Currency Wars Quotes

The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists.

Words and emotions are simple currencies. If we inflate them, they lose their value, just like money. They begin to mean nothing. Use 'beautiful' to describe a sandwich and the word means nothing. Since the war, there is no more room for inflated language. Words and feelings are small now - clear and precise. Humble like dreams.

I'm hip to their game, hip to the science of war Propoganda makes me fight but what am I fightin for? My way of life? Beans and rice? Give and take, less or more? See through the eyes of the poor, plus I'm black to the core Ignorance is on tour bookin stadiums and more The days of hitler painted pictures patriotic before You raise your flag on a land snatched from bald eagles claw, and stamp the symbol on your currency to finance your war. I'm sayin no. Not in my name. Not in my life. Not by my hands. That ain't my fight. Not in my name. You wage your war against terrorists and violence, and try to wave your guns and fear us all into silence. NO.

Rape is integral to the cultures of war, colonization, and forced displacement that have turned gender oppression and sexual violence into a global currency of desperation

We don’t need anything. Just listen to us and try to understand. Society is good at doing things, ‘giving’ medical help, pensions, flats. But all this so-called giving has been paid for in very expensive currency. Our blood.

The printing presses of the state treasuries cranked out reams of paper currency- showing wise kinds and blissful martyrs- while bankers wept and peasants starved.

What more do they want? She asks this seriously, as if there's a real conversion factor between information and lives. Well, strange to say, there is. Written down in the Manual, on file at the War Department. Don't forget the real business of the War is buying and selling. The murdering and violence are self-policing, and can be entrusted to non-professionals. The mass nature of wartime death is useful in many ways. It serves as a spectacle, as a diversion from the real movements of the War. It provides raw material to be recorded into History, so that children may be taught History as sequences of violence, battle after battle, and be more prepared for the adult world. Best of all, mass death's a stimulus to just ordinary folks, little fellows, to try 'n' grab a piece of that Pie while they're still here to gobble it up. The true war is a celebration of markets. Organic markets, carefully styled "black" by the professionals, spring up everywhere. Scrip, Sterling, Reichsmarks, continue to move, severe as classical ballet, inside their antiseptic marble chambers. But out here, down here among the people, the truer currencies come into being. So, Jews are negotiable. Every bit as negotiable as cigarettes, cunt, or Hersey bars.

There is hardly a part of the United States where men are not aware that secret private purposes and interests have been running the government.” President Woodrow Wilson

The first way to address the “war on poverty” is to get rid of currency inflation and return to a form of money whose value holds over the long term.

Printing dollars at home means higher inflation in China, higher food prices in Egypt and stock bubbles in Brazil. Printing money means that U.S. debt is devalued so foreign creditors get paid back in cheaper dollars. The devaluation means higher unemployment in developing economies as their exports become more expensive for Americans. The resulting inflation also means higher prices for inputs needed in developing economies like copper, corn, oil and wheat. Foreign countries have begun to fight back against U.S.-caused inflation through subsidies, tariffs and capital controls; the currency war is expanding fast.

University biologists working with infectious viruses have airtight facilities to ensure that the objects of their study do not escape from the laboratory and damage the population at large. Unfortunately, no such safeguards are imposed on economics departments.

In the end it was currency debasement and pure deficit spending to fund the military, public works, social programs, and war that brought down the Roman Empire.

Higher prices are the symptom, not the cause, of currency collapse.

Opinions are a useless currency

Devaluation and currency wars never produce either the growth or the jobs that are promised, but they reliably produce inflation.

Hitherto, the Palestinians had been relatively immune to this Allahu Akhbar style. I thought this was a hugely retrograde development. I said as much to Edward. To reprint Nazi propaganda and to make a theocratic claim to Spanish soil was to be a protofascist and a supporter of 'Caliphate' imperialism: it had nothing at all to do with the mistreatment of the Palestinians. Once again, he did not exactly disagree. But he was anxious to emphasize that the Israelis had often encouraged Hamas as a foil against Fatah and the PLO. This I had known since seeing the burning out of leftist Palestinians by Muslim mobs in Gaza as early as 1981. Yet once again, it seemed Edward could only condemn Islamism if it could somehow be blamed on either Israel or the United States or the West, and not as a thing in itself. He sometimes employed the same sort of knight's move when discussing other Arabist movements, excoriating Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath Party, for example, mainly because it had once enjoyed the support of the CIA. But when Saddam was really being attacked, as in the case of his use of chemical weapons on noncombatants at Halabja, Edward gave second-hand currency to the falsified story that it had 'really' been the Iranians who had done it. If that didn't work, well, hadn't the United States sold Saddam the weaponry in the first place? Finally, and always—and this question wasn't automatically discredited by being a change of subject—what about Israel's unwanted and ugly rule over more and more millions of non-Jews? I evolved a test for this mentality, which I applied to more people than Edward. What would, or did, the relevant person say when the United States intervened to stop the massacres and dispossessions in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo? Here were two majority-Muslim territories and populations being vilely mistreated by Orthodox and Catholic Christians. There was no oil in the region. The state interests of Israel were not involved (indeed, Ariel Sharon publicly opposed the return of the Kosovar refugees to their homes on the grounds that it set an alarming—I want to say 'unsettling'—precedent). The usual national-security 'hawks,' like Henry Kissinger, were also strongly opposed to the mission. One evening at Edward's apartment, with the other guest being the mercurial, courageous Azmi Bishara, then one of the more distinguished Arab members of the Israeli parliament, I was finally able to leave the arguing to someone else. Bishara [...] was quite shocked that Edward would not lend public support to Clinton for finally doing the right thing in the Balkans. Why was he being so stubborn? I had begun by then—belatedly you may say—to guess. Rather like our then-friend Noam Chomsky, Edward in the final instance believed that if the United States was doing something, then that thing could not by definition be a moral or ethical action.

It is a natural propensity to attribute misfortune to someone’s malignity. When prices rise, it is due to the profiteer; when wages fall, it is due to the capitalist. Why the capitalist is ineffective when wages rise, and the profiteer when prices fall, the man in the street does not inquire. Nor does he notice that wages and prices rise and fall together. If he is a capitalist, he wants wages to fall and prices to rise; if he is a wage earner, he wants the opposite. When a currency expert tries to explain that profiteers and trade unions and ordinary employers have very little to do with the matter, he irritates everybody, like the man who threw doubt on German atrocities. (In World War I) We do not like to be robbed of an enemy; we want someone to have when we suffer. It is so depressing to think taht we suffer because we are fools; yet taking mankind in mass, that is the truth. For this reason, no political party can acquire any driving force except through hatred; it must hold someone to obloquy. If so-and-so’s wickedness is the sole cause of our misery, let us punish so-and-so and we shall be happy. The supreme example of this kind of political thought was the Treaty of Versailles. Yet most people are only seeking some new scapegoat to replace the Germans.

It is one thing when prices drift downward over time due to innovation, scalability or other efficiencies. This might be considered “good” deflation and is familiar to any contemporary consumer who has seen prices of computers or wide-screen TVs fall year after year. It is another matter when prices are forced down by unnecessary monetary contraction, credit constraints, deleveraging, business failures, bankruptcies and mass unemployment. This may be considered “bad” deflation. This bad deflation was exactly what was required in order to return the most important currencies to their prewar parity with gold.

If the dollar falls, America’s national security falls with it.

Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalist System was to debauch the currency.

Regulators and bankers were using the wrong tools and the wrong metrics. Unfortunately, they still are.

But the petrodollar system is not about oil, per se. It is about a system of sustaining the worldwide need for a paper currency by linking it to a true global necessity – oil.

patriotism of many is....a voice and nothing more... A spirit of money-making has eaten up our patriotism. Our morals are more depreciated than our currency.

That's your currency, isn't it? Souls. You have plenty right here. I won't give you mine.

War is the currency of political power.

Those producing the ‘money’ (i.e. currency) get fabulously wealthy from their crime—at the expense of impoverishing the masses and completely hollowing-out/destroying the broader economy.

