We’ve all been had

A warning to you all – do not accept any magical solutions to complex real-life problems.

It seems relatively straightforward but this basic fact can get the better of even the most intelligent person in the room and reduce strategies to mere conspiracy theories.

In short, we’ve all been had.

I have followed some great financial commentators over the past 5 years and probably learnt more about the history of the world than in the previous 15. I am grateful for this and also for financial activism (a la Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert)

There is much more going on here than meets the eye.

Goldbuggery is a recently used term to describe the wild conspiracy theories floating around the ether. The sales pitch has been brought up to such extremes by including a shadowy branch of government – the plunge protection team (PPT) that protect the stock and bond markets. According to some sources, there is a conspiracy between these forces to drive the price of gold down and then sell the undervalued gold to the Chinese who have been selected by the nebulous men behind the curtain (elites, rothschilds, etc) to be part of our new elite club. Gold is apparently a historically tried and tested hedge against inflation and of course the price of gold will eventually rise to many thousands of dollars higher than it currently is (as it is manipulated), meanwhile housing and stocks will plummet to their true value – meaning there’s only one undervalued asset you need to own, and that is gold!

Horseshit.

Unfortunately, the acceptance of this theory relies on two things: 1) entrenched gold salesmen who either believe this crap or have little or no moral issue with selling this to people and 2) the gullability of humans the world over who like hearing stories before they go to sleep. The prevalence of the second point can be illustrated through the continued existence of literally-interpreted religious belief, despite many centuries of scientific discoveries about the natural world in which we live.

I will do a gold debunking post at some point but for now I’d just like to put this into balance. Yes, there have been manipulations – we have had quanitiative easing policies purchasing the distressed debt of governments. Max Keiser is quite right with his definitions of ‘zombie economy’ ‘ponzi economics’ and so on. These are excellent observations. The chain of command here is preserving empire, nothing less.

When you look back through history, you can see many things done in the name of empire. Slavery, public executions of traitors, war, you name it. A little financial engineering is mere childs play. Manipulating the price of gold though?

This is an absurd statement and it is meant to appeal to conspiracy theorists. Gold has been a symbol of independence free of national identity for hundreds of years but it was only used as money for a few thousand. Humans have existed in our current form for over one hundred thousand years. Yes, really! Do your own research (some call it due dilligence) we used cattle, sea shells, bronze and even women as currency in the past. What logic is there to the very core of a star being dug out of the ground and to be used as money? If you put this belief alongside the fact that god put it there for us to use as such, you then suggest that god is a destructive blood-thirsty sadist who enjoys seeing us pollute the land with arsenic and destroy our natural habitat while killing each other over the rarity of a paticular natural element. The truth is nothing of the sort. I cannot accept belief in such a god, if one were to exist.

While I advocate holding some gold, the truth is gold is (as Max Keiser says) an asset with no counter-party risk – in other words, a hedge against government and therefore civilisation! Yes, you read that right. As much as I despise our government, they are the current rulers of babylon in its current form and to take them down would take babylon down with it. Which might not be a bad thing, if you don’t mind the chances of us going into a dark age…