Money's Swan Song

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.

Well a lot has happened since then.

Our Creator had done some amazing creating through that original sparkle, and has given us the wherewithal to jump in there and participate in the creative playing out of all things in our domain.

The power to create was not given to other species on our planet—only to us.

We humans have done some pretty amazing things with our God-given talents.

After hunting and gathering, we planted, harvested and ate the fruits of our labors.

in the course of history, we have moved far beyond just eating, drinking and homesteading.

It’s been ever onward and upward for us, since we got a hold of this divine spark thing that we call creativity.

We’ve built pyramids and great walls, temples, mosques, cathedrals, skyscrapers, great bridges and machines that move across those bridges.

We’ve built roads, rails, blazed trails, had great successes and fails. We’ve devised tools, schools, lots of rules; we’ve forged implements, arts, coins, currency, and we’ve maintained a steady errancy.

We’ve painted, sculpted, interpreted the real world as works of art. We’ve disrupted, interrupted, corrupted and upended nature itself.

Now our carbonized creation turns—in some ways—against us.

Back at the olden time, when we received the power to cultivate earth, we were instructed to subdue those elements of the natural world that seem to be active against us—like, say, lions and tigers and bears. Such critters we had to subdue, so they would not make mincemeat of us.

Earthquakes, volcanoes, storms, tsunamis, etc.— these adverse forces we could not subdue, so we took shelter. As the ages rolled by, our sheltering instincts developed into elaborate structures.

And we have done pretty well with that. We homo sapiens have taken control of the planet—or at least we think we have. The planet may yet rise up to bite us in the ass. We shall see what happens with that.

A major sea-change that happened along the long odyssey of our progress was: we devised ways to substitute real goods into artificial representations of wealth.

Better known as making money.

Land, food, livestock, clothing, shelter and such commodities that are essential for survival—all these are now exchanged by monies, currencies, paper-backed assets. And the latest thing is: electrons seem to be our new currency.

Our ancestors carved trails out of the wilderness. They gathered grains, sowed seeds, domesticated animals, and sold to neighbors or merchants all the produce thereof.

As those primary goods coalesced over the ages as markets, their value was measured and traded as money. This we called trade. Then we called it commerce, then business, and now. . . economics. We humans invented the system a long time ago because . . . well, because . . . I don’t why.

lt’s just what we do I guess.

For one thing, it made the process of manipulating wealth easier.

In economics, wealth was and is evaluated in terms of dollars or yuan or yen, or marks, francs, drachmas, denarii, zlotys, rubles, pesos, pounds sterling, etc.

Euros are the new kid on the block. They seem to have trouble making that one work.

The difficulty with retaining true value in these currencies is related to the fact that they’re—in real survival life terms—not really worth anything.

They only represent wealth. But they are not really the real thing.

I say the EU is having trouble establishing the value of their Euro. This goes way back.

The Brits, for instance, were having trouble in the 1930’s retaining the value of their pound. It seemed that their constructed currency could not maintain its value compared to gold.

Who the hell can compete with gold?

Gold goes way back.

Way back.

The second chapter of Genesis, for instance, mentions gold.

“The name of the first (river) is Pishon; it flows around the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold.”

I suppose there’s a reason why gold goes way back in our history. Even though you can’t eat it, drink it, or keep your household warm with it, it is . . .

quite shiny.

Beautiful stuff, that gold. Precious!

Back to the Brits. As the world economy was falling apart back in the ’30’s, many savvy persons decided they would trade their British currency—pounds—for gold.

So many savvies were wanting to get back to gold, that the British government quit selling it.

What would happen after such an arrangement?

I think it was that fellow Keynes who figured out that—guess what—the economy just kept on cranking—all the goods and stuff and commodities and products and financial instruments and whatnot—just kept swirling around in international commerce.

The world didn’t stop turning. Business just kept on doing their thing. Rich get richer and poor get poorer and hey what else is new.

What else is new? Nothing. Nothing new under the sun.

Guess what. We didn’t really need gold to back currency! It was just a phase we were going through—the golden age of gold.

Back in ’73, Nixon pulled the same trick as the Brits had done in the ’30’s. He and his Bretton Woods powers-that-be decided we could no longer afford to sell gold for dollars. Too many folks wanted the gold instead of the dollars.

