- Galt, John [pseud.].
The Day the Dollar Died.
Florida: Self-published, 2011.
-
I have often remarked in this venue how fragile the infrastructure of
the developed world is, and how what might seem to be a small disruption
could cascade into a
black swan
event which could potentially result in the
end of the world as we know it. It is not
only physical events such as EMP attacks,
cyber attacks on critical infrastructure, or natural
disasters such as hurricanes and earthquakes which can
set off the downspiral, but also loss of confidence in the
financial system in which all of the myriad transactions
which make up the global division of labour on which our
contemporary society depends. In a fiat money system,
where currency has no intrinsic value and is
accepted only on the confidence that it will be subsequently
redeemable for other goods without massive depreciation,
loss of that confidence can bring the system down almost
overnight, and this has happened again and again in the sorry
millennia-long history of paper money. As economist
Herbert Stein observed, “If something cannot go on
forever, it will stop”. But, when pondering the
many “unsustainable” trends we see all around us
today, it's important to bear in mind that they can often go
on for much longer, diverging more into the world of weird than
you ever imagined before stopping, and that when they finally
do stop the débâcle can be more sudden and
breathtaking in its consequences than even excitable forecasters
conceived.
In this gripping thriller, the author envisions the sudden loss
in confidence of the purchasing power of the U.S. dollar and the
ability of the U.S. government to make good on its obligations
catalysing a meltdown of the international financial system
and triggering dire consequences within the United States as
an administration which believes
“you
never want a serious crisis to go to waste”
exploits the calamity to begin
“fundamentally
transforming the United States of America”. The story
is told in a curious way: by one first-person narrator and from
the viewpoint of other people around the country recounted
in third-person omniscient style. This is unusual, but I didn't
find it jarring, and the story works.
The recounting of the aftermath of sudden economic collapse is
compelling, and will probably make you rethink your own preparations
for such a dire (yet, I believe, increasingly probable) event. The
whole post-collapse scenario is a little
too black
helicopter for my taste: we're asked to simultaneously believe
that a government which has bungled its way into an apocalyptic
collapse of the international economic system (entirely plausible
in my view) will be ruthlessly efficient in imposing its new order
(nonsense—it will be as mindlessly incompetent as in
everything else it attempts). But the picture painted of how
citizens can be intimidated or co-opted into becoming
collaborators
rings true, and will give you pause as you think about your friends
and neighbours as potential snitches working for the Man. I
found it particularly delightful that the author envisions
a concept similar to my 1994 dystopian piece,
Unicard,
as playing a part in the story.
At present, this book is available only in PDF format. I read it with
Stanza
on my iPad, which provides a reading experience equivalent to the Kindle
and iBooks applications. The author says other electronic editions
of this book will be forthcoming in the near future; when they're released
they should be linked to the page cited above. The PDF edition is perfectly
readable, however, so if this book interests you, there's no reason to wait.
And, hey, it's free! As a self-published work, it's not surprising
there are a number of typographical errors, although very few factual errors
I noticed. That said, I've read novels published by major houses
with substantially more copy editing goofs, and the errors here never
confuse the reader nor get in the way of the narrative.
For the author's other writings and audio podcasts, visit his
Web site.
- Steyn, Mark.
After America.
Washington: Regnery Publishing, 2011.
ISBN 978-1-59698-100-3.
-
If John Derbyshire's We Are Doomed (October 2009)
wasn't gloomy enough for you, this book will have you laughing all way from
the event horizon to the central singularity toward which what remains of
Western civilisation is free falling. In the author's view, the West now
faces a perfect storm of demographic collapse (discussed in detail in
his earlier America Alone [November 2006]);
financial cataclysm due to unsustainable debt and “entitlement”
commitments made by the welfare state; a culture crash after two generations
have been indoctrinated in dependency, multiculturalism, and not just
ignorance but a counterfactual fantasy view of history; and a political
and cultural élite which has become so distinct and disconnected
from the shrinking productive classes it almost seems to be evolving
into a separate species.
