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Mix-Ansicht- Goldstandard und das Weltfinanzsystem in den 1920ern - Sorrento, 20.05.2004, 18:09
- Re: Goldstandard und das Weltfinanzsystem in den 1920ern - Diogenes, 21.05.2004, 09:11
Goldstandard und das Weltfinanzsystem in den 1920ern
-->Hallo,
ich habe gerade ein interessantes Fundstück entdeckt, über den Goldstandard bzw. das Weltfinanzsystem in den 1920ern und frühen 1930ern und wie dies zu der großen Depression führen konnte. Vielleicht mag sich ja der eine oder andere Goldbug daran erwärmen [img][/img]:
One consequence of the destructive European War of 1914-1918, was the unprecedented accumulation of the gold reserves of Europe's central banks into the vaults of the Federal Reserve, as debt-strapped European belligerants, from England to France to Italy and beyond, were forced to finance American war supplies with their gold. After the conclusion of Versailles, this left the United States as the possessor of the vast bulk of world monetary gold, a 400% increase in U.S. gold reserves...By 1920, the United States Federal Reserve held fully 40% of the world's monetary gold reserves...
Deliberate manipulation of a national currency is an old device for monarchs and governments to deal with unpayable debt obligations, but in the 1920's the Bank of England and the UK Treasury added a subtle refinement to the game. They called the new system Gold Exchange Standard.
England's development of the role of gold in the 1920's was the central part of their postwar economic strategy. It was also the heart of the entire credit pyramid which then built up from 1925 until its ruinous collapse in 1929-1931. More than any issues of German reparations or Allied war loans, the faulty Gold exchange standard of the Bank of England and UK Treasury was the decisive factor in causing the worst global economic deflation in history. The specific role of gold has been far too little discussed and too poorly understood. It certainly was poorly understood by Benjamin Strong and his colleagues in the New York banking community, even the House of Morgan...
The looming danger, as seen from Britain, was that South Africa, the world's largest gold producer, would ship its future gold mine production directly to New York, rather than through the City of London, making New York, not London the world's principal gold market. That would rob the Bank of England of its most powerful weapon....
By linking the Rand to Sterling and placing an embargo on gold sales other than to the Bank of England, South Afirca's largest export earner, gold, suffered. Many mines had become unprofitable. Inflation soared because of the Sterling link, as the English inflation increased dramatically after the war, and living standards of ordinary South Africans dropped sharply during the period of abandoning the gold standard. Strikes of mineworkers demanding higher pay became frequent.
Opposition inside South Africa to the British Sterling link became a heated political issue. Under such growing internal pressure, the South African mines consented to hold to their agreement with the Bank of England on embargo of free gold exports only until June 30, 1925, putting a severe time pressure on London to prepare a return to the Sterling Gold Standard.
A return to gold at the pre-war $4.86 parity in 1925, meant a severe deflation of the British economy, politically explosive, with soaring unemployment and other consequences. Sterling was at the time trading at a 30% discount or some $3.50 to the pound...
Kemmerer's answer was to recommend, that South Africa go back on the Gold Standard by July 1, 1925, with or without Britain. That would mean, of course, an American-dominated Gold Standard....
In January 1925, Hertzog's government announced it was implementing in full the recommendations of Kemmerer. In London, this was regarded as a near casus belli, pulled off by the upstart Americans... In 1925, South African gold mines produced fully 50% of the world's annual newly mined gold, with the output increasing rapidly each year...
Under the Dawes Plan, Germany returned to a U.S.-led gold standard, aided by a $100 million loan from J.P. Morgan & Co. to back the new Reichsmark. The United States and Germany, thus both were tied to the same gold standard, about to be joined by the world's largest gold producer, South Africa. Britain was sitting squarely on the outside....
