In response to one of my posts on the Manhigut Yehudit listserv, of which I am a frequent commentator on free market issues, one of my allies responded with the post, “Rafi Farber for Finance Minister!”
To which I responded thusly:
I don’t want the finance ministry. I want the Bank of Israel. Let me be BoI Chairman in the Feiglin administration and I know exactly what I’ll do and how. Without the Bank of Israel printing the money and creating inflation, the Finance Ministry is completely castrated, and it will have to raise taxes like crazy in order to fund all the waste and welfare, which would be impossible to do without endangering the regime itself. The government will be forced to either shrink down or risk a revolution.
Give me the Bank of Israel, and within a year I will sell almost all the dollars and the rest of the foreign exchange, buy gold and silver, hand it out to every bank in proportion to how many shekels each bank has on its books, tell them that they are now all completely on their own, close the BoI doors, fire everyone who works for me, resign, and call it a day.
Whew! Wouldn’t that be awesome. I salivate and get teary eyed just thinking about it. I’d need to hire a bodyguard.
Stanley Fischer is the head of the Bank of Israel. As such, he is the government appointed goon in charge of money printing. In his infinite wisdom, he is supposed to know exactly what the supply of money should be, because he’s purportedly a chacham she-ein kamohu – a crazy genius who has a pulsating brain and somehow knows these things. Or maybe God comes to him in his sleep and tells him how many shekels should exist and how much he should print and when.
Or maybe he’s just some guy who has no idea what he’s doing, given a power the equivalent of an economic nuclear weapon, something that no one man should ever, ever have.
Stan the Super Shekel Man recently came out with an announcement that he would be quitting his post early. Aside from the speculation as to why (I think it’s because he knows there will be an unstoppable economic tsunami in the next 3-5 years and he wants to duck out early and quit while he’s ahead), I have seen nothing but wall to wall praise for this central planning money printing soviet-style currency czar. Sure he’s kindly, has a sweet voice, an endearing Zambian accent, cutely mixes up male and female in his Hebrew grammar all the time, and the Israeli economy didn’t totally collapse in 2008 so everyone assumes the money master is responsible for saving us all from destitution. But this is all a big, sad, sorry myth.
Let’s break it down.
Let’s step aside for a moment from the persona of Stan the Man himself. He as a person is not the main problem. As I said, he’s a nice guy. The main problem is the very system of central banking that give men like him inordinate power over all of our economic lives, a power which, once you realize the scope and consequences of it, can make you dizzy.
Imagine for a moment two national economies. One where the supply of shoes and their price is controlled by one man and anybody else who manufactures or uses shoes besides him goes to jail, and another where the supply of shoes and their price is controlled by the free market, meaning a myriad of entrepreneurs freely importing and exporting shoes based on the demand for them by customers. In a free market where anyone can manufacture and buy as many or as few shoes as he wants, the supply, demand, and price of shoes will tend to reach an equilibrium point where profits will remain constant and steady. Shoe firms like wholesalers, manufactures, and retailers, will all compete with each other to sell the most shoes to the public. In order to do this, they will have to make shoes of the highest possible quality at the lowest possible prices in order to attract buyers.
If the supply of shoes gets too high, shoe prices will tend to fall, lowering profit margins, thereby restricting the amount of shoes manufactured, choking off supply, and bringing shoe prices back up to equilibrium. If demand gets too high, shoe prices will tend to rise, increasing profit margins, encouraging shoemakers to produce more in order to earn those increased profits. This brings supply back up to match demand, bringing prices back down to equilibrium again.
Now, in an economy where the supply of shoes and their price is controlled by one man, let’s call him the chairman of the Shoe Bank of Israel, we are entrusting a single person to:
Manufacture every single shoe in the country, because anyone else who does that is considered a shoe counterfeiter and goes to prison
Know automatically what the supply of shoes in the country should be at any given moment
Set the price of shoes at whatever he thinks it should be
Not abuse this power
The shoe market in such a country would be a complete mess and everyone who needs shoes would be miserable. Since only one firm would be allowed to make and sell shoes, there would be no competition and the quality of the shoes would deteriorate. If the Chairman of the Shoe Bank of Israel set the price of shoes too low, meaning he underestimates demand, people would start hoarding the shoes and buying more than they need, and there would be shoe shortages. If he sets the price of shoes too high, meaning overestimates demand, people who needed new shoes would not buy them, instead waiting for a lower price. Perhaps they would attempt to repair their old shoes, or cut open the ends if they didn’t fit. Huge surpluses of shoes would result.
