Dedicated to the Memory of Ferdinand Lips (1931-2005) Student and Advocate of the Gold Standard
On the Occasion of the Inauguration of GoldStandardUniversity Live*
Introduction
A specter haunts executive mansions, chambers of legislatures, and halls of universities: the ghost of the gold standard. Governments and academia have utterly failed in discharging their sacred duty to provide a serene environment for the search for and dissemination of truth regarding economics in general and monetary science in particular.
This failure has to do, first and foremost, with the incestuous financing of research ever since the Federal Reserve System was launched in the United States in 1913. The formula for distributing the profits and undivided surpluses of the Federal Reserve banks has made it possible for the United States Treasury to grab the lion’s share. As a consequence the bond market has been reduced to a gambling casino where the shill, alias Open Market Committee of the Federal Reserve (OMC), whips up gambling frenzy and gamblers, alias multinational banks make obscene gains at the gaming table. Bond speculation has been made virtually risk-free. Multinational banks rush in to pre-empt the OMC in buying government securities first. Losers are the involuntary participants: savers and producers of goods and services.
Under the gold standard government bonds were the instrument to which widows and orphans could safely entrust their savings. Under the regime of irredeemable currency they are the instrument whereby special interest fleeces the rest of society. You don’t have to be a bondholder to be victimized. If you are a saver, your savings account is surreptitiously pilfered as bond speculators drive interest rates up. If you are a producer, your capital account is clandestinely plundered as bond speculators drive interest rates down.
Official Check-Kiting
Unknown to the public, at the end of the day the shill is obliged to hand over her gains to the casino owner, alias the United States Treasury. There is nothing open about what is euphemistically called ‘open market operations’. It is a conspiratorial operation. It has come about through unlawful delegation of power without imposing countervailing responsibilities. It was never authorized by the Federal Reserve Act of 1913. It defies the principle of checks and balances. It is immoral. It is a formula to corrupt and ultimately to destroy the Republic.
Even though later amendments to the Federal Reserve Act authorized it retroactively, the constitutionality of open market operation has never been put to the test. Such an examination would not be permitted by the powers-that-be. Open market operations are tantamount to check-kiting whereby two conspiring parties issue obligations that neither one has the intention or the means to honor but, when they come up for clearing, the phantom obligation of one party is covered with that of the other.
Incest in Financing Research
The junior partner in the conspiracy, the Federal Reserve, can only increase its share of the loot beyond the mandated limit of 6 percent per annum of subscribed capital by increasing its power. To do so it makes grants to anybody pretending to be able to write awe-inspiring, mathematically convoluted, nonetheless vacuous papers on macroeconomics or anything else of which the fraudulence and charlatanism is hard to detect.
As a result a veritable deluge of worthless papers has glutted the technical literature on money which have one common earmark: they all attempt to defend the indefensible, the issuance of irredeemable promises to pay: bonds issued by the Treasury and notes issued by the Federal Reserve banks. Thus, then, the basis for money creation is the flimsy check-kiting scheme whereby the Federal Reserve banks buy the bonds with freshly printed notes, while the Treasury uses these notes to pay the bondholders. Bonds are supposed to have value because they are ‘redeemable’ in the notes which, in turn, are supposed to have value because they are ‘backed’ by bonds. In effect both instruments are irredeemable and neither has backing in the form of any verifiable segregated wealth in existence. At the heart of the money-creating process, however explained, analyzed, or defended, is the stubborn fact that both the Treasury and the Federal Reserve banks are privileged, improperly and unconstitutionally, to issue obligations that they have neither the intention nor the means to honor. Check-kiting by anybody else constitutes a crime dealt with by the Criminal Code.
The grant departments of the Federal Reserve banks have effectively put themselves in charge of deciding what should and what should not be researched on the subject of money. This incest in financing research stands without precedent in the entire history of science, to the eternal shame of this ‘enlightened’ and ‘pluralistic’ age.
