Monetary Scapegoats

We spotted a foreign news story the other day that is right out of the paper money fraudsters’ playbook.  We wanted to highlight it for you because it is a play that governments and central banks run again and again, seeking to deflect blame from themselves for their destructive practices.

Turkey’s monetary policies have been like those of most of the world:  its central bank has been destroying the purchasing power of the currency with money printing.

Why does money printing destroy purchasing power?

Here’s a recent comment by economist Don Boudreaux:  “Wealth is goods and services; wealth is not money. And so to create more money without creating more goods and services is to create, not more wealth, but only more inflation — along with the distortions and uncertainties that inflation unleashes.”

That’s it in a nutshell.  So, Turkey’s money printing is destroying the lira.  The annual inflation rate hit about 25 percent in the last quarter.  Food prices have been rising at a 30 percent rate and higher.  

But what we wanted to call to your attention is the way the government is scapegoating others for its own currency destruction.  The government is on a tear, issuing fines and demonizing farmers, wholesalers, vendors and anybody else it can for high food prices.  It calls them terrorists and traitors.

President Erdoğan says, “The government will finish off those terrorizing wholesale food markets in no time, the way it finished off those terrorists in caves.”

All of this will drive commerce to the black market, and suppress production, in turn driving prices higher still.

We see the same pattern often and elsewhere.  And not just in places like Turkey and Venezuela.  When the British were busy destroying their currency in the 1950s, Harold Wilson, the eventual prime minister, blamed “the gnomes of Zurich” for their crisis.   Nixon blamed international money speculators when he took the dollar off the gold standard.  

Consider this just an early warning about events to come here in the US, where money printing has been escalated to heights that make Turkey’s problems look insignificant.  When the effects become conspicuous, and our own government begins looking for scapegoats for its monetary malfeasance, you will know that draconian policies are close at hand.