Meanwhile, regardless of whether Stanley Shoemaker creates a shoe shortage or a shoe surplus in the country with his inaccurate divining of the appropriate shoe price and supply, people will have no choice but to buy shoes from him alone, and he will get richer selling them regardless of how crappy the shoes are. Nobody wants to be arrested for being a shoe counterfeiter after all.
Having one man in charge of the shoe supply in a country is bad enough. But it is infinitely worse to have one man in charge of the money supply in an entire country, because the supply and demand for money controls the entire economy, shoes included.
I know that the concept “demand for money” and “price of money” is hard to wrap your head around. Doesn’t everyone demand money all the time? How can it change? How can money itself have a price? Isn’t money money? Bear with me here.
It is difficult for people to understand these concepts these days because fiat government currencies have ruled the world since 1971, and governments the world over have taken upon themselves the exclusive right to produce money, forbidding anything else from entering the market as money. But in reality, money, just like shoes, is a good like any other. The only difference is that money is more easily tradable than shoes for other goods. In fact, money is the most easily tradable good that exists. That’s why it’s used as money.
Now, the “price of money” and the “demand for money” are reflected in many different ways. They are reflected in how much money money lenders (AKA banks) charge to borrow money, otherwise known as interest rates. If interest rates are high, then money is “expensive”. If money is expensive and money lenders can charge high interest rates, the “demand for money” must be high too. Otherwise, people would not be willing to pay such high rates in order to borrow money. If interest rates are low, then money is “cheap”. If money is cheap and money lenders are forced to lower interest rates in order to attract borrowers, then the “demand for money” must be low.
The price and demand for money is also reflected in the general economy in terms of the money prices of all other goods and services. At times when the demand for money is high, forcing interest rates up, that means people want to hold more of their money (AKA save) rather than spend it. If people want to save more money, the consequence is that the money-prices of goods and services will go down. Things will get cheaper to buy, because in order to attract sales, merchants will have to lower prices in order to entice more money out of savings.
The high interest rates, or high price of money, will in turn serve to bring the money market back into equilibrium at times when the demand for money is high and prices low, as money-savers (lenders) will earn higher rates of return. This will earn savers more money on their savings, and in that way they will be enticed to spend the money they earned from their saving, bringing prices back up, money out of savings, and interest rates back down as lenders are forced to settle for lower interest rates in order to attract more borrowers again. The demand for money is thus lowered, enabling merchants to raise the money-prices of other goods and services, prices go up, demand for money down, and interest rates down.
A short recap:
Demand for money up = interest rates up = prices down
Demand for money down = interest rates down = prices up
Eventually, this entire process reaches an equilibrium point where relative prices of goods and services in terms of money will stay more or less stable along with interest rates.
Now what about the supply of money? This is the cool part. In a free market, the supply of money will be controlled NOT by Stan the Shekel Man, but by gold and silver mining companies teaming up with private money coiners who in turn team up with private banks. Here’s how it works:
Mining Company A has mined 100 kilos of silver, but needs them coined by a recognized and respected money coiner so he can buy stuff. Merchants don’t accept uncoined blobs of silver because there is no way to tell how pure the silver is. So he goes to Money Coiner B and gives him 100 kilos of silver.
Money Coiner B puts the silver through his coining machine, checks its purity, and stamps it with his stamp of approval by coining it into little circles with his certification on it. He keeps 2 kilos of newly minted silver coins as a commission for his services.
Mining Company A and Money Coiner B then go to Money Bank C and say, “Do me a favor Money Bank C. We have these coins here. They’re too heavy. Could you please put them in your vault and give us paper receipts that the silver is sitting here? Please give the silver to whoever presents you with the receipt.” Money Bank C takes the silver coins, provides them with receipts, and charges Mining Company A and Money Coiner B a small fee for storing the coins and providing the receipts.
All parties go out and spend the paper receipts, AKA “money” in the economy and buy stuff.