Only powerful currencies earn the right to have a symbol. Just imagine, one US dollar was worth 64 rials in 1939, right after World War II. And what is it worth today? Around 150,000 rials.

The chief duty of the National Government in connection with the currency of the country is to coin money and declare its value. Grave doubts have been entertained whether Congress is authorized by the Constitution to make any form of paper money legal tender. The present issue of United States notes has been sustained by the necessities of war; but such paper should depend for its value and currency upon its convenience in use and its prompt redemption in coin at the will of the holder, and not upon its compulsory circulation. These notes are not money, but promises to pay money.

A country running deficits under the gold exchange standard could find itself like a tenant whose landlord does not collect rent payments for a year and then suddenly demands immediate payment of twelve months’ back rent. Some tenants would have saved for the inevitable rainy day, but many others would not be able to resist the easy credit and would find themselves short of funds and facing eviction.

Each time a police officer engages us, death, injury, maiming is possible. It is not enough to say that this is true of anyone or more true of criminals. The moment the officers began their pursuit of Prince Jones, his life was in danger. The Dreamers accept this as the cost of doing business, accept our bodies as currency, because it is their tradition. As slaves we were this country’s first windfall, the down payment on its freedom. After the ruin and liberation of the Civil War came Redemption for the unrepentant South and Reunion, and our bodies became this country’s second mortgage. In the New Deal we were their guestroom, their finished basement. And today, with a sprawling prison system, which has turned the warehousing of black bodies into a jobs program for Dreamers and a lucrative investment for Dreamers; today, when 8 percent of the world’s prisoners are black men, our bodies have refinanced the Dream of being white. Black life is cheap, but in America black bodies are a natural resource of incomparable value.

American hurricane relief was strange. The United States sent no money. Instead, the following year, it outlawed all Puerto Rican currency and declared the island’s peso, with a global value equal to the US dollar, to be worth only sixty American cents.7 Every Puerto Rican lost 40 percent of his or her savings overnight.8 Then, in 1901, a colonial land tax known as the Hollander Bill forced many small farmers to mortgage their lands with US banks.9

Worse yet, when the public realizes that it is being deceived, a feedback loop is created in which trust is broken and even the truth, if it can be found, is no longer believed. The United States is dangerously close to that point. ■

Berlin. 25 June 1940. I have the impression that we are rushing for a common currency for the whole of Europe. That would be progress, of course, and, one would hope, of lasting significance. Letter from Helmuth von Moltke (military intelligence)1

Chen shared a story with me about his in-laws. It was shortly after the 2008 financial crisis. Chen had no reason to expect his in-laws were worried. They were in their eighties and they were financially secure. The crash had not hurt their lifestyle. But they watched the response to the crisis from governments around the world, and they remembered what they had seen before. He asked them why they were worried. Their answer stayed with him: “First currency wars, then trade wars, then real wars.

In August, 1956, a Swedish bank teller cheerfully changed a $500 Confederate banknote for an enterprising customer, at the same favorable rate of exchange commanded by Federal currency in that season. His mistake was discovered only when it was much too late.

THE U.S. SECRET Service is one of the oldest law enforcement agencies in America, created in 1865. Its original mission was to investigate and prevent counterfeit currency, which was rampant after the Civil War and threatened to destabilize the country’s economy. The

But you didn’t mention Orrigar I, the first king of the House of Chaldarina. He put an end to years of unrest and civil strife. Neither did you mention Ronnick II, the one who reformed the monetary system and forbade the Great Houses to mint their own coins, thus stabilizing our currency. At the time it saved Ximerion from going bankrupt.” “I’m sorry. I told you we weren’t big—” “It’s not that, Hemarchidas. You remembered the fighting kings, those who brought war, destruction and ephemeral glory. Or those who ended tragically. You forgot the wise administrators, those who kept the peace, those who brought prosperity. You needn’t feel embarrassed, though. So did history.” Hemarchidas looked at his friend as if he saw him for the first time. “So, all in all, Hemarchidas, I’d rather history forgot me.

From its creation in 1913, the most important Fed mandate has been to maintain the purchasing power of the dollar; however, since 1913 the dollar has lost over 95 percent of its value. Put differently, it takes twenty dollars today to buy what one dollar would buy in 1913.

The Crippled God scattered some seeds onto the brazier’s coals. Popping sounds, then more smoke. ‘Peace. Warm yourself, warrior, while I tell you of peace. History is unerring, and even the least observant mortal can be made to understand, through innumerable repetition. Do you see peace as little more than the absence of war? Perhaps, on a surface level, it is just that. But let me describe the characteristics of peace, my young friend. A pervasive dulling of the senses, a decadence afflicting the culture, evinced by a growing obsession with low entertainment. The virtues of extremity—honour, loyalty, sacrifice—are lifted high as shoddy icons, currency for the cheapest of labours. The longer peace lasts, the more those words are used, and the weaker they become. Sentimentality pervades daily life. All becomes a mockery of itself, and the spirit grows…restless.

Hyperinflation produces fairly predictable sets of winners and losers and prompts certain behaviors and therefore can be used politically to rearrange social and economic relations among debtors, creditors, labor and capital, while gold is kept available to clean up the wreckage if necessary.

The institution of slavery was, for a quarter millennium, the conversion of human beings into currency, into machines who existed solely for the profit of their owners, to be worked as long as the owners desired, who had no rights over their bodies or loved ones, who could be mortgaged, bred, won in a bet, given as wedding presents, bequeathed to heirs, sold away from spouses or children to cover an owner’s debt or to spite a rival or to settle an estate. They were regularly whipped, raped, and branded, subjected to any whim or distemper of the people who owned them. Some were castrated or endured other tortures too grisly for these pages, tortures that the Geneva Conventions would have banned as war crimes had the conventions applied to people of African descent on this soil. Before there was a United States of America, there was enslavement. Theirs was a living death passed down for twelve generations.

I told them all, "If possible, I would be here with only you, forever. But I am a man who toils, and I must go where I must. We need currency for famous nightclubs, yes? I am doing something I hate for you. This is what it means to be in love. So do not spleen me." But to be truthful, I was not even the smallest portion sad to go to Lutsk to translate for Jonathan Safran Foer. As I mentioned before, my life is ordinary. But I had never been to Lutsk, or any of the multitudinous petite villages that still endure after the war. I desired to see new things. I desired to experience volumes. And I would be electrical to meet an American.

Steel is the nation, went a Japanese saying. If the nation had a strong steel industry, then it would have a strong shipbuilding industry, and it would be a powerful, respectable nation again. Thus the efforts in the postwar years centered first and foremost on steel. The recovery did not come easily. At the end of the war only three of the nation’s thirty-five blast furnaces were in operation, the others closed down as much from lack of raw material as from American bombs. The nation was poor, hard currency was limited, but the government poured much of its treasure into steel. By 1949 Japan had reached its prewar steel-production figures.

Bite the dog too often And you will tear it apart Before it even has the chance to rise Yet be too kind And it will forget that it was bred for war It will die in the killing fields Everything you do must be with purpose and reason All decisions must be made without emotion With respect to the mission And the currency of lives

The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists. Ernest Hemingway War, Political, Both Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime. Ernest Hemingway War, Justified, Matter Once we have a war there is only one thing to do. It must be won. For defeat brings worse things than any that can ever happen in war. Ernest Hemingway War, Once, Happen The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for and I hate very much to leave it. Ernest Hemingway Hate, Leave, Worth Personal columnists are jackals and no jackal has been known to live on grass once he had learned about meat - no matter who killed the meat for him. Ernest Hemingway Once, Matter, Learned The only thing that could spoil a day was people. People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good as spring itself. Ernest Hemingway Happiness, Good, Few But man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated. Ernest Hemingway Defeat, Defeated, Destroyed You're beautiful, like a May fly. Ernest Hemingway Beauty, Beautiful, Fly His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly's wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred. Ernest Hemingway Time, Natural, Talent The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life and one is as good as the other.

