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The root problem with conventional currencies is all the trust that’s required to make it work. The central bank must be trusted not to debase the currency, but the history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust. Satoshi Nakamoto, white paper, cited The New York Times 1 July 2018
In the autumn of 1967 Wilson and his chancellor James Callaghan were finally forced into devaluation: what concerned Wilson more than anything was how to present this surrender to the British people. Heath vs. Wilson: The 10 Year Duel, BBC 2012
The £ had fallen below $2 ... The IMF sent six international bankers to look at Britain’s books. Dominic Sandbrook, The 70s III: Goodbye Great Britain 75-77, BBC 2013
For years the mighty US dollar has ruled the world. But what if Saddam did have a weapon of mass destruction that would not only have threatened the position of the dollar, but American military might as well? ... The war was actually about protecting the global supremacy of the US dollar ... If you want to buy oil on the international market, the currency is the US dollar. But what would happen if some other currency threatened that position? Conspiracies – Iraq, 2006
The US has always needed to keep a firm hand on the trading of its oil dollars. But in November 2000 the most serious attack on the sacred dollar was about to take place. If left unchecked it could have been an economic Pearl Habor. After years of struggling under crippling sanctions, Saddam Hussein decided to use the one WMD that no-one had ever looked for or thought about – the Euro. With the mighty dollar’s position as the world’s number one suddenly under threat, did a ripple of fear go through the Bush administration? ibid.
The government should create, issue and circulate all the currency and credit needed to satisfy the spending power of the government and the buying power of consumers.
The privilege of creating and issuing money is not only the supreme prerogative of government, but it is the government’s greatest creative opportunity.
By the adoption of these principles, the long-felt want for a uniform medium will be satisfied. The taxpayers will be saved immense sums of interest, discounts and exchanges.
The financing of all public enterprises, the maintenance of stable government and ordered progress, and the conduct of the Treasury will become matter of practical administrators.
The people can and will be furnished with a currency as safe as their own government. Money will cease to be the master and become the servant of humanity.
Democracy will rise, superior to the money power. Abraham Lincoln
Let me control a peoples currency and I care not who makes their laws. Meyer Nathaniel Rothschild, speech to gathering of world banksters 12th February 1912
I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous than standing armies ... If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of currency ... The banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of their property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. Thomas Jefferson, attributed patchwork of three separate letters
The underlying idea in the greenback philosophy ... is that the issue of currency is a function of the government, a sovereign right which ought not to be delegated to corporations. Professor Davis Rich Dewey, MIT
All the perplexities, confusion and distress in America arise, not from the defects of the Constitution or confederation, not from want of honor or virtue, so much as from the downright ignorance of the nation, of coin, credit and circulation. John Adams
It was a totally fiat currency ... The colonies had been drained of gold and silver coin by British taxation. William T Still, The Money Masters, 1996
The bank [of America] was given a monopoly over the American currency. ibid.
We use national fiat currencies and bank promises. Paul Grignon, Money as Debt III: Evolution Beyond Money, 2006
They were the men interested in the establishment of the gold standard money system and right of the bankers to manage the currency and credit of every nation in the world. G G McGeer
Today in Britain the government spends more than all private individuals and companies put together. Martin Durkin, Britain’s Trillion Pound Horror Story, Channel 4 2010
Today in Britain the public sector is bigger than the private sector. ibid.
In the next five years annual government spending will climb from £697 billion to £757 billion. ibid.
We now have a national debt of £4.8 trillion. ibid.
Counted out in £50 notes our national debt would form a stack no less than 6,561 miles. Or to put it another way, if we sold off all the houses and flats in the whole of the UK, we would still be the best part of a trillion pounds short of paying our debt. ibid.
British governments have been steadily debasing the currency or printing money for decades through the deliberate expansion of credit. ibid.
It’s very much in the interests of politicians to spend money. ibid.
The idea that public spending will stimulate growth is the biggest myth of the twentieth century and is the cause of Britain’s economic decline. ibid.
What do they all do? ibid.
The idea that we need state monopolies in order to look after the poor is obviously untrue. ibid.
In our time we’ve witnessed the zenith of global finance. In 2006 the world’s total economic output was worth around $47 trillion. The total value of stock and bond markets was roughly $119 trillion. More than twice the size. And the amount outstanding of the strange new financial life-form known as derivatives was $473 trillion. Ten times larger ... This is the story of financial globalisation. Professor Niall Ferguson, Ascent of Money e6: Chimerica, Channel 4 2010
According to [George] Soros’s Theory of Reflexivity, financial markets can’t possibly be perfectly efficient much less rational ... His biggest coups came from being right about losers not winners. And the greatest of these was among the most momentous speculative hits in all of financial history. On September 16th 1992 with the British £ in big trouble I watched as Soros put out a contract on the Bank of England ... So sure was he that the £ would drop that he bet ten billion dollars. ibid.
The Nobel Prize in Economics. It seemed as if Intellect had triumphed over Intuition. As if rocket science had taken over from risk-taking. Equipped with their magical black box, the partners in LTCM seemed poised to make money far beyond the wildest imaginings of even George Soros. And then in the summer of 1998 when every self-respecting hedge-fund manager should have been playing with his yacht something happened that threatened to blow the lid right off the Nobel Prize winner’s black box: Reality started to misbehave ... On Monday August 17th 1998 a giant asteroid smashed into Planet Finance. ibid.
The only chance of survival was to find a White Knight to rescue them. And the most powerful knight in town was none other than George Soros. It was the ultimate humiliation: the Quants from Planet Finance begging for a bail-out from the Prophet of Irrational Unquantifiable Reflexivity ... Fear that Long Term’s failure could trigger a general financial meltdown, the New York Federal Reserve hastily brokered a multi-billion-dollar bailout by fourteen Wall Street banks. ibid.
The ascent of money has seldom been smooth. Time and again it’s been punctuated by big painful crises. ibid.
American borrowers have come to rely on Chinese savers, a symbiotic relationship between China and America that I call Chimerica. ibid.
So enormous have Chinese saving become in recent years they’ve enabled globalisation to do the most almighty U-turn. Previously, it was the rich English speakers who lent money to the poor Asian periphery. But now it’s the Chinese who are lending money to the Americans. Welcome to the strange new hybrid country of China and America – I call it Chimerica. ibid.
The People’s republic of China has become banker to the United States of America. ibid.
What starts with competition for Olympic medals could end in a battle over dollars if the Chinese decide one day to cut off their credit line to the American empire. Maybe as it name suggests Chimerica is nothing more than a chimera ... The really big crises come just seldom enough to be beyond the living memory of the people who run today’s companies, banks and funds. ibid.
In September 1992 John Major’s chancellor emerged from the shadows of the Treasury to announce the devaluation of the pound. It was the government’s worst humiliation. The Major Years II, BBC 1999