How is the supply of money regulated in a free market? In the following way: When the demand for money goes up and the prices of other goods go down, mining companies will make higher profits on the gold and silver that they mine for two reasons:
Since the prices of everything are going down, it will become cheaper for them to do the mining itself, increasing profit margins.
Since the prices of everything are going down, the mining companies will be able to buy more stuff with the gold and silver they produce.
These two factors will entice them to increase production of gold and silver, increasing the supply, bringing interest rates down and prices of other goods and services back up. When prices of other goods and services go back up, it will cost the mining companies more money to mine gold and silver, and they will be able to buy less with the gold and silver they mine. Eventually, profit margins for the gold and silver they mine will go down to a point where they will be forced to lower production. The supply of money will go down and the prices of goods and services back down again with it.
In a free market for money, the best, most efficient, and most honest money coiners will get the most business and have the most coins circulating on the market. Those coining companies that cheat and lie about the purity of their coins will lose business and go bankrupt. Their coins will not circulate, or they will circulate at a discount.
In a free market for money, the best, most efficient, and most honest money receipt issuers (currency printers, private banks) will store the most money and issue the most currency. Those private banks that cheat and lie about how much silver or gold they have in their vaults to match the receipts and “inflate” their currency will lose business, inspire their receipt holders to call in their receipts for silver and if they can’t provide it, they will go bankrupt. Their currency will not circulate, or it will circulate at a discount..
In a free market for money, you will have several different competing currencies and coinages, with people accepting the ones with the best reputations and rejecting the ones that are unreliable.
Interest rates and prices will remain stable as money supply and money demand equilibrate, and as in any developed economy, goods and services will increase faster than the supply of money, allowing for a gently falling price level and everyone to get richer in real terms.
Or you can have someone like Stan the Shekel Man Fischer in charge, printing sheets of paper backed by absolutely nothing, causing prices to continually rise and government controlled money to continually lose value, making everyone poorer and more miserable.
Stanley Fischer did not save the Israeli economy from collapse. He simply did not abuse the insane power given to him as badly as other central bankers did: the monopoly power to print money. This power, incidentally, was given to him in much the same way as our fictional Stan Shoemaker’s was given to him: By a bully State ready and willing to arrest anyone besides Stan who manufactures shoes. Or in this case, money. And why would the Israeli government forbid anyone but Stan their goon from manufacturing money? Because when you have control over the entire money supply, you can spend it on anything…you…want. Like welfare. And leather seats for Knesset members. And armored cars for party heads. And first class trips to France for Defense Ministers. And subsidies to ignoramuses who you want to vote for you. And huge campaign posters and TV ads and God only knows what else.
When one man controls the shoe market, the quality of shoes goes down and everyone who wears shoes, suffers. When one man controls the money market, the quality of money goes down. It loses value. It makes you poorer. Everyone who uses money, suffers.
Every single time Stanley Fischer printed shekels with the flip of a switch, he stole from people like you and me who have to work to earn our shekels. He stole from you. He stole from me.
Stanley Fischer is a thief who should be arrested. He is not a hero who should be praised.
The Fed today announced it would print money until the economy recovers. Ergo, it will print money forever, because printing money prevents economic recovery.
Gold and silver went berzerk today. But bonds did not. They went down. You’d expect, after an announcement that the guys who print money are going to be buying bonds with it, that the value of bonds would go up. If a company is bought out by a bigger company, then the stock goes up, because said bigger company is buying a bunch of stock of the smaller company being bought out. This is what happens in normal markets.
Unless…unless nobody wants any of the shares of the smaller company to begin with and they all think the big company is insane to buy up the smaller company because all they sell is solar powered flashlights, so everyone sells all their shares to the bigger company and the stock actually goes down even though the big company is buying it up because EVERYONE ELSE is selling their shares to the bigger company too.
This is what happened today. The government is selling pieces of paper that promise to pay you dollars in the future. They are selling “stock” in dollars. But dollars in the future are worth a lot less than dollars in the present. Nobody wants dollars in the future. They’re like solar powered flashlights. So they’re all selling them to the fed. And bonds went down, even though the biggest buyer just stepped in and said we will buy bonds forever.
