Afghanistan, let's not kid ourselves, all the wars America fought were staged by the cabal. Is there any war America has been involved in that makes sense?

WW2?, laughable.

Korea?

Vietnam?

Afghanistan?

Syria?

I have selected only the most striking ones.

Has America won any war?

Grenada?

Yugoslavia?

The End of Bretton Woods: A Mephistophelian Deal Part 1

President Nixon changed the world of money: good gold money was exchanged for bad paper money. Since then, the state can buy anything and expand its power. Detaching money from gold, and entrusting it to the state and its central bank as well, will probably yet prove to be one of the greatest follies in human history, writes Thorsten Polleit, chief economist at Degussa.

Almost 50 years ago, on August 15, 1971, the U.S. administration under President Richard Nixon (1913-1994) abolished the gold redeemability of the U.S. dollar. This was a unilateral decision by the Americans with extremely far-reaching consequences. It turned all the world's major currencies into unbacked money, that is, money that no longer has a precious metal peg. This sealed the end of the Bretton Woods system, which had been adopted in 1944. At that time, 730 delegates from 44 nations met in New Hampshire, the U.S. state of the same name, to determine the global monetary order for the period after World War II.

It was agreed to give the US dollar the status of world reserve currency. 35 US dollars corresponded to one troy ounce of gold (i.e. 31.10347… grams). All other currencies (such as the French franc, British pound, Swiss franc, etc.) were pegged to the greenback (U.S. dollar) at a fixed exchange rate and were exchangeable into it. In this way, they too were tied - at least indirectly - to gold.

However, one should not think that the Bretton Woods system was something like a new edition of the gold standard. Far from it. At best, it was something like a "pseudo gold standard."

For although the U.S. dollar was defined in terms of physical gold fineness, gold had long since ceased to circulate in the world's major economies on a day-to-day basis. In the USA, for example, in 1933 U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882-1945) even banned gold ownership for U.S. citizens under penalty of law. Banks and consumers had to hand over their gold to the US Treasury. In return, they received U.S. dollar banknotes and credit balances at the U.S. central bank. Only in international payments, in transactions between central banks, was the U.S. dollar still redeemable in gold.

Part 2

But shortly before the end of the war, the view was taken that there could be no reliable world monetary system entirely without gold. The competing proposals for the design of the world monetary system at Bretton Woods - the so-called "Keynes Plan" and the "White Plan" - both assigned gold an important anchor function. The yellow metal was seen as something like perfect money; at least no one could say how it could have been replaced by something better.

In the end, however, all that emerged from Bretton Woods was a "dollar-currency standard. The world thus relied on the promise of the United States of America that it would fully exchange the U.S. dollar for physical gold on demand. Not a good decision, as was to become apparent. But at first, the Bretton Woods system - despite its flaws - worked quite well. National economies recovered, world trade and world capital movements expanded.

As early as the 1950s, however, the Americans began to get bogged down in a bellicose foreign policy. They financed the costs of the Korean and Vietnam wars primarily by issuing new U.S. dollars. As might be expected, goods price inflation then began to soar. The purchasing power of the U.S. dollar dwindled visibly, and with it confidence in the world's reserve currency. More and more nations began to exchange their U.S. dollars for gold.

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)

Part 3

The Americans' gold reserve - which initially amounted to about two-thirds of the world's monetary gold - melted away like snow in the sun. America was threatened with insolvency. That's why President Nixon pulled the emergency brake in the summer of 1971. He decided to stop redeeming the U.S. dollar in gold, as had been contractually agreed. This was probably the greatest act of monetary expropriation in modern times. The world's money was thus fundamentally changed in one fell swoop.

All currencies became irredeemable paper money or "fiat money," a form of money that can be multiplied unhindered by central bank and commercial bank lending. With fiat money came chronic inflation: the phenomenon, in other words, that the prices of goods and services keep rising over time.

The issuance of fiat money through bank lending also causes recurring waves of speculation, bubble developments, and financial and economic crises. In an effort to keep expanding the fiat money supply, central banks artificially lower market interest rates, keeping a fake upswing ("boom") going, but sooner or later it must end in a recession ("bust"). As debt grows faster than economic performance increases, the economic debt pyramid becomes ever larger and more crushing.

Part 4

Above all, the state is becoming bigger and more powerful thanks to fiat money. After all, its central bank provides it with any desired amount of money by way of credit. There are therefore no limits to the financing of government spending desires; the state can literally buy anything and expand its power. Its expansion inevitably comes at the expense of the freedoms of citizens and entrepreneurs.

The abandonment of gold money some 50 years ago has thus had very far-reaching consequences for Western economies, and major problems have built up in the process. At least since the politically dictated lockdown crisis of 2020/2021, global debt has reached alarming record levels. For example, the International Institute of Finance (IIF) estimates that by the end of the first quarter of 2021, global debt stood at $289 trillion, or 360 percent of global economic output. Viewed soberly, this is a mountain of debt that no one is likely to be able to repay, nor does anyone want to.

The world's major central banks have therefore lowered market interest rates to or even below zero, and they are financing deficit-ridden states and banks by issuing more and more new money created "out of thin air". In other words, they are unabashedly resorting to inflationary policies to keep the system afloat. But this will lead to an increasingly rampant demonetization, which could even prove self-destructive for the fiat money system in extreme cases.

If the fiat money system is to be saved from collapse, the national economies will also have to throw what little is left of the free economic and social system overboard; they will not be able to avoid paralyzing and eliminating the corrective forces of the markets, which are pressing for the correction of the accumulated undesirable developments, with more and more prohibitions, regulations, laws and taxes. The result is a slide into a command-and-control economy, into unfreedom.

One can also put it this way: Fiat money is permanently incompatible with a free economy and society. Seen in this light, the move away from gold money, which found its dramatic endpoint in the summer of 1971, is more than just a historically isolated event. Rather, it was a Mephistophelian trade: good gold money was exchanged for bad paper money. Detaching money from gold and entrusting it to the state and its central bank will probably prove to be one of the greatest follies in human history.