Dear Reader,
People often make the mistake of assuming that just because you’re super-rich, you must be super-smart. That’s wrong. There’s actually no correlation.
Being rich can result from talent and hard work, but it can also come from sheer luck, inheritance, or the right marriage partner. Likewise, being smart is a blend of heredity, circumstance, and hard work, but it does not automatically translate into great wealth. There are smart poor people and dumb rich people.
A case in point is Melinda Gates
She’s one of the richest people in the world. Her foundation (started with her husband, Bill Gates) has many activities, including a heavy emphasis on medicine, vaccines, and pandemics. When the COVID-19 pandemic emerged, the Gates Foundation took a leading role in funding research and regurgitating conventional wisdom from the medical establishment about the need for lockdowns.
It turns out that lockdowns don’t stop the spread of the virus. Washing hands and social distancing are helpful. Masks are a low-cost approach (but the evidence is that they don’t do much good either). Lockdowns don’t work in stopping the virus. The only thing lockdowns are good for is destroying the economy.
Now, according to this article, even Melinda Gates has started to recognise the enormous cost of lockdowns and has admitted her role in perpetrating a world-historic blunder. She says, ‘What did surprise us is we hadn’t really thought through the economic impacts. […] That was a piece that I think we hadn’t really prepared for.’
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How could you lock down an economy and not expect to destroy that economy?
The problem is that Melinda Gates lives in an elite bubble where life is wonderful whether there’s a pandemic or not. She’s out of touch with everyday Americans and others around the world who make their living as bus drivers, bartenders, waiters, hair stylists, boutique store clerks, and a thousand other jobs that make up 50% of all jobs and 45% of US gross domestic product.
Only an out-of-touch elite could support shutting down the economy and not realise you would destroy that economy and the jobs that go with it. Next time there’s a pandemic, let’s replace Melinda Gates and her ilk with blue-collar and service workers who know more about the real economy than most economists.
And while we’re at it, perhaps we should do away with central banks…
When money’s weaponised to push social goals, it soon stops being money
I follow the speeches and papers of central bankers and IMF officials very closely. I’m looking for clues about monetary policy and interest rates. It’s also a good source of information of what may be happening to exchange rates as the currency wars are turned on and off again, depending on who needs to steal growth from whom.
About five years ago, I noticed that central bankers could not get through a speech without discussing climate change. That seemed odd.
I’m sceptical of the so-called ‘science’ of climate change. Ice ages and warming periods do come and go over 1,000-year increments (the last ice age ended about 12,000 years ago). But there’s serious doubt that the climate is changing quickly today.
Even if you accept the idea of climate change, it’s as likely to be caused by volcanoes and solar flares as CO2 emissions.
A hidden agenda
Those debates aside, why were central bankers talking about climate change at all? The answer has to do with the hidden agenda of the global elites. Climate change is being used as a stalking horse by global elites to push an agenda of global taxation and global governance.
If you want a global solution, you need a global problem, and climate change fills the bill. Central bankers certainly count among the global elite, so they signed on to the program.
More than just rhetoric
As reported in this article, central bank support for the climate change agenda is more than just rhetoric. Central banks regulate commercial banks and control payments systems. They may decide that loans to energy companies should be discouraged, and finance for wind and solar systems should receive favourable treatment. They can also require disclosures by banks intended to cast carbon-intensive sectors in a bad light.
This type of social engineering by unelected central bankers is beyond the traditional role of a central bank, but it’s happening anyway as part of a concerted effort by elites in banking, government, media, and elsewhere to push the green agenda.
Central bankers have failed badly at their core tasks of promoting stability and growth in the past 12 years. If they try pursuing social policy in areas like climate change, it’s a short step to a loss of confidence in central bank money. And it may be time to get rid of central banks entirely.
All the best,
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Jim Rickards,
Strategist, The Daily Reckoning Australia
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