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  1. #1
    x il Socialismo Mondiale
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    Predefinito Articolo interessante sull'oro (in inglese)

    Gold Bores

    The number of writers that are currently churning out books about
    ‘debt-enslavement’ and advocating currency-crank ideas seems to be rising faster
    than the price of the average derivative. One particular group of theorists are
    the ‘gold bugs’ who advocate gold as a safe-haven investment and tend to argue
    that only a gold-backed currency and international trading system is likely to
    stabilise the global market economy. Some hark back to the days when paper
    currency was ‘as good as gold’ and could be converted into the precious metal at
    a fixed rate.

    Business analyst Kelly Mitchell, author of Gold Wars: The Battle for the
    Global Economy
    (Clarity Press, 2013) seems to be part of this group. In
    fairness, to those who are interested, there is a lot of fascinating (if
    sometimes technical) detail in his book about the operation of the precious
    metals markets in gold and silver. Part of Mitchell’s case is that the
    powers-that-be are frightened that physical gold and silver will emerge as real
    money again now that the currency in use across the world is fiat (token) money
    not backed by anything of real value like precious metals. He contends that
    economies using fiat money are prone to asset price bubbles stimulated by credit
    expansion from the central banks and wider banking system.

    Mitchell repeats some of the myths about the power of the banks to create
    massive multiples of credit out of nothing that have been resurgent in recent
    years, and also trots out some of the highly questionable quotes often used to
    justify these views (see Socialist Standard October 2012 on these). He
    claims the financial crisis has now laid bare the mountains of debt and
    worthless paper being pumped out by banks and governments and that in order to
    stop a flight towards precious metals banks and governments have been
    manipulating the gold price downwards for years. This is to make it look less
    attractive and credible as an alternative to paper money and credit.

    Market manipulation


    It is certainly true that there appears to have been short-term market
    manipulation taking place periodically in the gold and silver markets, and this
    is where Mitchell clearly has accumulated much knowledge and evidence. Indeed,
    although Mitchell doesn’t describe it in detail here, the way the gold price for
    physical bullion is fixed in London each day – long the centre of the world gold
    market – is itself a gift to the conspiracy theorists. The five leading members
    of the London Bullion Market Association meet at 10.30am and 3pm each day to
    ‘fix’ in their words, the international ‘spot’ gold price. Until recent years
    this used to be done at the offices of NM Rothschild in the City of London
    (enough, of itself, to get the conspiracy theorists’ pulses racing) though these
    days it is done by Barclays, HSBC, Deutsche Bank, the Bank of Nova Scotia, and
    Société Générale. Private tele-conferences between these banks communicate
    information about demand and supply for physical gold until an average price
    emerges. When representatives of the five banks concerned are happy with the
    price, they each lower a miniature Union Jack flag on their desks – when all
    five flags are down the price is then fixed and relayed to other markets
    (including those for gold futures, options, etc).

    Naturally, it is in this sort of environment that conspiracy theories
    flourish and there are a fair few in this book concerning precious metals and
    the power struggles around them. These include a bizarre historical one linking
    the JFK assassination with an apparent attempt by Kennedy to get the US Treasury
    to issue currency backed by precious metal (in that particular case, silver). A
    more plausible contemporary theory is that because there are now mountains of
    paper derivatives of gold, including Exchange Traded-Funds which are investments
    intended to mimic fluctuations in the gold price, there may not be appropriate
    levels of physical gold held by banks to satisfy the potential claims on it. In
    other words, investment banks have been busy creating financial products to sell
    derived from gold but which are not really backed by gold. Indeed, Mitchell and
    others have claimed that it is likely that the same gold is used several times
    over to ‘back’ derivatives – and that if the owners of these financial products
    demanded physical gold bullion in return for their paper certificates there
    would be nowhere near enough gold held in the vaults of the major banks and
    central banks to satisfy the demand, leading to financial panic.

    Fort
    Knox

    Compounding this is the mystery about how much gold banks actually have in
    their vaults, and about the quality of this gold. In 2009, the Chinese
    government received a shipment of gold from the US only to find that when the
    bullion bars were drilled they were partly tungsten, and it is thought that an
    increasing proportion of gold held in bank vaults is adulterated and of poor
    quality. Most major governments are very reluctant to have the gold held in
    their vaults audited for volume and quality – the US government has resisted for
    years an audit of the 4,600 tons of bullion it claims is held in Fort Knox.

