19 Feb 2010

Potpourri

All Posts, Potpourri 10 Comments

* If you want to be a Summer Fellow and join the elite club, look here.

* Chip Knappenberger argues that it is far from obvious that late 20th century warming is mostly due to human activity.

* Krugman made the point I could not (for reasons of truce). Namely, people recently were making fun of the economists who had predicted the Eurozone was not a stable arrangement. And then, well, you know.

* Bob Roddis sends this Detroit News article on asset forfeiture policies. There is a bill afoot to say police can’t seize your property if they admit no crime occurred. (And this is news, mind you.)

* Jeff Tucker has some great one-liners in this blog post on medical costs. (I originally wrote “medical prices” to be more accurate, but c’mon it’s a blog post. I may type out “ain’t” before the day is done.)

* Jeff also gushes over the Hayek/Keynes rap video. OK OK, I had no idea it would get that many views. It is obviously a success. My initial reaction was totally totally wrong.

* Speaking of Russ Roberts, did you know he was the lyingest economist alive? (HT2 von Pepe)

* Just when you thought you’d nailed down Silas Barta’s position on climate science…

* About a week ago all the gold bugs were going nuts over this Tyler Durden discussion of a 1995 article on economic history (!!). The thing that I don’t get is, why did the Bank of England pressure the Fed to cut rates in 1927? That’s the theory I endorsed in my Depression book, thinking that the BofE was hurting because of the overvalued pound and so wanted the Fed to weaken the dollar by cutting US rates (thus fueling the stock market boom in the late 1920s). But if this prof whom Tyler Durden has found is right, then the Bank of England was actually suffering from a massive inflow of gold. So what’s the deal? Sure, it’s great to get new evidence that central bankers are naked liars, but Austrians need to do some soul-searching if they want to endorse this guy’s paper.

Conspiracy Section

* Imagine a dystopian novel where the government sends laptops home with kids, and then remotely activates the camera to spy on them and their families, and then punish the kids for things they were doing in their house. Oh wait, that’s the allegation in a lawsuit filed in Pennsylvania. (HT2 Tony G)

* Did you know that the Fabian Society’s stained glass window features a coat of arms with a wolf in sheep’s clothing?! Griffin in The Creature from Jekyll Island claimed this, and so I went to the Internet to confirm. I found a bunch of conspiracy websites saying it, but this site seems pretty neutral and there it is, bright as day.

* I was watching a documentary that was talking about how the bankers rammed through the Federal Reserve Act with as little fanfare as possible, in fact doing it two days before Christmas. Yep, checks out: The Act was enacted on December 23, 1913.

* The Georgia state senate recently passed a bill outlawing the involuntary implantation of microchips. Maybe you’re thinking it has to do with cattle or something. No, it’s humans. And you should be very relieved, only two people voted against the bill. (Not sure if they opposed bans on involuntary microchip placement, or if there were something odious tied to the bill.)

* I also tried to verify this inconceivable (I don’t think that word means what I think it means when the speaker is David Rockefeller) quotation I saw in a documentary. I don’t know how airtight this procedure is, but Wikiquote says it is sourced (whereas some other quotes attributed to Ben Franklin on fractional reserve banking were undocumented according to Wikiquote):

We are grateful to The Washington Post, The New York Times, Time Magazine and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost forty years. It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subject to the bright lights of publicity during those years. But, the world is now much more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government. The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national auto-determination practiced in past centuries. –David Rockefeller

10 Responses to “Potpourri”

  1. Hugo says:
    at

    About a week ago all the gold bugs were going nuts over this Tyler Durden discussion of a 1995 article on economic history (!!). The thing that I don't get is, why did the Bank of England pressure the Fed to cut rates in 1927? That's the theory I endorsed in my Depression book, thinking that the BofE was hurting because of the overvalued pound and so wanted the Fed to weaken the dollar by cutting US rates (thus fueling the stock market boom in the late 1920s). But if this prof whom Tyler Durden has found is right, then the Bank of England was actually suffering from a massive inflow of gold. So what's the deal? Sure, it's great to get new evidence that central bankers are naked liars, but Austrians need to do some soul-searching if they want to endorse this guy's paper.

