Reserves Money Quotes

It was true that I didn’t have much ambition, but there ought to be a place for people without ambition, I mean a better place than the one usually reserved. How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 6:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so?

If money is your hope for independence, you will never have it. The only real security that a man can have in this world is a reserve of knowledge, experience and ability.

It is no coincidence that the century of total war coincided with the century of central banking.

Justice is expensive. That is why there is so little of it, and it is reserved for those few with enough money and influence to afford it.

Most Americans have no real understanding of the operation of the international money lenders. The accounts of the Federal Reserve System have never been audited. It operates outside the control of Congress and manipulates the credit of the United States

I will feel no guilt on shutting my door to those who didn't listen.

Money is not an invention of the state. It is not the product of a legislative act. Even the sanction of political authority is not necessary for its existence. Certain commodities came to be money quite naturally, as the result of economic relationships that were independent of the power of the state.

All the same, I should like it all plain and clear," said he obstinately, putting on his business manner (usually reserved for people who tried to borrow money off him), and doing his best to appear wise and prudent and professional and live up to Gandalf's recommendation. "Also I should like to know about risks, out-of-pocket expenses, time required and remuneration, and so forth"--by which he meant: "What am I going to get out of it ? and am I going to come back alive?

I don't purchase people with money, or hiss like a snake to attract their attention, all i do is to rest on my couch because i have the conviction that no human can progress with an exception without a power behind.

According to the three missed calls from her mother—who thought Madison had been kidnapped in the big, bad city and was now being held for an ungodly sum of money—the four text messages from her brother wondering if she knew how to navigate the beltway—because apparently little sisters couldn’t drive—and the voice mail from her father warning there was a problem with the reservations, she was late for brunch.

I was reading in the paper today that Congress wants to replace the dollar bill with a coin. They’ve already done it. It’s called a nickel.

Payment and reserved copyright are at bottom the ruin of literature. Only he who writes entirely for the sake of what he has to say writes anything worth writing. It is as if there were a curse on money: every writer writes badly as soon as he starts writing for gain.

Though it has no intrinsic value – you cannot eat or drink a dollar bill – trust in the dollar and in the wisdom of the Federal Reserve is so firm that it is shared even by Islamic fundamentalists, Mexican drug lords and North Korean tyrants.

The financial system has been turned over to the Federal Reserve Board. That board administers the finance system by authority of a purely profiteering group. The system is private, conducted for the sole purpose of obtaining the greatest possible profits from the use of other people's money.

New Golden Rule of Fractional Reserve Banking: He who creates the "fool's gold" controls the fools.

A poor but confident man is as hard to find as a rich but shy man.

I TEND TO believe in government because it was the U.S. government that paid for my brain surgery when I was five months old and provided USDA food so I wouldn’t starve during my poverty-crushed reservation childhood and built the HUD house that kept us warm and gave me scholarship money for the college education that freed me. Of course, the government only gave me all of that good shit because they completely fucked over my great-grandparents and grandparents but, you know, at least some official white folks keep some of their promises.

I AM A CONSISTENT WINNER BECAUSE: 1. I objectively identify my edges. 2. I predefine the risk of every trade. 3. I completely accept the risk or I am willing to let go of the trade. 4. I act on my edges without reservation or hesitation. 5. I pay myself as the market makes money available to me. 6. I continually monitor my susceptibility for making errors. 7. I understand the absolute necessity of these principles of consistent success and, therefore, I never violate them.

If money is your hope for independence you will never have it. The only real security that a man will have in this world is a reserve of knowledge, experience, and ability.

If the American people ever allow the banks to control the issuance of their currency, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers occupied. The issuing power of money should be taken from the banks and restored to Congress and the people to whom it belongs. I sincerely believe the banking institutions are more dangerous to liberty than standing armies.(1)

Arriving on Bainbridge Island is the opposite of arriving in Seattle. When you got in your car and waited to unload off the ferry in Seattle, you saw the Space Needle, cars, and a mound of urban construction. Once you exit the ferry terminal on Bainbridge, however, it’s mostly trees. Pine as far as the eye can see. Well, pines, firework and coffee stands, and eventually a casino. You drive through the Port Madison Indian Reservation when you leave the island. I couldn’t help but smile as I went past the casino. I didn’t really get gambling, since I’d never had money to throw away, but as I passed through all the beautiful countryside that I’m sure once belonged to the tribe, I sort of hoped they would rob the white man blind. Perhaps not politically correct, but the feeling was there all the same.

The making of gardens and parks goes on with civilization all over the world, and they increase both in size and number as their value is recognized. Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where Nature may heal and cheer and give strength to body and soul alike. This natural beauty-hunger is made manifest in the little windowsill gardens of the poor, though perhaps only a geranium slip in a broken cup, as well as in the carefully tended rose and lily gardens of the rich, the thousands of spacious city parks and botanical gardens, and in our magnificent National Parks—the Yellowstone, Yosemite, Sequoia, etc.—Nature's sublime wonderlands, the admiration and joy of the world. Nevertheless, like anything else worth while, from the very beginning, however well guarded, they have always been subject to attack by despoiling gain-seekers and mischief-makers of every degree from Satan to Senators, eagerly trying to make everything immediately and selfishly commercial, with schemes disguised in smug-smiling philanthropy, industriously, sham-piously crying, "Conservation, conservation, panutilization," that man and beast may be fed and the dear Nation made great. Thus long ago a few enterprising merchants utilized the Jerusalem temple as a place of business instead of a place of prayer, changing money, buying and selling cattle and sheep and doves; and earlier still, the first forest reservation, including only one tree, was likewise despoiled. Ever since the establishment of the Yosemite National Park, strife has been going on around its borders and I suppose this will go on as part of the universal battle between right and wrong, however much of its boundaries may be shorn, or its wild beauty destroyed.

The liabilities of the bank thus became its deposits (on which it paid interest) plus its reserve (on which it could collect no interest); its assets became its loans (on which it could collect interest).

Whoever controls the volume of money in any country is absolute master of all industry and commerce.

Had Volcker never pushed through his radical change in policy, the world would be many bond traders and one memoir the poorer.

Justice is expensive,” Tharkay said. “That is why there is so little of it, and that reserved for those few with enough money and influence to afford it.

The Federal Reserve system is unlike any other in the world; it is a crazy genetic mashup of different animals, part private bank and part government agency.

If your expenditure brings you poverty, then you may call yourself a poor but the world will call you a fool.

The root problem with conventional currency is all the trust that’s required to make it work. The central bank must be trusted notto debase the currency, but the history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust. Banks must be trusted to hold our money and transfer it electronically, but they lend it out in waves of credit bubbles with barely a fraction in reserve.

Ray, people will come Ray. They'll come to Iowa for reasons they can't even fathom. They'll turn up your driveway not knowing for sure why they're doing it. They'll arrive at your door as innocent as children, longing for the past. Of course, we won't mind if you look around, you'll say. It's only $20 per person. They'll pass over the money without even thinking about it: for it is money they have and peace they lack. And they'll walk out to the bleachers; sit in shirtsleeves on a perfect afternoon. They'll find they have reserved seats somewhere along one of the baselines, where they sat when they were children and cheered their heroes. And they'll watch the game and it'll be as if they dipped themselves in magic waters. The memories will be so thick they'll have to brush them away from their faces. People will come Ray. The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It has been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game: it's a part of our past, Ray. It reminds of us of all that once was good and it could be again. Oh.. people will come Ray. People will most definitely come.

Another of them died last night. His body was in the bazaar this morning. It lay, with a collecting bowl at its feet, on the charpoy that is reserved for those who die without money or family to bury them. He looked desiccated and his skin had the sheen and color of the dates we eat to break our fast. There are new bodies on that charpoy every week.

