Crime Against Humanity: Forms of Seigniorage, 5
The world had accepted what the French leaders then denounced as the “America’s exorbitant privilege”, publicly stygmatised by their then leader Charles De Gaulle as follows:
“The fact that many countries accept as a principle dollars on the same footing as gold leads Americans to get into debt, and to get into debt for free towards the rest of the world, since they pay what they owe them with dollars that only they are allowed to emit. We consider it necessary that international trade be established, as it was the case before the great misfortunes of the world, on an indisputable monetary base, and one that does not bear the mark of any particular country. Which base? In truth one can’t see any that could really be a standard criterion other than gold.”
Such “America’s exorbitant privilege” is nothing more than international seigniorage; as pictured in Orwell’s Animal Farm, “all Countries are equal, but one is more equal than others”: in order to purchase anything from any other country, all countries have to obtain the medium of payment, the United States dollar, by producing and delivering something in exchange for it; with the sole exception of the country issuing that medium of payment. That country more equal than others will “purchase” anything for nothing: just run the mint. And what is there to check its running it at will, if not even ad infinitum? Almost nothing, in actual fact.
Here gold reserves enter the scheme, a scheme I discuss later as the ambiguous money cycle; suffice here to say that at the onset of the Bretton Woods system the United States commit to convert their dollars in gold upon request; that is, what forces them to back their dollars with intrinsic value is that anyone may claim that intrinsic value at any time. But as I detail later on, this commitment gets progressively hollowed out into a profitable chimaera by the same trick the goldsmiths used when they became bankers by defrauding the community through the creation of more claim checks than the gold deposited in their vaults. Based on the small proportion of dollars actually redeemed in gold at any given time, in Bretton Woods the United States start the fractional reserve scam on a global scale, getting everything in exchange for nothing… worldwide.
