Money is an artificial agreement on a measure of value. If money is backed by some heavy and shiny metal, gold, for example, a given value is assigned to gold that at least has some connection to its practical value in the real world. But even that connection is dependent on our emotional response to gold.
Gold is very attractive. We like how it looks. It has practical value as well. It doesn’t corrode when it gets wet for example, is a great electrical conductor and thus it has industrial value. But its primary value is our emotional response to it. We like how it looks, and how its ‘heft’ feels in our hands. It makes attractive jewelry and other ornamental objects.
The value of money is rooted in human emotions. It only has whatever value that we agree that it has, and our agreement is entirely dependent on how we ‘feel’ about it.
Much of the world’s money is just ink on paper, backed by 'confidence' in the integrity of whatever entity prints that money. 'Confidence' is nothing more than an emotional response. It has no ‘heft’ to hold in our hand. It has no shiny appearance that dazzles us in the sun when we gild a state house dome with it. It's less 'weighty' than our emotional response to a heavy shiny metal because it is not something we can hold in our hands. The 'value' of gold is volatile, but the value of 'confidence' is MUCH more so.
This Boston Globe article, by Evan Horowitz and contributing Globe staff, seeks to educate us concerning debt, which is a derivative function of money, but the article:
https://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2017/12/15/with-interest-rates-low-facts-don-justify-panic-over-national-debt/ZCKx7DKveGyeQZ6tTjfA0J/story.html
...demonstrates that its authors DO NOT really understand money, or debt, or how they affect our lives. The article tells us that "we can always print more money".
Well…That is true enough. But the money we print only has a value equal to people's confidence in it. When people lose their confidence in money, it loses value. We can always print money, but we surely all know that printed money is no more than ink-stained paper if people lose confidence in its value. We all surely know the legends of post-WW1 Germany, which suffered from hyper-inflation. People lost their confidence in the value of ink on paper, and were increasingly reluctant to exchange hard goods for it. The legends tell us that it took a wheelbarrow full of paper money to buy a loaf of bread.
When things get to that point, people begin to starve to death because the economy ceases to function. Food cannot even be distributed. No one will sell that loaf of bread for ANY amount of money.
In such conditions totalitarian powers usually arise and take control, exactly as they did in Germany in the 1930s.
In our modern world, we all surely know that the US dollar is the world’s dominant currency. This first came about by a treaty agreement among US allies called the Bretton Woods Agreement because it was signed in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, in 1944. That treaty agreement established a stable exchange rate among different nations’ currencies by tying ALL of them to the value of gold. The US dollar was dominant among all currencies simply because 2/3rds of the entire world’s gold supply was owned, at that time, by the US.
In 1971, under Richard Nixon, the US broke the Bretton Woods treaty by severing the US dollar from the price of gold. The dollar was no longer backed by gold. It became a ‘fiat’ currency. It was just paper and ink. It only had value because the government said it did. By ‘fiat’.
The dollar remained the world’s dominant currency, however, even after severing itself from the gold standard, because the US succeeded in establishing the ‘petro-dollar’. Through various policies and agreements, many of them ‘strong-arm’, with the world’s largest oil producers, we established that the entire world’s oil would be bought and sold in US dollars.
This created a constant demand for dollars in every nation on earth that had to buy oil. The dollar thus became the worlds ‘reserve currency’, because every nation had to have large reserves of dollars in order to assure its energy supply.
It has been because of this constant demand for US dollars that we have been able to live, for so many years, on debt, basically on printed money, on a ‘fiat currency’ that is no more than paper. We can’t afford to live on what we earn, so we pay our way by simply printing money.
The way we create our money in the US is actually a bankster racket. It’s a racket run by our banking industry. It’s not the government that prints our money, but the Federal Reserve, whose stock is owned by private banks.
The Federal Reserve prints the money, then ‘loans’ it to its member banks, which then loan it out at a profit, so the Federal Reserve is essentially a ‘scam’ that provides our banking industry with a constant supply of ‘free’ inventory. Whatever interest rate the banks pay to ‘buy’ /borrow the money, they always mark it up when they ‘sell’ /loan the money at a profit, so the inventory is essentially ‘free’ to them.
Few of us, few US citizens, understand that most of what is happening in the world now is driven by US determination to maintain the US dollar as the world’s dominant currency. The fact that our citizens are so poorly informed makes us susceptible to manipulation by the Elites who control our means of communication.
I’ll try to explain in as simple terms as possible. (It’s more complex, but we have to start somewhere).
The debt of the US Government has reached 106% of GDP, ‘gross domestic product’, the total value of all wealth and income produced in a nation in one year. Russia’s debt is less than 14% of GDP. China’s is around 21%.
Russia and China are leading a large consortium of nations that are sick and tired of being treated poorly, of being exploited, as a result of US world domination. This consortium is comprised of nations in which a majority of the world’s population lives.
This consortium of nations, led by Russia and China, is now intently engaged, so far successfully, in efforts to break the domination of the US dollar. They are establishing a market on which oil is bought and sold in various currencies. Russia, whose oil resources are vast, is an oil exporter whereas China is dependent on imports for most of its oil.