So we see that man-made currencies are not foolproof, and the gold bugs are always trying to make a comeback.

Money is a habit; that’s all. A very old habit.

Folks are born and bred into this modern economic world.  We are commercialized, or socialized (depending on your politics) to just keep spending those pounds and dollars and cents and euros and yuan and yen and SDRs and thusandsuch.

Nowadays we don’t really even use the money any more. Now it’s just electrons flowing around that represent debits and credits.

And that’s why—I suppose— the central banks of the world can keep cranking out their reserves, because the right to assign value is now reserved to them. It has nothing to do with gold or fiscal guarantee.

The central banks, in the fatal footsteps of every financial crisis, have reserved the right to “create money out of thin air.”

I told you we were creative!

The greatest discovery of the modern world:  we don’t even need anything to take the place of gold.

Money is just an old habit we have; we’ll never put it to rest. So somebody has to be “printing” it somewhere.  We spend so much money that all the .govs of the world are running deep debts trying to keep all the citizens fat 'n happy.

There’s so much liquidity in the world today that the dark swan of excess has smooth sailing. 

Someday, some Leninish strongman will come along and dissolve all that debt into even more liquidity.

It will be a meal ticket for everybody. Yes, Virginia, there is a free lunch, doesn’t matter who’s paying for it.

It’s only money.

Glass half-Full

Gold I Have Seen

On the Periodic Table of earth elements, gold is found in the middle of pack, at number 79. So while the shining yellow metal is just another lump or two in the great planetary array of substances, it is, and has always been, coveted and collected by us humans.

Gold has a curious effect on us. Through the ages, people have assigned many meanings and uses for the lustrous stuff.

I have seen gold on a few occasions in my life.  Like most folks, I am fascinated with the sight of it.  Here are a few pics of the bright metal I have collected. While pondering what gold represents, I made a list. For what it’s worth, here’s my take on what gold means to us.

~~~Gold as Wonder

Amazing how . . . ?

~~~Gold as Beauty

~~~Gold as Value

~~~Gold as Religious Ceremony

An altar in a Catholic Church in Rome

~~~Gold as Authority

This gold-tipped mast and dome is seen at the top of San Francisco City Hall.

~~~Gold as Power

In this room, the last emperor of the Hapsburg empire, Karl I of Austria, renounced all claims of royal authority over nations and empire. The renunciation took place November 11, 1918, the last day of World War I.

World War had begun in 1914 after his uncle, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, was assassinated in Sarajevo, Serbia, which was at that time a part of the Hapsburg Austrian empire.

From that point and time in history, the many families, dynasties, kingdoms, and empires of royal authority who have ruled the world for so long . . . began their slow, modern slipping into mere ceremony, and —many would say—irrelevance.

This room in the Schonbrunn palace, near Vienna, is now property of the Republic of Austria.

~~~Gold as Precious

a golden moment of precious repose, reflection and contemplation