Crime of Omission
The hijacking of the agenda for economic research has resulted in a distortion of traditional values. The new values favor ephemeral knowledge, myopia in planning, instant gratification, marginalization of savers, consumerism, debt-creation with abandon, without seeing how it can be retired, scientific charlatanism, spreading half truths. Discarded are the old values: durable knowledge, work-hard/save-hard ethics, long-horizon planning, and a healthy fear of dangers involved in the unlimited accumulation of debt. The agenda for research sponsored by the Federal Reserve banks is no less a crime of omission than it is a crime of commission, as revealed by the following.
1.Support for research on the merit of metallic monetary standards as a political arrangement of placing the power to create and to extinguish money directly into the hands of the people in conformity with the U.S. Constitution, rather than into the hands of appointed agents, is nil.
2.Support for research on the question whether the value of irredeemable currency is an exception to the ‘Rule of Mean Reversal’ and, for this reason, is subject to the ‘sudden death syndrome,’ is zero.
3.Support for research on the legality of open market operations, as it has been surreptitiously introduced and retroactively authorized, is unavailable.
4.Support for the examination of the absurd tenet that it is possible to increase the volume of debt in the world indefinitely, in complete disregard of the ability ever to reduce let alone retire it, is denied.
5.Support for the examination of the question whether the issuance of promises to pay which the issuer has neither the intention nor the means to honor can have any justification in contract law, is not available.
6.Support for research of causal relation between the making of bank notes legal tender in Europe in 1909, and the massive and persistent world-wide unemployment that followed twenty years later, in 1929, is withheld.
Integrity of Courts and Universities
The above short list already makes it abundantly clear that something is woefully amiss with the granting of unlimited power not subject to advice and consent, still less to control, review, or withdrawal by the public empowering one particular agency not only to issue purchasing media as it sees fit, but also to direct, permit or inhibit research pertaining to questions aboutits own activities.
It is a sad commentary upon the integrity of our institutions that not one court of justice, not one university in the entire world has found it possible to put the regime of irredeemable currency on trial. Directly attributable to that regime is the unprecedented economic and financial devastation of the past thirty-five years, including the decimation of the purchasing power of all the currencies of the world, followed by the even more vicious decimation of the market value of all bonds, as a result of an earthquake-style destruction of the interest-rate structure.
It was this corruption of financing research that has disabled the immune system of society. It has made economics open to the invasion of quackery, and politics to that of chicanery. It has ensured the success of the final assault on sound money. As a result of the darkness that has descended upon monetary science, the government of the United States could inflict irredeemable currency not only on its own subjects, as it did in 1933, but on the peoples of the rest of the world as well, as it did forty years later in 1973, without meeting any significant resistance.
Integrity of Financial Journalism
Nor is this the end of the corrosiveness of irredeemable currency upon our institutions. Financial journalism has failed to alert the public to the imminent danger of a credit collapse arising out of the global use of irredeemable currency which governments have blithely embraced and foisted upon their subjects. They did it without bothering to examine the scientific and juridical arguments against it. In previous instances of experiments with this type of currency sane and self-respecting governments have always resisted the temptation of siren song to join others living in financial backwater. Whenever weak-minded or weak-kneed governments came to their senses and wanted to return to monetary rectitude, there was no lack of countries around on the gold standard to lend them a helping hand. No such luck this time. The world is a rudderless ship on uncharted waters, and the storm is fast approaching. When it strikes, it will be ‘everybody for himself’. No helping hand will assist survivors. All defenses against disaster have been systematically dismantled, all life savers cast overboard.
In order to soften the coming blow a group of concerned citizens have decided to establish Gold Standard University Live, home for the study of monetary issues placed under taboo by other institutions of higher learning.