Barney Frank wanted to know where the Fed was going to get the $85 billion to lend to AIG. I didn’t think this was the time to explain the mechanics of creating bank reserves. I said, “We have $800 billion,” referring to the pre-crisis size of the Fed’s balance sheet. Barney looked stunned. He didn’t see why the Fed should have that kind of money at its disposal.

Before Volcker’s speech, bonds had been conservative investments, into which investors put their savings when they didn’t fancy a gamble in the stock market. After Volcker’s speech, bonds became objects of speculation, a means of creating wealth rather than merely storing it.

The grandmothers decided on William’s eighth birthday that the time had come for the boy to learn the value of money. With this in mind, they allocated him one dollar a week as pocket money, but insisted that he keep an inventory accounting for every cent he spent. Grandmother Kane presented him with a green leather-bound ledger, at a cost of 95 cents, which she deducted from his first week’s allowance. From then on the grandmothers divided the dollar up every Saturday morning. William could invest 50 cents, spend 20 cents, give 10 cents to charity and keep 20 cents in reserve. At the end of each quarter they would inspect the ledger and his written report on any unusual transactions.

Not all journeys have destinations. Power is the ability to effect change, and people who create change ride that tide, with far-reaching effects. For some of us, that’s something we’re born into. Our fathers or mothers instill us with a hunger for it from a very early point in time. We’re raised on it, always striving to be the top, in academics, in sports, in our careers. Then we either run into a dead-end, or we face diminishing returns.” “Less and less results for the same amount of effort,” Grue said. “Others of us are born with nothing. It is hard to get something when you don’t have anything. You can’t make money until you have money. The same applies to contacts, to success, to status. It’s a chasm, and where you start is often very close to where you finish. The vast majority never even move from where they began. Of the few that do make it, many are so exhausted by the time they meet some success that they stop there. And others, a very small few, they make that drive for success, that need to climb becomes a part of themselves. They keep climbing, and when someone like Accord recognizes them and offers them another road to climb, they accept without reservation.

Almost every Fed chairman in the past 60 years has manipulated interest rates to brighten the economic outlook for incumbent presidents or newly elected presidents who won by large margins. The purchasing power of the U.S. dollar has fallen 94 percent in the past 100 years. The only way you can create inflation is by creating more money that is backed by the same reserve assets; the Fed is the only entity that can create more money. Ben Bernanke’s quantitative easing (QE) programs have pumped billions of unfunded dollars into the economy, thereby setting us up for massive inflation in the very near future. If this isn’t a form of financial terrorism, it is incompetence of the highest order.

By loaning banks money for no interest, you’re really letting them into the casinos with the house’s money, aren’t you?

This is called fractional-reserve banking, and it’s how the vast majority of money in the world is created.

Bitcoin is rapidly becoming the global reserve cryptocurrency just like the dollar is to fiat currency.

A fool and his money are soon parted but don't worry, The Fed always prints more.

College costs money- a lot. Yet education in itself is not of much value. For example, we can look to the general public's almost complete disregard for anything that educated people have to say about global warming, shrinking oil reserves, pollution, or the threat of nuclear annihilation. But if all this is true, why does something as worthless as a college diploma cost so much money?

Wealth is violent and uneasy to acquire, don't blow yourself by rushing. You won't find, you will only get lost on your way to find and you won't find it, Reserve yourself and wealth will find you.

People who will not turn a shovel full of dirt on the project nor contribute a pound of materials will collect more money...than will the people who will supply all the materials and do all the work.56

How about the Federal Reserve, then, which has convinced millions that the paper it prints “is” “real” “money”? Prank or fraud? Or perhaps some species of magick that only other sorcerers can understand?

Having a reserve currency is great while it lasts because it gives a country exceptional borrowing and spending power and significant power over who else in the world gets the money and credit needed to buy and sell internationally. However, having a reserve currency typically sows the seeds of a country ceasing to be a reserve currency country. That is because it allows the country to borrow more than it could otherwise afford to borrow, and the creation of lots of money and credit to service the debt debases the value of the currency and causes the loss of its status as a reserve currency. The loss of its reserve currency status is a terrible thing because having a reserve currency is one of the greatest powers a country can have because it gives the country enormous buying power and geopolitical power.

Writing for money and reservation of copyright are, at bottom, the ruin of literature. No one writes anything that is worth writing, unless he writes entirely for the sake of his subject. What in inestimable boon it would be, if in every branch of literature there were only a few books, but those excellent! This can never happen as long as money is to be made by writing. It seems as though the money lay under a curse; for every author degenerates as soon as he begins to put a pen to paper in any way for the sake of gain. The best works of the greatest men all come from the time when they had to write for nothing or for very little. And here, too, that Spanish proverb holds good, which declares that honour and money are not to be found in the same purse--honra y provecho no caben en un saco. The reason why Literature is in such a bad plight nowadays is simply and solely that people write books to make money. A man who is in want sits down and writes a book, and the public is stupid enough to buy it. The secondary effect of this is the ruin of language.

Urban landlords quickly realized that piles of money could be made by creating slums: “maximum profits came, not from providing first-class accommodations for those who could well afford them… but from crowded slum accommodations, for those whose pennies were scarcer than the rich man’s pounds.” Beginning in the sixteenth century, slum housing would be reserved not only for outcasts, beggars, and thieves but for a large segment of the population.

... nature has arranged that when you overcome a given inertia the resulting momentum is proportionate. If I were to begin borrowing money I would end by devising means of persuading the Secretary of the Treasury to lend me the gold reserve.

This book is an essay in what is derogatorily called "literary economics," as opposed to mathematical economics, econometrics, or (embracing them both) the "new economic history." A man does what he can, and in the more elegant - one is tempted to say "fancier" - techniques I am, as one who received his formation in the 1930s, untutored. A colleague has offered to provide a mathematical model to decorate the work. It might be useful to some readers, but not to me. Catastrophe mathematics, dealing with such events as falling off a height, is a new branch of the discipline, I am told, which has yet to demonstrate its rigor or usefulness. I had better wait. Econometricians among my friends tell me that rare events such as panics cannot be dealt with by the normal techniques of regression, but have to be introduced exogenously as "dummy variables." The real choice open to me was whether to follow relatively simple statistical procedures, with an abundance of charts and tables, or not. In the event, I decided against it. For those who yearn for numbers, standard series on bank reserves, foreign trade, commodity prices, money supply, security prices, rate of interest, and the like are fairly readily available in the historical statistics.

When the first of us failed at growing or herding or plowing the fields, we were told that we could sign a piece of paper and get money for the land, without anyone taking it. Mortgage, this was called, a piece of banker’s cleverness that sounded good to many. I spoke against this trick, but who listened to Nanapush? People signed the paper, got money, came home night after night full of whiskey and food. Suddenly the foreclosure notices were handed out and the land was barred. It belonged to someone else.

Shame Resilience 101 Here are the first three things that you need to know about shame: We all have it. Shame is universal and one of the most primitive human emotions that we experience. The only people who don’t experience shame lack the capacity for empathy and human connection. We’re all afraid to talk about shame. The less we talk about shame, the more control it has over our lives. Shame is basically the fear of being unlovable—it’s the total opposite of owning our story and feeling worthy. In fact, the definition of shame that I developed from my research is: Shame is the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging.1 Shame keeps worthiness away by convincing us that owning our stories will lead to people thinking less of us. Shame is all about fear. We’re afraid that people won’t like us if they know the truth about who we are, where we come from, what we believe, how much we’re struggling, or, believe it or not, how wonderful we are when soaring (sometimes it’s just as hard to own our strengths as our struggles). People often want to believe that shame is reserved for the folks who have survived terrible traumas, but this is not true. Shame is something we all experience. And while it feels as if shame hides in our darkest corners, it actually tends to lurk in all of the familiar places, including appearance and body image, family, parenting, money and work, health, addiction, sex, aging, and religion. To feel shame is to be human.

