“Give me control of a nation?s money and I care not who makes her laws.” - Mayer Amschel Rothschild.
Alan Greenspan was one of the most over-rated Fed chairmen in history. (This coinage is admittedly akin to the phrase “one of the greediest bankers”; Bob Woodward even titled his biography of Greenspan „Maestro? – one eagerly awaits his biography of Hitler, which will presumably be titled "Pacifist?.) But even Alan Greenspan was capable, very occasionally, of speaking like an honest human being, as opposed to a machine for uttering gibberish. Replying to a question about social security funding in 2005, Greenspan inadvertently nailed the fundamental problem of an inflationist welfare state:
“We can guarantee cash benefits as far out and at whatever size you like, but we cannot guarantee their purchasing power.” [Emphasis ours.]
In other words, the central bank can always create money – but there?s no guarantee it will be worth anything. Another quotation is equally astonishing in its candour. Years before he sold his soul and credibility to become a stooge for Wall Street, he wrote, in 1967, that
“In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value. If there were, the government would have to make its holding illegal, as was done in the case of gold.. The financial policy of the welfare state requires that there be no way for the owners of wealth to protect themselves.
“This is the shabby secret of the welfare statists? tirades against gold. Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights. If one grasps this, one has no difficulty in understanding the statists? antagonism toward the gold standard.”
Greenspan may have – at least once – understood and articulated the attractions of gold when the monetary authorities go mad. His successor, the Ben Bernank (caution: parental advisory), shows not even this tenuous grasp of market realities. Hopelessly intellectually outmatched by congressman Ron Paul (caution: parental advisory), the current Fed chairman claims, amongst other things, that consumers don?t want to buy gold. US consumers may not want to buy gold, but somebody does, unless the gold price rose last week to a record nominal high by…
