Dear Joe,
Please consider the following argument:
"It is absurd to say that our country can issue $30,000,000 in bonds and not
$30,000,000 in currency. Both are promises to pay; but one promise fattens the
usurer, and the other helps the people. If the currency issued by the
Government were no good, then the bonds issued would be no good either. It is
a terrible situation when the Government, to increase the national wealth,
must go into debt and submit to ruinous interest charges at the hands of men
who control the fictitious values of gold.
"Look at it another way. If the Government issues bonds, the brokers will sell
them. The bonds will be negotiable; they will be considered as gilt edged
paper. Why? Because the government is behind them, but who is behind the
Government? The people. Therefore it is the people who constitute the basis of
Government credit. Why then cannot the people have the benefit of their own
gilt-edged credit by receiving non-interest bearing currency ...
instead of the bankers receiving the benefit of the people's credit in
interest-bearing bonds?"
This proposition was advanced by Thomas Alva Edison in support of a play by Henry Ford to finance a public works project by directly issued currency to cover its cost. But it underscores the essential problem in the system you advocate: the Central Banking fractional reserve banking swindle. Now please consider this discourse by Peter Myers:
"Print money" means EITHER issue paper dollars EX NIHILO, or credit bank
accounts (by computer), once again EX NIHILO.
Whenever the Central Bank "prints money", it's buying some asset, eg Treasury
Bonds. It exchanges the asset for newly-created money, ie for a Credit entry
in the seller's account at the Federal Bank.
The Fed buys $ notes from the mint, which is part of Treasury, but it only
pays a few cents each for them as bits of paper. When it makes payments with
them, on the other hand, they have face value ($1, $50 etc).
This magic is called Seigneurage.
In the same way, a church obtains ordinary tap water, but when a priest
blesses it, it becomes Holy Water, which people cross themselves with, &
sprinkle around their homes.
Treasury produces the $ notes, but can't use them as money. It sells each to
the Fed for the cost of production, then buys them back at face value, paying
for them with Treasury Bonds (Government Bonds). These are IOUs; Treasury has
to pay interest on them - interest that it gets from taxpayers.
In recent decades, the Fed has refunded the interest paid by Treasury, after
deducting its expenses. Those expenses include the salaries of the Fed
bankers; no-one knows if they pay themselves huge salaries or bonuses, because
the Fed is not audited. Given that the Fed itself is owned by private banks
and/or shareholders, it's possible that these "expenses" include dividend
payments to them; no-one knows.
Even though the Fed remits most of the interest Treasury pays on its debt, the
principal remains; Treasury never pays it, but just rolls it over. When
Treasury borrows from the private sector, as commonly happens when the
Government runs persistent budget deficits, it pays both the principal and the
interest.
Please Joe. Before you let go with another disquisition on the Central Banking system, consider this further analysis which was somehow overlooked in your brief presentation. When minds as advanced as Ford's and Edison's find fault with this system, you ought to give serious pause before proceeding to defend it. Make sure you at least understand their critique before you attempt to debunk it.
Peace,
Ken Freeland
From: ReportersNotebook@yahoogroups.com [mailto:ReportersNotebook@yahoogroups.com] On Behalf Of Michael
Sent: Monday, January 03, 2011 10:24 PM
To: reportersnotebook
Subject: Fwd: Joe Webb: let's get straight on monetization, the Fed , how banks work, and so on
From: joe webb <webfoote41@yahoo.com>
Date: January 3, 2011 9:01:59 PM EST
To: michael santomauro <reporternotebook@Gmail.com>
Hi Mike, the Jeff Gates piece you sent out prompted me to write the below. JOe
--- On Mon, 1/3/11, joe webb <webfoote41@yahoo.com> wrote:
From: joe webb <webfoote41@yahoo.com>
Subject: [CMS] let's get straight on monetization, the Fed , how banks work, and so on
To: CMS-MembersList@yahoogroups.com
Date: Monday, January 3, 2011, 5:45 PM
Every day we get messages, usually wrong I think, about the above. I would call especially on John Gardner to step in here.
First, monetization, per Wikipedia, is simply a process of making some tangible object ...money. Thus sea-shells, precious metals, paper notes, and IOUs and loans and other business contracts (debts or assets) can be passed around in exchange relationships.
The first thing I would recommend is that folks read the Wikipedia definition of money, money supply, and fractional banking.
Since so many folks are convinced that the Fed is a conspiracy of jokers, jews, capitalist pigs in general, illuminati and freemasons, it is really high time to try to get straight on the Fed and fractional reserve banking.
Here is my sense of things, and I do not pretend to understand money completely. Money is a kind of mystery, for those who can perceive that they do not know enough of x.
First, there are not enough precious metals to accomodate population/demand growth for money. If the amount of precious metals remains at a limited quantity, then more pressure for more money means that precious metals' prices inflate. Is this a source of bottlenecking an economy? Probably.
Second, fractional banking, the practice of creating money out of "thin air" as so many critics claim, by loaning out, say 10 times what the bank actually has in terms of deposits and other assets, has a very long history of success and occasional failures. I read that in the last 100 years or so, capitalism has created economic wealth in the West in the area of ten times the per capita wealth of a hundred years ago. One of the reasons for this spectacular achievement is credit...that is, what banks do when they lend "money." Without credit, projects do not get started. It is that simple.
Not all projects are successful, and when they fail, the bank is left holding the bag, or non-bag, of disappeared money. That money went up to money heaven, never to return. When projects succeed, the economy is enhanced, and the thin-air money turns into concrete goods and services.