We expect a solution of the unemployment problem, the cancer problem, the housing problem, the problems of currency, of war, of education. We expect from it a brighter, cleaner and fuller life for our children, in which we and they can march ever onward and onward and develop to the full urge of life which God has given each one of us.

The idea that the euro has “failed” is dangerously naive. The euro is doing exactly what its progenitor – and the wealthy 1%-ers who adopted it – predicted and planned for it to do. … Removing a government's control over currency would prevent nasty little elected officials from using Keynesian monetary and fiscal juice to pull a nation out of recession. “It puts monetary policy out of the reach of politicians,” [Robert] Mundell explained]. “Without fiscal policy, the only way nations can keep jobs is by the competitive reduction of rules on business.” … Hence, currency union is class war by other means. — Greg Palast, “Robert Mundell, evil genius of the euro.” Unlike

There are no advantageous defeats, but there can be disastrous victories. Few days in France’s history have cost her so dear as Cassel, for it gave currency to a number of false ideas, such as that the new King was invincible, and that foot-soldiers were worthless in war. The defeat of Crécy, twenty years later, was the consequence of this illusion.

During the Pequot War, Connecticut and Massachusetts colonial officials had offered bounties initially for the heads of murdered Indigenous people and later for only their scalps, which were more portable in large numbers. But scalp hunting became routine only in the mid-1670s, following an incident on the northern frontier of the Massachusetts colony. The practice began in earnest in 1697 when settler Hannah Dustin, having murdered ten of her Abenaki captors in a nighttime escape, presented their ten scalps to the Massachusetts General Assembly and was rewarded with bounties for two men, two women, and six children.24 Dustin soon became a folk hero among New England settlers. Scalp hunting became a lucrative commercial practice. The settler authorities had hit upon a way to encourage settlers to take off on their own or with a few others to gather scalps, at random, for the reward money. “In the process,” John Grenier points out, “they established the large-scale privatization of war within American frontier communities.”25 Although the colonial government in time raised the bounty for adult male scalps, lowered that for adult females, and eliminated that for Indigenous children under ten, the age and gender of victims were not easily distinguished by their scalps nor checked carefully. What is more, the scalp hunter could take the children captive and sell them into slavery. These practices erased any remaining distinction between Indigenous combatants and noncombatants and introduced a market for Indigenous slaves. Bounties for Indigenous scalps were honored even in absence of war. Scalps and Indigenous children became means of exchange, currency, and this development may even have created a black market. Scalp hunting was not only a profitable privatized enterprise but also a means to eradicate or subjugate the Indigenous population of the Anglo-American Atlantic seaboard.26 The settlers gave a name to the mutilated and bloody corpses they left in the wake of scalp-hunts: redskins.

They spend billions of their currency every year on killing each other, and because they invest so much into killing, they don’t have enough money to run their shops, to give people enough homes or food. They have guns that can shoot out an eyeball from hundreds of yards away, and people who want to shoot an eyeball out from hundreds of yards: yet they turn both eyes blind to the problems humanity face.

That brings us to the 20th century, which had two big cycles of boom, busts, wars, and new orders, the second of which we appear to be in the late stages of. Because I review these comprehensively in Chapters 10 through 13, and because they are much more familiar to most readers, I will end this overview here and dive now into the story of the Dutch and how they rose to become the first global reserve currency empire.

A prohibition on the hoarding or possession of gold was integral to the plan to devalue the dollar against gold and get people spending again. Against this background, FDR issued Executive Order 6102 on April 5, 1933, one of the most extraordinary executive orders in U.S. history. The blunt language over the signature of Franklin Delano Roosevelt speaks for itself: I, Franklin D. Roosevelt . . . declare that [a] national emergency still continues to exist and . . . do hereby prohibit the hoarding of gold coin, gold bullion, and gold certificates within the . . . United States by individuals, partnerships, associations and corporations.... All persons are hereby required to deliver, on or before May 1, 1933, to a Federal reserve bank . . . or to any member of the Federal Reserve System all gold coin, gold bullion and gold certificates now owned by them.... Whoever willfully violates any provision of this Executive Order . . . may be fined not more than $10,000 or . . . may be imprisoned for not more than ten years. The people of the United States were being ordered to surrender their gold to the government and were offered paper money at the exchange rate of $20.67 per ounce. Some relatively minor exceptions were made for dentists, jewelers and others who made “legitimate and customary” use of gold in their industry or art. Citizens were allowed to keep $100 worth of gold, about five ounces at 1933 prices, and gold in the form of rare coins. The $10,000 fine proposed in 1933 for those who continued to hoard gold in violation of the president’s order is equivalent to over $165,000 in today’s money, an extraordinarily large statutory fine. Roosevelt followed up with a

What Mr. Rothschild had discovered was the basic principle of power, influence, and control over people as applied to economics. That principle is "when you assume the appearance of power, people soon give it to you." Mr. Rothschild had discovered that currency or deposit loan accounts had the required appearance of power that could be used to INDUCE PEOPLE [WC emphasis] (inductance, with people corresponding to a magnetic field) into surrendering their real wealth in exchange for a promise of greater wealth (instead of real compensation). They would put up real collateral in exchange for a loan of promissory notes. Mr. Rothschild found that he could issue more notes than he had backing for, so long as he had someone's stock of gold as a persuader to show to his customers. Mr. Rothschild loaned his promissory notes to individuals and to governments. These would create overconfidence. Then he would make money scarce, tighten control of the system, and collect the collateral through the obligation of contracts. The cycle was then repeated. These pressures could be used to ignite a war. Then he would control the availability of currency to determine who would win the war. That government which agreed to give him control of its economic system got his support.

Jake, think of the population of this planet for one moment; we live for money, we fight for land then divide the land up and establish different currencies represented by different flags. The governments chosen to lead us are rife with corruption and at any given time one will be at war with another. And despite knowing that we are damaging the very environment that sustains us, we continue to pollute our skies and oceans.

America has, in fact, run trade deficits large enough to wipe out its gold hoard under the old rules of the game. Still, the idea of the gold standard was not to deplete nations of gold, but rather to force them to get their financial house in order long before the gold disappeared. In the absence of a gold standard and the real-time adjustments it causes, the American people seem unaware of how badly U.S. finances have actually deteriorated.

Trouble with arms is, everyone thought they were recession-proof, but they’re not. Iran–Iraq was an arms dealers’ charter, and they thought it would never end. Since then it’s been downhill all the way. Too many manufacturers chasing too few wars. Too much loose hardware being dumped on the market. Too much peace about and not enough hard currency. Our Dicky did a bit of the Serbo-Croat thing, of course – Croats via Athens, Serbs via Poland – but the numbers weren’t in his league and there were too many dogs in the hunt. Cuba’s gone dead, so’s South Africa, they make their own. Ireland isn’t worth a light or he’d have done that too. Peru, he’s got a thing going there, supplying the Shining Path boys. And he’s been making a play for the Muslim insurgents in the Southern Philippines, but the North Koreans are in there ahead of him and I’ve a suspicion he’s going to get his nose bloodied again.

Is the consideration of a little dirty pelf, to individuals, to be placed in competition with the essential rights & liberties of the present generation, & of millions yet unborn? shall a few designing men for their own aggrandizement, and to gratify their own avarice, overset the goodly fabric we have been rearing at the expence of so much time, blood, & treasure? and shall we at last become the victems of our own abominable lust of gain? Forbid it heaven! forbid it all, & every state in the union! by enacting & enforcing, efficatious laws for checking the growth of these monstrous evils, & restoring matters in some degree to the pristine state they were in at the commencement of the War. Our cause is noble. It is the cause of Mankind! and the danger to it springs from ourselves—Shall we slumber & sleep then while we should be punishing those miscreants who have brought these troubles upon us, & who are aiming to continue us in them? While we should be striving to fill our Battalions—and devising ways and means to appreciate the currency—On the credit of which every thing depends? I hope not—let vigorous measures be adopted—not to limit the price of articles—for this I conceive is inconsistent with the very nature of things, & impracticable in itself—but to punish speculators—forestallers—& extortioners—and above all—to sink the money by heavy Taxes—To promote public & private Œconomy—encourage Manufactures &ca—Measures of this sort gone heartily into by the several states will strike at once at the root of all our misfortunes, & give the coup-de-grace to British hope of subjugating this great Continent, either by their Arms or their Arts—The first as I have before observed they acknowledge is unequal to the task—the latter I am sure will be so if we are not lost to every thing that is good & virtuous.