Steyn uses H. G. Wells's
The Time Machine
as his guide to the future, arguing that Wells got the details right
but that bifurcation of mankind into the effete Eloi
and the productive but menacing Morlocks is not in the remote future,
but has already happened
in Western society in every sense but the biological, and even that
is effectively the case as the two castes increasingly rarely come
into contact with one another, no less interbreed. The Eloi,
what Angelo Codevilla called
The Ruling Class (October 2010),
are the product of top-ranked universities and law schools
and dominate government, academia, and the media. Many of them
have been supported by taxpayers their entire lives and have
never actually done anything productive in their careers.
The Obama administration, which is almost devoid of individuals
with any private sector experience at the cabinet level, might be
deemed the first all-Eloi government in the U.S. As Wells's Time
Traveller discovered, the whole Eloi/Morlock thing ended badly, and
that's what Steyn envisions happening in the West, not in the distant
future or even by mid-century, but within this decade, absent
radical and painful course changes which are difficult to
imagine being implemented by the feckless political classes of
Europe, the U.S., and Japan.
In a chilling chapter, Steyn invokes the time machine once again to
deliver a letter from the middle of our century to a reader
in the America of 1950. In a way the world he describes would
be as alien to its Truman administration reader as any dystopian
vision of Wells, Orwell, or Huxley, and it is particularly disturbing
to note that most of the changes he forecasts have already taken
place or their precipitating events already underway in trends which
are either impossible or extremely difficult to reverse. A final
chapter, which I'll bet was added at the insistence of the publisher,
provides a list of things which might be done to rescue the West from
its imminent demise. They all make perfect sense, are easily understood,
and would doubtless improve the situation even if inadequate to
entirely avoid the coming calamity. And there is precisely zero chance of
any of them being implemented in a country where 52.9% of the
population voted for Barack Obama in 2008, at the
tipping point
where a majority dependent on the state and state employees who
tend to them outvote a minority of productive taxpayers.
Regular readers of Steyn's columns will find much of this material
familiar—I suspect there was more than a little cut and
paste in assembling this manuscript. The tone of the argument is
more the full-tilt irony, mockery, and word play one expects in
a column than the more laid back voice customary in a book. You
might want to read a chapter every few days rather than ploughing
right through to the end to avoid getting numbed. But then the
writing is so good it's difficult to put down.
In the Kindle edition, end notes are properly linked
to the text and in notes which cite a document on the Web, the URL is linked
to the on-line document. The index, however, is simply a useless list of
terms without links to references in the text.
- Ahamed, Liaquat.
Lords of Finance.
New York: Penguin Press, 2009.
ISBN 978-0-14-311680-6.
-
I have become increasingly persuaded that World War I was the
singular event of the twentieth century in that it was not only an
unprecedented human tragedy in its own right (and utterly unnecessary),
it set in motion the forces which would bring about the calamities which
would dominate the balance of the century and which still cast dark
shadows on our world as it approaches one century after that fateful
August. When the time comes to write the epitaph of the entire project
of the Enlightenment (assuming its successor culture permits it to
even be remembered, which is not the way to bet), I believe World War I
will be seen as the moment when it all began to go wrong.
This is my own view, not the author's thesis in this book, but it is a
conclusion I believe is strongly reinforced by the events chronicled
here. The present volume is a history of central banking in Europe
and the U.S. from the years prior to World War I through the
institution of the
Bretton Woods system
of fixed exchange rates based on U.S. dollar reserves backed by gold.
