The Campaign Against Gold

From The Gold Wars by Gary North:

The State has adopted several strategies in undermining the use of gold as coinage. Here are a few of the more common strategies.

1.    Issue paper IOU’s for gold, called gold certificates.

2.    Issue more of these certificates than there is gold to redeem all of them on demand on the same day. “Suckers!”

3.    Allow commercial banks to do the same thing. “Suckers!”

4.    Create a central bank that stands ready to issue gold to bail out any bank that experiences a gold run.

5.    Allow commercial banks to suspend redemption of gold during a national emergency. “Suckers!”

6.    Allow the central bank to confiscate the gold of the now- protected commercial banks. “Suckers!”

7.    Make the ownership of gold illegal for citizens.

8.    Create a gold-exchange system internationally in which foreign central banks buy interest-bearing bonds from one or two countries that back their currencies in gold: IOU’s for central bankers.

9.    Create a central bank for central banks that will lend gold during a national bank run. Call it something other than a bank, such as the International Monetary Fund.

10.    Suspend gold payments to foreign central banks when too many of them catch on that there are more IOU’s out there than gold to redeem them. “Suckers!”

11.    Persuade all of the other central banks to store their gold in the senior branch of a central bank whose nation used to redeem gold on demand by foreign governments, but which defaulted decades ago. “Suckers!”

12.    If the price of gold rises, calling attention to the monetary fraud of legalized counterfeiting, sell some of this gold to the grandchildren of those trusting citizens from whom you stole the gold. But call the sales something else, such as gold leasing. Don’t reveal a reduction in the official reserves of gold.

13.    Allow central banks make a substitution: written promises to pay gold, issued by private organizations called bullion banks, instead of actual gold.

14.    Wait for the price of gold to rise, thereby bankrupting the bullion banks, which will not be able to repay. These are all corporations, and so enjoy limited liability benefits. No one goes to jail.

In this final scenario, who wins? All those people who bought gold while the gold- leasing operations lowered the market price of gold.

Today, the central banks’ gold is steadily being repatriated to private owners. The central banks are subsidizing the future net worth of gold buyers.

When there is finally no more gold to lease, or when central bankers at long last figure out that IOU’s issued by recently bankrupted gold bullion banks are not really what central bankers need to establish public confidence in their forecasting abilities, the price of gold will skyrocket. At that point, the public will decide it’s time to buy -- at high and rising prices.

Those who have already bought will then look at the rest of the population, which failed to buy while the buying was good, and very quietly, in private circles, issue their unofficial assessment: “Suckers!”