No economy runs without credit and credit creation. No economy runs without banks. Now, a bank can be held privately or publicly. I understand that North Dakota has the only State bank in the U.S. It does very well, and possibly is a model for more socially responsible and wealth spreading. (Is there anything wrong with spreading the wealth particularly when one of the choke-points in our economy is the poor performance of consumer spending, 70% of the economy? When ordinary folks don't have much dough, they cannot spend. The middle class has been spending less and less for the last 20 years...consumer spending, WSJ a few weeks ago.)
The Fed is no different than banks in creating money out of "thin air". The Fed does so by the purchase of treasury bonds. Even the WSJ agrees that quantitative easing (QE) by the Fed has helped the economy. The Fed buys the bonds, gives the gov't fresh new greenbacks and the gov't spends and gets more dough out into folks's hands. Then, the Fed holds debt, and, if I understand this correctly, that is tacked onto the Federal deficit.
So, yes, more national debt is accumulated, which is not good, but the economy is supposed to start cooking again so that the national debt can be paid down thru taxes, reduced spending by gov't, inflation, and, most importantly, economic growth which is the only thing that can generate more revenue ultimately.
So, there is no free money here. An economy within a country is not like home economics because it is 1, huge, 2, can expand and contract its money supply, 3, does not have to pay down its debt in bad times. On the other hand, too much debt begins to make everybody nervous, as it should, especially potential lenders (see Europe's sovereign debt crisis). Ultimately national debt must be paid down. The consensus of economists is that no more than maybe around one quarter of a country's GDP should consist of debt. (Today, the U.S. is approaching 100% of its GDP and Japan is at about 200% of its GDP.)
At the macro level, household economics is similar to sovereign debt. If you don't look like you can pay back your loans, you either don't get more loans, or you pay a large risk premium. If you are tied down by debt payments, you cannot invest in productive projects, let alone pay for bloated pensions and the like that are based on politics rather than economics. (The days of the pols getting rich may be over.)
So, assuming I got this correct, fractional banking at the micro level is like the Federal Reserve Bank. What is different is that the Fed is huge and can pretty much do what it wants, until of course, the whole economy is going over a cliff. The point is that the Fed is supposed to prevent it going over a cliff thru adjustment of the money supply.
The other major economics 101 feature with regard to the role of the Federal gov't is trying to regulate the economy, is its fiscal policy. All that means is how and how much it spends our tax dollars. Economists argue whether fiscal measures are more or less important than the money supply.
Clearly, spending tax money and public debt money on things that do not work, like useless wars for Israel, extravagant pensions and welfare payments, education boondoggles for the uneducable..are all a waste of money inasmuch as they do not contribute to economic wealth. (although they may buy social peace by preventing blacks from burning down cities...).
As I see it, the issue is not spending money, it is spending it on things that work, never mind the pump-priming for the economy right now. Scandinavia spends about half its wealth on Programs that are social and educational, and future oriented. They also enjoy the highest per capita wealth in the world (maybe there is an oilogarchy somewhere that is higher>). Spending money on White kids in schools works for the overall economy and the social fabric. In contrast, the U.S. is pouring billions down a black and brown hole in the ground...no economic benefit because black and brown skills acquisition end at about the 8th grade.
So, fractional reserve banking is, if not the heart and soul, of capitalism, it is its legs. Likewise, all countries have central banks and "fiat" money. A national currency is worth what it can buy, nothing else. It can buy lots of goods and services if the economy is productive.
If the economy is not productive, but is sitting on piles of gold, the only thing it can sell is its gold. When the gold is gone, then it is dead in the water.
Credit runs an economy, and all credit is based on a certain degree of "faith". That faith is, for example, to be seen in your credit rating. If you have never bounced a check and paid all your bills, you have a credit rating above 800. It is similar with a county, but not exactly. It gets more political with countries for obvious reasons, but nobody can forever can get away with economic idiocy.
Joe welcomes comments.
PS:
Let me add here that war, at a purely technical level, can or could be good for the economy, but not in the way that the usual leftie hysterics say it is. (the mere 4 or 5% of the GDP devoted to war cannot offset the overall cost to the economy in terms of useful projects that could be funded. Thus, the economy does not need war spending. Left-wing critics confuse morality with economics.) Also, the U.S. economy does not need the small piles of money from arms sales. It is negligible. The costs of paying soldiers and keeping bases is another issue, economically, but not a large issue. In short, the way the U.S. spends on war is a net loss, but could be a net gain, except for the genuine deterrent that ICBMs, war planes and trick guns provide. That is another issue. The deterrence could be maintained for a fraction of what we spend. Think Switzerland.
The wars for Israel, a colossal error in terms of geo-politics, could be useful wars if they did indeed result in more oil for us, and more stability in markets generally. Neither is the case. The oil companies did not want this war. They operated on the formula of , if it ain't broke , don't fix it. We have not got any oil from Iraq, no sweetheart deals, etc. Instead we have sunk about one trillion dollars into these wars for the Jews. Arguably Israel is not really better off, having incurred even more wrath from the Arabs and Muslims.
Of course, 9-11 was due to our support for Israel. Jihadism is probably 90% due to Israel and our support for Israel.. The other 10% is home-grown, it has been around for 50 years or more and got its start from the failure of Arab Socialism (more or less).
But to return to economics, war can be profitable, and is a legitimate function of the state, poliltics carried on by other means. However, in the context of the below piece, our wars for Israel have not only cost us about a trillion up front, they will continue to cost us just for the guns and ammo, and then the economic cost of supporting Israel in terms of oil embargoes, worsened diplomatic relations, trade agreements, and the like....who knows what the economic costs to the U.S. are?....probably another trillion dollars...just look at the oil embargoes of the 70s and what that did to the economy.
So, this piece is on money and we should try to understand money since it is sort of important. JoePs:
No comments:
Post a Comment