The newly released movie THE WEIGHT, starring Ethan Hawke, Russell Crowe and Julia Jones looks at an aspect of the Depression in 1933 now largely lost to history --the off book and sometimes violent machinations over gold as the Roosevelt administration both de-monetized and confiscated the stuff. What usually IS remembered is that the administration de-monetized gold. The shiny stuff would no longer back the Federal Reserve notes. (Eleven years later, the Bretton Woods Accord introduced some backdoor re-monetization -- but that is another story.) More to the movie's point, or at least to its backstory and a couple of expository speeches, Roosevelt figured he could not allow a lot of gold to remain in private hands. Had it stayed there, it could have been freely exchanged and it could well have become a de facto money, or at least a dangerous competitive risk to the fiat paper money by which it was supposed to have been replaced. So, private persons were ordered to tu...
"The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry." -Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms ------------------------------------ I won't try to explain it but I think the phrase "the world" as used in this lovely quote means something other than "everything that is the case." I think the sentiment is simultaneously Platonic and anti-Platonic. The world means "the cave." To be "broke" means to agree to take an interest in the trivial shadow-show on the wall of the cave. To "be brave" is to insist on searching for the light of the sky. "The cave breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not watch the shadow show it kills. It kills the ...