Politics is a dirty word

Economist John Maynard Keynes is the man most responsible for the economic chaos in the world today. In 1941, Keynes developed a plan for the era following the Second World War, He advocated an International Clearing Union. Instead of countries clearing their external credits and debits with payments in gold and internationally accepted currency, such as sterling or the US dollar, He proposed an essentially cashless society Central Banks of member countries were to form the Clearing Union and to avoid running up excessive credit or debit balances, creditor countries would revalue their currencies, while debtor countries could devalue. Removing the gold standard, which had given money an underlying value, he sowed the seeds of economic chaos which has led to Central banks printing endless amounts of money and the current plan of "Quantitative Easing." World leaders regarded him as a hero and his philosophy was implemented. Britain and some other countries moved off the Gold S...

It's no wonder that economies around the world are in trouble – because how can they grow when money is worthless? Record low interest rates demonstrate the collapse in the value of cash. India and Venezuela are the latest countries to experience the pain but many more will follow. The problem can be traced back to 1931 when Britain abandoned the gold standard. Up to that point the pound sterling was backed by gold. In 1933 US President Franklin Rooseveldt nationalised privately held gold and finally President Richard Nixon totally abandoned the gold standard for the dollar in 1971. Since then currencies have basically been worthless – simply pieces of paper with no intrinsic value. While financial institutions paid reasonable levels of interest on money invested, problems were held at bay, but once official and unofficial interest rates dropped virtually to zero, the current turmoil was inevitable. Thank you politicians and economists! Economics has never really recovered from the...