Thursday, October 25, 2012

Tech­noc­racy and the IMF: New Global Mon­e­tary System?


Findings & Forecasts 10/24/2012


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Tech­noc­racy and the IMF: New Global Mon­e­tary System?

Beware of a new trial bal­loon being floated by the Inter­na­tional Mon­e­tary Fund, that is, “The Chicago Plan Revis­ited.”
According to British jour­nalist Ambrose Evans-Pritchard,
The con­juring trick is to replace our system of pri­vate bank-created money — roughly 97pc of the money supply — with state-created money. We return to the his­tor­ical norm, before Charles II placed con­trol of the money supply in pri­vate hands with the Eng­lish Free Coinage Act of 1666.
Specif­i­cally, it means an assault on “frac­tional reserve banking”. If lenders are forced to put up 100pc reserve backing for deposits, they lose the exor­bi­tant priv­i­lege of cre­ating money out of thin air.
The nation regains sov­er­eign con­trol over the money supply. There are no more banks runs, and fewer boom-bust credit cycles. [Emphasis added]
At a time when some ivory-tower econ­o­mists are pre­dicting the end of cap­i­talism, any talk of mon­e­tary reform by global banking orga­ni­za­tions is worthy of atten­tion, if not alarm. The IMF has been one of the pri­mary engines of glob­al­iza­tion, having worked in con­junc­tion with the World Bank and the Bank for Inter­na­tional Set­tle­ments for decades.
The IMF has now dug up the so-called “Chicago Plan” from the Uni­ver­sity of Chicago dating back to 1936, and is seri­ously studying it for modern application.
Beware. As Patrick Henry once stated, “I smell a rat.”
First, the Uni­ver­sity of Chicago was orig­i­nally cre­ated with a grant from John D. Rock­e­feller in 1890, and has long been an aca­d­emic vassal of Rock­e­feller inter­ests. In 1936 during the heat of the Great Depres­sion, leading econ­o­mists were looking for alter­na­tives to cap­i­talism and mon­e­tary theory. Tech­noc­racy, for instance, was one attempt to sug­gest an alter­na­tive eco­nomic system, during the same time period. Nei­ther Tech­noc­racy nor the Chicago Plan were suc­cessful at the time.
According to the IMF’s study,
“The decade fol­lowing the onset of the Great Depres­sion was a time of great intel­lec­tual fer­ment in eco­nomics, as the leading thinkers of the time tried to under­stand the apparent fail­ures of the existing eco­nomic system. This intel­lec­tual struggle extended to many domains, but arguably the most impor­tant was the field of mon­e­tary eco­nomics, given the key roles of pri­vate bank behavior and of cen­tral bank poli­cies in trig­gering and pro­longing the crisis.
“During this time a large number of leading U.S. macro­econ­o­mists sup­ported a fun­da­mental pro­posal for mon­e­tary reform that later became known as the Chicago Plan, after its strongest pro­po­nent, pro­fessor Henry Simons of the Uni­ver­sity of Chicago. It was also sup­ported, and bril­liantly sum­ma­rized, by Irving Fisher of Yale Uni­ver­sity, in Fisher (1936). The key fea­ture of this plan was that it called for the sep­a­ra­tion of the mon­e­tary and credit func­tions of the banking system, first by requiring 100% backing of deposits by government-issued money, and second by ensuring that the financing of new bank credit can only take place through earn­ings that have been retained in the form of government-issued money, or through the bor­rowing of existing government-issued money from non-banks, but not through the cre­ation of new deposits, ex nihilo, by banks.” [Emphasis added.]
I have long argued that the Fed­eral Reserve Bank, estab­lished in 1913, is a pri­vate cor­po­ra­tion whose pri­vate stock­holders were the major banks of that time period. The Fed was a super-lobby that would work directly with gov­ern­ment to orches­trate lending and col­lecting on an orderly basis. At that time, the banks did not “own” the var­ious nations of the world, so they could not sum­marily dic­tate public policy.
The Frac­tional Reserve system that cur­rently spans the globe was never intended to be a per­ma­nent solu­tion to wealth dom­i­na­tion. By def­i­n­i­tion from the start, the lenders would even­tu­ally wind up owning every­thing (all the resources) in society, and the frac­tional banking system would become obsolete.
The IMF is sug­gesting that the day of the Cen­tral Bank (the Fed included) may be over, and that the power of cur­rency cre­ation and issuance should instead be given to the state. This would lit­er­ally pull the rug out from under all the cen­tral banks of the world, requiring their untimely disbandment.
But, so what? Corporation’s change strategy all the time. If the cen­tral banks are essen­tially a ser­vice provider to their major con­stituent banks, then they will be useful only as long as they can pro­vide a ben­e­fi­cial ser­vice; there­after, they are discardable.
The orig­inal Chicago Plan and the Chicago Plan Revis­ited make no ref­er­ence to the eco­nomic system of Tech­noc­racy (also from the 1930′s) or the use of Energy Credits as cur­rency. How­ever, during the 1930′s and beyond, the Uni­ver­sity of Chicago has been a hotbed of Technocracy.
For instance, Pro­fessor Patricio Silva wrote In the Name of Reason: Tech­nocrats and Pol­i­tics in Chile that the so-called “Chicago boys” (Chilean econ­o­mists edu­cated at the Uni­ver­sity of Chicago) brought Tech­noc­racy to Chile where it sur­vived sev­eral changes of polit­ical power.
The “Chicago Boys” were edu­cated by Milton Friedman and Arnold Har­berger as the result of a State Depart­ment ini­tia­tive called the “Chile Project” that was orga­nized in the 1950′s and finan­cially spon­sored by the Ford Foundation.
Thus, I will sug­gest that the IMF’s new plan could be an impor­tant and nec­es­sary stepping-stone toward tying the issuance of cur­rency to energy policy instead of eco­nomic policy.
This link is not trivial. A state that arbi­trarily deter­mines the nec­es­sary level of cur­rency required to make its economy work must have some form of linkage to a non-political and more stable touch­stone. For many years, gold was such a touchstone.
While gold is not in the imme­diate pic­ture for mon­e­tary policy, energy is!
The United Nations has been pushing hard for a new global “Green Economy” that would replace the cur­rent “brown economy” based on fossil fuel and over-consumption in devel­oped nations.
“A green economy implies the decou­pling of resource use and envi­ron­mental impacts from eco­nomic growth… These invest­ments, both public and pri­vate, pro­vide the mech­a­nism for the recon­fig­u­ra­tion of busi­nesses, infra­struc­ture and insti­tu­tions, and for the adop­tion of sus­tain­able con­sump­tion and pro­duc­tion processes.” [Emerging policy issues, UNEP, 2010, p. 2] [Emphasis added]
If mon­e­tary cre­ation is handed back to the state, the above “decou­pling” could easily become a reality. Con­versely, as long as the cen­tral bank system imposes a frac­tional reserve system on global mon­e­tary policy, it cannot become a reality.
Again I say, Beware! The argu­ments for scrap­ping the Fed will sound appealing to everyone: no more boom/bust cycles, no more bankster rip-offs, etc. Just remember that the global elite do not exer­cise influ­ence in order to ben­efit anyone except themselves.
In this writer’s con­sid­ered opinion, the next phase of global dom­i­na­tion will focus on the direct con­trol of resources, rather than indi­rect own­er­ship via debt-based money.

