We have had some important breakthroughs this week. For one, parallels between events preceding the Crash of 1929 and the antics of the stock market in 2012 are becoming every day more obvious. Not only that, but the insistence of the powers-that-be that the way to get out of debt is to spend more money has reached the point at which it merits a chapter in Charles MacKay's Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1841).
Be that as it may, here's what we've been doing to try and counter the increasingly hallucinogenic global monetary and fiscal policy:
• In what even the financial mavens are declaring to be a display of utter perversity, the impending bailouts in Europe and the continuing crises in [fill in the blank] has caused a surge in the U.S. stock market. Of course, some of this is the inflationary pressure caused by the transfer of investment funds from Europe as the situation becomes increasingly uncertain, but the gambling urge is exerting very strong pressure at this point. So far this year, the swings in the market have duplicated events of late 1928 to early-to-mid 1929 for anyone to have a real level of comfort.
• The Irish SIG newsletter — Litir Scéala an tSIG Gaelach — that we're viewing as a "test case" to determine the potential viability of reviving CESJ's Economic Justice Monitor as a similar "e-zine," has the first issue in the new series scheduled for release on Sunday. If you subscribed and verified your subscription, you will receive an e-mail containing the full text of the newsletter, not a link to the newsletter. We've received several questions on that, and yes, subscribers (assuming they clicked on the validation link in the e-mail that Google sent to the stated e-mail address), will receive an actual newsletter in electronic form, not a link. (Did you click on that, even though it clearly says, "not a link"?)
• Recently we located eight books by Dr. Harold Moulton of which we were previously unaware, and ordered them. We also located two reasonably priced copies of his 1943 pamphlet, The New Philosophy of Public Debt that exposes the thinking behind today's global debt crisis.
• Not by coincidence, we also recently discovered the "missing link" in the chain leading from Jean-Baptiste of "Say's Law of Markets" to Louis Kelso's application of the theory of pure credit to the problem of financing expanded capital ownership without redistribution or redefining property or money. Thomas Tooke was an early 19th century economist whose work in pure credit that modern commentators trapped in the slavery of past savings have seriously misunderstood. Tooke provided the basis for John Fullarton's critique of the British Bank Charter Act in On the Regulation of the Currencies of the Bank of England (1845), however, and even though erroneously credited with being an inspiration for Georg Friedrich Knapp's "chartalism" — the reductio ad absurdum of the British Currency School, reaching its nadir in Keynesian economics, was one of the primary contributors to the theory behind the British Banking School, of which binary economics is the only survivor today of which we're aware.
• As of this morning, we have had visitors from 60 different countries and 47 states and provinces in the United States and Canada to this blog over the past two months. Most visitors are from the United States, the UK, Canada, India, and Australia. People in Swden, Qatar, Syria, Egypt, and Belgium spent the most average time on the blog. The most popular postings this past week were "Thomas Hobbes on Private Property," "Aristotle on Private Property," "CESJ's Orientation in Brief," "The Global Debt Crisis VII: A Permanent Solution." and "Common Cause, Part XIII: The German Monetary Union of 1871."
Those are the happenings for this week, at least that we know about. If you have an accomplishment that you think should be listed, send us a note about it at mgreaney [at] cesj [dot] org, and we'll see that it gets into the next "issue." If you have a short (250-400 word) comment on a specific posting, please enter your comments in the blog — do not send them to us to post for you. All comments are moderated anyway, so we'll see it before it goes up.
#30#