Phil Tinline is a British journalist I've never heard of. (Apparently he's made a bunch of documentaries for BBC Radio... that explains it, being on the state propaganda dole.)
For some puffy/marketing reason, he has a long read in the Financial Times about gold. Ouew, feisty (#878667)... except, it turns out, it's pretty retarded.
The story is as old as economic writing itself, and advances an altogether yawn-provoking reaction in monetary economics. Hoarding is bad.
By extension, "obsession" with gold is right-wing, crazy, and societally harmful. A few bad people in history have liked the yellow metal.
To reach this non-obvious conclusion, Tinline reaches well into the utterly scientific discipline of... literature: Aesop, George Eliot, Dickens' Scrooge, and even Smaug the dragon in Tolkien's world (#793537).
They all end poorly, right, so... therefore, central bankers stacking up on gold these days is bound to end in tears. Right. Also, lack of empathy:
These stories insist that if you try too hard to remove risk from your life, you remove all that gives life value: the things you could have done, the relationships with other mortals that could have enriched you. They warn that hoarding is not just caution. It’s caution curdled by a lack of empathy.
(jeez, is this guy cognitively challenged… I will thus gladly ignore his next book, the title of which I won't repeat, and for which this is a puff marketing piece.)
Back to the "serious" econ:
For central banks, buying gold may make strategic sense, but these tales remind us that stockpiled gold exudes a certain way of looking at the world, and with it, a certain kind of politics.
Old news, but yes, generally true: inflationistas come with certain politics; bitcoin has a culture of its own (#855317). One of these is greatly preferable to another.
This dispute rested partly on differing views of the nature of money. In 1912, the banker JP Morgan had insisted that “gold is money”. But what if its value sprang not from the natural world but — as Aesop intimated — from the human mind?
Said Keynes, "It was intolerable to prioritise the gold standard over human beings — and it wasn’t working. People were over-saving; the route to recovery, he argued, was lowering interest rates and stimulating the economy."
Via Skidelsky, Keynes’ long-time biographer, we learn that, actually, appreciating gold is “rooted in an infantile putting-off of the pleasure of defecating.”
uh, yeah. Right.
Some Americans, however, never quite got over the end of the gold standard: they feared it risked rendering their national currency worthless. This has driven conspiracy theories — and hoarding — ever since. Some conspiracists went further, believing the end of the gold standard was a plot to leave the US bankrupt, forcing it to run up foreign debt, and so to fleece ordinary people.
Perhaps not so intentional or coordinated, but that was definitely the consequence.
Our orange coin doesn't escape criticism (well, "criticism") either:
Perhaps real gold feels more reassuring than a picture of a gold coin with a “B” on it. The question, however, is whether any of this will help if the catastrophe arrives. When you’re fighting over a dead squirrel with a knife made out of an iPhone, JP Morgan’s claim that gold is money may not hold.
“Salvation through hoarding has its limits. As Scrooge or Silas Marner might advise, a more generous approach to your fellow human beings may prove more effective.”
So there you have it, Stackers. Hoarding is bad cuz credentialed, insider, journalist says so.
OK, loser. HFSP etc.
non-paywalled here: https://archive.md/9rEFV