~~~Gold as Fidelity

Good as gold. . . in our case, 39 years and continuing.

~~~Gold as Heaven

“. . . and the street of that city was pure gold.”  (Revelation 21:21)

I haven’t seen this one yet, but one day I will, thanks to Jesus, who was resurrected after being nailed to a cross.

King of Soul

Elemental shenanigans

At the Start, Hydrogen heaved ho.

Helium laughed. Lithium lay low while Beryllium became bemused.

But Boron bore the burden of all the work yet to be done.

Then Carbon was conceived, and came forth in a manger wrapped in swaddling clothes, surrounded by angelic hosts of other elements, celebrated as the great center-point of history. He would go on to  bring myriads of other elements together in peace and productivity, but in latter days was criticized for attaching himself to everybody’s business.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, good ole Nitrogen nourished all the stuff that came later.

Oxygen got involved and opened a whole new way of life.

Fluorine flew flags of fluorescence for all to see.

Neon knew nothing but nonsense, but was neutral enough to practice non-intervention.

Sodium solved a lot of problems, and he's all over the map with that

Magnesium managed to make itself useful.

Aluminum lightened everybody’s load.

Silicon solidified his/her position, early on in the sands of time, and then later went on to establish a ubiquitous presence in the science of small smart circuits.

Meanwhile Phosphorus flamed along, brightening the path for others.

Sulfur suffered through a lot.

Chlorine clung to just about everything, cleaning house along the way, but has been known to kill when too excited.

Argon atoms are gone until somebody proves their actual existence.

Potassium produces plenteously.

Calcium is known as a great  collector of a lot of stuff.

Scandium is scant. Titans use Titanium to tighten up their tridents.Vanadium is very strong, while Chromium captures all the attention. Manganese manages to make good use of itself.

Iron Age innovations initiated innumerable inventions.

Cobalt combines with others to combat corrosion.

Nickel has made itself a necessity.

Copper's a good cop,  conducts a lot of traffic.

Amazing Zinc sets up rustless zones wherever it goes. Thank God.

And then there's Gallium; it has the gall to call itself a metal, as if it were a major player along with iron and nickel and all those other big-time movers and shakers.

Germanium is a dope in silicon valley. Arsenic is also a real dope, but reputed to be a pathological killer when let out of his cell. He hides behind old lace.

Selenium periodically illuminates this end of the Table, while Bromine combines medicinally and then resigns.

Krypton is a rare super-phenom found only in old comics of the 1950’s.

Now here's the line-up for the second Period:

Rubidium rules while Strontium drools— radioactivity, that is— 90 times a second, I think, and then renders all those other metalistic johnny-come-lately wannabees as metalla non grata.

 If we keep this mining expedition going long enough, we could  find  lucky ole  Silver hiding under the Table. 

Along the way we're bound to kick up that perennial  also-ran can—Tin— he comes to town and makes the rounds, but always  ends up  wasting away in a landfill, a real slacker if there ever was one.

And I mean, sure, there are some bright spots on the Periodic Table. There’s the star of the show, gold, hiding down there in the middle of the pack, and glinting in at a clandestine #79. Highly-prized all the time, but he's oh-so-hard to find, unless you’ve got a really big credit line.

Every now and then you may catch sight of that tempereal Mercury, but its hard to pin him down.  He never stays in one place long enough to amount to anything. He’s got a really hot temper, but, I'm told, a cold personality.

Down there in the middle of the defensive line there’s the Lead heavyweight-- not very fast, but good on the line-- a good blocker for those fast Uranium backs. 

 Uranium backs are the stars of the show, you know, forever racking up the big stats. But most of them are real hot shots, and if their temper gets worked up, you can't get rid of 'em. The refs kick 'em out of the game, but they hang around for a long time like they own the place and make trouble for anybody who crosses their path. Don't cross 'em. If they get really fired up they'll go plutonium on ya and that's all she wr

Glass Chimera

Peering through windows

Whether through windows of time

or a window of glass

we peer through,

maybe through the windowed pane

eyes of the artist who is

long gone yet

lives on

displaying legacy image for us

to view

through our window of time

into his memory of love

through her yielding to the pangs

of love

the pain of love

Yeah, windows golden with memory

they are

moments of love so

dear to him and her and now

to us

golden memories they are

images of what carried them forward

into future or carry us

backward into reflection

backward into history

where precious intricacies of the human mind and hand were

crafted for us or 

assembled for us

to see,

to view

through a glass darkly

through barriers of time

or glass

or gates of iron or the

gates

of Vienna

when the invaders had been turned away

and later where

the artist lived and breathed and

loved

and left a gift, their moment of prescious love

which came to be their

golden moment,  and later his gilded

memorial of love for us to

peer into,

before the gates could close again.

 

Smoke

The Narrative of the Ancient !con