***
Gold Standard University Live appeals to all those
¶ who cherish freedom and the ideal of government of limited and enumerated powers;
¶ who support the principle of checks and balances in public affairs as well as the notion of delegating power only to the extent it is encumbered with countervailing responsibilities;
¶ who reject the incestuous combination of the monopoly to create money with a monopoly to dictate the research agenda for the principles governing money creation;
¶ who reject the prostitution of monetary science to be used as a smoke-screen with which to camouflage the gradual enslavement of the entire population of the Earth.
It calls upon them
¶ to step forward and support the cause of exposing monetary deceit and mischief;
¶ to demand the reinstatement of the gold standard, the return to constitutional money, and putting the individual citizen in charge of money-creation at the Mint once more;
¶ to force the government to write gold clauses into its bonds.
Disenfranchised people of the Earth, rise! Put an end to the usurpation of power by the clique of impostors pretending to be monetary experts! Chase the money-mongers out of the temple! Cast your jail-keepers into the sixth circle of the seven in Hell to which Dante confined all counterfeiters of money, perpetrators of false pretenses, and other tormentors of widows and orphans! Truth is on your side! You, not your slave-drivers, command the high moral ground! You can win a world free of yokes! The only thing you may lose is your shackles!
Savers and producers of the world, unite!
January 1, 2007.
GOLDSTANDARDUNIVERSITYLIVE
At the MARTINEUM, in the city of Szombathely, Hungary
Inaugural Session starts on February 14, 2007
GoldStandardUniversity was started on the Internet by Antal E. Fekete, Professor Emeritus, Memorial University of Newfoundland in the Summer of 2002. Now it will go ‘live’. The host institute is MARTINEUM , an institute of Higher Adult Education, see The program is in two parts: (1) intensive instruction taking up the first week; and (2) an optional recreational program and sight-seeing during the second week that is available for interested participants. The first week of scientific program consists of one of the following four courses of 13 lectures each:
Monetary Economics 101: The Real Bills Doctrine of Adam Smith
Monetary Economics 102: Gold and Interest
Monetary Economics 201: The Bill Market and the Discount Rate
Monetary Economics 202: The Bond Market and the rate of Interest
The 100 level courses are independent of each other. The 200 level courses have prerequisites as follows: 101 is prerequisite for 201 and 102 for 202. Some of the lectures of the 100 level courses are available, free of charge, on the Internet, see, e.g., ,
, .
The inaugural session is scheduled for the week of February 14, 2007, at which time the course Gold and Interest will be offered. GoldStandardUniversity Live will continue on the premises of MARTINEUM, in Szombathely, Hungary. Further sessions will be announced later depending on interest, up to one session per month. They will have the same format: one week of intensive instruction covering one of the above four courses in thirteen lectures, followed by an optional second week of recreation.
GoldStandardUniversity Live is seeking accreditation from the Hungarian Board for Higher Adult Education. Accreditation is expected in 2007. Those participants who have completed the four courses will get a certificate confirming this.
Martineum offers a full range of guest services, including private rooms, double rooms, dorms, and meal services. Breakfast is included in the room charge; other meals are ‘pay as you go’. Lecture rooms are on the premises. Language of instruction is English. Send your inquiry about the combined registration and tuition fee, including room and breakfast for seven days for the one-week academic program. Charge for the optional second-week of recreation and sight-seeing is additional. Participants pay their own fare to and from Szombathely.
Nearest international airport is Graz, Austria, about 75 miles from Szombathely to the South-West. Other international airports serving Szombathely are: Vienna, Austria, about 100 miles to the North-West; and Budapest, Hungary, about 175 miles to the North-East. From all three cities direct train services to Szombathely are available.
Szombathely is the capital city of Vas County in Hungary. If you would like to learn more about that part of world, please look up where you will find well-written and well-illustrated information in English on the local population, culture, history, economy, and geography.
Pre-registration is available at a non-refundable fee of $25 per person which, however, will be counted towards the registration and tuition fee. Contact for details.
Further announcement will be made in early January, 2007.
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