bobbyw24
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Bernanke's Great Lie - The 'Gold Standard' and the Great Depression
The claim that the "gold standard" caused or worsened the Great Depression debunked.
liberty
(If you like this article, a more formal paper version of this article may be downloaded here. Please distribute if you see fit.)
The purpose of the following is to argue that the "gold standard," as understood by most of the public, did not cause or worsen the Great Depression as current FED Chairman Ben Bernanke has based many of his papers, speeches, and, to a large extent, his entire career on. In our contemporary times, I do believe this blame must be firmly rejected and monetary policy should, at the very least, be debated in a national forum. Indeed many other economists, such as the Friedman family, Anna Schwartz, Alan Greenspan, and Jeffrey "Shock Doctor" Sachs, have all propagated this lie. (photo)
My premise is simple. I charge that these renowned Keynesian and Friedmanite-Monetarist-Chicago-Shock-School economists have consistently used the term "gold standard" to mislead their audiences and readers. For the sake of brevity, I will focus on Mr. Bernanke as he is the current standard-bearer of the FED's fiat monetary system. Frequently, these economists do concede there are differences, but instead of clarifying they muddy the waters. For instance, in his 1990 NBER paper Bernanke frequently refers to an "interwar gold standard" and in his 2002 salute to Milton Friedman he acknowledged that "the gold standard was not adhered to uniformly as the Depression proceeded."
austriancrestWhile there may be a paper from the Austrian School of economics that firmly rebukes the claim in my direct fashion, based on the mislabeling of the term, I have not come across it (yet). However, both Murray Rothbard and Walter Block have understood this truth as well, and dropped the clues. (photo)
Furthermore, there should be very little surprise that the statist forces have used this trick. Yesterday's communist "nationalization" is today's "conservatorship." "Hoarders" are really savers. "Insurgents" are really guerrilla fighters; only a minority are "terrorists" as our political leaders consistently tell us. An unbiased observer would call a "war" whether on terror, poverty, drugs, WWII, etc. - as state-sanctioned murder, destruction, and theft of property. Even the political terms "liberal" and "conservative" are terms meant to confuse and divide, as I discovered in one of my first articles "An Hypocrisy of Terms: Liberal and Conservative".
Without more ado, let's dive into "gold standard" terminology, although if you do not understand the differences between commodity, receipt, fractional, and fiat money please read this first "The Money Matrix - What is Honest Money? (PART 4/15)".
* The pure 100% reserve gold and silver standard is commodity money issued in the form of hard gold and silver coins, or receipt (whether paper or electronic) money issued in lieu of metal held in a money warehouse. The amount of coinage in circulation plus the receipt money always equals the total mass of metal in the monetary system. Rothbard refers to this as a "parallel standard," but be careful to not confuse this with bimetallism(1). I have found that this is what people commonly mistaken as the "gold standard." I will refer to the above as the Austrian standard for simplicity. (2)
* mapleleafThe "international" or "classical" gold standard is actually a form of fractional money. In simple terms, one can redeem paper or electronic currency for fixed amount of gold coinage; America was officially under this standard from the Gold Standard Act of 1900(3) until FDR outlawed and confiscated the gold of the people in 1933. The critical concept to understand here is that the monetary supply can be inflated or pyramided upon the total base amount of metal, which of course is conveniently possessed by the government. So, under the "classical" gold standard, if everyone decided to exchange their paper receipts at the same time, the country would be bankrupted; not enough gold would exist for everyone to redeem their receipts. When the United States executed the Gold Standard Act of 1900, the first step was for the government to procure a massive reserve amount of gold, so that everyone can be fooled or lulled into thinking that their gold can always be redeemed in full.(4) (photo)
* The "gold bullion" standard is one of the systems Bernanke lumps together as the "interwar gold standard." Under this monetary system, gold coins are never minted. Redemption in gold is only permitted in the case of large international transactions; the country's populace is prohibited from ever possessing the actual money. [Rothbard, America's Great Depression, p(190-1/409)] The country can proceed to inflate for as long as they can fool the populace that the disparity between gold and their banknotes is acceptable. In many ways, America existed under this unstable yoke from the FDR Gold Theft of 1933 until the Nixon closure of the international gold window in 1971.(5) The American citizenry was not permitted to own gold coins and bars until 1975.
* Under a "gold exchange" standard a country keeps no physical gold that can be redeemed. For reserves, only other "hard" receipt money from another nation that could ultimately be redeemed in gold is kept. The prime example of this is many European countries adopting the US dollar immediately following WWI. Again, the country can proceed to inflate for as long as they can fool the populace that the disparity between the pegged "hard" currency and their banknotes is acceptable.
* A fiat monetary system consists of money that is declared "legal tender" by a government with no commodity backing. Fiat is Latin for "so be it" meaning money ordered into existence by a sovereign power. As Rothbard notes, if one examines both the "gold exchange" standard and the "gold bullion" standard closely, both are de facto fiat currencies as the people are in effect banned from possessing the backing commodity, gold.
IndianNow what really happened in the early twentieth century? This must be understood before we examine Bernanke's interpretation. Up until 1914, America and most European nations were on the "classical" gold standard. China operated on a "classical" silver standard. Then America brought the central bank known as the FED into existence in 1914 via the Federal Reserve Act of 1913. Next, to finance WWI, France, Holland, Germany, Britain, Belgium, and Italy broke off of the "classical" gold standard and issued paper money to finance their military spending deficits. Indeed, the four year long war would have only lasted months if the countries had remained on the gold standard, or had their paper debt been refused by countries like America! [Lips, 2001] (photo)
Amidst the ruined fields and cities, the inequities of Versailles led to Germany's infamous Weimar hyperinflation of 1923, which was only one of many national currencies ravaged by hyperinflation. Germany, Russia, Poland, Austria, and other countries suffered greatly due to the lack of sound money; Weimar was ended by the introduction of the Rentenmark, which was tied to gold. [Evans, 2003] However, on the side of the WWI victors (Britain, France, and Italy) was America with its gigantic horde of gold. American FED chairman Benjamin Strong massively inflated the dollar to prop up the Bank of England's "gold bullion" standard, with no benefit to the American people whatsoever. This Great Inflation took place between 1921-1929 and the American monetary supply was inflated by 62%, or 7.7% annualized, as can be seen in the below table. As the table shows, this gushing spigot of credit was abruptly slammed shut by the FED at the end of 1928, and directly preceded the stock market's infamous crash of 1929, as well as collapses in farm prices and commerce. In 1930, massive job losses gave way to many economists' soothsayer prophesies of the future, including Lord Keynes' "The Great Slump of 1930." [Note that several intervals in the table are just 6 months. Rothbard, America's Great Depression, p(128-209/409)]
READ THE REST
http://towneforcongress.com/economy/bernankes-great-lie-the-gold-standard-and-the-great-depression
Then we have Rand and Peter in the Senate....
