From: M Holmes 
Newsgroups: uk.politics.misc uk.finance uk.politics.economics
Subject: Re: "Its different this time". They said the same before and during the last crash.
Date: Thu, 1 Dec 2005 12:18:42 +0000 (UTC)

In uk.finance Doug Ramage  wrote:

> I came across this set of articles (~ 3 years old) on Gold - do have any 
> substance or are they mis-conceived rantings?

> www.huttoncommentaries.com/Other/MonetaryCrisis/upsetting_of_america.htm

Where most of these Gold Bugs are concerned, it's a bit of both. They
more often or not do know their stuff. However there's a strong tendency
in a fairly large subgroup to paranoid ranting. 

The trick is to figure out what's ranting and what's not. Going on about
fiat currency being fake money and fractional reserve banking being
fraud sounds lunatic at first, but when one thinks about it, they're
pretty much on the ball and it's just that until there's a crisis, the
rest of us have all agreed to pretend that funny money isn't a problem.

Then there's all the stuff about conspiracies like the Plunge Protection
team and an agreement amongst the central banks to rig the gold price.
Looked like dead cert paranoia at first, but now most commentators would
accept that while there's no smoking gun, there was a Plunge Protection
Team of some sort at the end of the 90's. As for the latter, it can't be
said to be out of the question either. Rigging markets is what central
bankers are there to do. A Central Bank is a Soviet construct. If the
intention weren't to rig markets we'd just leave it to markets and the
price mechanism to sort out stuff like interest rates through supply and
demand for money.

The most wacky of it shades into survivalism and hiding gold, food and
ammo in the desert for the fall of global capitalism. It's pretty much
Way Out There, but then there is the thought at the back of one's mind
that we are using funny money and we have run up debts unprecedented in
history. That sort of behaviour does almost always end in
unpleasantness.

So in short, I'm afraid the answer is: yes and no.

FoFP