First Post

Warren James and the faculty at STFU are kindly allowing me to be a guest poster here. On principle I wouldn’t join any club with such low standards that it would accept Uncle costata as a member so it’s fortunate that STFU isn’t a club. It’s a freewheeling forum with a penchant for debunking things that are crying out for a good debunking. Screwtape Files also has a kind of ‘petting zoo’ feel about it because of all the cute pictures of prosimians. I think that's really nifty too if rabies isn’t high on your list of things to obsess over. So apart from being a good forum it’s also an ideal venue in which to incubate a pet project I have been thinking about for quite a while.

I want to kick start a beginners guide to the topics I have been exploring and discussing over the past few years. These topics include money, banking and economics. So this beginners guide will be attempting to cover a lot of ground eventually. I’m not aiming high initially. Lego Land will do for now. Some basic building blocks and rules. But I’m hoping that STFU can help me to incubate this project and one day it might become a kind of Kahn Academy meets SimCity.

I’m going to tackle a few controversies as well starting with one about the GLD ETF. When I explore a controversy I’m going to collate the opposing arguments and present it as a debate between two teams. Please take into account that I will be giving you my interpretation of the arguments and positions of each of the teams. If you want to be certain that you have a complete and accurate understanding of the views of any individual who is identified with either side of one of these controversies then please go directly to the source.

I will be striving for brevity in my posts in order to increase the accessibility of some of these topics. So this first post is about as long as any future posts will be. If this is too long for you then I’m going to fail to meet your definition of brevity. I’m also going to try to put the topics that I want to cover into a more conventional frame of reference than readers are used to seeing from me in the past and to make a habit of defining my terms.

In another break with blogosphere tradition I’m reserving the right to change my posts after they’re posted. If anyone can point out any glaring omissions or errors in one of my posts I will amend it and acknowledge the source in a footnote. But you will have to make a convincing argument in order to persuade me to do this. Periodically I’m going to revisit some earlier posts and update them. In the update I’ll incorporate feedback from comments and any new information on the topic I have unearthed in the meantime.

Another elusive goal I’m pursuing is to try to simplify the explanation of the reasons why a return to a gold-based international monetary and financial system (IMFS) has such a high probability that it approaches inevitability. I wanted to come up with a label for my writings on this subject that would help to distinguish them from the work of the well known “freegold” blogger FOFOA and the work of the earlier writers he set up his blog in tribute to. (I will be discussing many of the same topics FOFOA writes about but in order to understand his writings and his thinking you must read his work.)

I came up with the label New Gold for these writings and Warren tacked the words “Supra-Theory” onto it. It sounds a bit grandiose to me but I’m going to adopt Warren’s term anyway. I hope it will help to make it clear that my writings on this topic have nothing whatsoever to do with the mining company of the same name.

So I’ll label these probability-approaching-inevitability writings as A New Gold Supra-Theory and make that the aspiration of the discussion. Coming up with a big picture theory about what this new system will look like and addressing questions like this along the way: What elements of the present IMFS can survive the transition into a new gold-based system? What changes would be required to allow gold to return to the system? What elements of a new system are already in place?

You are all cordially invited to join me in this discussion at STFU if you feel you have something to contribute. If you have nothing to contribute but still want to speak anyway I reiterate my invitation to STFU (with a somewhat different emphasis).