Fundamentally it is just a matter of ignorance and failed comprehension, some of which is intractable. Most gold-buggerists are just the unwitting shills for charlatans who sell junk silver coins, and really seem to have this apocalyptic fantasy where they buy sandwiches with gold coins when everyone else is running around with wheelbarrows full of cash.
What ultimately dissuaded me from giving any credence to Fed conspiracy narratives was following the Fed open market operations as an effort to gauge potential market volatility. You read in Fed conspiracist literature about "the Plunge Protection Team", but you never read in that literature that the Fed, at least pre-TALF, was not just transparent but outright telegraphed its weekly market controls to anyone paying attention. When i learned that, I looked at the actual history and found that the conspiracist narratives aren't necessarily inaccurate--they're just incomplete and underwritten by vulgar theory. Two facts that stuck in my mind were that the original sponsor of the Fed legislation withdrew his support after the bill was revised to allow increased oversight, and the simple fact that Congress can alter the Fed's mandate.
Likewise, you rarely ever read conspiracist mentions of the Volker-era austerity, presumably because right-wingers love the idea of 18% interest. But again, it's just a lack of data--possibly because they lack tools (and would not take them up if they had them) to interpret it.
Unfettered goldbuggery, as opposed to garden-variety goldbuggery or charlatanism, is a disease of thought and probably cannot be cured without a period of psychosis. If someone wants to live in a future where they rule their neighborhood with junk silver and gold bars, the only other "investment" he has (and it's a he) is some ammunition and mason jars.
There is also a profound discourse of antisemitism to all of this that simply can't be wiped away, but conspiracists have been very good at de-racializing their narratives in the past two decades. You'd hardly know that Ron Paul and Rand Paul hate blacks, Jews, Mormons, Italians and the Irish.
On 10/07/2011 10:23 AM, Doug Henwood wrote:
> On Oct 7, 2011, at 10:08 AM, shag carpet bomb wrote:
>
>> what is this obsession with the fed some of these folks have? could
>> someone give my lazy ass an executive summary?
> It fits perfectly with the conspiratorial mindset. It's a fairly opaque institution that does work for the big guys. But it's not their puppet - a friend who spent many years at the NY Fed once told me that within the institution, the thinking is that bankers come and go but they have to do the long-term thinking for the ruling class. So it has more autonomy than the paranoid allow. The founding of the Fed is also a great subject of mythmaking - secret meetings involving a few Jews. There were some of those, but there was also agitation among the elite for a decade or two before the Fed's founding to create a central bank. And although the Fed does put U.S. interests first, it is internationally minded, and consults constantly with its foreign counterparts. This is also rich soil for conspiratorial thinking - that, plus the Jews. (Greenspan. Bernanke. You'd almost forget that Volcker's middle name is Adolph.) And it's tempting to see this body as controlling everything - it'!
> s complicated and messy to think about how financial markets work, and the Fed's relationship to those markets. Much easier to think of the FOMC controlling everything.
>
> Also, the right hates central banks because they're state regulators of money. They much prefer gold, which is stateless and automatic - and painfully austere. That makes sense from their POV. The lefties who pick up Ron Paul's line on the Fed don't really understand that he has a coherent political philosophy. When says "end the Fed" he means "switch to gold." Again, that makes sense from his POV. But why an unemployed kid should embrace the gold standard, well, that makes no sense.
>
> I'm going to write something on this for my radio commentary later today, and I'll post the text when I do.
>
> Doug
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