The efforts of this consortium are steadily eroding the value of the dollar reserves that are held by nations around the world. Since the value of their reserves are threatened, the nations that hold those reserves are losing confidence in their value. Since the value of the dollar, as a fiat currency, is totally based in confidence, once a critical mass (of loss of confidence) is reached, once nations lose enough confidence in the value of the dollars they hold, they will dump them, and the dollar will then likely hyper-inflate.
Since the US economy cannot function other than by constantly printing new money, the US economy will fall in ruins, and US world domination along with it, because no matter how much money we print, it will be worth no more than whatever value ink-stained paper might have. Wheelbarrows full of a hyper-inflated currency will not buy a loaf of bread.
The US spends more on military power than all other nations on Earth combined. We can only afford to do this because we pay for it with ‘fiat’ money, with money that is no more than paper and ink. If the world no longer needs dollars to buy oil, then the dollar will hyper-inflate, which means that no matter how much we print, it will have no value.
This is the bass drum-beat of world events. This is why our Elites, who own and control all our mass media, including the Boston Globe I read, are demonizing Russia and China. These Elites can see that their world domination is doomed, and that the only thing that can save them is to militarily defeat and destroy the rising economic powers of other nations, led by Russia and China.
All this Russia-gate BS is just a lot of hooey, folks. It is a ‘stinking load’ of lies and propaganda intended to prepare us for war against Russia, a nation that has a nuclear arsenal that matches our own, and China, which is also a nuclear-armed nation. History has taught us that this degree of intense ‘demonizing’ of other nations is ALWAYS a precursor to war.
In other words, WW3 is looming over ALL of us. ALL our lives are at stake here, and only FEW of us know what is happening.
Meanwhile Russia and China, both, are constantly preaching peace and cooperation among all nations. All nations must respect the essential interests of all other nations. Based on that essential respect, Russia and China are preaching that nations can then negotiate a world economy that will be the most prosperous for ALL of us, for ALL the world’s citizens.
Russian and China preach this every day. Hardly a day ever goes by that the Russian and Chinese governments don’t issue some statement, in some form, pleading for world peace based on respect among all nations for the interests of all other nations.
They are also putting their money behind what they preach, as more and more nations are being attracted, like bees to the sweet scent of nectar, to China’s ambitious One Belt One Road project, also called the New Silk Road, a massive multi-TRILLION dollar infrastructure project to link the economies of Europe, Asia, and even Africa, through an ultra-modern network of transportation systems, for both economic goods and people, and a communications network to link the populations of all participating nations.
Russia, whose territory spans both Europe and Asia and whose vast natural resources have only barely begun to be tapped, is key to this project, and is fully on board.
Needless to say the US Elites, who are determined to rule the entire world, HATE this whole One Belt One Road concept.
Surely we can all see that our nation has been captured under the control of people who are dominated, above all else, by their own uncontrolled GREED. They HATE the very idea of peace based on mutual respect of all nations for the interests of all other nations. The US Elites can maintain ‘peace’ only by forcing the world to bow before US military power.
But US military power is based on our paper currency, and US Elites can clearly see that billions of our fellow humans are unhappy with our domination and are working constantly to escape from the grip of the US dollar, through the simple process of buying and selling oil in other nations’ currencies.
In a nutshell, THAT is what’s happening in the world. THAT is the drumbeat behind all the world’s events. The US Elites are desperately holding onto US world domination. They declare this OUT LOUD.
It is the official written policy of the US Government that the US must maintain “Full Spectrum Dominance” over the entire Earth and even space. This is the TRUTH. This is FACT. It’s not in any dispute. The US Elites are intent that the US must rule the world.
But American citizens are so addled by the constant propaganda and lies that our mass media owned by these same Elites constantly propagate, that we somehow just can’t see what is so very obvious.
Under the domination of a relatively small Cabal they proclaim, in essence, “America uber alles!” After all, “full spectrum dominance” is the official declared policy of the US Government.
I beseech my fellow American citizens to please WAKE UP! We are NOT the Jedi Warriors. We are The Empire. The heroic Jedi Warriors are fighting against us.
Despite that glaringly obvious truth, despite the fact that the US has openly declared that we must rule the Earth, and despite the fact that most of the citizens of Earth consider the US the gravest threat to world peace, American citizens somehow, incredibly, think that WE are the ‘good guys’, just as German citizens once did, even as Hitler rose to power.
This is NOT going to turn out well for us? Remember, how did that other “uber-alles” nation end up?
We have reduced the cities of many nations to rubble. Our Elites try to convince us, through the immense power of their highly centralized mass media, Russia is a nation full of two-headed demons. As we move ever closer to the brink of nuclear war, can we really not imagine our own cities, our own nation, in ruin, our cities reduced to piles of rubble?
R Zwarich
Bent Birch Farm
63 Webber Rd.
Brookfield, MA 01506
774 449-8030
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