The story is told through the careers of the four central bankers
who dominated the era:
Montagu Norman of
the Bank of England,
Émile Moreau
of la Banque de France,
Hjalmar Schact
of the German Reichsbank, and
Benjamin Strong
of the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
Prior to World War I, central banking, to the extent it existed at all
in anything like the modern sense, was a relatively dull field of
endeavour performed by correspondingly dull people, most aristocrats
or scions of wealthy families who lacked the entrepreneurial bent to
try things more risky and interesting. Apart from keeping the system
from seizing up in the occasional financial panic (which was done
pretty much according to the playbook prescribed in
Walter Bagehot's
Lombard Street,
published in 1873), there really wasn't a lot to do. All of the major
trading nations were on a hard gold standard, where their paper currency
was exchangeable on demand for gold coin or bullion at a fixed rate. This
imposed rigid discipline upon national governments and their treasuries,
since any attempt to inflate the money supply ran the risk of inciting a
run on their gold reserves. Trade imbalances would cause a transfer of
gold which would force partners to adjust their interest rates, automatically
cooling off overheated economies and boosting those suffering slowdowns.
World War I changed everything. After the guns fell silent and the exhausted
nations on both sides signed the peace treaties, the financial landscape
of the world was altered beyond recognition. Germany was obliged to pay
reparations amounting to a substantial fraction of its GDP for
generations into the future, while both Britain and France had run
up debts with the United States which essentially cleaned out their
treasuries. The U.S. had amassed a hoard of most of the gold in the
world, and was the only country still fully on the gold standard.
As a result of the contortions done by all combatants to fund their
war efforts, central banks, which had been more or less independent
before the war, became increasingly politicised and the instruments of
government policy.
The people running these institutions, however, were the same as before:
essentially amateurs without any theoretical foundation for the policies
this unprecedented situation forced them to formulate. Germany
veered off into hyperinflation, Britain rejoined
the gold standard at the prewar peg of the pound, resulting in
disastrous deflation and unemployment, while France revalued the
franc against gold at a rate which caused the French economy to boom
and gold to start flowing into its coffers. Predictably, this led to
crisis after crisis in the 1920s, to which the central bankers tried
to respond with Band-Aid after Band-Aid without any attempt to
fix the structural problems in the system they had cobbled together.
As just one example, an elaborate scheme was crafted where the U.S.
would loan money to Germany which was used to make reparation payments
to Britain and France, who then used the proceeds to repay their war debts
to the U.S. Got it? (It was much like the “petrodollar recycling”
of the 1970s where the West went into debt to purchase oil from OPEC
producers, who would invest the money back in the banks and
treasury securities of the consumer countries.) Of course, the problem
with such schemes is there's always that mountain of debt piling up
somewhere, in this case in Germany, which can't be repaid unless the
economy that's straining under it remains prosperous. But until the
day arrives when the credit card is maxed out and the bill comes due,
things are glorious. After that, not so much—not just bad,
but Hitler bad.
This is a fascinating exploration of a little-known epoch in
monetary history, and will give you a different view of the
causes of the U.S. stock market bubble of the 1920s, the
crash of 1929, and the onset of the First Great Depression.
I found the coverage of the period a bit uneven: the author
skips over much of the financial machinations of World War I
and almost all of World War II, concentrating on events of the
1920s which are now all but forgotten (not that there isn't
a great deal we can learn from them). The author writes from
a completely conventional wisdom
Keynesian
perspective—indeed
Keynes
is a hero of the story, offstage for most of it, arguing that
flawed monetary policy was setting the stage for disaster.
The cause of the monetary disruptions in the 1920s and the Depression
is attributed to the gold standard, and yet even the most cursory
examination of the facts, as documented in the book itself, gives
lie to this. After World War I, there was a gold standard in name
only, as currencies were manipulated at the behest of politicians
for their own ends without the discipline of the prewar gold
standard. Further, if the gold standard caused the Depression,
why didn't the Depression end when all of the major economies were
forced off the gold standard by 1933? With these caveats, there is a
great deal to be learned from this recounting of the era of the
first modern experiment in political control of money. We are still
enduring its consequences. One fears the “maestros” trying
to sort out the current mess have no more clue what they're doing
than the protagonists in this account.
In the Kindle edition the table of contents and
end notes are properly linked to the text, but source citations, which
are by page number in the print edition, are not linked. However,
locations in the book are given both by print page number and Kindle
“location”, so you can follow them, albeit a bit tediously,
if you wish to. The index is just a list of terms without links to
their appearances in the text.