Some Cutting Advice by Stewart Stafford Before you pick up your knife, To run your enemy through, Know the entry wound bleeds red, And the exit thrust bleeds blue. Not because they are of noble birth, But they are protected by a mighty hand, Not just of those moneyed and influential, But the mightiest hands in all the land. So stab with caution, I urge you, For the blade jabs back in your gut, Swallow the bile that fuels you so, Lest it be your throat you cut. © Stewart Stafford, 2022. All rights reserved.

Not pursuing your “own pleasure” on the Sabbath requires self-discipline. You may have to deny yourself of something you might like. If you choose to delight yourself in the Lord, you will not permit yourself to treat it as any other day. Routine and recreational activities can be done some other time. Think of this: In paying tithing, we return one-tenth of our increase to the Lord. In keeping the Sabbath holy, we reserve one day in seven as His. So it is our privilege to consecrate both money and time to Him who lends us life each day.

he details a cost-analysis of the entire construction project. In order to make a little money, Thoreau cultivates a modest bean-field, a job that tends to occupy his mornings. He reserves his afternoons and evenings for reflection, reading, and walking about the countryside.

The true nature of the inflation effect has never been more accurately perceived or more vividly described than it was by Thomas Jefferson: It will be asked how will the two masses of Continental and of State money have cost the people of the United States seventy-two millions of dollars, when they are to be redeemed now with about six million? I answer that the difference, being sixty-six millions, has been lost on the paper bills separately by the successive holders of them. Every one, through whose hands a bill passed, lost on that bill what it lost in value during the time it was in his hands. This was a real tax on him; and in this way the people of the United States actually contributed those sixty-six millions of dollars during the war, and by a mode of taxation the most oppressive of all because the most unequal of all.

Sneaky and underhanded, the Federal Reserve has been sucking the life blood out of the United States since 1913. Like a black widow spider, it weaves a web of corruption and deceit. Unknown to its prey, the FED's bite is poisonous, deep, long-lasting and brings financial upheaval and misery to Americans.

The only way that the Treasury can redeem its debt to the Social Security Administration is to borrow the money from the public, run a surplus in its other activities or have the Federal Reserve print the money—the same alternatives that would be open to it to pay Social Security benefits if there were no trust fund.

Religionists from pulpits and evangelical TV stations announced that this [AIDS] was all God’s punishment for the perverted vice of homosexuality, quite failing to explain why this vengeful deity had no interest in visiting plagues and agonized death upon child rapists, torturers, murderers, those who beat up old women for their pension money (or indeed those cheating, thieving, adulterous and hypocritical clerics and preachers who pop up on the news from time to time weeping their repentance), reserving this uniquely foul pestilence only for men who choose to go to bed with each other and addicts careless in the use of their syringes. What a strange divinity. Later he was to take his pleasure, as he still does, on horrifying numbers of women and very young girls raped in sub-Saharan Africa while transmitting his avenging wrath on the unborn children in their wombs. I should be interested to hear from the religious zealots why he is doing this and what kind of a kick he gets out of it.

Remember, the economy wasn’t really global then, and it depended upon private money institutions called banks, gold reserves, and the value of physical money—actual coins and pieces of paper that were supposed to be worth something. It was all a consensual hallucination, of course, and in the 1930s, the hallucination turned nightmare.

[Hyperinflation is] not going to happen in this country, will never happen... [The Fed putting so much money into the system is] not going to create the risk of hyperinflation in the future. We have a strong independent Federal Reserve with a very strong mandate from the Congress, and they will do what's necessary to keep inflation low and stable over time.

What is the attraction of central bankers to issuing their own digital currencies? The answer lies in wider access to second-layer money. Recall that the Federal Reserve issues two types of money, wholesale reserves for private sector banks and retail cash for people. In order to provide monetary stimulus, the Fed issues reserves and hopes that private sector banks will use those reserves to circulate third-layer deposits into the economy by lending money. With a CBDC, the Fed could issue second-layer money directly to people in the form of digital helicopter money; the phrase “helicopter money” comes from Milton Friedman, who in 1969 provided the imagery of dropping cash out of a helicopter in order to stimulate economic demand.

Cixi’s lack of formal education was more than made up for by her intuitive intelligence, which she liked to use from her earliest years. In 1843, when she was seven, the empire had just finished its first war with the West, the Opium War, which had been started by Britain in reaction to Beijing clamping down on the illegal opium trade conducted by British merchants. China was defeated and had to pay a hefty indemnity. Desperate for funds, Emperor Daoguang (father of Cixi’s future husband) held back the traditional presents for his sons’ brides – gold necklaces with corals and pearls – and vetoed elaborate banquets for their weddings. New Year and birthday celebrations were scaled down, even cancelled, and minor royal concubines had to subsidise their reduced allowances by selling their embroidery on the market through eunuchs. The emperor himself even went on surprise raids of his concubines’ wardrobes, to check whether they were hiding extravagant clothes against his orders. As part of a determined drive to stamp out theft by officials, an investigation was conducted of the state coffer, which revealed that more “than nine million taels of silver had gone missing. Furious, the emperor ordered all the senior keepers and inspectors of the silver reserve for the previous forty-four years to pay fines to make up the loss – whether or not they were guilty. Cixi’s great-grandfather had served as one of the keepers and his share of the fine amounted to 43,200 taels – a colossal sum, next to which his official salary had been a pittance. As he had died a long time ago, his son, Cixi’s grandfather, was obliged to pay half the sum, even though he worked in the Ministry of Punishments and had nothing to do with the state coffer. After three years of futile struggle to raise money, he only managed to hand over 1,800 taels, and an edict signed by the emperor confined him to prison, only to be released if and when his son, Cixi’s father, delivered the balance. The life of the family was turned upside down. Cixi, then eleven years old, had to take in sewing jobs to earn extra money – which she would remember all her life and would later talk about to her ladies-in-waiting in the court. “As she was the eldest of two daughters and three sons, her father discussed the matter with her, and she rose to the occasion. Her ideas were carefully considered and practical: what possessions to sell, what valuables to pawn, whom to turn to for loans and how to approach them. Finally, the family raised 60 per cent of the sum, enough to get her grandfather out of prison. The young Cixi’s contribution to solving the crisis became a family legend, and her father paid her the ultimate compliment: ‘This daughter of mine is really more like a son!’ Treated like a son, Cixi was able to talk to her father about things that were normally closed areas for women. Inevitably their conversations touched on official business and state affairs, which helped form Cixi’s lifelong interest. Being consulted and having her views acted on, she acquired self-confidence and never accepted the com“common assumption that women’s brains were inferior to men’s. The crisis also helped shape her future method of rule. Having tasted the bitterness of arbitrary punishment, she would make an effort to be fair to her officials.

