city of gold: dubai and the dream of capitalism

Buy Cheap City of Gold: Dubai and the Dream of Capitalism

Just a dusty fishing village in the 1950s, Dubai has grown faster than any other city in the world to become a glittering mecca for investors and pleasure-seekers, the repository of vast foreign investments, and a bellwether for the entire economy. In this compelling new book, Jim Krane charts the history of Dubai from its earliest days, considers the influence of the family who has ruled it since the nineteenth century, and looks at the effect of the global economic downturn on a place that many tout as a blueprint for a more stable Middle East.

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the true gold standard - a monetary reform plan without official reserve currencies

Buy Cheap The True Gold Standard - A Monetary Reform Plan without Official Reserve Currencies


How We Get from Here to There

This Monetary Reform Plan proposes to establish the framework for an enduring, stable value for the United States dollar; that is, to define the dollar by statute as a certain weight unit of gold to be coined into lawful money.

Long associated with free market prices, mobile factors of production, and free people, a dollar convertible to gold * is warranted by the United States Constitution in Article I, Sections 8 and 10 (see Appendix I). A monetary standard of precious metal (gold and silver) was the institutional monetary foundation, the gyroscope, of the great Industrial Revolution of the western world, giving rise at the birth of the American Republic to a reasonably stable American currency. Wars did interrupt stability and growth. But over the long run, economic productivity and population expansion led to unprecedented prosperity. They were hallmarks of the United States from the Coinage Act of 1792 (see Appendix II) until 1971 when the last vestige of dollar linkage to gold was suspended. Floating paper money exchange rates, mixed with pegged and manipulated exchange rates, have persisted during peace and war to this very day. (Since 1971 average hourly real wages have hardly improved.)

A floating, or pegged paper and credit currency, has proven itself throughout history an unreliable, depreciating store of value. Unlike the paper dollar, a dollar defined in law as a weight unit of gold is the monetary standard which simultaneously provides all the primary functions of true standard money: (1) a stable store of value; (2) a stable measure and unit-of-account; and, (3) a universally accepted means of payment. A gold monetary standard combines, in one monetary article of wealth, the three primary functions of money. Moreover, the true gold standard of history provides the global networking effects of universally acceptable, equitable, ubiquitous, standard money. Through long historical evolution gold became free trade money.

Throughout ancient and modern history it was the unique properties of the gold monetary standard which made it universally acceptable to trading peoples in the market. The test of what The Purpose of The True Gold Standard will endure as honest money can only be studied in the empirical laboratory of human history; mathematical abstractions, drawn from the blackboards of academic economists, will not do. Because trust and universal acceptability are the trademarks of honest money these virtues must be affirmed, in the long run, by the tests of the open market, and then reinforced by wise, limited, and prudent governments which understand and embrace the inductive, tested verdict of the market.

No perfect monetary system can be fashioned in this imperfect world, peopled by imperfect human beings. But the natural monetary properties of the true gold standard developed by supple and subtle institutional mechanisms through centuries of observation and experience provide the world trading system with the least imperfect domestic and international monetary system. Such a system best enables that fragile reed known as civilization to endure.

* The term convertibility is a conventional but misleading usage handed down from time immemorial. I use the term reluctantly. The historic dollar of the American Constitution should be understood as a certain weight unit of precious metal. Paper and credit monies should be no more than rights to redemption in gold dollars at the statutory parity........
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fool\'s gold: the inside story of j.p. morgan and how wall st. greed corrupted its bold dream and created a financial catastrophe

Buy Cheap Fool's Gold: The Inside Story of J.P. Morgan and How Wall St. Greed Corrupted Its Bold Dream and Created a Financial Catastrophe


 From award-winning Financial Times journalist Gillian Tett, who enraged Wall Street leaders with her newsbreaking warnings of a crisis more than a year ahead of the curve, Fool's Gold tells the astonishing unknown story at the heart of the 2008 meltdown.

Drawing on exclusive access to J.P. Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon and a tightly bonded team of bankers known on Wall Street as the "Morgan Mafia," as well as in-depth interviews with dozens of other key players, including Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, Tett brings to life in gripping detail how the Morgan team's bold ideas for a whole new kind of financial alchemy helped to ignite a revolution in banking, and how that revolution escalated wildly out of control.

The deeply reported and lively narrative takes readers behind the scenes, to the inner sanctums of elite finance and to the secretive reaches of what came to be known as the "shadow banking" world. The story begins with the intense Morgan brainstorming session in 1994 beside a pool in Boca Raton, where the team cooked up a dazzling new idea for the exotic financial product known as credit derivatives. That idea would rip around the banking world, catapult Morgan to the top of the turbocharged derivatives trade, and fuel an extraordinary banking boom that seemed to have unleashed banks from ages-old constraints of risk.

But when the Morgan team's derivatives dream collided with the housing boom, and was perverted -- through hubris, delusion, and sheer greed -- by titans of banking that included Citigroup, UBS, Deutsche Bank, and the thundering herd at Merrill Lynch -- even as J.P. Morgan itself stayed well away from the risky concoctions others were peddling -- catastrophe followed. Tett's access to Dimon and the J.P. Morgan leaders who so skillfully steered their bank away from the wild excesses of others sheds invaluable light not only on the untold story of how they engineered their bank's escape from carnage but also on how possible it was for the larger banking world, regulators, and rating agencies to have spotted, and heeded, the terrible risks of a meltdown.

A tale of blistering brilliance and willfully blind ambition, Fool's Gold is both a rare journey deep inside the arcane and wildly competitive world of high finance and a vital contribution to understanding how the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression was perpetrated.

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gold, peace, and prosperity: the birth of a new currency (lvmi)

Buy Cheap Gold, Peace, and Prosperity: The Birth of a New Currency (LvMI)


Ron Paul — the leading champion of sound money in the Congress — explains here why sound money means a new gold standard. Writing in the clearest possible terms, Paul explains the basics of paper money and its effects of inflation, business cycles, and government growth. He maps out a plan to bring about a dollar that is as good as gold — one protected against manipulation by government and central bankers. Part of that strategy is the minting of a new gold dollar, but the more far-reaching plan involves a redefinition of the dollar and complete monetary competition. Written in 1981, this monograph has been in wide distribution ever since. Henry Hazlitt provides the foreword, and Murray Rothbard the preface.

To search for Mises Institute titles, enter a keyword and LvMI (short for Ludwig von Mises Institute); e.g., Depression LvMI.......
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