Opponents Of Gold, Get On Your Mark

A good article from Brian Domitrovic on Forbes.com:

Let’s face it – we’ve seen what arbitrary government control and central bank manipulation can do. Namely, what the Federal Reserve has done since 2008. This is to scare everyone away from the currency such that there’s no investment, with inflation hedges (such as gold) shooting the moon, all the while stiffing the small defaulter and bailing out the biggest of the big. This kind of anti-democratic monopolism is exactly what the gold standard forestalls, and The True Gold Standard explains why, among much else, in less than a hundred tidy pages. Here’s another exquisite recommendation from the book: given gold, government bonds can’t count as bank reserves. This will do two things. First, dry up the market for government debt, an unqualified good in our age of trillion-dollar deficits. And second, release bank assets to be at the service of the real economy.

Bandits With Begging Bowls

A recent CNBC article by Catherine Boyle has some classic quotes from Sean Corrigan:

The euro zone’s banks, seen by many as the source of the region’s debt crisis, will ultimately be bailed out by “vested interests,” Sean Corrigan, chief investment strategist, Diapason Commodities Management, said. “There may be one or two forced to merge or to fall by the wayside, but all the vested interests will come back together,” he said. “We don’t allow for the market or competitive forces to come to their full severity, and when these guys act like bandits in the good times and come with begging bowls in the bad, we criticize capitalism.”

On the euro zone deal:

“They have averted a collapse this way, but they themselves don’t know what they have put in place,” Corrigan said of the EU leaders. “There’s this idea that it will conduct some little bit of magic, that these guys in the financial markets, who we hate, have been conducting and this will simply make Italy’s debt lower and Greece competitive. Yet nobody knows what the details are.”

On policy closer to home:

“Whether or not you believe the government should be setting banking policy rather than bankers, the issue is that the government didn’t take any executive control,” Corrigan said. “If that’s going to happen, there should be a clear program of forcibly putting the bank back in the hands of the market in a set time. I don’t see that happening in Britain.”

Sean of course had more to say that didn’t make it into the article, but even so, it’s great to see our message relayed in the mainstream press.