew too well what they had come for." Corruption became rampant. People were stripped of their coat and shoes at knife-point on the street. The winners were those who -- by luck or design -- had borrowed heavily from banks to buy hard assets, or industrial conglomerates that had issued debentures. There was a great transfer of wealth from saver to debtor, though the Reichstag later passed a law linking old contracts to the gold price. Creditors clawed back something. telegraph.co.uk

To: TobagoJack who wrote (66120)	9/17/2010 4:34:49 AM
From: Maurice Winn	1 Recommendation Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 217619

TJ, for over quarter of a century I have moaned about the flimsy fiat financing of governments and the need to have solid foundations for money. In 1984 colleagues called me Mr Bring Back the Gold Standard. Not that that's what I was advocating. For decades before that I was well aware of the value of having robust money. So it's not as though I've just heard of gold and money and inflation and financial relativity theory. For decades I have threaded my way through monetary MADness. Pretty well too, the odd glitch notwithstanding. I have plans for the future too and so far, so good. You will recall our discussions of several years ago with me predicting that gold would easily get to $2,000 per ounce with financial relativity theory debilitation of US$ and $10,000 per ounce if gold was to take over to a large extent as money. Here we are cruising through $1280 per ounce. Gold is so small in quantity that for it to be used as money, it would have to be at $10,000 per ounce. At that price, the economic madness in the hunt for gold would be very expensive. We'd be back to the gold culture of the Aztecs. Swarms of people would waste their lives sucking it out of the oceans, digging homeopathic amounts out of mountains, and adding and removing protons to cheaper metals to get the good stuff. I've got bigger and more productive games to play than fiddle with speculative mania on gold [platinum and silver]. Swarms of people are already doing that. I'll swap you one mirasol screen and Snapdragon/LTE asic with WhiteFi thrown in for free, for one of your ounces of gold, and you'll be glad to give up your gold. A billion people in China are taking up my offer. Not many are bothering with gold. Mqurice

To: TobagoJack who wrote (66120)	9/17/2010 4:35:25 AM
From: Maurice Winn	2 Recommendations Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 217619

TJ, for over quarter of a century I have moaned about the flimsy fiat financing of governments and the need to have solid foundations for money. In 1984 colleagues called me Mr Bring Back the Gold Standard. Not that that's what I was advocating. For decades before that I was well aware of the value of having robust money. So it's not as though I've just heard of gold and money and inflation and financial relativity theory. For decades I have threaded my way through monetary MADness. Pretty well too, the odd glitch notwithstanding. I have plans for the future too and so far, so good. You will recall our discussions of several years ago with me predicting that gold would easily get to $2,000 per ounce with financial relativity theory debilitation of US$ and $10,000 per ounce if gold was to take over to a large extent as money. Here we are cruising through $1280 per ounce. You were very excited at the suggestion of $10,000 per ounce. Gold is so small in quantity that for it to be used as money, it would have to be at $10,000 per ounce. At that price, the economic madness in the hunt for gold would be very expensive. We'd be back to the gold culture of the Aztecs. Swarms of people would waste their lives sucking it out of the oceans, digging homeopathic amounts out of mountains, and adding and removing protons to cheaper metals to get the good stuff. I've got bigger and more productive games to play than fiddle with speculative mania on gold [platinum and silver]. Swarms of people are already doing that. I'll swap you one mirasol screen and Snapdragon/LTE asic with WhiteFi thrown in for free, for one of your ounces of gold, and you'll be glad to give up your gold. A billion people in China are taking up my offer. Not many are bothering with gold. Mqurice