Authored by Alasdair Macleod via VonGreyerz.gold,
For years, bulls of gold and silver have complained about how derivatives have been used to suppress their prices. Their dreams of the practice ending could be coming true...
If you think about it, there is a simple reason that derivatives for speculating or hedging gold is fatally flawed. It is because in nearly every nation’s common law, gold is money, and currencies are inferior credit, which is where payment risk actually lies. That the Western financial establishment is ignorant of this fact does not change the facts.
There is a good reason why this matters. Gold has lasted as legal money, and credit has been separately acknowledged to be deferred payment in money since Roman law. Since then, there have been many instances of governments denying these facts and promoting their currencies in the place of gold, which have always ended in their collapse.
In any price relationship involving a medium of exchange, there is an objective value and a subjective one.The objective value is always in the medium of exchange, and the subjective value is in the goods or services being exchanged. Put another way, the buyer and seller will both value money or its substitute the same, but the buyer values the goods or services more highly than the seller: otherwise, the exchange won’t take place. But if gold is the money, where does that leave a fiat currency?
Clearly, if the currency is not a credible gold substitute, then it should bear the subjective value relative to gold. That it is not regarded this way is partly due to government anti-gold propaganda, but mainly due to accounting in the government’s currency for tax purposes. Furthermore, while a gold standard is always defined as a currency being exchangeable for a given weight of gold, for convenience it is referred to as so many currency units per gramme or ounce. This gives the erroneous impression that gold is being priced in the subordinate currency.
This is as may be, but in the knowledge that a fiat currency always fails while gold as money never does, the recognition of this reality will eventually kill off any derivatives when fiat currencies collapse. And if some derivatives survive, it should then refer to fiat currencies in terms of gold-grammes, or better still, in a credible gold substitute instead if one exists.
Gold derivatives should not exist in the first place, except perhaps for seasonal agricultural produce — the original function. It should be borne in mind in the context of this article.
Following the inflationary seventies, which almost destroyed the post-1971 dollar-based fiat currency system,there can be little doubt that the deep thinkers in the US Treasury thought long and hard as to how to drive inflation out of the economy while promoting the dollar to kill off gold as money. The solution chosen came in three distinct policies.
The first and most obvious was to reform the financial system so that the banks would wrest control of financial securities from the brokerage industry: this resulted in London’s big-bang, implemented by the Thatcher government in the mid-eighties at the US Treasury’s behest. A capital-starved securities industry would become turbocharged by bank finance, ensuring a perpetual bull market in financial asset values, including government debt, and ensuring everlasting demand for dollars.
Source: ZeroHedge News
