Nick Barisheff is the founder, president and CEO of Bullion Management Group Inc., a company dedicated to providing investors with a secure, cost-effective, transparent way to purchase and hold physical bullion.
As anyone who has read my recent book, $10,000 Gold: Why Gold’s Inevitable Rise Is the Investor’s Safe Haven knows, I am a firm believer in sound money, free markets and the negative impact of central banks. I also stand firmly against global deficit spending and its major proponent, the U.S. Federal Reserve. I am a strong supporter of Austrian economics.
On December 13, 2013, the Federal Reserve will celebrate its 100th birthday. Undoubtedly, there will be many articles forthcoming about the Fed between now and that infamous date, and I expect most, like this presentation, will be highly critical.
Today I will be speaking about the effects central banking and the Federal Reserve have had on our lives, our society and, most important, on the way we think and act. I know many feel overwhelmed by the economic forces that have essentially taken full control of our markets since 2008, but I am here to remind you that the light shines much brighter today than it did when I first began seriously exploring this subject several decades ago.
During what I believe are the final years of the U.S. dollar’s rule as the world’s de facto reserve currency, desperation is confirming what only a few years ago would have been dismissed as conspiracy theories of the lunatic fringe. Desperate acts, like the bailouts of 2008 and the attempts at crushing the gold market in 2013, have opened a window into the dark world of central banking and the most ubiquitous propaganda campaign in history against sound money practices.
Today I want to look at the methods used by the Fed to wage such a war over the past one hundred years against gold and economic common sense—practices the Fed would very much like to keep from the public eye.
Today we can come to understand the deception of fiat currency, and we can protect our wealth through precious metals ownership at a great discount to its true value. We can regain economic sovereignty by changing the way we think about money, and by acting on that knowledge.
So let’s begin by looking at a quotation from Ludwig von Mises’ On Money and Inflation:
“If a judge was to say that whatever the government calls a horse is whatever the government calls a horse, and that the government has the right to call a chicken a horse, everybody would consider him either corrupt or insane. Yet in the course of a very long evolution, the government has converted the situation that the government must settle disputes concerning the meaning of “money” as referred to in contracts, into another situation. Over centuries many governments and many theories of law have brought about the doctrine that money, one side of most exchange agreements, is whatever the government calls money. The governments are pretending to have the right to do what this doctrine tells them that is to declare anything, even a piece of paper, “money.” And this is the root of the monetary problem.”
These words were spoken a half-century ago. Yet today, this is still the root of all of the world’s major financial problems. Governments have tried to alter our reality to the point that we accept that central banks and, most notably, the Federal Reserve, have the right to create currency out of thin air while the rest of the population exchanges blood, sweat, thought and emotion for that same currency. This wouldn’t seem fair to a Neanderthal, yet today most of us accept it as the norm. Many have joined the banking matrix, even though it has nothing to do with common sense.
I chose the controversial title of $10,000 Gold only after watching the 2011 debt-ceiling fiasco, because it was clear then that there would never be a serious attempt at reducing debt until the entire system implodes. The October 2013 debt-ceiling debate, which accomplished nothing other than removing the debt-ceiling limit for the next three months, further confirmed that only financial disaster would bring a new system. Washington’s decision makers lack the understanding and political will to avert such a disaster. I sincerely doubt that the Fed will ever voluntarily taper its quantitative easing program. My view is shared by many in the gold community, but by very few mainstream financial commentators.
For the rest of this column, click here: http://bmgbullionbars.com/the-federal-reserves-centennial-birthday-the-hundred-years-war-against-gold-and-economic-common-sense/