Happy birthday John Maynard Keynes!

Today is good old John Maynards 125th birthday.

Here is a good quote from him for all those who think "conspiracy theories" about the "elite" in monetary matters are stuff for "nutjobs" and it just went wrong somehow and those guys did not know what they were doing (the shit-happens-theory of monetary history):

"Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the capitalist system was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and, while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some. The sight of this arbitrary rearrangement of riches strikes not only at security, but at confidence in the equity of the existing distribution of wealth. Those to whom the system brings windfalls, beyond their deserts and even beyond their expectations or desires, become 'profiteers,' who are the object of the hatred of the bourgeoisie, whom the inflationism has impoverished, not less than of the proletariat. As the inflation proceeds and the real value of the currency fluctuates wildly from month to month, all permanent relations between debtors and creditors, which form the ultimate foundation of capitalism, become so utterly disordered as to be almost meaningless; and the process of wealth-getting degenerates into a gamble and a lottery. Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose."

After cutting the last bond between the Dollar and Gold, Richard Nixon is supposed to have said:

"Now we are all Keynesians".

But Nixon wasn`t - in dubio pro reo - smart enough to REALLY understand what he was talking about. I`m pretty sure his advisors were.