Friday Oct 14, 2011
The US state of Utah has passed a Bill that legalizes gold and silver for everyday financial transactions.
For Video Go HEREPress TV talks with David Morgan, Silver Investor.com from Washington who was a party to the signing of this declaration to allow people to use gold and silver as transactional money for their everyday living expenses. He explains how this would be done. Following is an approximate transcript of the interview.
Press TV: There's a huge global insurrection against banker occupation and underneath that we see some interesting cross currents going on as well. You've just returned from the Utah monetary conference where you signed the Utah monetary declaration. How exciting - tell us all about it?
David Morgan: Utah is the first state in the union that has at law passed the fact that citizens can voluntarily transaction in the state in commerce. So in other words simply stated you can buy and sell with gold and silver as a transaction basis throughout the state.
Now, that is a little tough to do coin-wise so they've implemented a strategy that I think is very simple and one that we're familiar with - Put your gold and your silver with a depository; the bank gives you a credit on their balance sheet; they issue you with a debit card; and then you just use the debit card.
So to the merchants, Wal-Mart as an example, you simply swipe your debit card, the transaction goes down to the spot price that day whatever the spot price for gold or silver is and then at the end of the month they reconcile the account based on what you purchased during the month.
Once this is implemented I think it's going to catch on and then of course it sets a standard I think for other states to come along and do the same thing. There are 11 states that have proposed gold and silver in transactions, but Utah is the only one that has passed it in the law so far.
Press TV: If you have your account based in gold and silver and you're using it as your go-to savings account and checking account, you have protection against the government printing up lots of fiat-dollars and inflating the purchasing value away from your currency - so why wouldn't anyone not want to do this?
David Morgan: I do believe it's going to catch on - it's hard to say; there's a argument about Gresham's law that good money chases out bad - that you're only going to save the good money. But I don't think this is necessarily true and I don't have time to go into all the arguments, but I interviewed Larry Hilton who wrote the bill - he's a lawyer in Utah - and basically there's lots of reasons why you would want to use physical gold and silver in a transaction.
One, is some of the merchants will give you a discount, in other words, if you pay in real money they're more likely to take a bit of a discount just like paying for something in cash on the spot so present value for money that's one reason.
Second reason is these markets do fluctuate and there are people who say, I have this really nice move here in silver I think I'm going to take advantage of that I want to buy this X-box of whatever it is because now is the time according to my gut feeling or whatever.
Lastly and one I get all the time is, I'd love to get into the gold and silver market, but how do I sell it - so now you don't have to sell it, you can spend it.
Press TV: Yes, exactly, And I think a lot of people who follow this space, that's their exit for gold and silver is when eventually the whole world goes to gold and silver standards and you start to exit your gold and silver as you spend your gold and silver because that's the new defacto global currency.
Now, there is this global insurrection against banker occupation. We kind of started it a few years back in the work that we do here and now its spread all over the world - folks finally understand it's the banks and the banks of course create all of the fiat money.
Press TV: If you were to talk to somebody from the Occupy Wall Street - What would you tell them about the benefits of gold and silver and how that might relate to their objective?
David Morgan: I think the first thing I would start with is the fact and that is there has never been a fiat currency in the history of mankind that's ever survived. So that implies right now that the fiat system is going to collapse, or collapse further is probably a better way to state it.
And the second one is that gold and silver have maintained purchasing power for that same time frame. It does fluctuate in price, but it doesn't fluctuate in value over a long period of time. But, that's it - I think you get the basic concept that we're on a path out of fiat destruction and it's continuing and it's probably going to get worse and worse.
And secondly the only money outside of the matrix or outside of the system or outside the bankers' hands that you can employ is physical silver and gold and that can now be accomplished quite easily or will be in this Utah Bill. I don't know when they'll bring that in, but that's the trend - gold money.
Press TV: You were at the conference and you spoke on several panels including on called “Booms, Busts and Money Policy”. Explain the role of monetary policy in creating the current bust we see all around us.
David Morgan: Well, in basic high school or even college economics what you're going to find is that there is two main policies that the Federal government is in charge of - they do refer to the Federal Reserve and they talk about fiscal and monetary policy; they talk about the role of the Fed and they say basically it's to maintain low inflation and maintain a high growth rate in the economy; stability is used over and over again - and it's laughable.
This is what their mandate is, but it's anything but the truth.
The truth is that they have a bias to inflate the currency to oblivion. And that's where we're at right now and the Keynesian model is that when the economy goes poorly what you do is stimulate the economy by throwing more money out there either to the government sector or private sector or both and get things rolling again.
Well, it only happens so many times and now we're in a liquidity squeeze. They've got zero interest rates; they've got tons of funny money sitting there in banks, but the credit worthy people that could borrow it, aren't. They're sitting on cash themselves and the people that would love to borrow more are not credit worthy. So you've got a ton of cash just sitting there doing nothing and the system continues to deteriorate almost daily.
Press TV: In the US you've got free market capitalism and you've got a monetary based system run by the Federal Reserve bank in Washington and the theory is that inflation is OK - they'll keep printing dollars because if you inject a lot of currency into the economy it makes credit easier to get and it's a trade off between the GDP growth you can achieve by putting credit into the hands of so-called entrepreneurs Vs. the loss of purchasing power that comes with inflating your money supply.