This is it folks. The real crash is starting right now. If bonds are going down today of all days, interest rates are on their way up That means the interest on the national debt is about to go through the roof. Every bailed out bank is going to fail. Again. And this time there won’t be any more bailouts.
Government of Country A wants money to bribe citizens of A for votes.
Government A goes into debt by selling bonds, and gives money to people of A, and gets reelected.
Government A needs more money, so it sells more bonds, and gives it to people of A.
Government A sells so many bonds that debt surpasses GDP of A. People get worried that A will not pay bonds. Interest rates rise.
ECB buys hundreds of billions in bonds of A to “stabilize the system”, and gives A the money it printed to buy them, in exchange for going even deeper into debt.
A defaults, ECB stops giving them Euros.
A leaves the Euro and prints its own currency.
Currency A plummets in value because nobody else wants it. People of A have nothing to exchange for goods and services. They starve and riot.
Debt is encouraged in a fiat system because in the back of their minds, investors always know the central bank will guarantee the bonds, enabling countries to go so deep into debt that they will never be able to pay it back. How would it work under a gold standard?
Government of B wants to bribe its citizens for votes.
Government A goes into debt by selling bonds for gold, gives gold to people of A, and gets reelected.
Government A needs more gold, so it sells more bonds. But they can’t sell as much since investors are trying to conserve gold rather than keep lending it to A. Interest rates rise.
Investors in A’s bonds are literally running out of gold. They stop buying bonds in order to conserve gold for other purposes.
ECB does not buy any bonds either since ECB does not exist. Gold is money and it is spread around, given in exchange for goods and services.
A’s debt is large, but manageable, because nobody allowed them to go too deep into debt in an attempt to conserve their gold reserves.
A cuts its budget, stops borrowing gold, and begins to pay back its debt in gold by exchanging goods and services for gold. Life is harder, but the budget is eventually balanced and the debt is repaid.
In the next election, people of A elect fiscal conservatives who understand that it is a bad idea to go too deep into debt.
Let’s begin from the end. Warren Buffet likes to claim that gold is not a worthy investment because gold can’t do anything. Own it for a century and a century later, you’ll own nothing more. It’s not like gold reproduces by binary fission like an amoeba or something like that. And no central bank can print gold.
Buffet is right. Gold is not a worthy investment. In fact, it’s not even an investment at all. It’s a material that stores value. Gold doesn’t go up or down. It’s the dollar that goes up or down. The question is, what would you rather hold: gold, which maintains its purchasing power, or the dollar, which is a man made fiction?
In 2008, stocks began to seriously crash, and the dollar index went up. The dollar index is an arbitrary measurement of the dollar in terms of how many units of other paper currencies it can buy. It means nothing in relation to actual commodities. The dollar index went up because stocks plummeted. Stocks plummet because people sell them in exchange for dollars. So in 2008, everyone was demanding dollars, so the dollar index went up. The dollar was the “safe haven” even though dollars buy less and less every year.
There are other safe haven options. One is US treasury bonds. For example, one can purchase a piece of paper for $1,000 that says that the US Government will owe you $1,100 in ten years, when the US national debt will exceed something like $30 trillion and every penny of tax revenue will be going to the interest payments of creditors like you who, looking for a “safe haven” loaned the US $1000 ten years before. As good as gold, as they say. Sound good?
Traditionally, if stocks go down, the dollar, or bonds, go up. One of the two. This has certainly been the case up to now. But what happens when people suddenly realize the US dollar actually loses value? The dollar will stop being a safe haven. And what if they start realizing that the US will not pay up on its bonds, just like Greece or Spain? Perhaps they will stop buying them. At that point, bonds will no longer be a safe haven, nor will the dollar.
Will some other currency? Doubtful. All other currencies are backed by the dollar. If the dollar falls, so do the other currencies.
All that’s left is gold and precious metals. Everyone out of stocks, out of bonds, out of dollars. Where does all that money go? Into gold.
As long as either stocks, or the dollar, or bonds – ONE of those three, goes up, then the system is still intact. But the minute all three of those go down simultaneously, the only thing left standing will be gold, silver, and commodities that people actually need to live.
