The following text is taken from the November/December 1997 issue of "The Australasian Social Credit Journal" (3 Beresford Drive, Draper, Queensland 4520, Australia):
The recent debacle affecting Asian currencies should be sufficient to raise questions about the operation of currency markets. Note - we said currency markets - not commodities. It is the value placed on money that affects the price of commodities not the other way around.
The freeing of currency exchanges to allow speculation to determine the value of a currency is one of the greatest confidence tricks played on people. As one commentator remarked the effect of the currency devaluations will be to slow growth. Growth of what? Wheat, wool on the sheep, citrus fruits, sugar cane, pineapples, labour rates, working hours, the rate at which machines can operate, stocks of coal, lead, copper?
The black magic is at work again and our leaders are mesmerised, hypnotised or, dare we say it, completely divorced from reality. We could suggest two other alternatives such as they are ignorant or accomplices but we all know this could not be true, don't we?
The reality is that the root of the problem exists in the operation of a defective financial system governed by a defecting accounting system. Until this is changed all the rhetoric, cynical comments from politicians and economists and their suggestions as to the reasons for the problem and their suggestions as to how to overcome them will, as Rick Blaine in Casablanca said, "Won't mount to a hill of beans".
Note of "Michael": Every day, over $1,000 billion are being transferred on financial markets, by people who are looking for the places where the funds they are in charge of will yield the highest returns. For countries to rely on this kind of money to finance their developments is really outrageous, since it forces them to keep their interest rates as high as possible, for fear of losing the money of these investors. If these countries issued their own debt-free currency, as it should be, they would not need to go abroad and ask for the money of foreign investors, or fear that these investors remove their money and invest it somewhere else.