Defla­tion vs. Spending

An economy grows when spending occurs for goods and ser­vices. There are three gen­eral sources of spending: Per­sonal, busi­ness and government.
Since I have been talking about credit defla­tion for sev­eral years now, it is worth noting again that the only escape from defla­tion is spending. When spending caves in, the economy caves in with it.
Since Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke was appointed by George Bush on Feb­ruary 1, 2006, his pri­mary nemesis has been defla­tion, not infla­tion. As the credit melt­down pro­gressed, con­sumer and busi­ness spending fled, leaving gov­ern­ment spending the only pos­sible source of rescue. This became painfully obvious as lending/borrowing activity did not pick up after interest rates were dropped to almost zero.
Thus, the var­ious stim­ulus and Quan­ti­ta­tive Easing pro­grams were directed to get the gov­ern­ment to spend, and hence, we now have a $16 tril­lion national debt and vir­tu­ally nothing to show for it. The economy has not recov­ered, jobs have not returned and global sen­ti­ment has rad­i­cally shifted to a policy of fiscal austerity.
Since 2007, the Amer­ican con­sumer has been limping along while slowly descending into the eco­nomic abyss. Wages are down, unem­ploy­ment is higher and banks aren’t lending. People are trying to spin the real estate market uptick as some kind of bottom, but the activity is more like oxygen-starved koi sucking for air in a stag­nant pond.
The fol­lowing excerpt from the October 2012 McAl­vany Intel­li­gence Advisor) aptly describes the state of the average consumer:
…con­sumers are in the worst finan­cial shape they’ve been in since the Great Depres­sion. One recent report showed that credit card bal­ances for the indebted (people who carry a bal­ance each month) have dropped nearly $2,000, from $16,383 in March 2010 to $14,517 in March 2012. This sounds like Amer­i­cans are finally get­ting a grip on their finances. Hardly. If you look at credit card debt for all house­holds, the average has only dropped from $7,219 to $6,772.
That’s not the worst news, though. The reason for the decrease is not that Amer­i­cans are paying off their debt. Tim Chen wrote on Forbes.com (5/30/2012): “The reality of the sit­u­a­tion is much grimmer. In 2010, credit card com­pa­nies wrote off seri­ously delin­quent debts, declaring a huge chunk of money uncol­lec­table. America’s credit card debt dropped. The charge-off rate, which is the per­centage of dol­lars that have been clas­si­fied uncol­lectible, jumped to 10.7% – a 300% increase from 2006.
“After losing a gar­gan­tuan number of pay­ments, credit card com­pa­nies began to exer­cise shrewder dis­cern­ment in issuing finan­cial prod­ucts. With credit cards more dif­fi­cult to obtain, average debt con­tinued to fall.
“So, no. A decrease in credit card debt does not indi­cate height­ened finan­cial lit­eracy, a recov­ering job market, or smarter spending habits. It means the sit­u­a­tion was beyond repair and required an arti­fi­cial reduction.”
The truth of the matter is that the Amer­ican con­sumer is com­pletely tapped out on credit. This was true before the housing crunch, as most home­owners used the equity in their home as a piggy bank to main­tain bloated lifestyles. When home prices dropped, they went under­water in a hurry. [Emphasis added]
So, do the math. Con­sumer spending is not recov­ering. Gov­ern­ment spending will shift due to inter­na­tional and internal demands for aus­terity. Busi­nesses are already cur­tailing spending on cap­ital goods and ser­vices. Who is left to spend? No one.
This is where we stand as of today. On the first of Jan­uary, how­ever, the employed uni­verse of workers are going to see sig­nif­i­cantly higher taxes taken from their pay­checks, thanks to the sunset of the Bush Tax Cuts of 2001.

A family with a $100,000 income will lose about $3,000, or 3 per­cent, of their spend­able income. Con­sid­ering how tight bud­gets are already, that $3,000 loss rep­re­sents a dis­pro­por­tionate per­centage of dis­cre­tionary spending… and it’s going to be painful to many households.
Thus, the spiral down into defla­tion continues.

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