"Or one may say that there were no real human villains; that given the economic and political cues, actors would have been in the wings to come on and play the parts which circumstances dictated.
Certainly there were many others as reprehensible and irresponsible as those who played the leading roles. The German people were the victims. The battle, as one who survived it explained, left them dazed and inflation-shocked.
They did not understand how it had happened to them, and who the foe was who had defeated them."
Adam Fergusson, When Money Dies: The Nightmare of the Weimar Collapse
The loss of confidence in their money, their fiat currency, which to some people becomes the touchstone for all value in their life, is almost too difficult to adequately describe, and for most people too awful, unthinkable, to fully understand.
And yet it happens. I have seen it happen first hand in Russia. It is happening now again in Europe and elsewhere. And it will bring a sea change, and an anger and despair that is hard to imagine in advance in its enormity.
The work of one's life can be stolen in an instant by the modern money masters and their criminal accomplices, with a few touches on the keyboard and a newswire release. If you do not believe it is possible, have a discussion some time with one of the account holders at MF Global, or the holders of a tech stock post bubble.
This is the pernicious nature of a fraud, because it robs not only the confidence in the peculiar aspects of the con itself, but undermines the very confidence that allows the commerce of society among people to continue.
All the transactions of life are based on some level of confidence in the honesty of measures and the integrity of contracts and product representations.
And if that trust is sufficiently undermined, shaken to its foundations, the people will at first freeze up in fear and stop buying and selling, and then eventually rise up in anger looking for redress and justice, if they are still free to think and to act.
And there are those that would welcome that crisis, and attempt to use it for their own ends. Anarchists. Demagogues. Oligarchs. They would subvert the Constitution and the rule of law, and create a new way for themselves and their adherents, a grab for resources and power, thereby subjugating the common people, whom they secretly despise, to their will to power.
Intraday commentary here.
