QUESTION:  Hi AE, et al. Your blogs not only inform, but are actually entertaining as they give most of us a point of view we’ve never before contemplated.
My question….you have stated numerous times that one of the reasons the Roman government survived for 100’s of years is because they simply created currency, as needed, instead of borrowing (gov’t bonds) as they do today. But their currency was mainly silver, which possessed at least some intrinsic value, as opposed to today’s digital, key-stroke variety.
The only public figure I can think of, with whom I would entrust such easy access, might be Thomas Jefferson. Human nature being what it is, corruption would be as inevitable as it is today.
To many of us, currency without some intrinsic value, just doesn’t make sense. Too much temptation. Would love to hear a more fulsome reply, with your thoughts on this subject. All of us here deeply respect what you are doing.

Thanks.
HS

ANSWER: All currencies today are still backed and are not intangible. Now, that statement may provoke thousands of emails. But the value of any currency has NEVER been its intrinsic value even throughout history. Proof of that statement is the fact that the surrounding economies to the Roman Empire imitated the gold and silver coinage of Rome for a single reason — the coins were accepted and regarded as more valuable than their intrinsic value simply in metal content.

Here is an imitation of a gold aureus of Rome struck in India. The weight of the gold was even greater than that minted in Rome. India routinely imitated Roman coinage from the reign of Tiberius (14-37 AD) to Gordian III (238-244 AD). Obviously, India had gold but the coinage of Rome carried a premium. There would have been no other reason to imitate Roman coinage if the monetary system was purely intrinsic.

So, why do I say that ALL currency is backed to this very day and it is not simply fiat with no intrinsic value? All currency is backed by the total productive capacity of its people. For further proof of that statement, just look at China, Japan, and Germany and you will see that each economy rose to the top 10 list in the world when they had NO gold reserves after World War II. It was the total capacity of its people that created the wealth of those nations.

Italy has more gold reserves than France. Yet, Italy is considered to be the third-largest economy in Europe behind France. Algeria has the largest gold reserves in Africa followed by South Africa. At the end of 2017, Algeria had a GDP of about US$170 billion. But South Africa’s GDP is about US$350 billion. The size of an economy does not correlate to its gold reserves.

A currency does not move into hyperinflation because it increases its money supply with no backing. It moves into hyperinflation BECAUSE of the collapse in the confidence of the government both domestically among its citizens and internationally.

With 300,878 million barrels of proven oil reserves, Venezuela has the largest amount of proven oil reserves in the world. The VEF/USD has collapsed to 0.09 from a high of 0.46 back in 2010. Despite having intrinsic assets, the collapse in the currency reflects the total collapse in the confidence of the government.

Therefore, step back a moment and abandon this old world mercantilist idea of what is behind the wealth of a nation, which was more Phyisocrat than Adam Smith. Your labor is not worthless. Each of us constitutes the wealth of a nation. America has the greatest economy, NOT because of gold, but because we have the biggest consumer market on the planet to which everyone tries to sell goods in order to take home money.

This idea that money MUST be tangible is not realistic. It is the product of people frustrated by the business cycle, no different than Karl Marx. Marx sought to confiscate all wealth to kill the business cycle and others keep preaching a gold standard to fix the currency to also defeat the business cycle. If money were truly fixed and could not rise or fall, that would mean your house could never rise or fall in value and you should not expect a raise at work.

Money is the perception of the wealth of a nation, which is its total productive capacity of its people, and not its gold reserves or tangible resources. Russia has tremendous natural resources, but its economy is dominated by oligarchs who have prevented Russia from expanding as China has shown the opposite. The fluctuations in currencies are how capital votes on the confidence of the political state behind each currency.

I have heard what I thought was every excuse for governments to raise taxes and seize money, but this is one I quite honestly thought was something too low for even the police. New South Wales police have come up with the most bizarre excuse to rob your money I have ever heard of. They now claim that driver safety is the main reason for this new initiative to confiscate whatever coins you have in your car. They have the audacity to claim that “Loose coins within cars are a safety hazard.” (see Double Bay Today)

They claim that a driver may perhaps bend down to pick up a coin and get into an accident. What’s next? They confiscate your phone and then sell it back to you after you are done the driving?

Australia has become perhaps the MOST aggressive country in Western Culture to hunt down its own citizens for money. They follow school children and then investigate how the parents are paying for the school. The Australian Tax Office (ATO) has applied for access to everything to hunt for money. They want access to phone calls, emails, posts, and SMS text messages.

Australians could face two-year jail sentences and fines of up to $25,200 under proposed laws that limit the use of cash to $10,000 — a move some groups argue would create an Orwellian state by giving authorities greater control over people’s finances. The government’s slogan – Cash is for Criminals. Thus was hidden in the 2018 Australian Government budget claiming it would save $5.3 billion by banning cash payments of $10,000 or more. Australian Treasurer Scott Morrison said it was a crackdown on the black economy.