In this episode

we find PMUnicomm inquiring among the projection heads as to what is going to happen next and how should we proceed from this point and what strategy should we devise to beat the numbers because they be indicating correction ahead and NIRPy deadends between buyin dips and sellin peaks and rockofdebt and hardplace of reality, so Arioch chiefofstaff say to PMUniCom:

BLS-BS say UnEmp be way down and thats good but LabrPart don't match up to historical precedental expectations so we brought in DaProphit to make recommendation for FEd shells to be moved thus and such so game can go on and broncos can beat panthers and bulls chase bears off into sunset. So here be DaProphit and he say:

You, O PMUnicomm, were dreaming and behold there was a single great !con on your !phone, which was large and of extraordinary splendor and it was standing in front of you and its number of followers was awesome, like in datrillions.

And you saw, O PMUnicomm, the head of the !con was made of silvergold, its breast and arms of ironsteel, its belly ass and thighs of assets, its legs of stokbond, and its feet partly made of toxi and partly made of asset.

You were like this is awesome what the hell is it and while you were grokking it a rock was cut but not with human hands because the hand was busy writing on the wall and the rock suddenly smashed the feet of the !con to smithereens and the tox and the assets and the stokbond and the ironsteel and the silvergold came tumblin down and humpty couldn't put the dumpty back together again. But the rock that struck the !con became a great mountain and filled the earth.

And as you watched, PMUnicomm, the credits began to roll on your !device and it was time to find another fluffup.



Glass Chimera

the System

In days of old
the world was dazzled with gold.
Silver was shiny too,
available to more than a few.
Then iron proved most useful all,
so we built many a structure so tall.
Now we find clay is common and easy to get,
so we include it in all that we bet,
until the day when we crumble and fall
on the stone that will crush us all.

Smoke

Elements of Life, simplified

Hydrogen initiates life; oxygen proliferates it; carbon gives life something to hold onto.
While helium laughs at the universe, nitrogen fertilizes it.

Sodium makes living things interact; calcium lends them some structure.
Neon, colorful and spritely, excites life, while cousin chlorine cleans up the messes.

Iron puts life to work; silicon makes it smart.
Nickel enables commerce; silver makes the life shine; gold makes it rich.

Uranium steps up the power exponentially, but then it requires maintenance in perpetuity.

Heat it up, and the whole life experiment becomes volatile; anything can happen, and probably will.
Drop in a little arsenic, and life bites the dust. Pay attention.

There's funny money in them thar hills

What's funny is that, every now and then in history, gold re-establishes itself as the de facto invisiblo reserve currency, in spite of what the central bankers and talking-head journalists of the world try to do otherwise.

We know that democrats, socialists and populists do not like this trend, but the sequestered "rich", who lurk acquisitively in the holds of their yachts and in the shadows of their McMansions, do like it. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer. So what else is new.

All this talk about dividing folk into classes and then setting them against each other is Marxian boilerplate hot air to inflate riotous passions and fiat currencies. And although there is certainly some truth to it, all this class-identity disruptive rhetoric is no excuse for rabble ruffians to be running roughshod over small mainstreet business establishments in Wisconsin or Philadelphia or London or wherever the discontented are roused from their couches. Nor is it defensible moral fodder for severing privately-owned, publicly-utilized fiberoptic communication lines.

Back in 1896, William Jennings Bryan pointed out to his grassroot-gathered supporters that there are two types of government:

There is the (paraphrasing) Republican trickle-down type, who legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous. Then the wealth ostensibly drips down to everybody else. You've heard of this; the analogy became widespread during the Reagan years. I would point out that Marie Antoinette had, back in 18th-century France, infamously embodied the upper end caricature of this economic arrangement when she had heartlessly uttered the slogan of the Bourbonites, Let them eat cake.

But here in America, a hundred or more years later, William Jennings Bryan described his second category of government as the (paraphrasing) Democratic percolate-up type. They legislate to make the masses prosperous. The wealth then percolates up from the laboring, resource-driven productivity of the people, and thus nourishes the upper social regions as it passes through industrially.

And the esteemed Mr. Bryan said, famously, at the Democratic convention in Chicago in 1896, that the rich Republican crowd were trying to nail the working folks to a cross of gold by insisting on the rigid gold standard instead of the more malleable, accessible silver standard.

Though he was an fiery orator and a charismatic leader without parallel, William Jennings Bryan lost that 1896 Presidential election to the Republican, William McKinley. And then they had, amazingly, an uninstant replay four years later when McKinley was re-elected in 1900.