    What is for certain – and partly accounts for the title of Mitchell’s book –
    is that a significant shift has been taking place in recent years in the
    ownership of gold bullion. China and Russia have been significant buyers and so
    have some Middle Eastern states. This in turn seems to be part of a concerted
    attempt to undermine the US dollar and the American political and economic
    hegemony underpinning it, by establishing alternative trading mechanisms to the
    US currency. An example is that oil has been priced and traded in dollars for
    decades (the so-called ‘petro-dollar’), but many states are now showing signs of
    moving away from this system, including both Russia and China who have recently
    signed a deal to trade oil in the Chinese Yuan. This is indicative of the US
    losing its place as the dominant global capitalist power as happened to Britain
    after the end of the First World War. The dollar is seen as a far weaker
    currency than it has been in living memory and Mitchell claims that the lack of
    real gold backing it has been part of the cause.

    Interesting though it is, there are nevertheless a number of problems with
    this book. One is that it is not especially well written and many of the charts
    and figures included are not properly explained or even reproduced in an
    intelligible way. The analytical faults, however, are even more serious. Like
    many in this field, Mitchell is prone to exaggeration and overlooks evidence
    which contradicts his case. For instance, if suppression of the gold price is
    part of a concerted attempt by major central banks and private banks to prevent
    gold emerging as an alternative to fiat currency as a representative of wealth,
    this is hardly consistent with the 800 percent increase in the price of gold
    seen in recent years, even if it is down on the highs it achieved in the
    immediate wake of the financial crisis.

    Gold standard


    More seriously still, Mitchell holds totally untenable views about monetary
    and trading systems based on gold (both in terms of national currencies and
    earlier international trading systems like the Gold Standard). Referring to the
    US Federal Reserve, he says ‘Since the Fed’s inception, the dollar has declined
    over 95%, the economy has seen a series of booms, busts, crashes, asset bubbles,
    and bank runs, that almost never happened under a gold standard, and
    unemployment has been far greater’ (p.110-111). But apart from the decline in
    the value of the dollar caused by inflation, none of this is true.

    The idea that slumps, asset bubbles and bank runs didn’t happen under the
    Gold Standard of international trading payments and when currencies like the
    pound sterling and the dollar were convertible into gold on demand, is frankly
    ludicrous. They actually happened on a regular basis including the major 1907
    financial crisis in the US when JP Morgan organised a bail-out of several major
    US banks that were about to fail, and of course the 1929 Wall Street crash and
    subsequent Great Depression. As well as banking crises and equity bubbles and
    crashes, there were also asset price bubbles in housing, land, commodities and a
    range of other assets. Asset bubbles, runs on banks and financial panics were
    commonplace throughout the period, and in all major countries. For example, the
    UK has experienced 12 banking crises since 1800, with only four of these since
    it came off the Gold Standard, while in the US the figures are 13 and two
    respectively (see This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial
    Folly
    by Reinhart and Rogoff).

    Mitchell has failed to understand that the expansion and contraction of the
    credit system that he is fixated on, and its attendant asset bubbles, is a
    reflection of the underlying trade cycle of the market economy and is not its
    cause. This instead is the drive by firms to sell commodities at a profit as if
    the demand for them is unlimited, leading to over-expansion of the booming
    sectors of the economy. This overproduction leads to cut-backs, hoarding and
    lay-offs and the monetary and credit systems are what transmits these effects
    throughout the economy more widely. An example was the over-expansion of the
    property sector in relation to paying demand in the US, UK, Spain and other
    countries which triggered the most recent financial crisis when credit lines and
    derivatives related to this turned sour. And as Marx pointed out in Capital
    in relation to the many crises that have taken place when monetary systems
    were based on gold, convertibility was no solution but just another means for
    transmitting financial chaos:

    ‘[A]s soon as credit is shaken, and this is a regular and necessary phase in
    the cycle of modern industry, all real wealth is supposed to be actually and
    suddenly transformed into money, into gold and silver – a crazy demand, but one
    that necessarily grows out of the system itself. And the gold and silver that is
    supposed to satisfy these immense claims amounts in all to a few millions in the
    vaults of the bank . . . with the development of the credit system, capitalist
    production constantly strives to overcome this metallic barrier, which is both a
    material and an imaginary barrier to wealth and its movement, while time and
    again breaking its head on it’ (Volume 3, p.708).