And for decades this argument looked good. There was a natural rate of inflation; purchasing power went down every year - but so did GDP though. However, it increased so then they got into some statistical gamesmanship didn't they?
David Morgan: Absolutely and you stated it better than I. Basically people use that argument against me saying you've been using that argument for years and it's been good - well, it's not good now. And I had to rethink that question and basically everything has a limit. There's a limit to how many times you can bend a wing before it breaks - there's a limit to how much fiat funny money you can pump into the system before sophisticated people say enough is enough, we don't want this anymore.
Whenever you've got a lot of something the value becomes less and less. Look at the Zimbabwe dollar - most people don't know about that little video I did, was that the one dollar bill unit from Zimbabwe was worth actually more than a US dollar and 18 months later the printing of a 100 trillion dollar note was so worthless that it didn't even get into circulation - that took 18 months. Now I'm not saying the US is going to go that badly, but the implication is certainly the same because the principles are the same.
Print your way out of it - you cannot print wealth. If you could print wealth Zimbabwe would be the richest place on the planet, and it's not.
Press TV: At the moment, despite all of this printing of money in the US, the dollar is enjoying a rally against every major currency in the world and it's making some headway against gold and silver - it's become the go-to currency around the world as we see a continuation of a trend first coming to the fore in 2008 - The unwinding of decades-worth of derivatives and debt, which is forcing people to jump into the US dollar.
Is this sustainable or are people going to find themselves in a few months time as they did back in the 2008-2009 period holding a rapidly depreciating dollar against precious metals?
David Morgan: Great question and hopefully your audience is sophisticated enough to understand I'm not contradicting myself. For short periods of time and that could be three to six months we're going to see what I call a deflationary scare, which you just described. And because the US dollar is the reserve currency of the world and you've got 7 billion people on the planet you can actually print a great deal of money until it starts to really deteriorate even more.
In other words, the deflationary scare has brought a lot of money thinkers into the dollar as the reserve currency or as a stable currency and it, and it's more stable than the Euro right now - and that goes back and forth. So there could be a demand for dollars on a short term basis, but longer term the principles are still there, which means at some point you're going to see what you described as what happened in 2008 and 2009 especially among the nation states.
It's not like China, Russia even some of the IMF, even the UN - all of these have stated that they're looking for alternatives to the dollar - Well, why is that? It's because they know that the dollar's days are numbered.
Press TV: Let's consider an extreme case - let's call it hyper-deflation. The Fed would love inflation, but they can't seem to create inflation with QE1, QE2, Operation Twist - QE3 is on the horizon; they can't seem to create any inflation no matter what they do because the housing collapse and all the mortgages associated with the housing collapse and all the derivatives associated on banks balance sheet with the collapse of the housing market around the world is so great that there is no amount of money printing that will stop this deflationary crash similar to what we saw in the 1930s - I guess it's not a devil's advocate argument because didn't gold do very well in the 1930s as well?
David Morgan: Actually yes. Professor Jastrun - The Golden Constant - a book he wrote proved that gold does best in a deflationary environment. But we were also on a gold standard back then as well so the argument you're making and by my deflationist friends saying, that we are deflating - our asset prices are deflating - The money supply is still increasing and the argument is that they're not getting any stimulus into the economy.
It's true in the private sector - to not contradict myself, but it's not true in the government sector. The fiscal policy is to keep creating more and more and more make-worth jobs in the government so if you take that to the extreme it'll fail at the point at where 100 percent of the population is working for the government and all they're doing is printing funny money and a lot of these jobs are digging up holes and filling them back in again - as a metaphor.
That's the direction that we're going. The government keeps expanding, which of course is one of the main problems i.e. government regulation and the size of government, but that keeps increasing and that's where this money is actually going that they're able to get into the economy.
Press TV: Using a metaphor - I know that your background is in the aviation industry and one of the principles of flying is that the speed of wind over the wing is faster than what you see under the wing and this is why the curvature of the wing is as it is and this gives the lift, which we now know is the recipe for flight.
In the monetary authorities they're trying to fly the economy by creating the right speed of the forces of high speed monetary going one way Vs the natural deflationary tendencies of cost efficiencies and productivity gains going the other way. Now, this is the theory, but the plane is crashing, isn't that so?
David Morgan: It is. Even by the Feds own numbers the US dollar from the time that the Fed started to now; we've lost 95-96 percent of the purchasing power. And again they're mandate is to maintain stability so they really held to their mandate a dollar in 1913 would be the equivalent to a dollar in 2011 and it's not, it's worth about 3 or 4 percent of what it was then.
It think if anyone really examined that in a short term basis in other words went from one hundred basis to three in a year's time that would be hyper inflation. As it's happened over a hundred years or so people think oh well it should be that way or that's the way it just is etc.
No it isn't - because the path is very clear which way it's going. Even with this deflationary scare that we're seeing now, which could maintain for a few more months, it's not going to correct the problem.
There are two ways to correct the problem: one you stop the quantity of money in its tracks and you make the dollar stable you don't print anymore and you let the market clear - everything that's too big to fail fails - every bank that was too big to fail, it fails - let the market determine who wins and who loses - that's free market capitalism.
But you don't see that on Wall Street - they cry and say we have to be bailed out we are too big to fail. Well, that's not free market. The free market allows you to succeed and it allows you to fail, but then they changed the rules... saying the tax payers have to bail us out.
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