This unique ability of the U.S. Government to borrow from foreign central banks rather than from its own citizens is one of the economic miracles of modern times. Without it the war-induced American prosperity of the 1960s and early 1970s would have ended quickly, as was threatened in 1973 when foreign central banks decided to cut their currencies loose from the dollar, letting them float upward rather than accepting a further flood of U.S. Treasury IOUs.

As earnings from abroad fell, wealthy Dutch savers moved their cash into British investments, which were more attractive due to their strong growth and higher yields.9 Despite this, the guilder remained widely used as a global reserve currency. As explained earlier, reserve currency status classically lags the decline of other key drivers of the rise and fall of empires. Then, as is typical, a rising great power challenged the existing great power in a war.

The root of all evil, the liberal insists, was precisely this interference with the freedom of employment, trade and currencies practiced by the various schools of social, national, and monopolistic protectionism since the third quarter of the nineteenth century; but for the unholy alliance of trade unions and labor parties with monopolistic manufacturers and agrarian interests, which in their shortsighted greed joined forces to frustrate economic liberty, the world would be enjoying today the fruits of an almost automatic system of creating material welfare. Liberal leaders never weary of repeating that the tragedy of the nineteenth century sprang from the incapacity of man to remain faithful to the inspiration of the early liberals; that the generous initiative of our ancestors was frustrated by the passions of nationalism and class war, vested interests, and monopolists, and above all, by the blindness of the working people to the ultimate beneficence of unrestricted economic freedom to all human interests, including their own. A great intellectual and moral advance was thus, it is claimed; frustrated by the intellectual and moral weaknesses of the mass of the people; what the spirit of Enlightenment had achieved was put to nought by the forces of selfishness. In a nutshell this is the economic liberal’s defense. Unless it is refuted, he will continue to hold the floor in the contest of arguments.

a result of the Bretton Woods Agreement, the dollar became the world’s leading reserve currency. This was natural because the two World Wars had made the US the richest and most powerful country by far. By the end of World War II the US had amassed its greatest gold/money savings ever—about two-thirds of all the government-held gold/money in the world, the equivalent to eight years of import purchases. Even after the war, it continued to earn a lot of money by exporting.

The risks to our nation are increasing, rather than decreasing, every minute we turn a blind eye to China’s theft of billions of dollars’ worth of intellectual property and technology; to years of piracy and copyright law violations; to the CCP’s closed economy, the artificial valuation of its own currency, its relentless political influencing operations; and so much more. As we continue to turn a blind eye, our nation moves closer to losing its independence and its freedom.

1 and 2. The United States represents less than 5 percent of the world’s population; it consumes more than 25 percent of the world’s resources. This is accomplished to a large degree through the exploitation of other countries, primarily in the developing world. Point 3. The United States maintains the largest and most sophisticated military in the world. Although this empire has been built primarily through economics—by EHMs—world leaders understand that whenever other measures fail, the military will step in, as it did in Iraq. Point 4. The English language and American culture dominate the world. Points 5 and 6. Although the United States does not tax countries directly, and the dollar has not replaced other currencies in local markets, the corporatocracy does impose a subtle global tax and the dollar is in fact the standard currency for world commerce. This process began at the end of World War II when the gold standard was modified; dollars could no longer be converted by individuals, only by governments. During the 1950s and 1960s, credit purchases were made abroad to finance America’s growing consumerism, the Korean and Vietnam Wars, and Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society. When foreign businessmen tried to buy goods and ser vices back from the United States, they found that inflation had reduced the value of their dollars—in effect, they paid an indirect tax. Their governments demanded debt settlements in gold. On August 15, 1971, the Nixon administration refused and dropped the gold standard altogether.   Washington

broad-based tax cut . . . accommodated by a program of open market purchases . . . would almost certainly be an effective stimulant to consumption.... A money-financed tax cut is essentially equivalent to Milton Friedman’s famous “helicopter drop” of money.... Of course . . . the government could . . . even acquire existing real or financial assets. If . . . the Fed then purchased an equal amount of Treasury debt with newly created money, the whole operation would be the economic equivalent of direct open market operations in private assets.

The military cultivates civilians including scholars, journalists, and analysts, providing them selective access to the institution and punishing them—either with physical harm (or the threat of it) to the author or her family members or simply with the denial of future access—should they produce knowledge that harms the interests of the army. Since access is perhaps the most valuable currency among those who wish to be and remain experts on the military, the army uses this implied transaction to produce sympathetic assessments of the armed forces and their actions and goals.

With the simple suspension of gold redeemability, governments’ war efforts were no longer limited to the money that they had in their own treasuries, but extended virtually to the entire wealth of the population. For as long as the government could print more money and have that money accepted by its citizens and foreigners, it could keep financing the war. Previously, under a monetary system where gold as money was in the hands of the people, government only had its own treasuries to sustain its war effort, along with any taxation or bond issues to finance the war. This made conflict limited, and lay at the heart of the relatively long periods of peace experienced around the world before the twentieth century.

It was not always the case, of course, that navies paid for themselves. In wartime, costs often exceeded revenues, and those deficits grew over time as fleets and armies got bigger. But this was hardly an insurmountable obstacle for the most dynamic economies in the world. The United Provinces and England were able to borrow all they needed to underwrite their defense budgets. The pressures of war gave a powerful impetus to the growth of stocks, bonds, loans, and paper currencies during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries and helped to turn Amsterdam and then London into international financial centers. To take one example, the Bank of England was established in 1694 to raise funds to allow England to wage war against France.

The Dreamers accept this as the cost of doing business, accept our bodies as currency, because it is their tradition. As slaves we were this country’s first windfall, the down payment on its freedom. After the ruin and liberation of the Civil War came Redemption for the unrepentant South and Reunion, and our bodies became this country’s second mortgage. In the New Deal we were their guestroom, their finished basement. And today, with a sprawling prison system, which has turned the warehousing of black bodies into a jobs program for Dreamers and a lucrative investment for Dreamers; today, when 8 percent of the world’s prisoners are black men, our bodies have refinanced the Dream of being white. Black life is cheap, but in America black bodies are a natural resource of incomparable value.

The world is in the midst of a war, but it is not the kind of war you may be imagining. It is a currency war in which nations compete to lower the value of their currency in order to help their industries gain greater profits from exports. The currency disputes have arisen from a conflict of interest between the United States and China. The U.S. has been struggling against a massive fiscal deficit and foreign debt in recent years, especially since the global financial crisis. With so much at stake, the era of U.S. dollar hegemony seems to be ending. China has been raking in profits from its biggest export market, the U.S., by keeping its yuan, also known as the renminbi, undervalued. China has also been purchasing U.S. treasury bonds to add to its foreign reserves, worth more than $2 trillion. In September, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Currency Reform for Fair Trade Act with a vote of 348 to 79. Under the bill, the U.S. is allowed to slap tariffs on goods from China and other countries with currencies that are perceived to be undervalued. Basically, the U.S. is pushing China to allow the yuan to appreciate. “For so many years, we have watched the China-U.S. trade deficit grow and grow and grow,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said on the day of the vote, which was on Sept. 29 local time. “Today, we are finally doing something about it by recognizing that China’s manipulation of the currency represents a subsidy for Chinese exports coming to the United States and elsewhere.” But China does not want the value of its currency to increase because a stronger yuan will hurt Chinese exporters who will see a decline in exports to the U.S. once the currency’s value rises.

