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

To: carranza2 who wrote (75323)	6/16/2011 10:35:01 PM
From: TobagoJack	1 Recommendation Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 219836

<<'circulating medium' eh, i have read that phrase somewhere..vbg>> i quote the classic and i think all should reread the classic ... much like reading the news of 2025 today. "FIAT MONEY INFLATION IN FRANCE HOW IT CAME, WHAT IT BROUGHT AND HOW IT ENDED * EARLY in the year 1789 the French nation found itself in deep financial embarrassment: there was a heavy debt and a serious deficit. The vast reforms of that period, though a lasting blessing politically, were a temporary evil financially. There was a general want of confidence in business circles; capital had shown its proverbial timidity by retiring out of sight as far as possible; throughout the land was stagnation. Statesmanlike measures, careful watching and wise management would, doubtless, have ere long led to a return of confidence, a reappearance of money and a resumption of business; but these involved patience and self-denial, and, thus far in human history, these are the rarest products of political wisdom. Few nations have ever been able to exercise these virtues; and France was not then one of these few.† There was a general search for some short road to prosperity: ere long the idea was set afloat that the great want of the country was more of the circulating medium; ..." Jay: so started the legend storied in dusty books stored a musty archives mises.org :0) ... and, i continue to quote from the back pages ... "... And, finally, as to the general development of the theory and practice which all this history records: my subject has been Fiat Money in France; How it came; What it brought; and How it ended. It came by seeking a remedy for a comparatively small evil in an evil infinitely more dangerous. To cure a disease temporary in its character, a corrosive poison was administered, which ate out the vitals of French prosperity. It progressed according to a law in social physics which we may call the "law of accelerating issue and deprecia- tion." It was comparatively easy to refrain from the first issue; it was exceedingly difficult to refrain from the second; to refrain from the third and those following was practically impossible. It brought, as we have seen, commerce and manufactures, the mercantile interest, the agricultural interest, to ruin. It brought on these the same destruction which would come to a Hollander opening the dykes of the sea to irrigate his garden in a dry summer. It ended in the complete financial, moral and political prostration of France—a prostration from which only a Napoleon could raise it. * For similar effect of inflated currency in enervating and undermining trade, husbandry, manufactures and morals in our own country, see Daniel Webster, cited in Sumner, pp. 45-50. For similar effects in other countries, see Senior, Storch, Macaulay and others already cited." btw, the folks who engaged with gold at that sorry time either made out fabulous or got wet-worked 50/50 odds. good enough; because everyone else got wiped out for 100% sure.