Instead of reform, they are reforming ways to hunt their own citizens. Australia began as a penal colony. The king needed money so just about anything you did from stealing an apple to any minor issue landed you not in prison, but they would sell you to a plantation for 5 years and transport you to a foreign land and leave you there. If they could torture you and get you to confess to one of 240 felonies, they carried the death penalty where the king could confiscate all your assets and throw your family out on the street. Prisoners would die under torture to save their families.

The King is Dead – Long Live The Tax Extortioner

We actually owe the Fifth Amendment and the right to remain silent to John Lilburne (1614 – 1657). He defended himself vigorously in court, quoting from the works of the great jurist Sir Edward Coke (1552-1634) whose work the Institutes was the seminal statement of English law.

The Miranda decision by the Supreme Court quoted this right to remain silent enshrined in the Constitution of the United States known as the Fifth Amendment right against compelled Self-Incrimination. Lilburn proudly declared:

“Another fundamental right I then contended for, was, that no man’s conscience ought to be racked by oaths imposed, to answer to questions concerning himself in matters criminal or pretended to be so.”

Governments have made so many promises to win votes that they cannot keep. When in danger of being exposed, they turn on their own citizens and hunt them down for money. This is how Empires, Nations, and city-states collapse into dust.

The hunt for money is moving into high gear in Germany. Prior to 2017, it was possible to buy gold anonymously in quantities up to €15,000. In 2017, this limit was reduced to €10,000. Now, Merkel has drastically reduced this limit to just €2,000 beginning in 2020. Any transaction greater than that amount requires the buyer to prove their identity and give their data to the gold trader.

While Merkel has allowed the refugees to pour into Germany, denying there are terrorists hidden among them, she has justified this reduction in anonymous gold purchases by arguing against money laundering to stop terrorism. This means that terrorist would be buying gold inside Germany, which on the other hand she denies letting them in to start with.

Merkel is not satisfied with imposing just a price limitation. She also wants to introduce the 50-gram rule, which would apply regardless of price. For physical gold buyers, this means they will not be able to buy a 50-gram ingot (1.60754 troy ounces) without the gold trader taking personal data and saving it for five years. This certainly applies if you tried to buy just two one ounces coins.

Merkel has formally justified this change in the laws on gold as a step in the fight against money laundering and terrorist financing. The government studies show that out of 77,252 cases registered in 2018 that suspected terrorism financing, only 175 cases involved precious metals.

Terrorism has been a real windfall for governments since 9/11. They have increased their powers globally and probably send thank you cards to the terrorists for handing them the excuse to create total financial surveillance that they use in the hunt for taxes.

The Merkel government has been making a concerted effort to introduce a total surveillance state and track the finances of its citizens. There is chaos in Europe with negative and punitive interest rates, high bank charges, and a declining euro. All of this is mixed with a prolonged economic recession in Europe since 2007 as we approach a 13-year decline in 2020. More and more Europeans are looking for ways to safely and anonymously invest their savings, which have been under direct assault by the government. This has been leading to the hoarding of US dollars and now the change in legislation on gold is only going to increase the switch to dollars.

QUESTION: Marty,
Sometime you compare today’s financial markets and economy to what was going on in the mid to late 1920s . Woodrow Wilson is even referenced concerning the flight of capital and of course that flight came to the United States.
You also say that the global markets and economy are unlike anything in modern history. I can only assume that you are referring to the artificial bond yields and prices due to central banks buying so much of the sovereign debt.
How is this period that same as the late 1920s and how is it different?
I am a huge fan of your work. Thanks for the blog and for Socrates!
NM

ANSWER: There was a flight of capital to the United States pushing the dollar higher for World War I. Woodrow Wilson was president 1913 – March 4, 1921. Wilson introduced a comprehensive program of domestic legislation at the outset of his administration, something no president had ever done before. Willson took a rather interesting view of tariffs. He argued that the system of high tariffs

“cuts us off from our proper part in the commerce of the world, violates the just principles of taxation, and makes the government a facile instrument in the hands of private interests.”

Tariffs were really an additional tax on consumers which Trump does not understand for he is looking only at jobs which is typical. Tariffs benefits only the producers by rewarding them with a higher income than the free market would provide. However, the other side of the coin on this issue was that Wilson also created the income tax. The Revenue Act of 1913 reduced the average import tariff rates from approximately 40% to about 26% and the revenue shortfall was to be be made up with income taxes.