McDougall was a certified revolutionary hero, while the Scottish-born cashier, the punctilious and corpulent William Seton, was a Loyalist who had spent the war in the city. In a striking show of bipartisan unity, the most vociferous Sons of Liberty—Marinus Willett, Isaac Sears, and John Lamb—appended their names to the bank’s petition for a state charter. As a triple power at the new bank—a director, the author of its constitution, and its attorney—Hamilton straddled a critical nexus of economic power. One of Hamilton’s motivations in backing the bank was to introduce order into the manic universe of American currency. By the end of the Revolution, it took $167 in continental dollars to buy one dollar’s worth of gold and silver. This worthless currency had been superseded by new paper currency, but the states also issued bills, and large batches of New Jersey and Pennsylvania paper swamped Manhattan. Shopkeepers had to be veritable mathematical wizards to figure out the fluctuating values of the varied bills and coins in circulation. Congress adopted the dollar as the official monetary unit in 1785, but for many years New York shopkeepers still quoted prices in pounds, shillings, and pence. The city was awash with strange foreign coins bearing exotic names: Spanish doubloons, British and French guineas, Prussian carolines, Portuguese moidores. To make matters worse, exchange rates differed from state to state. Hamilton hoped that the Bank of New York would counter all this chaos by issuing its own notes and also listing the current exchange rates for the miscellaneous currencies. Many Americans still regarded banking as a black, unfathomable art, and it was anathema to upstate populists. The Bank of New York was denounced by some as the cat’s-paw of British capitalists. Hamilton’s petition to the state legislature for a bank charter was denied for seven years, as Governor George Clinton succumbed to the prejudices of his agricultural constituents who thought the bank would give preferential treatment to merchants and shut out farmers. Clinton distrusted corporations as shady plots against the populace, foreshadowing the Jeffersonian revulsion against Hamilton’s economic programs. The upshot was that in June 1784 the Bank of New York opened as a private bank without a charter. It occupied the Walton mansion on St. George’s Square (now Pearl Street), a three-story building of yellow brick and brown trim, and three years later it relocated to Hanover Square. It was to house the personal bank accounts of both Alexander Hamilton and John Jay and prove one of Hamilton’s most durable monuments, becoming the oldest stock traded on the New York Stock Exchange.

The world order, largely intact since the end of the World War II, seems to be breaking down. Capitalism, and its relentless march towards progress, allowed many to win. Although no system is perfect, the rules by which capitalism operated were well regarded and understood. You could expect that if you made a big bet and were wrong, you would be wiped out—but if you were right, your hard work, ingenuity, or risk taking would be rewarded. In game theory, we could call this a dominant cooperative strategy, and it dominated for the better part of the twentieth century. The rise of fiat currencies that could be manipulated domestically and the bailout in 2008 changed that strategy to one where the players whose bad bets caused the crisis, instead of being wiped out, were rewarded handsomely. Capitalism’s long-dominant cooperative strategy was replaced by a non-dominant strategy, crony capitalism, where the cheaters won.

The obvious costs of such a policy became apparent to me as I sat along the back wall of vault V22 at NSA headquarters with two of the more talented infrastructure analysts, whose workspace was decorated with a seven-foot-tall picture of Star Wars’ famous wookie, Chewbacca. I realized, as one of them was explaining to me the details of his targets’ security routines, that intercepted nudes were a kind of informal office currency, because his buddy kept spinning in his chair to interrupt us with a smile, saying, “Check her out,” to which my instructor would invariably reply “Bonus!” or “Nice!” The unspoken transactional rule seemed to be that if you found a naked photo or video of an attractive target—or someone in communication with a target—you had to show the rest of the boys, at least as long as there weren’t any women around. That was how you knew you could trust each other: you had shared in one another’s crimes.

Isn't this grand? Here I am, a nobody from a nowhere town in North Carolina, and now I've seen Richmond and Washington City both. Who'd've figured I'd travel so far? Must be close to two hundred miles down to Rivington." Caudell nodded. The army had expanded his life. Before the war, outside of a couple of trips to Raleigh, he'd spent his whole life inside Nash County. Now he'd been in several different states and even though recalling it still came hard sometimes-a for eign country: the United States. Whether in a foreign country or not, Washington was still the source of traditions he held dear, as London once might have been to an early Carolina colonist. ...The ordinary folk of Washington City did better at taking their occupiers in stride. Their principal complaint against the rebels was that they had too little money, and that in Confederate currency. Lee had issued an order that made the locals take Southern money in exchange for goods and services, but he could not

In 1832, Andrew Jackson, today a folk hero to American free-marketeers, refused to renew the license for the quasi-central bank, the second bank of the USA - the successor to Hamilton's Bank of the USA (see chapter 2). This was done on the grounds that the foreign ownership share of the bank was too high -30% (the pre-EU Finns would have heartily approved!). Declaring his decision, Jackson said: 'should the stock of the bank principally pass into the hands of the subjects of a foreign country, and we should unfortunately become involved in a war with that country, what would be our condition?........Controlling our currency, receiving our public moneys, and holding thousands of our citizens in dependence, it would be far more formidable and dangerous than the naval and military power of the enemy. If we must have a bank...it should be purely American.' If the president of a developing country said something like this today, he would be branded a xenophobic dinosaur and blackballed in the international community.

You repay the debt,” he said. “That should be more than enough." “What if I disagree? And what if, after all your trouble, I still say no?” “I have ways to insist.” “I have ways to decline.” “You’ll pay one way or the other,” he said. “In euros? Dollars? How much do I owe you?” If he registered the sarcasm, he didn’t react to it. “You pay in the only currency that holds value to you,” he said. “You pay in innocent life.” The words stung like a hard smack across the face and her eyes smarted as if she’d been physically struck. He should not know these things. Casual indifference remained plastered on her face while deep below, in that hollow crevice where madness had lain dormant these last nine months, the slow, steady percussion of war tapped out, faint but perceptible. “Which innocents?” she said. He waved his hand with that dismissive gesture. “Innocents are innocents,” he said. “Is one life really valued higher than another?” From the fear bubbling to the surface, she instinctively knew. Knew that the only way a man in his position could gloat as if he owned her was if he held what she deemed most priceless.

In the Afro-Asian world from which the Spaniards came, the obsession for gold was indeed an epidemic. Even the bitterest of enemies lusted after the same useless yellow metal. Three centuries before the conquest of Mexico, the ancestors of Cortés and his army waged a bloody war of religion against the Muslim kingdoms in Iberia and North Africa. The followers of Christ and the followers of Allah killed each other by the thousands, devastated fields and orchards, and turned prosperous cities into smouldering ruins – all for the greater glory of Christ or Allah. As the Christians gradually gained the upper hand, they marked their victories not only by destroying mosques and building churches,but also by issuing new gold and silver coins bearing the sign of the cross and thanking God for His help in combating the infidels. Yet alongside the new currency, the victors minted another type of coin, called the millares, which carried a somewhat different message. These square coins made by the Christian conquerors were emblazoned with flowing Arabic script that declared: ‘There is no god except Allah, and Muhammad is Allah’s messenger.’ Even the Catholic bishops of Melgueil and Agde issued these faithful copies of popular Muslim coins, and God-fearing Christians happily used them.2

Back then, Japan as a nation aspired to something in which each individual seemed invested. And that "something"wasn't just about economic growth, or transforming the yen into an international currency. It had more to do with accessing information. Information was indispensable, and not only as a means of obtaining necessities like food and clothing and medicine. Within two or three years of World War II's end, starvation had been basically eliminated in Japan, and yet the Japanese had continued slaving away as if their lives depended on it. Why? To create a more abundant life? If so, where was the abundance? Where were the luxurious living spaces? Eyesores dominated the scenery wherever you went, and people still crammed themselves into packed commuter trains each morning, submitting to conditions that would be fatal for any other mammal. Apparently what the Japanese wanted wasn't a better life, but more things. And things, of course, were a form of information. But as things became readily available and information began to flow smoothly, the original aspiration got lost in the shuffle. People were infected with the concept that happiness was something outside themselves, and a new and powerful form of loneliness was born. Mix loneliness with stress and enervation, and all sorts of madness can occur. Anxiety increases, and in order to obliterate the anxiety people turn to extreme sex, violence, and even murder.

