Thinking Outside the Banker’s Box: Monetary Policy May be too Important to be Left to Bankers

Like Deutsche Bank AG, Morgan Stanley has announced major layoffs as businesses stop during deals and investors stop making trade.   The Financial Times noted: “Morgan Stanley faces similar pressure to all banks with big trading operations: the Basel III capital rules are punitive to holding big illiquid positions on a bank’s balance sheet.”

Bankers have been having a tough year.  Standard Charter is in trouble with U.S. authorities for facilitating transactions with Iran.  And that is on top of the ongoing investigation of Libor manipulation that cost Barclay’s its top executives.  On July 2, Bank of England Governor Mervyn King said  off with CEO Bob Diamond’s head  – in a meeting with the chairman of the Barclay’s board.  Within hours, the deed with done – first with a big compensation package which “Banker Bob” Diamond later gave up.    It’s tougher to decapitate Lord Green, the Trade minister who was formerly Barclay’s CEO and chairman , but British politicians tried to bring him before the House of Lords.

Ben Bernanke has called the Libor rate “structurally flawed.”  Indeed, even banks don’t trust each other to lend these days.  “Since the crisis, many banks have been content to part cash with central banks, rather than lending it out to other institutions,” noted Peter Eavis and Nathaniel Popper.  The New York Times quoted Cass Business School Professor Peter Hahn on the relevance of Libor rates: “Libor was intended for an international lending market that has long since past....The whole concept of interbank lending died after Lehrman Brothers collapsed.” As the King of Siam sings in The King & I:

When I was a boy

World was better spot.

What was so was so,

What was not was not.

Now I am a man;

World have changed a lot.

Some things nearly so,

Others nearly not.

World have changed a lot – but not necessarily for the better in recent years as bankers seek to invent new ways to generate profits and central bankers seek ways to prevent a cataclysm.   Back in 1976,  Lehrman wrote in Money in the Coming World Order that “the interdependent world economic system grows steadily more precarious. The disorders of the global economy, and in particular the disequilibrium of its monetary system, are inextricably tied up with this problem of inflation.  Internationally as well as nationally, power replaces the market. The unrestrained use of political power, in pursuit of particular national economic interests, exemplifies an increasing tendency both to circumvent market disciplines and to brush aside temporarily inconvenient systems of international rules. Nowhere, of course, has this tendency toward accentuated nationalism been more obvious than in the growing disorder of the international monetary system.”

Time to put the world in “a better spot.

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George Gilder Thankfully Returns, Bearing Knowledge and Power

by Ralph Benko

George Gilder, whose new book publishes today, is one of the original pillars of Supply Side economics. As stated by Discovery Institute, which he co-founded, “Mr. Gilder pioneered the formulation of supply-side economics when he served as Chairman of the Lehrman Institute’s Economic Roundtable, as Program Director for the Manhattan Institute….”

He was the living writer most quoted by President Reagan. And he is back with his most brilliant work yet — one of potentially explosive importance if taken to heart by our political and policy thought leaders. It is a radical guide, with surprising insights on almost every page, to the creation of a new era of vibrant prosperity.


The Lehrman Standard

by Paul Brodsky

As reviewer Paul Brodsky, a professional investor in New York City, perceptively notes,

"Lewis Lehrman is one of a very small group of contemporary gold advocates able to successfully bridge the gap separating practical conservative intellectualism from fleeting, half-baked idealism. His CV lists great success across many fields including education (degrees and teaching fellowships from Yale and Harvard); industry (past president of Rite Aid); politics (narrow loser to Mario Cuomo in the 1982 New York governor’s race); finance, (past Morgan Stanley managing director); private sector entrepreneur (founder, L. E. Lehrman & Company); public sector advocate (founder, Lehrman Institute); historian (author, Lincoln at Peoria: The Turning Point); and recognized philanthropist (awarded the National Humanities Medal by George W. Bush in an Oval Office ceremony). ... Only someone erudite and elegant in demeanor could hope to pull it off . In an irreconcilably over-leveraged world where irritated bond vigilantes question economic sustainability and angry Tea Partiers protest the immorality of it all, Lehrman’s views are considered and his convictions carry weight. He brings gravitas to his cause, and he does so from within as a member of the club."

Read More

 

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Before the Fed: JP Morgan Summons the Bank Presidents

"Finally, on the night of Sunday, November 2, Morgan summoned the presidents of the major New York banks to his new library, at the corner of Madison Avenue and Thirty-sixth Street, an Italian Renaissance-style palace he had built next door to his house to showcase his collection of rare books, manuscripts, and other artwork. Its marble floors, frescoed ceilings, walls lined with tapestries and triple-tiered bookcases of Circasian walnut, crammed full of rare Bibles and illuminated medieval manuscripts, made it an incongruous setting for a meeting of the banking establishment. Once the moneymen had gathered, Morgan had the great ornamental bronze doors to the library locked and refused to let anyone leave until all had collectively agreed to commit a further $25 million to the rescue fund."

— Liaquat Ahamed, Lords of Finance (Penguin Books, 2009, p. 54)



The Demise of Money and Credit

by Lewis E. Lehrman

Lately we have been engulfed by headlines reporting financial turmoil on every continent, in almost every nation, large and small. The commissars of central planning who so marred the history of the 20th century have been replaced by central banks in the 21st. In Cyprus, the new leadership now dares to confiscate citizens’ wealth with a one-time tax of up to 60 percent on bank deposits above 100,000 euros. Self-interested prime ministers blame continental monetary policies for instigating the currency wars that they themselves surreptitiously carry on.

Read More

 

The Common Sense of the Common Law

Ralph J. Benko  |  Jun 18, 2013
Constitution.org provides an extensive and thoughtful Memorandum of Law by Larry Becraft, Esq., of Huntsville, Alabama, on Article I, Section 10, clause 1 of the US Constitution. Sir William Blackstone courtesy of Wikipedia One of many interesting matters the Memorandum treats is Blackstone's Commentaries, a book that was a fixture in the...

Fighting the Currency Wars

Kathleen Packard  |  Jun 17, 2013
The value of the yuan has been slowly rising. The value of the Japanese yen has been sharply falling. Abenomics is attempting to reflate the Japanese economic – slowly, slowly. “Japan is back!” Prime Minister Shinzo Abe tells the Japanese. Coming back isn’t easy. The Financial Times’ Jonathan Soble has noted...
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Jun 17, 2013
World Press
Daniel Eckert

Policy Should Allow Gold as a Parallel Currency

via Google Translate: Milton Friedman was one of the most outstanding economists of the 20th Century. He came from...
VIEW WORLD NEWS
Jun 09, 2011
Key Monetary Writings
Lewis E. Lehrman

It's Not the Debt Ceiling -- It's the Dollar

The missing issue of this Presidential election is monetary policy -- America's need for a stable dollar. But massive Federal...
VIEW KEY MONETARY WRITINGS
 
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(1896-1978)

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