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

The “German problem” after 1970 became how to keep up with the Germans in terms of efficiency and productivity. One way, as above, was to serially devalue, but that was beginning to hurt. The other way was to tie your currency to the deutsche mark and thereby make your price and inflation rate the same as the Germans, which it turned out would also hurt, but in a different way. The problem with keeping up with the Germans is that German industrial exports have the lowest price elasticities in the world. In plain English, Germany makes really great stuff that everyone wants and will pay more for in comparison to all the alternatives. So when you tie your currency to the deutsche mark, you are making a one-way bet that your industry can be as competitive as the Germans in terms of quality and price. That would be difficult enough if the deutsche mark hadn’t been undervalued for most of the postwar period and both German labor costs and inflation rates were lower than average, but unfortunately for everyone else, they were. That gave the German economy the advantage in producing less-than-great stuff too, thereby undercutting competitors in products lower down, as well as higher up the value-added chain. Add to this contemporary German wages, which have seen real declines over the 2000s, and you have an economy that is extremely hard to keep up with. On the other side of this one-way bet were the financial markets. They looked at less dynamic economies, such as the United Kingdom and Italy, that were tying themselves to the deutsche mark and saw a way to make money. The only way to maintain a currency peg is to either defend it with foreign exchange reserves or deflate your wages and prices to accommodate it. To defend a peg you need lots of foreign currency so that when your currency loses value (as it will if you are trying to keep up with the Germans), you can sell your foreign currency reserves and buy back your own currency to maintain the desired rate. But if the markets can figure out how much foreign currency you have in reserve, they can bet against you, force a devaluation of your currency, and pocket the difference between the peg and the new market value in a short sale. George Soros (and a lot of other hedge funds) famously did this to the European Exchange Rate Mechanism in 1992, blowing the United Kingdom and Italy out of the system. Soros could do this because he knew that there was no way the United Kingdom or Italy could be as competitive as Germany without serious price deflation to increase cost competitiveness, and that there would be only so much deflation and unemployment these countries could take before they either ran out of foreign exchange reserves or lost the next election. Indeed, the European Exchange Rate Mechanism was sometimes referred to as the European “Eternal Recession Mechanism,” such was its deflationary impact. In short, attempts to maintain an anti-inflationary currency peg fail because they are not credible on the following point: you cannot run a gold standard (where the only way to adjust is through internal deflation) in a democracy.

But while it’s true that helping other people makes us happier, and that people feel a distinct “helper’s high,” it’s also true that when people are unhappy, they often find it tough to help others. If they did, they’d likely feel happier, but unhappy people often feel preoccupied with their own problems and don’t have the emotional reserves to turn outward. By contrast, happy people volunteer more, give away more money, and naturally take an interest in others.

La plus importante réforme monétaire que l’on puisse espérer serait l’abolition de toutes les banques centrales et un retour à une situation qu’ont vécu les humains de tous temps où l’argent est une commodité d’échange qui ne peut être produite qu’à un coût élevé, tel qu’en or ou en argent, par le marché. À nouveau, pas de monopole dans la production monétaire mais bien une compétition de cette production monétaire afin de ne pas pouvoir la créer à partir de rien.

The panic was blamed on many factors—tight money, Roosevelt’s Gridiron Club speech attacking the “malefactors of great wealth,” and excessive speculation in copper, mining, and railroad stocks. The immediate weakness arose from the recklessness of the trust companies. In the early 1900s, national and most state-chartered banks couldn’t take trust accounts (wills, estates, and so on) but directed customers to trusts. Traditionally, these had been synonymous with safe investment. By 1907, however, they had exploited enough legal loopholes to become highly speculative. To draw money for risky ventures, they paid exorbitant interest rates, and trust executives operated like stock market plungers. They loaned out so much against stocks and bonds that by October 1907 as much as half the bank loans in New York were backed by securities as collateral—an extremely shaky base for the system. The trusts also didn’t keep the high cash reserves of commercial banks and were vulnerable to sudden runs.

The Alchemy of Affection by Stewart Stafford The language of Aphrodite, Rendering words as liquid gold. To flood the heart's chambers, Setting them in gilded aurum bold. When this opulent heart beats, Minted blood in golden boughs flows, In possession of treasure most precious, Whose true worth none of us knows. Magnates and moguls may scheme to buy, The devotion that is never truly theirs, Count your kisses instead of fortunes, To bequeath to your loving, rightful heirs. © Stewart Stafford, 2022. All rights reserved.

The root problem with conventional currency is all the trust that’s required to make it work. The central bank must be trusted notto debase the currency, but the history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust. Banks must be trusted to hold our money and transfer it electronically, but they lend it out in waves of credit bubbles with barely a fraction in reserve. We have to trust them with our privacy, trust them not to let identity thieves drain our accounts. Their massive overhead costs make micropayments impossible.

These two flaws meant that the gold standard was always vulnerable to a run on gold in any country where circumstances might lead a large enough percentage of the population to demand redemption of their paper money in gold. The fatal flaw of the gold standard at the heart of these two problems was that settlement in physical gold is cumbersome, expensive, and insecure, which meant it had to rely on centralizing physical gold reserves in a few locations—banks and central banks—leaving them vulnerable to being taken over by governments.

The world did remain on a pseudo gold standard for decades; foreign governments could still trade dollars for gold (at a rate of $35 per ounce, as set by Roosevelt in 1934), but ordinary people could no longer do so. Finally, in 1971, the United States broke the link to gold entirely. It became the job of the Federal Reserve to manage the value of the dollar—not in terms of gold, but in terms of the stuff ordinary Americans buy. In other words, America (and every other country) finally started thinking of money the way Irving Fisher wanted us to.

Speculators, meanwhile, have seized control of the global economy and the levers of political power. They have weakened and emasculated governments to serve their lust for profit. They have turned the press into courtiers, corrupted the courts, and hollowed out public institutions, including universities. They peddle spurious ideologies—neoliberal economics and globalization—to justify their rapacious looting and greed. They create grotesque financial mechanisms, from usurious interest rates on loans to legalized accounting fraud, to plunge citizens into crippling forms of debt peonage. And they have been stealing staggering sums of public funds, such as the $65 billion of mortgage-backed securities and bonds, many of them toxic, that have been unloaded each month on the Federal Reserve in return for cash.21 They feed like parasites off of the state and the resources of the planet. Speculators at megabanks and investment firms such as Goldman Sachs are not, in a strict sense, capitalists. They do not make money from the means of production. Rather, they ignore or rewrite the law—ostensibly put in place to protect the weak from the powerful—to steal from everyone, including their own shareholders. They produce nothing. They make nothing. They only manipulate money. They are no different from the detested speculators who were hanged in the seventeenth century, when speculation was a capital offense. The obscenity of their wealth is matched by their utter lack of concern for the growing numbers of the destitute. In early 2014, the world’s 200 richest people made $13.9 billion, in one day, according to Bloomberg’s billionaires index.22 This hoarding of money by the elites, according to the ruling economic model, is supposed to make us all better off, but in fact the opposite happens when wealth is concentrated in the hands of a few individuals and corporations, as economist Thomas Piketty documents in his book Capital in the Twenty-First Century.23 The rest of us have little or no influence over how we are governed, and our wages stagnate or decline. Underemployment and unemployment become chronic. Social services, from welfare to Social Security, are slashed in the name of austerity. Government, in the hands of speculators, is a protection racket for corporations and a small group of oligarchs. And the longer we play by their rules the more impoverished and oppressed we become. Yet, like

We all know that 97% of the money in the world doesn't exist and that's thanks to Fractional Reserve Banking, or should I say fictional reserve banking." He grinned at his own joke, his smile partly hidden by his hair, "Money is no longer attached to the Gold Standard, therefore, it isn't based on anything. So when it says, 'I promise to pay the bearer on demand ten pounds,' I have to ask, ten pounds of what?" Silence. "The world is owned by the rich shareholder, the rich superstar, the rich industrialist, the rich aristocracy." He was now marching around the stage, "It doesn't matter who or what they are, if they're rich then they own a part of the world, but they only own it because they've got lots of money. Which means they own part of the 97% of the world’s fictional money, the pretend money that only exists on a computer." He stopped abruptly and stared out at the audience, "Which means that if they cashed in their fictional nonexistent money they'd get something like this ten pound note offering to pay the bearer the sum of ten pounds of nothing." He held the note aloft, "Which means the rich have managed to buy the entire world with paper nothing that has a value of nothing and we've let them do it.

