From www.zerohedge.com/article/stunner-gold-standard-fully-supported-alan-greenspan As reported on http://beforeitsnews.com/story/370/443/Gold_SHOCKER:_Alan_Greenspans_stunning_admission.html In an interview with Fox Business, Alan Greenspan said: "Some mechanism has got to be in place that restricts the amount of money which is produced, either a gold standard or a currency board, because unless you do that all of history suggest that inflation will take hold with very deleterious effects on economic activity... There are numbers of us, myself included, who strongly believe that we did very well in the 1870 to 1914 period with an international gold standard." And a further stunner: Greenspan himself wonders if we really need a central bank.... The article goes further to state: if and when we do get a return to a gold standard there would be a need to reindex the monetary base to a real time equivalent price of gold, putting the price of the precious metal at about $6,300.
it just shows what a hypocrite he is that he is happy to work as the fed chairman and undertake policies he also claims to believe are bad for the country.
True, but even back when he was talking about the Gold Standard, most of the country was going "la la la..." Is it too much to suggest he tried to make the best of a bad situation? Thinking that "well, the country's heading down this path anyway, maybe if I can get in there I might be able to mitigate it somewhat"? Or was it just all selfishness and self-aggrandizement?
It's a conspiracy! .... well .... according to Mr Bix Weir .... At the very least, it does make for entertaining reading. http://www.roadtoroota.com/public/101.cfm
Nice quote on limiting overlending problem. If proper limits are placed then market crashes will also be limited: "When banks loan money to finance productive and profitable endeavors, the loans are paid off rapidly and bank credit continues to be generally available. But when the business ventures financed by bank credit are less profitable and slow to pay off, bankers soon find that their loans outstanding are excessive relative to their gold reserves, and they begin to curtail new lending, usually by charging higher interest rates. This tends to restrict the financing of new ventures and requires the existing borrowers to improve their profitability before they can obtain credit for further expansion. Thus, under the gold standard, a free banking system stands as the protector of an economy's stability and balanced growth." - Alan Greenspan 1966
"But prior to World War I, the banking system in the United States (and in most of the world) was based on gold and even though governments intervened occasionally, banking was more free than controlled. Periodically, as a result of overly rapid credit expansion, banks became loaned up to the limit of their gold reserves, interest rates rose sharply, new credit was cut off, and the economy went into a sharp, but short-lived recession. (Compared with the depressions of 1920 and 1932, the pre-World War I business declines were mild indeed.) It was limited gold reserves that stopped the unbalanced expansions of business activity, before they could develop into the post-World Was I type of disaster. The readjustment periods were short and the economies quickly reestablished a sound basis to resume expansion." "But the process of cure was misdiagnosed as the disease: if shortage of bank reserves was causing a business decline-argued economic interventionists-why not find a way of supplying increased reserves to the banks so they never need be short! If banks can continue to loan money indefinitely-it was claimed-there need never be any slumps in business. And so the Federal Reserve System was organized in 1913." "Under a gold standard, the amount of credit that an economy can support is determined by the economy's tangible assets, since every credit instrument is ultimately a claim on some tangible asset. But government bonds are not backed by tangible wealth, only by the government's promise to pay out of future tax revenues, and cannot easily be absorbed by the financial markets." "In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value. If there were, the government would have to make its holding illegal, as was done in the case of gold. If everyone decided, for example, to convert all his bank deposits to silver or copper or any other good, and thereafter declined to accept checks as payment for goods, bank deposits would lose their purchasing power and government-created bank credit would be worthless as a claim on goods. The financial policy of the welfare state requires that there be no way for the owners of wealth to protect themselves. This is the shabby secret of the welfare statists' tirades against gold. Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights. " - Alan Greenspan 1966 Damn it. He knew all along...
I don't believe that. I articulated it badly I guess.... I'm not sure what his motivations were at the end of the day. He certainly seems to be a hypocrite.
your own beliefs and what you do for work dont always aline. Sometimes when someone calls the shots for you and you are working for them, you just nod your head and say yes .... Many of us have said, if this was my company, id run it like *whatever* ... Same with Bernanke, Im pretty sure Bernanke knows what his doing is bad for the long run, how could he not know it and millions of others who have almost squat experience in economics know it but im sure there is influence and force to keep him doing this for a period of time longer.... its obvious what would happen if he didnt
I think it just go's back to that old idiom Familiarity Breeds Contempt , He knows the faults and the fallacy of the fiat , just from reading here he always has. Maybe he's just still in there for the "best worst outcome", a bit like a grandfather letting a kid break his arm stuffin around on a pushbike , ya know they are gonna do it but they just wont listen to the old fart...... till it happens.
