Skip to main content

Wacker v. JPMorganChase

Image result for silver coins worth

Was JPMorganChase manipulating the price of silver and/.or silver futures in the markets in 2010-11?

I submit that the question is one of historical importance, not of importance merely to the parties directly involved in the litigation captioned above.

Further, I expect that a trial on this question will aid the historians of posterity, bringing to light valuable data on this point, and thus on the significance of precious metals as a Magoffin in the post-Crisis financial world.

If you're a law student, and are taking the Civil Pro course, dear reader, this case might also be a valuable introduction for you into the vagaries of pleadings law.

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-jpmorgan-lawsuit-silver-idUSKBN15G4Z 

But let's get back to the point: WHY is this case of historical importance? It may clarify judges and parties' attitudes toward the traditional Precious metals, gold predominantly but silver as well, once thought of as the paradigmatic form of Money.

The prices of silver and gold can be volatile precisely because there is a background feeling that they are something other than just another commodity,suitable for jewelry. These are traditional bearers of and metrics for VALUE.

Bryan recommended -- indeed DEMANDED -- the coinage of silver as an alternative to the sacrifice of mankind on a cross of gold. The only alternative to the one metal was bi-metallism. The notion of understanding money as paper issued by a govt or central bank would have struck even the most eager monetary reformers of Bryan's day as wild-eyed.

Sentiment about metals as real money in turn makes the manipulation of silver prices a fraught matter.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere.  At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.   We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...

The Growing Block Theory of Time

My own disposition, in regard to the philosophy of time, is toward the "growing block" theory. This is the view that past events remain realities, that present-moment events are also realities, but that future events are not yet real. The image is of the universe as a block with an edge on (say) the right-hand side. The block is expanding because that edge is moving ever further right, and that edge is what we call the present, or, simply, "now." Everything to the left of that edge is both static (the past is complete) and, still and forever, real. Think of the phrase "the moving finger writes." The chief alternatives to the growing-block theory are "presentism" (only the now-edge itself is real) and "eternalism" (past, present, and future are all real." I believe that time is a growing block because (1) that's what it feels like, (2) we should stick with the introspective phenomenon unless we have good reason to abandon ...