I had no Inclination to be a Wife again, I had had such bad Luck with my first Husband, I hated the Thoughts of it; I found, that a Wife is with Indifference, a Mistress with a strong Passion; a Wife is look’d upon, as but an Upper-Servant, a Mistress is a Sovereign; a Wife must give up all she has; have every Reserve she makes for herself, be thought hard of, and be upbraided with her very Pin-Money; whereas a Mistress makes the Saying true, that what the man has, is hers, and what she has, is her own; the Wife bears a thousand Insults, and is forc’d to sit still and bear it, or part and be undone; a Mistress insulted, helps herself immediately, and takes another.

Then Alan looked thoughtful and seemed reluctant to speak, perhaps because he had just written the sequel to the Star Wars novelization that Lucas had sold to Ballantine Books, but in his reserved and gentlemanly fashion he told the audience of a day when he had seen a rough cut of the film and had remarked on just this scientific illiteracy to Lucas. He had even suggested a workable alternative. . .no, two workable alternatives. . .and Lucas had said words to the effect of (approximate quote), "There's a lot of money tied up in this film and people expect to hear a boom when something blows up, so I'll give them the boom." And at that moment, the cynicism showed through.

From a monetary competition perspective, keeping gold reserves is a perfectly rational decision. Keeping reserves in foreign governments' easy money only will cause the value of the country's currency to devalue along with the reserve currencies, while the seigniorage accrues to the issuer of the reserve currency, not the nation's central bank. Further, should central banks sell all their gold holdings (estimated at around 20% of global gold stockpiles), the most likely impact is that gold, being highly prized for its industrial and aesthetic uses, would be bought up very quickly with little depreciation of its price and the central banks would be left without any gold reserves.

What do I have to give to love, to feed it so that it grows lush and beautiful like you see in the movies? The happy ones, I mean.......I'm talking about the good love that some people get to have, the kind that nourishes the soul, helps it bloom in the springtime no matter how frigid the winter that precedes it. Everything I have broken or bent somehow, stained so bad that no amount of extra-strength detergent could rub it all out, no matter what the ad says. I have no money to offer to love, no wisdom or kindness. Inside me I have nothing but vast reserves of suspicion and heartache, a current that runs so deep and dark I feel its chill right to my core. And, as it turns out, this current never plays me false.

Since I’ve been home I’ve been trying hard to mend my relationship with my mother. Asking her to do things for me instead of brushing aside any offer of help, as I did for years out of anger. Letting her handle all the money I won. Returning her hugs instead of tolerating them. My time in the arena made me realize how I needed to stop punishing her for something she couldn’t help, specifically the crushing depression she fell into after my father’s death. Because sometimes things happen to people and they’re not equipped to deal with them. Like me, for instance. Right now. Besides, there’s one wonderful thing she did when I arrived back in the district. After our families and friends had greeted Peeta and me at the train station, there were a few questions allowed from reporters. Someone asked my mother what she thought of my new boyfriend, and she replied that, while Peeta was the very model of what a young man should be, I wasn’t old enough to have any boyfriend at all. She followed this with a pointed look at Peeta. There was a lot of laughter and comments like “Somebody’s in trouble” from the press, and Peeta dropped my hand and sidestepped away from me. That didn’t last long — there was too much pressure to act otherwise — but it gave us an excuse to be a little more reserved than we’d been in the Capitol. And maybe it can help account for how little I’ve been seen in Peeta’s company since the cameras left. I go upstairs to the bathroom, where a steaming tub awaits. My mother has added a small bag of dried flowers that perfumes

Though all the brilliant intellects of the ages were to concentrate upon this one theme, never could they adequately express their wonder at this dense darkness of the human mind. Men do not suffer anyone to seize their estates, and they rush to stones and arms if there is even the slightest dispute about the limit of their lands, yet they allow others to trespass upon their life—nay, they themselves even lead in those who will eventually possess it. No one is to be found who is willing to distribute his money, yet among how many does each one of us distribute his life! In guarding their fortune men are often closefisted, yet, when it comes to the matter of wasting time, in the case of the one thing in which it is right to be miserly, they show themselves most prodigal. And so I should like to lay hold upon someone from the company of older men and say: "I see that you have reached the farthest limit of human life, you are pressing hard upon your hundredth year, or are even beyond it; come now, recall your life and make a reckoning. Consider how much of your time was taken up with a moneylender, how much with a mistress, how much with a patron, how much with a client, how much in wrangling with your wife, how much in punishing your slaves, how much in rushing about the city on social duties. Add the diseases which we have caused by our own acts, add, too, the time that has lain idle and unused; you will see that you have fewer years to your credit than you count. Look back in memory and consider when you ever had a fixed plan, how few days have passed as you had intended, when you were ever at your own disposal, when your face ever wore its natural expression, when your mind was ever unperturbed, what work you have achieved in so long a life, how many have robbed you of life when you were not aware of what you were losing, how much was taken up in useless sorrow, in foolish joy, in greedy desire, in the allurements of society, how little of yourself was left to you; you will perceive that you are dying before your season!"7 What, then, is the reason of this? You live as if you were destined to live forever, no thought of your frailty ever enters your head, of how much time has already gone by you take no heed. You squander time as if you drew from a full and abundant supply, though all the while that day which you bestow on some person or thing is perhaps your last. You have all the fears of mortals and all the desires of immortals. You will hear many men saying: "After my fiftieth year I shall retire into leisure, my sixtieth year shall release me from public duties." And what guarantee, pray, have you that your life will last longer? Who will suffer your course to be just as you plan it? Are you not ashamed to reserve for yourself only the remnant of life, and to set apart for wisdom only that time which cannot be devoted to any business? How late it is to begin to live just when we must cease to live! What foolish forgetfulness of mortality to postpone wholesome plans to the fiftieth and sixtieth year, and to intend to begin life at a point to which few have attained!

Primer of Love [Lesson 47] And Aaron shall lay both his hands upon the head of the live goat, and confess over him all the sins of the children of Israel, putting them upon the head of the goat. ~ Leviticus 16:3-30 Kowal zawini, cygana powiesili. The blacksmith was guilty, but they hung the gypsy. ~ Polish Proverb Lesson 47) Sometimes to save a relationship you need a scapegoat Not an innocent scapegoat ~ that's fair game for the media wolves. The scapegoat for the common man is the government. Don't like the economy ~ blame it on Obama.Don't like your job ~ blame it on your boss. Not enough money for Christmas gifts -- it's Ben Bernanke and the Federal Reserve's fault. If he loves hummus -- it's Hillary Clinton's Mideast policy. If she's contracted genital warts -- it's Bill Clinton's fault. It really is.

But it must be observed that as the depreciation of money proceeds, the demand for money (i.e. for the kind of money in question) gradually begins to fall. When loss of wealth is suffered in proportion to the length of time money is kept on hand, endeavours are made to reduce cash holdings as much as possible. N ow if every individual, even if his circumstances are otherwise unchanged, no longer wishes to maintain his cash holding at the same level as before the beginning of the inflation, the demand for money in the whole community, which can only be the sum of the individuals' demands, decreases too. There is also the additional fact that as commerce gradually-begins to use foreign money and actual gold in place of notes, individuals begin to hold part of their reserves in foreign money and in gold and no longer in notes.

You may be thinking, Why don’t you call a bank? Don’t they loan money to businesses all the time? Yes, they do. But not after they’ve heard a story like mine, in which a long-established but barely profitable company enters a downward spiral. Banks want one thing: their money back, with interest. They only want to do business with a company that has a good plan to pay them back, and plenty of collateral available if that plan doesn’t work out. They aren’t interested in propping up a company that’s in trouble. And clearly I’m in trouble. Everything is wrong here—the fact that I’ve survived for many years without building up a healthy cash reserve indicates bad management, and our disappearing sales indicate incompetent marketing. Showing up, hat in hand, at a bank, when I may be out of business in a few weeks, would show a serious lack of judgment on my part.

