As of this writing, the Dow is
dropping like a stone. If you believe
that the secondary market is in any way related to reality, don’t worry. “They” (meaning the people who control money
and credit) will take steps to “reflate” (as Irving Fisher put it) the money
supply to continue shifting purchasing power away from producers and toward
speculators, gamblers, and the non-productive . . . after they’ve taken their
profits from short-selling, of course. . . .
If you believe that we should be
ignoring the antics on Wall Street or any of the other gambling casinos because
they have practically nothing to do with the real, productive sector of the
economy, be very worried. “They” will
take steps to “reflate” the money supply under the illusion that “they” are
solving the problem instead of making it worse.
• We are almost ready to launch a major fundraising drive to
get the resources to translate a number of significant articles (e.g., “Pope
Francis and the Just Third Way”) and other material that present concepts
that are key to solving the increasing number of crises in the world. This will be geared toward obtaining grants
from foundations, and not from the general public, at least at this stage, and
not for at least a year and a half. This
will almost certainly be launched before the end of our fiscal year on
September 30, and we could be seeing results as early as January of 2016.
• Donald
Trump says he’s going to scare Pope Francis because he (Trump) doesn’t like
the way the pope talks about capitalism.
Trump is going to look the pope straight in the eye and deliver the
astounding message that “ISIS wants to get you.” The astounding part of this message is that
Trump thinks this is somehow news to Francis, or that threatening someone with
a greater evil to make them accept a lesser evil is somehow sound tactics or
attractive to an institution that has been under constant attack since its
founding. One is reminded of the
semi-humorous “Chuthulu for President” campaign that restarts every four years
that has the slogan, “Why Choose the Lesser Evil?” — “Chuthulu” being H.P.
Lovecraft’s thing of ultimate evil from between universes (we won’t comment on
the logical errors that abound in the concept) bent on taking over the world
and enslaving humanity.
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| Panic in the streets . . . literally, October 28, 1929 |
• We haven’t done the research, but yesterday the Dow Jones
Industrial Average (which no longer contains any industrial stocks), considered
a leading economic indicator because it lags behind lagging economic leaders,
and presumably measures the primary productive sector by making guesses about
the secondary speculative sector, experienced — in objective terms — one of the
greatest drops in its history, $358.04, somewhere like 9 or 10 on the
list. (The single largest to date was
$777.68 on September 29, 2008.) Not to
worry, though. Due to inflation and the
flexible standard of the U.S. dollar, the drop is not the disaster it would
have been when the dollar was convertible into gold at $20.63 per ounce as in
1929. Today gold is around $1,150 per
ounce. Going solely by the price of
gold, today’s dollar is worth less than one cent in 1929 money, or (to put it
another way) $1 in 1929 would be worth $55.74 today in terms of gold. Thus a drop of $358.04 in the Dow translates
into less than $6.50 in 1929 terms as measured by gold — serious, but nothing really
to get excited about. Of course, on
October 28, 1929, a $38.33 drop in the Dow was the second largest in Wall
Street’s history in terms of percentage (12.82%), following the October 19,
1987 drop of $508.00, or 22.61%. This
would all be moot if, as we have said many times before, we implemented a
Capital Homesteading program with the monetary and tax reforms required, which
would turn all this around in 18 to 24 months.
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| Are the hopeless the only real heroes . . . or those who work for justice? |
• As we expected (but didn’t say, lest we jinx the situation
and, like a Greek tragedy, bring about the very situation we tried to avoid),
the prime minister of Greece has resigned.
The message is clear: austerity without a viable plan to make every
child, woman, and man productive may be essential, but it offers no light at
the end of the tunnel. Why, after all,
should anyone do what they know to be hopeless?
This might be true heroism as Edith Hamilton analyzed it in her study of
the Norse myths about Ragnarok, but it’s no way to run a country or an
economy. Without Capital Homesteading or
some other sort of economic democracy program based on financing new capital formation
and broadened ownership with future savings instead of expanding government
debt, the Greeks — and the rest of the world, for that matter — are in a hole
they can’t get out of.
• As of this morning, we have had
visitors from 44 different countries and 49 states and provinces in the United
States and Canada to this blog over the past two months. Most visitors are from
the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Poland. The
most popular postings this past week were “Halloween Horror Special XIII: Mean
Green Mother from Outer Space,” “Let’s Talk About Retirement, II: Social
Security,” “Thomas Hobbes on Private Property,” “Minimum Wage or Profit
Sharing,” and “The Population Bomb.”
Those are the happenings for this week, at least those 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, so we’ll see it before it goes up.
#30#
