Not to mention the eradication of the last radical elements of the labor movement and the murder of civil rights leaders.
What is even the argument here? The Fed prints money so therefore people get paid less?
“Printing money” is not what causes inflation but most people think it does
Is there something I could read/watch/listen to understand this better? I feel like I know this but lack the vocabulary to explain it in detail, or maybe I’m big dumb trying to convince myself I’m smol dumb
I don’t have any resources readily available that are easy. Capital, Vol II goes into how money markets interact with the capital circulation process but its extremely difficult and kind of old. I just recently saw a reddit that did do a good job of explaining it.
The problem is that two issues that it seems “common sense” to connect - currency supply and inflation - aren’t as relevant to each other as people think. It just sticks out sharply in peoples’ consciousness that in periods of hyperinflation (say early 1920s Germany oe Venezuela today) money and currency are heavily devalued and so the government response is typically to print larger currency denominations.
In a nutshell inflation is caused because capitalists decide to raise prices for whatever reason - typically because wages rise or the rate of interest fluctuates. The currency supply is controlled by the government, but the currency supply is not the same as the money supply. The currency supply is always a fraction of the money supply, as money can exist in forms other than physical currency.
The money supply is controlled by the banks, who generate, reduce, and issue money based off the demands of the money market and other factors such as inflation and interest rates. The Federal Reserve is essentially a cabal of public-private partnerships between federal and commercial banks that regulates the money and currency supplies, controls the federal interest rate, and attempts the keep inflation low (but not too low) at all costs.
The gold standard had to be ended so the USD could circulate globally as the world default currency. To make sure the USD moved around the world we had to do globalization and undercut a ton of protectionist polices a la NAFTA so that places like Mexico and Vietnam are spending dollars and not pesos or dongs. Now the US is the center of global capital but it’s workers are treated even more harshly than most European nations. OP is wrong and their take is antimaterialist
The argument is that we should go back to sound money because after it went off the gold standard things went bad. It’s wrong because things going bad was in reality a class project of the rich to re-establish a stronger dominance of society which is incidentally one of the same reason the gold-standard was developed.
http://www.supremelaw.org/authors/dodd/interview.htm
I was fortunate enough, to secure a position in one of the important banks in New York. I lived there. I lived through the conditions which led up to what is known as the crash of 1929. I witnessed what is tantamount to a collapse of the structure of the United States as a whole.
Much to my surprise, my superiors, in the middle of the panic in which they were immersed, confronted me. I was confronted with the question, “Norm, what do we do now?”
I was thirty at the time, and I had no more right to have an answer to that question than the man in the moon. However, I did manage to say to my superiors, “Gentlemen, you take this experience as proof of something that you do not know about banking.” And you better go find out what that something is, and act accordingly.
Four days later, I was confronted by these same superiors, with a statement to the effect that, “Norm, you go find out.” And I really was fool enough to accept that assignment, because it meant that you were going out to search for something, and nobody could tell you what you were looking for. I felt so strongly on the subject that I consented to it.
I was relieved of all normal duties inside the bank and, two and a half years later, I felt that it was possible to report back to those who had given me this assignment. So, I rendered such a report and, as a result of the report I rendered, I was told the following: “Norm, what you are saying is, we should return to sound banking.” And I said, “Yes, in essence, that’s exactly what it is that I am saying.”
Whereupon, I got my first shock, which was a statement from them to this effect: “We will never see sound banking in the United States again.” And they cited chapter and verse, to support that statement.
What they cited was as follows: since the end of WWI, we have been responsible for what they call the institutionalizing of conflicting interests. And they are so prevalent inside this country, that they can never be resolved.
This came to me as an extraordinary shock because the men who made this statement were men who were deemed as the most prominent bankers in the country. The bank of which I was a part was spoken of a Morgan bank. Coming from men of that caliber, a statement of that kind made a tremendous impression on me.