    I dont see any contradiction between austrian economics and the pound being overvalued. Rothbard explains in his book "History of money and banking in the USA…" that :

    After the end of the war, Strong’s monetary policy was delib-
    erately guided by the prime objective of helping Great Britain
    establish, and impose upon Europe, a new and disastrous gold-
    exchange standard. The idea was to restore “England”—which
    really meant the Morgans’ English associates and allies—to her
    old position of financial dominance by helping her establish a
    phony gold standard. Ostensibly this was a return to the prewar
    “classical” gold standard. But the return, in the spring of 1925,
    was at the prewar par, a rate that hopelessly overvalued the
    pound sterling, which Britain had inflated and depreciated dur-
    ing the fiat money era after 1914. Britain insisted on returning to
    gold at an overvalued par, a policy guaranteed to hobble British
    exports, and yet was determined to indulge in continued cheap
    money and inflation, instead of contracting its money supply to
    make the prewar par viable. To help Britain get away with this
    peculiar and contradictory policy, the United States helped to
    pretend that the post-1925 standard in Europe—this gold bul-
    lion-pound standard—was really a genuine gold-coin standard.
    The United States inflated its money and credit in order to pre-
    vent inflationary Britain from losing gold to the United States, a
    loss which would endanger the new, jerry-built “gold stan-
    dard” structure. The result, however, was eventual collapse of
    money and credit in the U.S. and abroad, and a worldwide
    depression. Benjamin Strong was the Morgans’ architect of a dis-
    astrous policy of inflationary boom that led inevitably to bust.

    pages 270-271

    So basically the Morgans wanted a over-valued pound to gain finatial power over Europe, and the USA helped them by inflating the dollar, and that helped to create the bubble that bust in the 1929 crash.

    And the original paper about how the Bank of England managed to keep the pound overvalued by cheating and lying to the market is very interesting. It says a lot about the mindset of central bankers. Recomended lecture.

  2. Hugo says:
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    Just to clarify the previous:

    The 1995 paper explains how the BoE was trying to set the interest rates higher than the market rate, and the Fed helped with that.

    The reason the BoE wanted higher interest rates was to trick the market into believing that the pound was stronger than it really was, so there would be no attack on a overvalued pound. This obviously made people send their gold to england and the BoE had problems to keep the rates artificially high, and that is why it had to do all the lying and cheating. The paper explains the process in detail. The New York Fed helped the BoE to get rid of the extra gold, so nobody could suspect what was going on.

  3. Bob Murphy says:
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    Hugo,

    That's just about the opposite of the standard Rothbardian story, though. In that story, the Bank of England was losing gold, and so told the Fed to push interest rates below the market rate, to help England.

    I'm not saying that we have to choose between the Austrian business cycle theory explanation and this guy's paper about the BofE, but I am saying that the standard Austrian explanation for why the BofE pressured the Fed is backwards. And that should be a little disturbing, if we can make the ABCT story fit whether the BofE had too much or too little gold.

  4. Bob Roddis says:
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    Re: World Government. Whether or not that Rockefeller quote is correct, this youtube video seems authentic. It is pretty scary considering that it was John Anderson who came out of nowhere in 1980 to be the ubiquitous "Third Party Candidate" just as libertarian candidate Ed Clark seemed ready to gain some attention. Anderson's third party bid was mentioned in EVERY SINGLE media mention of the 1980 presidential campaign.

  5. Yancey Ward says:
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    I really don't understand why you found Barta's comment surprising.

  6. Beefcake the Mighty says:
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    Here's a cool site:

    http://www.bigeye.com/nanothermite.htm

    and a great quote:

    "I think there is only one conspiracy theory worth mentioning, the one involving 19 hijackers. I think viewers should ask themselves what evidence they have seen to support the official conspiracy theory. If anyone has seen evidence, I would like to hear about it. No one has been formally charged. No one is "wanted." Our work should lead to demands for a proper criminal investigation of the 9/11 terrorist attack. Because it never happened. We are still waiting for it. We hope our results will be used as technical evidence when that day comes."

    Keep in mind there are obvious disinformation agents and plants posting here (e.g., Cody). I guess you've hit the big-time, Bob, to attract such attention from Leviathan.

  7. notacrank says:
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    ^ HAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAAH what crankery.

  8. Greg says:
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    Much of the core of "global warming science" = Piltdown Man

    Who would have guessed that Silas Barta agrees …

  9. Hugo says:
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    Bob, I see what you meant.

    From reading the paper, I understood that the BoE did not had enough gold to exchange all its notes for gold (it had gone fiat to pay for IWW), so I understood that to stop people from exchanging pound notes for gold it tried to push interest rates higher than market rates. So some gold came to England looking for those high interest rates. So instead of issuing notes, the BoE sold pound denominated assets and tried another gimmicks to sterilize the gold. And to hide it, the BoE asked the New York Fed to sell the gold and adquire US treasuries denominated in dollars. But to hide that it now had dollar denominated assets, it hide them under "other assets" (wich was a mix of assets reported in pounds).

    I only gave it a couple of hours, but that seemed solid for me and was happy about it. Guess I need to give it some more time.