Monday, December 30, 2013

Weisenthal's Useless Rocks

By, Chris Rossini

Joe Weisenthal, the gold-hating "Stalwart" at BusinessInsider, was able to squeeze in one more anti-gold pitch before the end of 2013.

Gold is finishing down for the year for the first time in a decade, and in his signature hyperbolic style, Weisenthal says:
Everyone in the world should be happy about this development.
While the average American & European struggles, Weisenthal says we're in the clear:
The US is doing okay, the European crisis is over, and there aren't major fears of a hard landing in China. For now there's no strong reason to think the global financial system could collapse.
Let's put it this way. With all the money-printing, QE's, and stimulus packages that have littered the economic world, the only thing the digit manufacturers can point to is another artificial stock market boom that (using some BI lingo) NOBODY cares about. The rest is just an ever-growing pile of malinvestments, artificially enriched cronies, and a lot of economic pain for the common man.
A secondary effect of lower gold prices is that there's less urgency to spend labor and energy digging up gold from the ground. Watching people spend lots of resources to dig up useless rocks is a sad thing for the world, so lower prices has a nice knock-on benefits.
Now...there are plenty of physical objects on this Earth that are sitting around in desolate areas, and providing no utility to acting man. Those deserve the label "useless". Gold, on the other hand, is held by individuals all over the world, and not because of "tradition".

People, despite their government educations, know the drill. Government money always fails, without exception. You'll never see an individual sweeping gold into a sewer:


One must also wonder....if gold is just a bunch of "useless rocks" why write about it at all? Does the top brass at BusinessInsider tell The Stalwart to cover useless things? Perhaps they say: "Go write about useless rocks for our readers. And do it incessantly."
But the real reason we should be happy with the gold crash is that it proves the worth of the corpus of economic knowledge we've built up over all these years. If large government deficits and QE had resulted in hyperinflation and gold going to $10,000 then we'd pretty much have to do the drawing board in terms of what we know about the economy, and how we can prevent future crisis. The fact that the gold fever popped is a demonstrate that contra the angry-Austrian, hard-money cranks, the conventional view of the economy is more-or-less correct.
Ok, that paragraph is loaded with good stuff.

First, Weisenthal assumes that after hyperinflation, his ilk would just have to go to "the drawing board" and figure out how to "prevent a future crisis". I wouldn't be so confident. Keynesianism is running on fumes.

Maybe, just to be safe, I would suggest Joe and the gang have a few cardboard boxes on hand. And make sure to leave behind the poster. It'll act as a centerpiece for the new decor:


It's good the Stalwart got one more anti-gold piece in. The window for publishing such nonsense is quickly closing.


Chris Rossini on TwitterFacebook & Google+

3 comments:

  1. Please send me all your useless rocks. In addition to gold, I'm especially interested in useless diamonds, rubies, sapphires and emeralds.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I'd rather have useless rocks than toxic assets or advise from a worthless economist.

    ReplyDelete
  3. That guy is no writer. He cuts and pastes and baits people. Dont go to that worthless site. It is backed by venture capital and that felon Blodgett. Don't give that shill any space, he just wants a job on CNBS.

    ReplyDelete