Why the Gold Standard is bad: a thread by Luciano Barra Caracciolo

31 March 20222 years ago babelfish

In Italy there are few educated and lucid minds like Luciano Barra Caracciolo . Why go crazy writing about the dangers of the Gold Standard, when he has already said it all …

Here is the original article on the desire to find a better "Reserve Currency" for the West, perhaps linked to Gold:

https://goldswitzerland.com/how-the-west-was-lost-declining-world-reserve-currency/

Here are the comments of Luciano Barra Caracciolo:

1 I nteresting revanchism of the gold standard: forgetting that, every time that, within the gold standard, the Western powers have become external debtors, FIRST the gunboats started (with the result of resentments that are still very strong today); then they found themselves with a social policy (protective of the income of the financial oligopolies) of police super-repression, to quell the revolt of workers reduced to below the subsistence level.

And the beauty is that the article recalls the knowledge of history implying a perfect world in which the gold standard guaranteed an ideal society.
But ideal for whom? It is enough to re-read Eichengreen and, even better, Polanyi, to understand how liberalism based on the gold standard has led to two world wars with the Bolshevik revolution in between, but, above all, the promotion of Nazi-fascism as an instrument for the preservation of the international order of market (commodity-money and commodity-work), once the liberal police repression system had lost its effectiveness, precisely because of the legal structuring of the trade union organization, the consequent universal suffrage and, decisively, the general mobilization of the same masses of workers for World War I. Factors which, together, yielded to the oligopolies & monopolies, and to the their financiers (large Anglo-Saxon banks of the colonial globalization phase), extremely difficult to grab the rents for war orders and for the reparations imposed on the losing empires (in "gold").

A short circuit that, in historical forms in part new, risks repeating itself as the liberal (mono-class) management of Western states is favored, where the concept of nation-state has once again been replaced by that of the international order of the market, as a fundamental institution. Thus, the stigma towards "debt" emerges, that is, the "moral" condition of debtor (of States and small savers / investors as well as, above all, of consumers), as the cause of all evil. Forgetting the CAUSE of this debt, which is the employment and wage compression in favor of profits and to the detriment of productive capacity in the West.
And therefore what has been obvious for over 40 years also emerges: democracy (state with multi-class government) is a necessity, since it is based on the stable solution of social conflict, otherwise with disruptive effects on the entire sustainability of the capitalist economy itself, in any sense. we mean it (even "physiocratic").
But it is evident that we are far from returning to understanding these basic elements of the truly sustainable governance of society.

And the disproportionate pressure to return to the gold standard is the tragic confirmation of this. And it is also confirmed that if finance is not brought back to its purely instrumental role – and not as a centralized government of society -, a dark destiny is gathering before us.

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1509482957345636359.html

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The article Why the Gold Standard is bad: a thread by Luciano Barra Caracciolo comes from ScenariEconomici.it .

This is a machine translation of a post published on Scenari Economici at the URL https://scenarieconomici.it/perche-il-gold-standard-e-male-un-thread-di-luciano-barra-caracciolo/ on Thu, 31 Mar 2022 19:26:19 +0000.