From: Gerald_A_Levy@MSN.COM
Date: Mon Nov 22 2004 - 08:32:47 EST
After the 4th para. in Jurriaan's message, there is an intervention on the "recent references on 'problem' of money commodity?" thread./ In solidarity, Jerry ----- Original Message ----- From: "Jurriaan Bendien" <andromeda246@hetnet.nl> To: "Gerald A. Levy" <Gerald_A_Levy@msn.com> Sent: Monday, November 22, 2004 6:19 AM Subject: Re: (OPE-L) Jacob van Gelderen Of course I am familiar with those works, but not only that, I translated Marcel's essay into English (although this is not acknowledged in the journal): Marcel van der Linden, "Marx and Engels, Dutch Marxism, and the Model Capitalist Nation of the Seventeenth Century", Science and Society (New York), 61 (1997), pp. 161-192. I also translated by the same author 'The Origins, Spread, and Normalization of Free Wage Labour", in: Tom Brass and Marcel Van Der Linden (eds.), Free and Unfree Labour: The Debate Continues (International and Comparative Social History, 5). New York: Peter Lang AG, 1997, pp. 501-523. For a debate on Dutch merchant capitalism, see my translations in FBC Review: Ad Knotter "A New Theory of Merchant Capitalism?", in: Review of the Fernand Braudel Center (New York), Vol. XX, Number 2, Spring 1997; Jan Luiten van Zanden, "Do We Need a Theory of Merchant Capitalism?'', in: Review of the Fernand Braudel Center (New York), Vol. XX, Number 2, Spring 1997; Ad Knotter, "Afterword: Parasitory and Dynamic Elements in Merchant Capitalism", in: Review of the Fernand Braudel Center (New York), Volume XX, Number 2, Spring 1997. Van Gelderen also receives a mention in Ernest Mandel's work Late Capitalism, as a progenitor of long-wave theory. Mandel of course wrote an article on gold for the Robert Langston Memorial Volume (1984) but I don't think it is very good really. Kalshoven wrote his Phd on early Dutch Marxian economic thought - I think he ended up being a journalist and columnist. What's quite interesting is that several early Marxians in Holland tried to find mathematical formulae for equilibrium and crisis, beyond exploring the phenomenology of capitalism. I cannot say however that their grasp of economics was very good, and they did not really come to grips seriously with the so-called "transformation problem" either. While there has been a nominal increase in the stock of M3 for the US$ by one-third in the last five years (about one-quarter in real terms), gold prices have also increased significantly. Here's some current price averages for the last years (troy ounce, London PM fix): 2000 - $275 2001 - $271 2002 - $308 2003 - $363 2004 - $392? At the present moment, gold sells at close to $450 an ounce. Although the stock of available gold is obviously insufficient to back the amount of bank money in circulation, it can function as security, or a means of speculation/hedging. In recent years, as I mentioned before, many central banks actually sold off a considerable amount of their gold. Assume a mid-year US CPI index of 100 for 2000 and 109.6 for 2004 (derived from BLS series), then this suggests a general price inflation rate in the US of 9.6% over five years or just under 2% a year on average. But during the same time, the average price of gold increased by 42.5%, or an average of 8.5% per year. At that rate, one would often be better off investing in gold, than in shorter-term bonds. The advantage of gold compared to e.g. real estate is that, beyond having to store it securely, you don't have to worry about maintenance costs, taxes, rates and suchlike. Although gold prices are still nowhere near the alltime high of January 1980 (the Iranian hostage crisis), I predict that gold price averages will continue to rise in the coming years. However, the goldmining industry is not doing as well, mainly because of increased production costs - but higher production costs must ultimately also feed into the price rises. For data on government gold reserves, see the useful IMF template http://www.imf.org/external/np/sta/ir/colist.htm The US data are at: http://www.imf.org/external/np/sta/ir/usa/eng/curusa.htm#I Obviously, this data does not refer to all the gold in circulation, since an unknown quantity would be privately held (interestingly, Roosevelt made private gold ownership illegal in the United States in 1933!). For comparisons of investment returns internationally, see the ABN-AMRO Global Investment Returns Yearbook at: http://www.finfacts.ie/Private/curency/GIRY2004.pdf If we examine this data, we can easily find clues about the real causes of sluggish real growth in production. "Gold? Yellow, glittering, precious gold? No, Gods, I am no idle votarist! ... Thus much of this will make black white, foul fair, Wrong right, base noble, old young, coward valiant. ... Why, this Will lug your priests and servants from your sides, Pluck stout men's pillows from below their heads: This yellow slave Will knit and break religions, bless the accursed... - Shakespeare, Timon of Athens, cited by Karl Marx http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/power.htm Jurriaan
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