Election Outcome Prediction: Blue Or Red They Print More Money

Summary: Politics &amp; media benefit from inflaming the masses<br> To escalate or de-escalate is a choice, not a consequence<br> Media: Don’t censor truth, give it to me &amp; let me decide<br> <br>  <br> The McAlvany Weekly Commentary<br> with David McAlvany and Kevin Orrick<br> Election Outcome Prediction: Blue Or Red They Print More Money<br> October 28, 2020<br> “We need to be able to engage and not move toward writing someone off and assuming that they are uneducated, and uninformed, with a blanket accusation like, ‘You’re a socialist.’ End of conversation. ‘You’re a racist.’ End of conversation. Social media, of course, exaggerates the trends toward those unfiltered, knee-jerk responses, a kind of verbal tyranny, if you will, and I think this is where both the right and the left need to calm down.”<br> David McAlvany<br> Kevin: In history there are turning points. There are forks in the road that make all the difference in the world. We have talked over and over about our economy being run by, worldwide actually, back in the late 1800s or early 1900s, it was founded on and run by a gold standard, which was implied discipline. You had to balance your payments over time. Then, of course, they changed it a little bit in the 1920s. We went to a different type of gold exchange standard. And then, of course, we went through Bretton Woods in the 1940s up to 1971 when we finally just lost the gold thing altogether. But that was a major fork in the road. Remember, you bought for me the book Monetary Sin of the West, which was published right before that fork was taken?<br> David: That’s right. Jacques Rueff was trying to make the case to Charles de Gaulle that there were issues with the U.S. and the U.S. dollar. He had been a young man in Britain just before the pound sterling devaluation, pretty massive sterling devaluation. And so, as an older man with some experience, was trying to get the ear of de Gaulle, but de Gaulle wouldn’t listen for whatever reason, and so he started publishing things to Le Monde, the popular magazine/daily newspaper in Paris.<br> Kevin: And that got de Gaulle’s attention.<br> David: It did.<br> Kevin: It made sense. What Jacques Rueff was saying made sense.<br> David: As soon as the people were paying attention, the politician had to, as well. He had to play a little bit political in order to get de Gaulle’s ear. Ultimately, he did. The Monetary Sin of the West is kind of the description of what is happening throughout the late 1950s, early 1960s, and what Jacques Rueff sees as a deteriorating financial circumstance for the United States.<br> Kevin: One of the chapters, Chapter Four, is a copy of de Gaulle’s press conference where he is calling for a European Union, but in a different way. He is talking about how as we have seen the move away from the gold standard to the gold exchange standard, it has really ruined the economies. And even though the U.S. dollar was still exchanging for gold, he saw the end of that line. So what he was calling for in this press conference that he gave, he was calling for Europe to go back to the gold standard that they had before 1914, before World War I. How different would the world have been if we would have gone back to an all-out gold standard instead of going off of the gold standard? Look at the inequalities that we see in society right now. A lot of that is based on some people being able to print their own money, and others have to earn it.<br> David: We know the world as it is, not as it could have been, and so there could have been a number of things that we didn’t like as a consequence of the gold standard, things that we enjoy today because of the excesses in the system. Household net worth has never been higher, stretching toward 120 trillion dollars. So there are those things that we think, well, we could have that, too. But probably not. We would be dealing with a smaller dollar that would buy more,