Once the habit is ingrained and you become the starter, the center of the circle, you will find more and more things to notice, to instigate, and to initiate. Momentum builds and you get better at generating it. If you go to bed at night knowing that people are expecting you to initiate things all day the next day, you’ll wake up with a list. And as you create a culture of people who are always seeking to connect and improve and poke, the bar gets raised. What might be considered a board-level decision at one of your competitors’ companies gets done as a matter of course. What might be reserved for a manager’s intervention gets handled at the customer level, saving you time and money (and generating customer joy). This incredibly prosaic idea, the very simple act of initiating, is actually profoundly transformative. Forward motion is a defensible business asset.

In the 1980s, psychologists Susan Fiske and Shelly Taylor were looking for a way to describe what research was showing to be a ubiquitous tendency among humans: to think only as much as they feel they need to, and no more. And so the metaphor of the cognitive miser was born, with each of us an Ebenezer Scrooge—except instead of sitting on piles of money and refusing to pay for an extra lump of coal to keep the house warm, we sit on reserves of mental energy and processing capacity, unwilling to spend much of it unless we really have to. We rely on simple, efficient thought processes to get the job done—not so much out of laziness (though there is some of that, too), but out of necessity. There is just too much going on, too much to notice, understand, and act on, for us to give every individual and every occurrence our undivided, unbiased attention. So not only are you innately hard to understand, but the people observing you are hoarding their attention.

These crises are really a form of domestic default that governments employ in countries where financial repression is a major form of taxation. Under financial repression, banks are vehicles that allow governments to squeeze more indirect tax revenue from citizens by monopolizing the entire savings and payments system, not simply currency. Governments force local residents to save in banks by giving them few, if any, other options. They then stuff debt into the banks via reserve requirements and other devices. This allows the government to finance a part of its debt at a very low interest rate; financial repression thus constitutes a form of taxation. Citizens put money into banks because there are few other safe places for their savings. Governments, in turn, pass regulations and restrictions to force the banks to relend the money to fund public debt. Of course, in cases in which the banks are run by the government, the central government simply directs the banks to make loans to it.

Oh, it's a good story, as a story,' returned that gentleman; 'as good a thing of its kind as need be. This Mr Dorrit (his name is Dorrit) had incurred a responsibility to us, ages before the fairy came out of the Bank and gave him his fortune, under a bond he had signed for the performance of a contract which was not at all performed. He was a partner in a house in some large way—spirits, or buttons, or wine, or blacking, or oatmeal, or woollen, or pork, or hooks and eyes, or iron, or treacle, or shoes, or something or other that was wanted for troops, or seamen, or somebody—and the house burst, and we being among the creditors, detainees were lodged on the part of the Crown in a scientific manner, and all the rest Of it. When the fairy had appeared and he wanted to pay us off, Egad we had got into such an exemplary state of checking and counter-checking, signing and counter-signing, that it was six months before we knew how to take the money, or how to give a receipt for it. It was a triumph of public business,' said this handsome young Barnacle, laughing heartily, 'You never saw such a lot of forms in your life. "Why," the attorney said to me one day, "if I wanted this office to give me two or three thousand pounds instead of take it, I couldn't have more trouble about it." "You are right, old fellow," I told him, "and in future you'll know that we have something to do here."' The pleasant young Barnacle finished by once more laughing heartily. He was a very easy, pleasant fellow indeed, and his manners were exceedingly winning. Mr Tite Barnacle's view of the business was of a less airy character. He took it ill that Mr Dorrit had troubled the Department by wanting to pay the money, and considered it a grossly informal thing to do after so many years. But Mr Tite Barnacle was a buttoned-up man, and consequently a weighty one. All buttoned-up men are weighty. All buttoned-up men are believed in. Whether or no the reserved and never-exercised power of unbuttoning, fascinates mankind;

Belinda was able to carry the most complicated orders for six or seven tables in her head without ever forgetting an item. She also knew instinctively what her customers would order before they did. Her predictions became something of a parlor trick for a while, in fact. Beyond such obvious attributes, however, Belinda was able to morph both her personality and her looks to suit whoever she was waiting on. For example, I'd watch her waiting on a group of young women and she'd appear reserved and fresh faced. Her conversation with them would be friendly but impersonal, never threatening. For couples, she'd become sophisticated, knowledgeable, and attractive. When waiting on men, she became girlishly flirtatious and subtly sexy. Were it not for her obvious sincerity at the table, Belinda would have merely been a good actress. But I don't believe that Belinda herself was aware of her transformations, and that detachment was part of the reason she made more money and received more compliments on her service than any of her coworkers.

MYTH: Car payments are a way of life; you’ll always have one. TRUTH: Staying away from car payments by driving reliable used cars is what the average millionaire does; that is how he or she became a millionaire. Taking on a car payment is one of the dumbest things people do to destroy their chances of building wealth. The car payment is most folks’ largest payment except for their home mortgage, so it steals more money from the income than virtually anything else. The Federal Reserve notes that the average car payment is $495 over sixty-four months. Most people get a car payment and keep it throughout their lives. As soon as a car is paid off, they get another payment because they “need” a new car. If you keep a $495 car payment throughout your life, which is “normal,” you miss the opportunity to save that money. If you invested $495 per month from age twenty-five to age sixty-five, a normal working lifetime, in the average mutual fund averaging 12 percent (the eighty-year stock market average), you would have $5,881,799.14 at age sixty-five. Hope you like the car!

game hunting was flourishing; and, dining at Muthaiga Club, I was offered trout freshly caught in the mountains, together with some last bottles of a particularly fragrant Rhine wine. Not since that last bright summer in Paris in 1939, when the wealthy of the world came flocking to spend their money lest they should not visit Paris again, had I seen women so well groomed, wearing so many lush furs. Baboon pelts and leopard skins were particularly popular. Great log fires burned in the grates of the club chimney places, though the nights were scarcely sharp. The men wore dinner-jackets or dress uniform. The conversation tended to hunting. In the day one had golf at Brackenridge, or swimming or riding or fooling round the game reserves where giraffe still roam haphazardly. Normally one looked in at a roadhouse for an apéritif around eight in the evening, and after dinner perhaps went down to Torr’s to dance. They say the altitude at Nairobi makes people slightly crazy, but after the desert I found it all delightful, as though the world were enjoying one long holiday. As

The sums of money collected in hoards lie there idle, waiting for the moment when commerce needs them for maintaining the stability of the objective exchange-value of money; and all those sums of money, that might threaten this stability when the demand for money decreases, flow back out of circulation into these hoards to slumber quietly until they are called forth again. This tacitly assumes ll the fundamental correctness of the arguments of the Quantity Theory, but asserts that there is nevertheless a principle inherent in the economic system that always prevents the working out of the processes that the Quantity Theory describes. In the first place, it must be recognized that from the economic point of view there is no such thing as money lying idle. All money, whether in reserves or literally in circulation (i.e. in process of changing hands at the very moment under consideration), is devoted in exactly the same way to the performance of a monetary function. The stock of money of the community is the sum of the stocks of individuals; there is no such thing as errant money.

