DT:  Michael Hudson may be assuming things about the use of gold here, but on Venezuela

C:  The solution is simple. Don’t fix rates, let them float. You may want to intervene a little now and then – but just don’t oppose massive, reality based movements. It’s like trying to send your army out in the field – against a hurricane. Mark Weisbrot and other sympathetic economists have been giving them good advice for decades – and it looked like they finally might listen – but they didn’t. Michael Hudson’s take is wrong. Tying it to gold – a barbarous relic – is folly. The only thing a currency should ever be tied to is what it is really always fundamentally tied to – the labor, the productivity of the nation’s people.

Democratic accountability is not sufficient. The Venezuelan left brainwashed itself into the reverse of the truth. They are fanatical – the word is not too strong – that fixed exchange rates is Marxist, leftist while floating is Milton Friedman capitalism. They needed logic and rational understanding. The Bolivarians have and had a lot of it, except in this one sphere of international trade, which wrecked their other good work.

Me:  The ultimate solution isn’t gold of course, though it might be a tactic that Venezuela and other subservient economies with the encouragement of China, Iran and Russia might employ to outflank the US’s monopoly payment systems. But these are just palliative measures for what must eventually occur and that is a new paradigm in finance and economics that is obviously beneficial for all of the individual, commercial agents and the economic system as a whole, and which paradigm also ends private for profit banking in favor of a publicly administered national banking system guided by an unimpeachable ethic like the NATURAL PHILOSOPHICAL concept of grace as in benevolence. The current system with its obviously monopolistic powers over the most powerful factor in the entire economy, namely credit/money, flies in the face of the wisdom of the dictum that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. We need to get real about this.