That 1900 election was a kind of sitcom pilot for the cyclical reruns that would characterize much of 20th century American politics, especially the Bush-Gore contention that came exactly a hundred years later in 2000.

Dems and Repubs are always at each other throats, some times more than others. Just now though, the fireworks, rhetoric and bluster seem to be intensifying. The Dems see their liquidity-easing policies as justified, beginning a third of the way through the 20th century, by their anointed prophet, Maynard G. Keynes--or excuse me, that's John Maynard Keynes. Now Krugman and Reich and that stimulus-addicted crowd want to liquify the rigid constraints of the bogeyman Corporate "rich" so that the greenbacks will percolate, William Jennings Bryan style, up through the fissures of job-generating governmental largesse. Those fissures should be facilitated and regulated by community organizers and unionbosses and government employees instead of, say, corporate directors, "rich" investors, and Texans.

While everybody is arguing about politics and money, as if there were a difference between them, the smartest guys in the room (or so they think themselves to be and they may be correct in their assessment) are buying gold like crazy.

Those gold-acquirers are looking for some incorruptible way to consolidate their wealth into a specie that escapes devaluation. They are buying the precious metal now because, well...

Who you gonna call when you need some reál value?, amidst debt crisis in America, sovereign debt precipice in Euroland, and the Chinese, who are bellyaching because all their meticulously-gathered dollars are being devalued, and their renminbi is still yuaning like an adolescent who just got up at noon and stumbles onto the world monetary stage. Who you gonna call? Ben Bernanke? Ron Paul? Angela Merkel? Who's the grownup in the room? Harry Reid? Pat Toomey?

So I think it inevitable that the gold standard in some form or another is probably going to re-emerge, as has happened cyclically in the histories of human commerce, in spite of all the special drawing rights and myriad currencies that float flotsam-like upon the oceans of global liquidity. And I suppose that all those day-trading smartest guys, riding high on their speculative see-saws of keyboard frenzy, in bubblesome combo with the methish high-freq hedgehogs, will emerge as the new kings of the western-hemisphere hill when th detritus of international wealth settles into a pile, two or ten years from now.

Or maybe all of commerce, accounting, and wealth will go electronic, and those elusive gold reserves will be soldered as conductors into smart circuitboards that will determine every person's caste, class and purchasing power when they're standing in the checkout at World Mart.

... while Horatio Alger hides in an ally somewhere near MainStreet. Or, if you're a Brit, HighStreet.

I'm not saying we should get back to the gold standard as a means to establish predictable value in the world marketplace. God knows I don't have any of the stuff, except for the little ring that's been on my finger for thirty-one years (which is the true wealth in this life.) But I do know that numerous entities and persons with assets are buying gold like its goin out of style, as it has done numerous unsustainable times before. This feverish demand for the precious yellow stuff is driving up the price up to boot, in anticipation of fiat paper descending to its authentic, incendiary value.

Somewhere, somehow, when you least expect it, the battle between real wealth and perceived wealth will be settled in a showdown, maybe at high noon in the OK corral, or maybe in your own backyard.

Got heirloom seeds?

Glass Chimera

Oyl and Dreidel

Zechariah described this vision, or event, about 2500 years ago:
"
Then the angel who was speaking with me returned and roused me, as a man who is awakened from sleep.
He said to me, 'What do you see?' And I said, 'I see, and behold, a lampstand all of gold with its bowl on the top of it, and its seven lamps on it with seven spouts belonging to each of the lamps which are on top of it. Also, two olive trees by it, one on the right side of the bowl and the other on its left side.'
Then I said to the angel who was speaking with me saying, 'What are these, my lord?'
So the angel who was speaking with me answered and said to me, 'Do you not know what these are?' And I said, 'No, my lord.'
Then he said to me, 'This is the word of the Lord to Zerubbabel saying, 'Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit,' says the Lord of hosts.

'What are you, O great mountain? Before Zerubbabel you will become a plain; and he will bring forth the top stone with shouts of "Grace, grace to it!'"

Also the word of the Lord came to me, saying, 'The hands of Zerubbabel have laid the foundation of this house, and his hands will finish it. Then you will know that the Lord of hosts has sent me to you.'
'For who has despised the day of small things? But these seven will be glad when they see the plumb line in the hand of Zerubbabel. These are the eyes of Lord which range to and fro throughout the earth.'

Then I said to him, 'What are these two olive trees on the right of the lampstand and on the left?'
And I answered the second time and said to him, 'What are the two olive branches which are beside the two golden pipes, which empty the golden oil from themselves?'
So he answered me, saying, 'Do you not know what these are?' And I said, 'No, my lord.'
Then he said, 'These are the two anointed ones who are standing by the Lord of the whole earth.'
"