Points 1 and 2. The United States represents less than 5 percent of the world’s population; it consumes more than 25 percent of the world’s resources. This is accomplished to a large degree through the exploitation of other countries, primarily in the developing world. Point 3. The United States maintains the largest and most sophisticated military in the world. Although this empire has been built primarily through economics—by EHMs—world leaders understand that whenever other measures fail, the military will step in, as it did in Iraq. Point 4. The English language and American culture dominate the world. Points 5 and 6. Although the United States does not tax countries directly, and the dollar has not replaced other currencies in local markets, the corporatocracy does impose a subtle global tax and the dollar is in fact the standard currency for world commerce. This process began at the end of World War II when the gold standard was modified; dollars could no longer be converted by individuals, only by governments. During the 1950s and 1960s, credit purchases were made abroad to finance America’s growing consumerism, the Korean and Vietnam Wars, and Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society. When foreign businessmen tried to buy goods and ser vices back from the United States, they found that inflation had reduced the value of their dollars—in effect, they paid an indirect tax. Their governments demanded debt settlements in gold.

Our faith in victory had been unquestioning, its opposite, defeat, had no currency among us. Victory was possible, that was all. It would be easy or difficult, quick or prolonged, but it would be victory. So here came the disturbing Hoosier, displaying the other side of the coin, showing us defeat. It shook us. And it was from this moment that we dated the feeling of what is called expendability. All armies have expendable items, that is, a part or unit the destruction of which will not be fatal to the whole. In some ordeals, a man might consider his finger expendable, but not his hand, or in extremity his arm but not his heart. There are expendable items which may be lost or destroyed in the field either in peace or in war without their owner being required to replace them. A rifle is so expendable or a cartridge belt. So are men. Men are the most expendable of all. Hunger, the jungle, the Japanese, not one nor all of these could be quite as corrosive as the feeling of expendability. This was no feeling of dedication because it was absolutely involuntary. I do not doubt, that if the Marines had asked for volunteers for an impossible campaign such as Guadalcanal, almost everyone now fighting would have stepped forward. But that is sacrifice, that is voluntary. Being expended robs you of the exultation, the self-abnegation, the absolute freedom of self-sacrifice. Being expended puts one in the roll of victim rather than sacrificer, and there is always something begrudging in this. I doubt if Isaac would have accepted the knife of his father, Abraham, entirely without reproach yet, for the same master he would have gone gladly to his death a thousand times. The world is full of the sacrifices of heroes and martyrs, but there was only one victim. If we were to be victims, we were as firmly secured to our role as Isaac bound to the faggots. No day passed without extenuating it.

Sung was a land which was famous far and wide, simply because it was so often and so richly insulted. However, there was one visitor, more excitable than most, who developed a positive passion for criticizing the place. Unfortunately, the pursuit of this hobby soon lead him to take leave of the truth. This unkind traveler once claimed that the king of Sung, the notable Skan Askander, was a derelict glutton with a monster for a son and a slug for a daughter. This was unkind to the daughter. While she was no great beauty, she was definitely not a slug. After all, slugs do not have arms and legs - and besides, slugs do not grow to that size. There was a grain of truth in the traveler's statement, in as much as the son was a regrettable young man. However, soon afterwards, the son was accidentally drowned when he made the mistake of falling into a swamp with his hands and feet tied together and a knife sticking out of his back. This tragedy did not encourage the traveler to extend his sympathies to the family. Instead, he invented fresh accusations. This wayfarer, an ignorant tourist if ever there was one, claimed that the king had leprosy. This was false. The king merely had a well-developed case of boils. The man with the evil mouth was guilty of a further malignant slander when he stated that King Skan Askander was a cannibal. This was untrue. While it must be admitted that the king once ate one of his wives, he did not do it intentionally; the whole disgraceful episode was the fault of the chef, who was a drunkard, and who was subsequently severely reprimanded. .The question of the governance, and indeed, the very existence of the 'kingdom of Sung' is one that is worth pursuing in detail, before dealing with the traveler's other allegations. It is true that there was a king, his being Skan Askander, and that some of his ancestors had been absolute rulers of considerable power. It is also true that the king's chief swineherd, who doubled as royal cartographer, drew bold, confident maps proclaiming that borders of the realm. Furthermore, the king could pass laws, sign death warrants, issue currency, declare war or amuse himself by inventing new taxes. And what he could do, he did. "We are a king who knows how to be king," said the king. And certainly, anyone wishing to dispute his right to use of the imperial 'we' would have had to contend with the fact that there was enough of him, in girth, bulk, and substance, to provide the makings of four or five ordinary people, flesh, bones and all. He was an imposing figure, "very imposing", one of his brides is alleged to have said, shortly before the accident in which she suffocated. "We live in a palace," said the king. "Not in a tent like Khmar, the chief milkmaid of Tameran, or in a draughty pile of stones like Comedo of Estar." . . .From Prince Comedo came the following tart rejoinder: "Unlike yours, my floors are not made of milk-white marble. However, unlike yours, my floors are not knee-deep in pigsh*t." . . .Receiving that Note, Skan Askander placed it by his commode, where it would be handy for future royal use. Much later, and to his great surprise, he received a communication from the Lord Emperor Khmar, the undisputed master of most of the continent of Tameran. The fact that Sung had come to the attention of Khmar was, to say the least, ominous. Khmar had this to say: "Your words have been reported. In due course, they will be remembered against you." The king of Sung, terrified, endured the sudden onset of an attack of diarrhea that had nothing to do with the figs he had been eating. His latest bride, seeing his acute distress, made the most of her opportunity, and vigorously counselled him to commit suicide. Knowing Khmar's reputation, he was tempted - but finally, to her great disappointment, declined. Nevertheless, he lived in fear; he had no way of knowing that he was simply the victim of one of Khmar's little jokes.

We usually think of empires as violent undertakings. As Frantz Fanon observed in the 1960s, the process of conquering and governing a colony is, by definition, violent. But in the context of global capitalism, empire has a more expansive meaning. Capitalist empires are not simply the states capable of winning the most wars; they are the command centers of the capitalist world system. Their corporations are the largest and most powerful multinationals, extracting profits from all corners of the globe and sucking them back to the imperial core. Their financial institutions are some of the most important nodes in the networks of global finance. The priorities of their governments are forcefully communicated to -and sometimes enforced upon- less powerful states. In fact, at the global level it is much easier to see the equivalence between economic and political power than it is domestically. The power of US businesses abroad is maintained through an international order that prioritizes the interests of US capital, promulgated by the US government and its allies. The power of US finance rests on the central role played by the dollar as the global reserve currency, which is it self a function of American military, political, and economic might. American military power, meanwhile, stems from and helps to reinforce the power of a web of military contractors, weapons manufacturers, and research hubs that provide the expertise and equipment needed to maintain its supremacy. In certain parts of the world, as in Iraq after its invasion, the US government has rules through private corporations like Halliburton. Empire is, then, about more than formal colonization -it refers to all the processes through which the world's most powerful capitalist institutions plan who gets what at the level of the world economy. Throughout history, this imperial power has often been exercised through horrendous acts of violence that have warped the development of entire societies for decades. But today, it is often exerted in far more covert ways, such as through the secretive system of international courts or international financial institutions imposing rigid conditions on countries trying to access emergency lending.