This started to happen on Friday, when stocks, the dollar, and bonds all went down, and gold went up 4%. That was just a taste. We’re not there yet. But we’re teetering.
Warren Buffet is right. Gold is a lousy investment. Own it today and you’ll own the same thing in ten years. The only difference is, by then, you’ll own everything, because gold is a store of value, and value will by then have chased down gold as the only real safe haven. Gold will be money. Buy money now before people finally figure out that paper is just paper.
Over at Economicpolicyjournal, Robert Wenzel is reporting that the Fed is seriously considering another round of quantitative easing (QE). The reason they’re considering it is that their gauge of inflation, a formula which changes on a whim depending on whether they like the result of their calculations or not, is still low, so there is room to print more money without affecting prices too much.
The reason inflation is low is that in times of economic slowdown, debt becomes liquidated. Debt that once represented dollars becomes nothing. So let’s say Jay owes Mike $10,000 that Mike lent to Jay to start a business in a time of economic boom, say in 2007. Jay got his business off the ground just before the 2008 crash. Mike owns $10,000 worth of Jay’s debt, and as long as the economy is going, that debt is still worth $10,000 because the debt will be paid back. So that $10,000 still exists in the economy in the form of Jay’s debt.
Now the crash happens. Jay’s business fails. He can’t pay back the $10,000. So the value of his debt goes to zero. $10,000 is erased from the economy. The amount of money in the economy goes down, the value of the dollar goes up. Prices go down, so printing money will keep the prices stable.
Problem is, when there is less money in the economy because the Jays in the world can’t pay their debts, the Mikes of the world have less money, so keeping prices stable while people lose money is equivalent to raising prices while people have the same amount of money. Either way they can’t afford to buy as much with the money they have.
The economy naturally wants to deflate now because people cannot pay their debts. And the Fed keeps pulling it the other way and trying to inflate it. What you have here is a massive tug of war, and someone is going to win. That someone is the Fed, because as much as debt can be liquidated and money erased from the economy, the Fed can always, always just print more.
What will happen? After some round of QE or another, probably after the Euro collapses, gold and silver will suddenly become the only preserver of value that exists anymore. Dollars will be erased from the economy, which should push the value of the dollar up, but the Fed will have printed so many of them that it can no longer increase in value. With no Euro, everyone will pour into gold and silver simultaneously.
That’s when those who own gold and silver will escape with their wealth, and those holding paper will be in serious, serious trouble.
Last Friday the stock market experienced a sea change. Perhaps even a game changer. Gold suddenly skyrocketed $66 (about 3.5%), and gold stocks went up almost 7% in one day. You can look at this in one of two ways. Either the value of gold went up, or the value of the dollar went down.
The truth is probably somewhere in between, leaning heavily towards the dollar losing value. Gold and silver generally don’t gain or lose value so rapidly with such volatility. After all, it’s not silver and gold that is being magically produced by a Federal Reserve computer. The increase in the stock of gold and silver is rather slow. Watch this ingenious video and you’ll see that the cost of almost everything has pretty much stayed constant since the 1960’s in terms of silver and gold.
Except, of course, for education, which has been so grossly inflated because of government loans that even in terms of silver the price has skyrocketed.
This tells you several things. First, a silver dime or silver quarter from 1964 or earlier (all dimes and quarters were made of 90% silver before 1965) can buy the same thing today that it could buy in 1964. Second, if you had saved all your money in silver dimes and quarters, then you’d have the same purchasing power today that you would have had in 1964. If you had saved in pieces of paper called dollars, you would be able to buy very very little.
Here’s more: The price of gasoline has actually gone down since 1964, not up. If you want to see that in practical terms, then take 10 dimes from 1964 or older. That’s one lousy dollar in legal tender, and go fill up your tank. One dime will buy you a gallon of gasoline. One dollar in silver dimes will buy you 10.
Owning dollars is opening yourself up to government theft, because the government can just print them. Imagine if there was a magical elf that could simply conjure silver out of thin air. Don’t you think the price of silver would go down? Sure it would. You wouldn’t want to own it anymore. Well, there is a magical elf that can conjure up dollars out of thin air. It’s called the Federal Reserve. So why would you ever want to own dollars? After all, they grow on trees.
The Jewish Libertarian 