>I take your point, Chris - but it's a damned diffcult call - impoverishing
>Africans by supporting their economic marginalisation in the hope that a
>continental support mechanism involving all nation-states might ensue is
>placing an awful lot of faith in a system where clout is ever more a
>function of one's relevance to the global economy. I, too, was under the
>impression gold was on its way to the status of lapis lazuli, but Doug and
>not a few others have argued we won't know this until a scary market dip
>comes along and does not culminate in a flight to gold.
>
>It reminds me of that famous line of Keynes's - Brad has it as his e-mail
>signature - about long-run predictions being far too easy a task for
>economists ('in the long run we're all dead'). Africa is absolutely
>fraught right now - AIDS, famine and barbarism stalk the continent - to
>take yet another leg of this faltering stool is just possibly to invite a
>calamity of unprecedented proportions.
Africa as a whole would be a lot better off with serious debt relief - though obviously that's only a start - than it would be by promoting a continued monetary role for gold. South Africa's mines are running low on the stuff, making them very high-cost producers; they'd thrive in a world environment of profound crisis or rapid inflation. Some South Africans welcome this - Patrick Bond quotes the old saying from the 1930s, that the country could play the role of a "prosperous undertaker in a plague." Not too appealing, really.
Doug