After dinner Karamenaios would drop in. We had about fifty words with which to make lingual currency. We didn't even need that many, as I soon discovered. There are a thousand ways of talking and words don't help if the spirit is absent. Karamenaios and I were eager to talk. lt made little difference to me whether we talked about the war or about knives and forks. Sometimes we discovered that a word or phrase which we had been using for days, he in English or I in Greek, meant something entirely different than we had thought it to mean. It made no difference. We understood one another even with the wrong words. I could learn five new words in an evening and forget six or eight during my sleep. The important thing was the warm handclasp, the light in the eyes, the grapes which we devoured in common, the glass we raised to our lips in sign of friendship. Now and then I would get excited and, using a melange of English, Greek, German, French, Choctaw, Eskimo, Swahili or any other tongue I felt would serve the purpose, using the chair, the table, the spoon, the lamp, the bread knife, I would enact for him a fragment of my life in New York, Paris, London, Chula Vista, Canarsie, Hackensack or in some place I had never been or some place I had been in a dream or when lying asleep on the operating table. Sometimes I felt so good, so versatile and acrobatic, that I would stand on the table and sing in some unknown language or hop from the table to the commode and from the commode to the staircase or swing from the rafters, anything to entertain him, keep him amused, make him roll from side to side with laughter. I was considered an old man in the village because of my bald pate and fringe of white hair. Nobody had ever seen an old man cut up the way I did. "The old man is going for a swim," they would say. "The old man is taking the boat out." Always "the old man." If a storm came up and they knew I was out in the middle of the pond they would send someone out to see that "the old man" got in safely. If I decided to take a jaunt through the hills Karamenaios would offer to accompany me so that no harm would come to me. If I got stranded somewhere I had only to announce that I was an American and at once a dozen hands were ready to help me.

Learning to meditate helped too. When the Beatles visited India in 1968 to study Transcendental Meditation at the ashram of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, I was curious to learn it, so I did. I loved it. Meditation has benefited me hugely throughout my life because it produces a calm open-mindedness that allows me to think more clearly and creatively. I majored in finance in college because of my love for the markets and because that major had no foreign language requirement—so it allowed me to learn what I was interested in, both inside and outside class. I learned a lot about commodity futures from a very interesting classmate, a Vietnam veteran quite a bit older than me. Commodities were attractive because they could be traded with very low margin requirements, meaning I could leverage the limited amount of money I had to invest. If I could make winning decisions, which I planned to do, I could borrow more to make more. Stock, bond, and currency futures didn’t exist back then. Commodity futures were strictly real commodities like corn, soybeans, cattle, and hogs. So those were the markets I started to trade and learn about. My college years coincided with the era of free love, mind-expanding drug experimentation, and rejection of traditional authority. Living through it had a lasting effect on me and many other members of my generation. For example, it deeply impacted Steve Jobs, whom I came to empathize with and admire. Like me, he took up meditation and wasn’t interested in being taught as much as he loved visualizing and building out amazing new things. The times we lived in taught us both to question established ways of doing things—an attitude he demonstrated superbly in Apple’s iconic “1984” and “Here’s to the Crazy Ones,” which were ad campaigns that spoke to me. For the country as a whole, those were difficult years. As the draft expanded and the numbers of young men coming home in body bags soared, the Vietnam War split the country. There was a lottery based on birthdates to determine the order of those who would be drafted. I remember listening to the lottery on the radio while playing pool with my friends. It was estimated that the first 160 or so birthdays called would be drafted, though they read off all 366 dates. My birthday was forty-eighth.

No sound strategy for studying fascism can fail to examine the entire context in which it was formed and grew. Some approaches to fascism start with the crisis to which fascism was a response, at the risk of making the crisis into a cause. A crisis of capitalism, according to Marxists, gave birth to fascism. Unable to assure ever-expanding markets, ever-widening access to raw materials, and ever-willing cheap labor through the normal operation of constitutional regimes and free markets, capitalists were obliged, Marxists say, to find some new way to attain these ends by force. Others perceive the founding crisis as the inadequacy of liberal state and society (in the laissez-faire meaning of liberalism current at that time) to deal with the challenges of the post-1914 world. Wars and revolutions produced problems that parliament and the market—the main liberal solutions—appeared incapable of handling: the distortions of wartime command economies and the mass unemployment attendant upon demobilization; runaway inflation; increased social tensions and a rush toward social revolution; extension of the vote to masses of poorly educated citizens with no experience of civic responsibility; passions heightened by wartime propaganda; distortions of international trade and exchange by war debts and currency fluctuations. Fascism came forward with new solutions for these challenges. Fascists hated liberals as much as they hated socialists, but for different reasons. For fascists, the internationalist, socialist Left was the enemy and the liberals were the enemies’ accomplices. With their hands-off government, their trust in open discussion, their weak hold over mass opinion, and their reluctance to use force, liberals were, in fascist eyes, culpably incompetent guardians of the nation against the class warfare waged by the socialists. As for beleaguered middle-class liberals themselves, fearful of a rising Left, lacking the secret of mass appeal, facing the unpalatable choices offered them by the twentieth century, they have sometimes been as ready as conservatives to cooperate with fascists. Every strategy for understanding fascism must come to terms with the wide diversity of its national cases. The major question here is whether fascisms are more disparate than the other “isms.” This book takes the position that they are, because they reject any universal value other than the success of chosen peoples in a Darwinian struggle for primacy. The community comes before humankind in fascist values, and respecting individual rights or due process gave way to serving the destiny of the Volk or razza. Therefore each individual national fascist movement gives full expression to its own cultural particularism. Fascism, unlike the other “isms,” is not for export: each movement jealously guards its own recipe for national revival, and fascist leaders seem to feel little or no kinship with their foreign cousins. It has proved impossible to make any fascist “international” work.

In the 1860s, during its civil war, the US suspended gold convertibility and printed paper money (known as “greenbacks”) to help monetize war debts. Around the time the US returned to its gold peg in the mid-1870s, a number of other countries joined the gold standard; most currencies remained fixed against it until World War I. Major exceptions were Japan (which was on a silver-linked standard until the 1890s, which led its exchange rate to devalue against gold as silver prices fell during this period) and Spain, which frequently suspended convertibility to support large fiscal deficits. During World War I, warring countries ran enormous deficits that were funded by central banks’ printing and lending of money. Gold served as money in foreign transactions, as international trust (and hence credit) was lacking. When the war ended, a new monetary order was created with gold and the winning countries’ currencies, which were tied to gold. Still, between 1919 and 1922 several European countries, especially those that lost the war, were forced to print and devalue their currencies. The German mark and German mark debt sank between 1920 and 1923. Some of the winners of the war also had debts that had to be devalued to create a new start. With debt, domestic political, and international geopolitical restructurings done, the 1920s boomed, particularly in the US, inflating a debt bubble. The debt bubble burst in 1929, requiring central banks to print money and devalue it throughout the 1930s. More money printing and more money devaluations were required during World War II to fund military spending. In 1944–45, as the war ended, a new monetary system that linked the dollar to gold and other currencies to the dollar was created. The currencies and debts of Germany, Japan, and Italy, as well as those of China and a number of other countries, were quickly and totally destroyed, while those of most winners of the war were slowly but still substantially depreciated. This monetary system stayed in place until the late 1960s. In 1968–73 (most importantly in 1971), excessive spending and debt creation (especially by the US) required breaking the dollar’s link to gold because the claims on gold that were being turned in were far greater than the amount of gold available to redeem them. That led to a dollar-based fiat monetary system, which allowed the big increase in dollar-denominated money and credit that fueled the inflation of the 1970s and led to the debt crisis of the 1980s. Since 2000, the value of money has fallen in relation to the value of gold due to money and credit creation and because interest rates have been low in relation to inflation rates. Because the monetary system has been free-floating, it hasn’t experienced the abrupt breaks it did in the past; the devaluation has been more gradual and continuous. Low, and in some cases negative, interest rates have not provided compensation for the increasing amount of money and credit and the resulting (albeit low) inflation.

Certainty is eaten away by the thousand and one compromises that are the currency of democracy.

Don’t boast in cafes388 that American currency is the only real honest-to-God money in the world. It isn’t. Besides such bursts of financial patriotism are annoying to people who did not spend the years 1914 to 1916 accumulating world credit by selling munitions, cotton and wheat to other nations which were busy with a war. . . . Don’t confide to your fellow passengers on railway trains that America is the most generous of creditors because America has cancelled all that part of debts, which nobody can collect. Talk instead of our prowess in tennis, golf or Prohibition. It comes with better grace.

Currency wars begin in an atmosphere of insufficient internal growth. The country that starts down this road typically finds itself with high unemployment, low or declining growth, a weak banking sector and deteriorating public finances. In these circumstances it is difficult to generate growth through purely internal means and the promotion of exports through a devalued currency becomes the growth engine of last resort.