Wilson created the Federal Reserve in 1913. He also moved for major legislation seeking antitrust legislation to enhance the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, which was really a response to the consolidation of railroads. The politicians saw mergers as destroying jobs rather than creating an efficient railway system. Wilson was also against the position that the USA should own colonies, and thus he promoted the independence of the Philippines. From 1914 until early 1917, Wilson’s tried to keep the USA out of the war in Europe. That did not sit well with the hawks in Congress.

All of that said, on the one hand we have Trump against war, as was Wilson, but in favor of tariffs as a tool to win free trade ignoring that they are really a consumer tax and protectionism for overpaid jobs. It was Wilson who told the Fed they had to buy US government bonds to prevent the yield from rising, which is sort of the problem we still have today. The Fed was originally designed to stimulate buying corporate paper directly when banks would not lend. Now the Fed stimulates by supporting government buying bonds from the banks who in turn still do not lend to support the economy in a crisis. The very idea why we needed the Federal Reserve has been completely reversed.

The primary difference today is the debt. The capital shifted into the USA and we see divergences between the highs and lows centered around World War I, whereas the 1929 and 1932 lows take place in both British pounds and dollars. For the World War I commodity boom, the US high was November 1919, whereas the British pound high was January 1920.

There was a major debt crisis in Europe, but not the United States. This is what wiped out Britain as it lost the crown of the financial capital of the world to the USA. This time, the debt crisis is systemic. The currencies are showing divergences as they did pre-World War I. But we have a socialist crisis whereas Western economies are collapsing unable to fund all the promises, as was the case with Communism in 1989-1991 in China and Russia. The central banks only keep governments on life-support and there is no direct stimulation of the economy. Every lesson from the past has been forgotten. We have put all the eggs in one basket (government) and we have politics in meltdown as republics are collapsing and the left v right is becoming much more intense which will, as always and without exception, lead to violence, civil unrest, separatist movements rising, and could result in revolutions which increases the risk of international war as politicians need a distraction from their failed domestic agenda.

It is just now our turn to rock & roll.

This will make for a very interesting WEC this year in Orlando.

QUESTION: Hi Martin
I recently stumped upon a documentary on Netflix about you and your model.
I then went on and watched some YouTube videos.
To me it makes totally sense that taxation does not work, but how can we change it. Do we need to become politicians?
We have a very high tax in Denmark. Base level around 39 percent and top level around 60. So it’s eminent to cajnge this in Denmark.
We have a quite new political party here called Liberal alliance. They promote a flat tax of 40 percent, and I think that makes sense…. But, they had such bad election and are so tiny now, they have no influence.
Everyone say we need taxes to have welfare. So how do we go from 60 to 0 percent in tax without sacrifice our welfare. And how do we convince people that it Wan work….. It will be some very tough months or years once the tax is not flowing to the hospitals etc?
I hope you can elaborate on these things.
DB

ANSWER: In building the model, I assembled data on everything I could find and then put it all together to see how and what made the world tick. I investigated tax rates to see how civilizations operated. I investigated what types of governments worked best and what always collapsed into oligarchies, then tyrannical entities, before collapsing into dust.

I read many contemporary historians directly rather than the modern interpretation of events, which have NEVER been unbiased. I discovered that inevitably people interpreted the past with a modern context. I found one of the funniest to be when they named the city of Philadelphia after the Greek meaning “brotherly love.” The founders were devoted Christians, and in their view, they loved their brother as they loved themselves. However, the real meaning in Greek meant incest — the brother was fooling around with his sister. Understanding the meaning in which words were used is critical to understanding history. You can NEVER read it in terms of a modern context.

The Romans generally had a 7% tax. They also had welfare. The difference was that they had NOcentral bank and NO national debt. They controlled the mines and simply minted coins to fund the government and its programs. The Romans controlled the mine Rup Tinto in Spain, which they won from Carthage in the Punic War. The amount of silver they mined from that location funded the government for decades.

The debasement began in 64 AD under Nero when Rome experienced the great fire and Nero had to rebuild the city. As the new silver was declining, we find the debasement. It was not an issue of vote for me and I will give you this or that. The debasement begins because the government funded itself with new money and the sources were running dry.

The problem we face is that it would have been far less inflationary to print the money than borrow it. We have a debt crisis that cannot be paid and the accumulative interest expenditures rose to reach at times even 70% of the national debt. Now that they have discovered NEGATIVE interest rates, they think they discovered a new way to tax people indirectly. They think we are too stupid to realize this is even a tax.

But fear not. We are heading into a Monetary Crisis of untold proportions. If the governments do not listen, they will create the biggest civil unrest in all of history. This is the collapse of socialism, for they have promised everything, funded nothing, and cannot keep raising taxes without causing the economy to collapse. This will undermine their entire tax system.

There are ways to deal with this crisis if we have the courage to first admit that we have a crisis. That is step one.