{"id":51059,"date":"2020-02-09T19:47:43","date_gmt":"2020-02-10T00:47:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=51059"},"modified":"2020-02-09T19:48:59","modified_gmt":"2020-02-10T00:48:59","slug":"the-triumph-of-madness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=51059","title":{"rendered":"The Triumph of Madness"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><a href=\"https:\/\/economicprism.com\/the-triumph-of-madness\/\">The Triumph of Madness<\/a><\/h3>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignleft\"><a href=\"https:\/\/economicprism.com\/the-triumph-of-madness\/\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/economicprism.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/12\/Reichsbanknote.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-908\"\/><\/a><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Viewing the past through the lens of history is unfair to the participants. &nbsp;Missteps are too obvious.&nbsp; Failures are too abundant.&nbsp; Vanities are too absurd.&nbsp; The benefit of hindsight often renders the participants mere imbeciles on parade.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Was George Armstrong Custer really just an arrogant Lieutenant Colonel who led his men to massacre at Little Bighorn?&nbsp; Maybe.&nbsp; Especially when Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, and numbers estimated to be over ten times his cavalry appeared across the river.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Were George Donner and his brother Jacob na\u00efve fools when they led their traveling party into the Sierra Nevada in late fall?&nbsp; Perhaps.&nbsp; Particularly when they resorted to munching on each other to survive the relentless blizzard.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Certainly, Custer and the Donner brothers were doing the best they could with the information available to them.&nbsp; The decisions they made must have seemed reasoned and calculated at the time.&nbsp; But what they couldn\u2019t see \u2013 until it was too late to turn back \u2013 was that with each decision, they unwittingly took another step closer to their ultimate demise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Still they were human just like we are human\u2026no smarter, no dumber.&nbsp; We\u2019re not here to ridicule them; but rather, to learn from them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>A Good Man in a Bad Trade<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Rudolf von Havenstein had been president of the Reichsbank \u2013 the German central bank \u2013 since 1908.&nbsp; He knew the workings of central bank debt issuances better than anyone.&nbsp; He was good at it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Thus, when he was called upon by history to deliver a miracle for the Deutches Reich in the aftermath of WWI, he knew exactly what to do.&nbsp; He\u2019d deliver monetary stimulus.&nbsp; In fact, he\u2019d already been at it for several years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">On August 4, 1914, at the start of the war, the Goldmark \u2013 or gold-backed Reichmark \u2013 became the unbacked Papermark.&nbsp; With gold out of the picture, the money supply could be expanded to meet the endless demands of war.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Triumph of Madness Viewing the past through the lens of history is unfair to the participants. &nbsp;Missteps are too obvious.&nbsp; Failures are too abundant.&nbsp; Vanities are too absurd.&nbsp; The benefit of hindsight often renders the participants mere imbeciles on parade. Was George Armstrong Custer really just an arrogant Lieutenant Colonel who led his men [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[122,12043,11763,538],"class_list":["post-51059","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","tag-central-bank","tag-economic-prism","tag-mn-gordon","tag-money-printing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51059","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=51059"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51059\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":51061,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51059\/revisions\/51061"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=51059"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=51059"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=51059"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}