In an economy where individuals and businesses will not expand and where government spending is constrained, the only remaining way to grow the economy is to increase net exports (X − M) and the fastest, easiest way to do that is to cheapen one’s currency.

Well, this was the country that had seen its currency blown to smithereens. Lose a war that you started and the conditions imposed on your surrender could include reparations you were in no position to refuse, that would damn your population unto the seventh generation

Many Americans assume that part of maintaining quality of life in the country means that we should do whatever we can to maintain the status quo situation of the dollar as the world reserve currency. However, I view it differently. The status quo of the dollar’s hegemony has directly contributed to the domestic hollowing-out that we’ve experienced for decades — especially after the Cold War ended. The system that has been in place since the 1970s is antiquated monetary technology and is inherently unsustainable due to the accrued imbalances that it creates. Losing dollar hegemony at this point would harm special interests in the United States, would reduce the country’s imperial reach, and would require a shift of priorities, but ultimately it would lead toward a more natural and balanced global economy and provide the opportunity for U.S. domestic revitalization. The risk comes when we fail to recognize that and thus fail to make proactive changes from a position of strength. And so far, that’s the path we’ve chosen.

Less than a month after the fall of the wall, Mitterrand offered a deal to Helmut Kohl, the German chancellor. If Germany agreed to a common currency, France would support reunification. If Germany didn’t agree, France would oppose reunification—and the UK and the Soviet Union would go along with France, leaving Germany surrounded as it was before World War I. “We will return to the world of 1913,” Mitterrand told Kohl.

Aren’t fears of disappearing jobs something that people claim periodically, like with both the agricultural and industrial revolution, and it’s always wrong?” It’s true that agriculture went from 40 percent of the workforce in 1900 to 2 percent in 2017 and we nonetheless managed to both grow more food and create many wondrous new jobs during that time. It’s also true that service-sector jobs multiplied in many unforeseen ways and absorbed most of the workforce after the Industrial Revolution. People sounded the alarm of automation destroying jobs in the 19th century—the Luddites destroying textile mills in England being the most famous—as well as in the 1920s and the 1960s, and they’ve always been wildly off the mark. Betting against new jobs has been completely ill-founded at every point in the past. So why is this time different? Essentially, the technology in question is more diverse and being implemented more broadly over a larger number of economic sectors at a faster pace than during any previous time. The advent of big farms, tractors, factories, assembly lines, and personal computers, while each a very big deal for the labor market, were orders of magnitude less revolutionary than advancements like artificial intelligence, machine learning, self-driving vehicles, advanced robotics, smartphones, drones, 3D printing, virtual and augmented reality, the Internet of things, genomics, digital currencies, and nanotechnology. These changes affect a multitude of industries that each employ millions of people. The speed, breadth, impact, and nature of the changes are considerably more dramatic than anything that has come before.

That’s not a government, it’s a rugby scrum with a currency.

Peace. Warm yourself, warrior, while I tell you of peace. History is unerring, and even the least observant mortal can be made to understand, through innumerable repetition. Do you see peace as little more than the absence of war? Perhaps, on a surface level, it is just that. But let me describe the characteristics of peace, my young friend. A pervasive dulling of the senses, a decadence afflicting the culture, evinced by a growing obsession with low entertainment. The virtues of extremity — honour, loyalty, sacrifice — are lifted high as shoddy icons, currency for the cheapest of labours. The longer peace lasts, the more those words are used, and the weaker they become. Sentimentality pervades daily life. All becomes a mockery of itself, and the spirit grows… restless. Is this a singular pessimism? Allow me to continue with a description of what follows a period of peace. Old warriors sit in taverns, telling tales of vigorous youth, their pasts when all things were simpler, clearer cut. They are not blind to the decay all around them, are not immune to the loss of respect for themselves, for all that they gave for their king, their land, their fellow citizens. The young must not be abandoned to forgetfulness. There are always enemies beyond the borders, and if none exist in truth, then one must be fashioned. Old crimes dug out of the indifferent earth. Slights and open insults, or the rumours thereof. A suddenly perceived threat where none existed before. The reasons matter not — what matters is that war is fashioned from peace, and once the journey is begun, an irresistible momentum is born. The old warriors are satisfied. The young are on fire with zeal. The king fears yet is relieved of domestic pressures. the army draws its oil and whetstone. Forges blast with molten iron, the anvils ring like temple bells. Grain-sellers and armourers and clothiers and horse-sellers and countless other suppliers smile with the pleasure of impending wealth. A new energy has gripped the kingdom, and those few voices raised in objection are quickly silenced. Charges of treason and summary execution soon persuade the doubters. Peace, my young warrior, is born of relief, endured in exhaustion, and dies with false remembrance. False? Ah, perhaps I am too cynical. Too old, witness to far too much. Do honour, loyalty and sacrifice truly exist? Are such virtues born only from extremity? What transforms them into empty words, words devalued by their overuse? What are the rules of the economy of the spirit, that civilization repeatedly twists and mocks? Withal of the Third City. You have fought wars. You have forged weapons. You have seen loyalty, and honour. You have seen courage and sacrifice. What say you to all this?" "Nothing," Hacking laughter. "You fear angering me, yes? No need. I give you leave to speak your mind." "I have sat in my share of taverns, in the company of fellow veterans. A select company, perhaps, not grown so blind with sentimentality as to fashion nostalgia from times of horror and terror. Did we spin out those days of our youth? No. Did we speak of war? Not if we could avoid it, and we worked hard at avoiding it." "Why?" "Why? Because the faces come back. So young, one after another. A flash of life, an eternity of death, there in our minds. Because loyalty is not to be spoken of, and honour is to be endured. Whilst courage is to be survived. Those virtues, Chained One, belong to silence." "Indeed. Yet how they proliferate in peace! Crowed again and again, as if solemn pronouncement bestows those very qualities upon the speaker. Do they not make you wince, every time you hear them? Do they not twist in your gut, grip hard your throat? Do you not feel a building rage—" "Aye. When I hear them used to raise a people once more to war.

And as news and what was described as ‘mounting enemy propaganda about conditions in German concentration camps’ spread, Dönitz and Jodl were among those who saw the need of a public statement ‘that neither the German Wehrmacht nor the German people had knowledge of these things’.144 The myth of the ‘good’ Wehrmacht, which had such currency for decades in post-war Germany, was being forged.

The population was angered by the ever-present censorship, hunger was looming due to the economic blockade, and industries were suffering due to coal, iron, wool, cotton, and people shortages. The government printed currency to cover its massive losses, but this only made inflation rapidly rise. By 1918, the cost of living in Austria rose more than tenfold in just four years. Bread rations were introduced for both the army and the civilians, and the overall consumption of meat dropped to half of what it was before the war.

new currency to replace the bankrupt Reichsmark in February 1948 led the following month to a dramatic walkout by the Soviet delegation at the Allied Control Council, which had governed Germany since the end of the war. The Russians had intentionally debased and over-circulated the Reichsmark by excessive printing, deliberately reducing the German population to penury, until bartering with cigarettes and the black market underpinned their economy. The introduction by the West of the new Deutschmark in June subsequently brought the hostility of the negotiating table out into the open. On June 16, Colonel Yelizarkov, the deputy to the commander of the Soviet Sector, withdrew from the Four Power Kommandatura [the governing body of Berlin].

A hasty retreat from globalization would entail trade and currency wars, damaging every country’s economy, provoking social havoc and triggering ethno- or clan nationalism. The establishment of a much more inclusive and equitable form of globalization that makes it sustainable, both socially and environmentally, is the only viable way to manage retreat. This requires policy solutions addressed in the concluding chapter and some form of effective global governance. Progress is indeed possible in those global areas that have traditionally benefited from international cooperation, like environmental agreements, public health and tax havens.

Another subgroup was tackling government rules that prohibited pictures from using real money as props—putting currency on-screen was considered a form of counterfeit.