Consistently and uninterruptedly continued inflation must eventually lead to collapse. The purchasing power of money will fall lower and lower, until it eventually disappears altogether. It is true that an endless process of depredation can be imagined. We can imagine the purchasing power of money getting continually lower without ever disappearing altogether, and prices getting continually higher without it ever becoming impossible to obtain commodities in exchange for notes. Eventually this would lead to a situation in which even retail transactions were in terms of millions and billions and even higher figures; bu t the monetary system itself would remain. But such an imaginary state of affairs is hardly within the bounds of possibility. In the long run, a money which continually fell in value would have no commercial utility. It could not be used as a standard of deferred payments. For all transactions in which commodities or services were not exchanged for cash, another medium would have to be sought. In fact, a money that is continually depreciating becomes useless even for cash transactions. Everybody attempts to minimize his cash reserves, which are a source of continual loss.

I know I said this before, but it bears repeating. You know Tate won’t like you staying with me.” “I don’t care,” she said bitterly. “I don’t tell him where to sleep. It’s none of his business what I do anymore.” He made a rough sound. “Would you like to guess what he’s going to assume if you stay the night in my apartment?” She drew in a long breath. “Okay. I don’t want to cause problems between you, not after all the years you’ve been friends. Take me to a hotel instead.” He hesitated uncharacteristically. “I can take the heat, if you can.” “I don’t know that I can. I’ve got enough turmoil in my life right now. Besides, he’ll look for me at your place. I don’t want to be found for a couple of days, until I can get used to my new situation and make some decisions about my future. I want to see Senator Holden and find another apartment. I can do all that from a hotel.” “Suit yourself.” “Make it a moderately priced one,” she added with graveyard humor. “I’m no longer a woman of means. From now on, I’m going to have to be responsible for my own bills.” “You should have poured the soup in the right lap,” he murmured. “Which was?” “Audrey Gannon’s,” he said curtly. “She had no right to tell you that Tate was your benefactor. She did it for pure spite, to drive a wedge between you and Tate. She’s nothing but trouble. One day Tate is going to be sorry that he ever met her.” “She’s lasted longer than the others.” “You haven’t spent enough time talking to her to know what she’ s like. I have,” he added darkly. “She has enemies, among them an ex-husband who’s living in a duplex because she got his house, his Mercedes, and his Swiss bank account in the divorce settlement.” “So that’s where all those pretty diamonds came from,” she said wickedly. “Her parents had money, too, but they spent most of it before they died in a plane crash. She likes unusual men, they say, and Tate’s unusual.” “She won’t go to the reservation to see Leta,” she commented. “Of course not.” He leaned toward her as he stopped at a traffic light. “It’s a Native American reservation!” She stuck her tongue out at him. “Leta’s worth two of Audrey.” “Three,” he returned. “Okay. I’ll find you a hotel. Then I’m leaving town before Tate comes looking for me!” “You might hang a crab on your front door,” she said, tongue-in-cheek. “It just might ward him off.” “Ha!” She turned her eyes toward the bright lights of the city. She felt cold and alone and a little frightened. But everything would work out. She knew it would. She was a grown woman and she could take care of herself. This was her chance to prove it.

Let us assume that a man gets half his income in the form of interest-bearing securities and half in the form of money; and that he is in the habit of saving three-quarters of his income, and does this by retaining the securities and using that half of his income which he receives in cash in equal parts for paying for current consumption and for the purchase of further securities. Now let us assume that a variation in the composition of his income occurs, so that he receives three-quarters of it in cash and only one-quarter in securities. From now on this man will use two-thirds of his cash receipts for the purchase of interest-bearing securities. If the price of the securities rises or, which is the same thing, if their rate of interest falls, then in either case he will be less willing to buy and will reduce the sum of money that he would otherwise have employed for their purchase; he is likely to find that the advantage of a slightly increased reserve exceeds that which could be obtained from the acquisition of the securities. In the second case he will doubtless be inclined to pay a higher price, or more correctly, to purchase a greater quantity at the higher price, than in the first case. But he will certainly not be prepared to pay double as much for a unit of securities in the second case as in the first case.

Mollie’s brother-in-law, Bill Smith, was one of the first to wonder if there was something curious about Lizzie’s death, coming so soon after the murders of Anna and Whitehorn. A bruising bulldog of a man, Bill had also expressed deep frustration over the authorities’ investigation, and he had begun looking into the matter himself. Like Mollie, he was struck by the peculiar vagueness of Lizzie’s sickness; no doctor had ever pinpointed what was causing it. Indeed, no one had uncovered any natural cause for her death. The more Bill delved, conferring with doctors and local investigators, the more he was certain that Lizzie had died of something dreadfully unnatural: she’d been poisoned. And Bill was sure that all three deaths were connected—somehow—to the Osage’s subterranean reservoir of black gold. 4  UNDERGROUND RESERVATION The money had come suddenly, swiftly, madly. Mollie had been ten years old when the oil was first discovered, had witnessed, firsthand, the ensuing frenzy. But, as the elders in the tribe had relayed to Mollie, the tangled history of how their people had gotten hold of this oil-rich land went back to the seventeenth century, when the Osage had laid claim to much of the central part of the country—a territory that stretched from what is now Missouri and Kansas to Oklahoma, and still farther west, all the way to the Rockies. In

Why Did the Stock Market Crash? The most persuasive explanation for the 1929 stock market crash blames the Federal Reserve. Throughout the 1920s, but particularly in 1927, the Fed pumped artificial credit into the loan market, pushing down interest rates from their free-market level. Lower interest rates exaggerated the feeling of prosperity, and misled businesses and investors. In a laissez-faire market where money and banking are not disturbed by the government, the interest rate is a price that tells borrowers how much capital citizens have saved and made available to fund projects. But when the Fed adopts an “easy-money” policy by pushing down interest rates, this signal is distorted and the interest rate no longer does its job of channeling the available capital into the most deserving projects. Instead, an unsustainable boom develops, with firms hiring workers and starting production processes that will have to be discontinued once the Fed slows down its injections of new money. Many economists point to the Fed hikes in interest rates during 1928 and 1929 as the cause of the stock market crash. In a sense this is true, but the deeper point is that the crash was made inevitable by the bubble in the stock market fueled by the artificially cheap credit preceding the hikes. In other words, when the Fed stopped pumping in gobs of new money that pushed up the stock market, investors came to their senses and asset prices plunged back towards their pre-bubble level.

But there was a lacuna in Nehru’s concept of science: he saw it exclusively in terms of laboratory science, not field science; physics and molecular biology, not ecology, botany, or agronomy. He understood that India’s farmers were poor in part because they were unproductive—they harvested much less grain per acre than farmers elsewhere in the world. But unlike Borlaug, Nehru and his ministers believed that the poor harvests were due not to lack of technology—artificial fertilizer, irrigated water, and high-yield seeds—but to social factors like inefficient management, misallocation of land, lack of education, rigid application of the caste system, and financial speculation (large property owners were supposedly hoarding their wheat and rice until they could get better prices). This was not crazy: more than one out of five families in rural India owned no land at all, and about two out of five owned less than 2.5 acres, not enough land to feed themselves. Meanwhile, a tiny proportion of absentee landowners controlled huge swathes of terrain. The solution to rural poverty, Nehru therefore believed, was less new technology than new policies: give land from big landowners to ordinary farmers, free the latter from the burdens of caste, and then gather the liberated smallholders into more-efficient, technician-advised cooperatives. This set of ideas had the side benefit of fitting nicely into Nehru’s industrial policy: enacting them would cost next to nothing, reserving more money for building factories.