Under the Gold Exchange Standard, the United States would, de facto, act as the ultimate backing for the inflated currencies of Britain, the rest of Europe, and the world. Britain, in particular, would keep its reserves not in gold, as it had before 1914, but mainly in dollars, while the countries of Continental Europe, still struggling with after effects of the war, would keep their reserves, not in gold, but in Sterling. This new scheme, in effect, permitted Britain to pyramid its inflated currency, Sterling, and its credit, on top of dollars, while British client states could pyramid their currenties in turn, on top of Sterling. It meant in effect, only the United States after 1925 would remain on a strict gold standard, and all others would redeem on paper currency....
Were the dollar also to inflate, as it did under Strong after 1925, the dollar also would begin to become unreliable, and the entire edifice, the pyramid of global credit would eventually collapse. This small flaw in the British monetary pyramid became evident when the credit expansion came to a halt in 1929. Before then, a wide spectrum from American banking and business hailed what Strong termed a"New Era" of permanent prosperity and price stabilization. The reality was quite something else, as the Federal Reserve was forced to resort to inflationary credit expansion to try to reflate falling prices in Europe by the late 1920's.....
Did the New York Stock crash of October, 1929 in fact lead to the Great Depression and its international ramifications?...What was called the Great Depression... actually originated outside the United States, with the collapse beginning early 1931, of the rotten economic and political structures of Europe. That collapse process was directly tied to developments with the Gold Exchange Standard....
France became the world's second largest holder of monetary gold by 1931, next to the Federal Reserve. In a short five year span, French central bank gold holdings had increased tenfold.... This left France and the Bank of France in an extraordinarily strong position when the European crisis erupted, a crisis in any case, detonated by French political and financial demands on Germany and Austria.
In July 1931, as Germany pleaded for another $500 million emergency central bank loan from London, Paris, New York, France was the decisive player....
Hoover estimated that Germany, Austria and Hungarian banks alone held as much as $5 billions of such short-term bills—all due in latest 60 to 90 days, a staggering sum no one before had the slightest awareness...As the flow of trade began to crater across Germany, Austria, Hungary in Spring 1931, deliveries began to collapse with it, and the paper based on it became worthless. This ultra-short-term debt was over and above the $5 billions of longer-term borrowing ... he recounts his reaction on learning the dimension of what was then unravelling with Europe's debt pyramid:
"The explosive mine which underlay the economic system of the world was now coming clearly into view. It was now evident why the European crisis had so long been delayed. They had kited bills A in order to pay B and their internal deficits. I don't know that I ever received a worse shock. The haunting prospect of wholesale bank failures and the necessity of saying not a word to the American people as to the cause and the danger, lest I precipitate runs on our banks, left me little sleep. The situation was no longer one of helping foreign countries to the indirect benefit of everybody. It was now a question of saving ourselves."...
The Bank for International Settlements...reported that the"total amount of international short-term (private) indebtedness which existed at the beginning of 1931, aggregated more than $10 billion." That was fully twice the staggering amount estimated by Hoover, the Achilles heel of the global credit pyramid erected on the back of the Gold Exchange Standard in less than seven years' time.
The standstill calmed matters briefly, until the Bank of England defaulted on foreign payments on September 21, 1931, and abandoned the Gold Exchange Standard it had set up only six years before.
The Bank of France had begun on July 24, 1931 to withdraw their sizeable gold deposits from the Bank of England, as well as from the Federal Reserve. That withdrawal triggered a crisis of confidence in Sterling. London, as Montagu Norman and the UK Treasury had intended, indeed, had once again become bankers to the world, all based on a Gold Exchange Standard resting on tiny Bank of England gold reserves, and huge pyramiding on the U.S. dollar...
Suicidally, the United States kept its gold discount window open at the Federal Reserve. Instead of injecting liquidity into the system, it withdrew it to hold onto the gold standard for dear life, raising Federal Reserve discount rates from 1 to 3% in October, 1931, pushing the economy deep into depression and deflation.
Gruß und einen schönen Feiertag noch,
Sorrento
<ul> ~ Den kompletten Text gibt es hier (Achtung: recht lang!)</ul>
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