    Indeed, whether the market economy operates with a monetary system tied to
    gold or not is effectively irrelevant so far as its underlying trade cycle is
    concerned as this cycle occurs irrespective of the precise monetary conditions,
    which influence the surface froth and bubble but little else. It therefore
    follows that tinkering with the monetary system is illusory as a solution to
    this problem of periodic booms, crises and slumps. In fact, it is partly because
    the international Gold Standard and also convertibility of notes did not solve
    these very problems (and in the minds of many economists even exacerbated them)
    that they were abandoned.

    The only change of significance since token money (paper notes, etc) has not
    been convertible any more into gold at a fixed price has been that this has
    allowed a massive expansion of the note issue to take place. Over time, gold as
    a real store of wealth and a product of human labour became the means by which
    all other commodities and services produced by labour could be measured – in
    this sense it was ‘real money’. If paper tokens were introduced to circulate on
    behalf of gold, representing it in fixed quantities, these paper tokens acted as
    money (as ‘good as gold’) and so were representative of the social wealth
    embodied in commodities more generally in the economy.

    But when convertibility was suspended this allowed paper money to be issued
    far in excess of the amount of gold that was representative of the wealth being
    produced by society – and this phenomenon has been the source of the massive
    currency inflation that has occurred across the world market economy since the
    1930s, massively eroding the purchasing power of the dollar, pound and other
    currencies. It means notes and coins in circulation are no longer tied in any
    way to levels of production and trade in the economy. In this respect, any move
    to tie paper money back to gold would in all likelihood halt inflation – but it
    would do nothing whatsoever to halt the market economy’s periodic crises and
    slumps, like the recent one, that have caused so much misery across the world.
    Only the abolition of prices, credit and money itself can do that, enabling
    social regulation of production and free access to wealth. In such
    circumstances, gold will no longer be stored in bank vaults (as these will not
    exist) and can instead be used productively and creatively rather than as an
    object of financial speculation and power-broking. And that situation will
    represent a golden opportunity for us all.

    Gold Bores | The Socialist Party of Great Britain
    Ultima modifica di Gian_Maria; 27-07-14 alle 12:18
    "Ma chi è quel mona che continua a inquinare?" (cit. Mosconi variata)
    "Tanti di loro sono così assuefatti, così dipendenti dal sistema, che combatterebbero per difenderlo." The Matrix
    Cos'è il Socialismo

  2. #2
    Eroe Faustiano
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    Predefinito Re: Articolo interessante sull'oro (in inglese)

    io non parlo inglese, traduca per cortesia!

  3. #3
    x il Socialismo Mondiale
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    Predefinito Re: Articolo interessante sull'oro (in inglese)

    Ma come, non hai fatto le scuole alte?
    "Ma chi è quel mona che continua a inquinare?" (cit. Mosconi variata)
    "Tanti di loro sono così assuefatti, così dipendenti dal sistema, che combatterebbero per difenderlo." The Matrix
    Cos'è il Socialismo

  4. #4
    Eroe Faustiano
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    Predefinito Re: Articolo interessante sull'oro (in inglese)

    Citazione Originariamente Scritto da Gian_Maria Visualizza Messaggio
    Ma come, non hai fatto le scuole alte?
    no, ho fatto i ragionieri e so fare solo le sottrazioni senza riporto

  5. #5
    x il Socialismo Mondiale
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    Predefinito Re: Articolo interessante sull'oro (in inglese)

    Allora usa il traduttore di Google.
    "Ma chi è quel mona che continua a inquinare?" (cit. Mosconi variata)
    "Tanti di loro sono così assuefatti, così dipendenti dal sistema, che combatterebbero per difenderlo." The Matrix
    Cos'è il Socialismo

 

 

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