Jamie used the time away from me to do some soul-searching. She finally also did something she’d thought about for a long time. She walked into an Army recruitment office in Nashville and joined the military. She didn’t discuss it with me beforehand. Instead she called and said, “I’m joining the Army. It’s active duty and I’m going to be a truck driver with an airborne contract.” Shocked, I blurted out, “You’re going to do what? No you’re not.” “What do you mean? I’m gonna be a truck driver in a convoy.” I knew she was referring to a seventies country song she likes. Only this wasn’t a country song, this was real life. “Are you crazy? This is not a game. You will hate being a truck driver. You don’t even know if you’ll like being in the military. Go National Guard or Reserves and see if you like it.” “They said I’m already in. Basic is not for another few months but I’m in and I can’t change it.” “Yes you can. You are not in yet. You are not in the military. That was just a recruiter telling you that. Why aren’t you going in as an officer? You have a degree. You can make more money.” She seemed annoyed that I was raining on her parade, but I think it was also dawning on her that maybe I was right and she hadn’t done the research. “They told me that it’s not really that much more.” I explained to her, “They are lying to you. It is a lot more.” I had no problem with her joining the military. If that’s what she wanted to do, I supported it. But I was going to make sure she made the smartest moves she could make if that was in fact what she wanted to do with her life. I certainly wasn’t going to let her be talked into a lower-paid, higher-risk job.

Here he was in the old dilemma. How often before now had he halted on the threshold of Catholicism, sounding himself thoroughly and finding always that he had no faith. Decidedly there had been no effort on the part of God to reclaim him, and he himself had never possessed the kind of will that permits one to let oneself go, trustingly, without reserve, into the sheltering shadows of immutable dogma. Momentarily at times when, after reading certain books, his disgust for everyday life was accentuated, he longed for lenitive hours in a cloister, where the monotonous chant of prayers in an incense-laden atmosphere would bring on a somnolence, a dreamy rapture of mystical ideas. But only a simple soul, on which life's wear and tear had left no mark, was capable of savouring the delights of such a self-abandon, and his own soul was battered and torn with earthly conflict. He must admit that the momentary desire to believe, to take refuge in the timeless, proceeded from a multitude of ignoble motives: from lassitude with the petty and repeated annoyances of existence, quarrels with the laundress, with the waiter, with the landlord; the sordid scramble for money; in a word, from the general spiritual failure of a man approaching forty. He thought of escaping into a monastery somewhat as street girls think of going into a house where they will be free from the dangers of the chase, from worry about food and lodging, and where they will not have to do their own washing and ironing. Unmarried, without settled income, the voice of carnality now practically stilled in him, he sometimes cursed the existence he had shaped for himself. At times, weary of attempting to coerce words to do his bidding, he threw down his pen and looked into the future. He could see nothing ahead of him but bitterness and cause for alarm, and, seeking consolation, he was forced to admit that only religion could heal, but religion demanded in return so arrant a desertion of common sense, so pusillanimous a willingness to be astonished at nothing, that he threw up his hands and begged off.

Another obstacle was the stubbornness of the countries the pipeline had to cross, particularly Syria, all of which were demanding what seemed to be exorbitant transit fees. It was also the time when the partition of Palestine and the establishment of the state of Israel were aggravating American relations with the Arab countries. But the emergence of a Jewish state, along with the American recognition that followed, threatened more than transit rights for the pipeline. Ibn Saud was as outspoken and adamant against Zionism and Israel as any Arab leader. He said that Jews had been the enemies of Arabs since the seventh century. American support of a Jewish state, he told Truman, would be a death blow to American interests in the Arab world, and should a Jewish state come into existence, the Arabs “will lay siege to it until it dies of famine.” When Ibn Saud paid a visit to Aramco’s Dhahran headquarters in 1947, he praised the oranges he was served but then pointedly asked if they were from Palestine—that is, from a Jewish kibbutz. He was reassured; the oranges were from California. In his opposition to a Jewish state, Ibn Saud held what a British official called a “trump card”: He could punish the United States by canceling the Aramco concession. That possibility greatly alarmed not only the interested companies, but also, of course, the U.S. State and Defense departments. Yet the creation of Israel had its own momentum. In 1947, the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine recommended the partition of Palestine, which was accepted by the General Assembly and by the Jewish Agency, but rejected by the Arabs. An Arab “Liberation Army” seized the Galilee and attacked the Jewish section of Jerusalem. Violence gripped Palestine. In 1948, Britain, at wit’s end, gave up its mandate and withdrew its Army and administration, plunging Palestine into anarchy. On May 14, 1948, the Jewish National Council proclaimed the state of Israel. It was recognized almost instantly by the Soviet Union, followed quickly by the United States. The Arab League launched a full-scale attack. The first Arab-Israeli war had begun. A few days after Israel’s proclamation of statehood, James Terry Duce of Aramco passed word to Secretary of State Marshall that Ibn Saud had indicated that “he may be compelled, in certain circumstances, to apply sanctions against the American oil concessions… not because of his desire to do so but because the pressure upon him of Arab public opinion was so great that he could no longer resist it.” A hurriedly done State Department study, however, found that, despite the large reserves, the Middle East, excluding Iran, provided only 6 percent of free world oil supplies and that such a cut in consumption of that oil “could be achieved without substantial hardship to any group of consumers.

If the claims of the papacy cannot be proven from what we know of the historical Peter, there are, on the other hand, several undoubted facts in the real history of Peter which bear heavily upon those claims, namely: 1. That Peter was married, Matt. 8:14, took his wife with him on his missionary tours, 1 Cor. 9:5, and, according to a possible interpretation of the "coëlect" (sister), mentions her in 1 Pet. 5:13. Patristic tradition ascribes to him children, or at least a daughter (Petronilla). His wife is said to have suffered martyrdom in Rome before him. What right have the popes, in view of this example, to forbid clerical marriage?  We pass by the equally striking contrast between the poverty of Peter, who had no silver nor gold (Acts 3:6) and the gorgeous display of the triple-crowned papacy in the middle ages and down to the recent collapse of the temporal power. 2. That in the Council at Jerusalem (Acts 15:1–11), Peter appears simply as the first speaker and debater, not as president and judge (James presided), and assumes no special prerogative, least of all an infallibility of judgment. According to the Vatican theory the whole question of circumcision ought to have been submitted to Peter rather than to a Council, and the decision ought to have gone out from him rather than from "the apostles and elders, brethren" (or "the elder brethren," 15:23). 3. That Peter was openly rebuked for inconsistency by a younger apostle at Antioch (Gal. 2:11–14). Peter’s conduct on that occasion is irreconcilable with his infallibility as to discipline; Paul’s conduct is irreconcilable with Peter’s alleged supremacy; and the whole scene, though perfectly plain, is so inconvenient to Roman and Romanizing views, that it has been variously distorted by patristic and Jesuit commentators, even into a theatrical farce gotten up by the apostles for the more effectual refutation of the Judaizers! 4. That, while the greatest of popes, from Leo I. down to Leo XIII. never cease to speak of their authority over all the bishops and all the churches, Peter, in his speeches in the Acts, never does so. And his Epistles, far from assuming any superiority over his "fellow-elders" and over "the clergy" (by which he means the Christian people), breathe the spirit of the sincerest humility and contain a prophetic warning against the besetting sins of the papacy, filthy avarice and lordly ambition (1 Pet. 5:1–3). Love of money and love of power are twin-sisters, and either of them is "a root of all evil." It is certainly very significant that the weaknesses even more than the virtues of the natural Peter—his boldness and presumption, his dread of the cross, his love for secular glory, his carnal zeal, his use of the sword, his sleepiness in Gethsemane—are faithfully reproduced in the history of the papacy; while the addresses and epistles of the converted and inspired Peter contain the most emphatic protest against the hierarchical pretensions and worldly vices of the papacy, and enjoin truly evangelical principles—the general priesthood and royalty of believers, apostolic poverty before the rich temple, obedience to God rather than man, yet with proper regard for the civil authorities, honorable marriage, condemnation of mental reservation in Ananias and Sapphira, and of simony in Simon Magus, liberal appreciation of heathen piety in Cornelius, opposition to the yoke of legal bondage, salvation in no other name but that of Jesus Christ.