Question for Saint Germain. At the beginning of the 20th century, paper currencies were considered money substitutes for gold and silver. Many today think that a return to the gold standard is necessary for a properly functioning economy. What are your thoughts on this? With the weakening of the US dollar, there is more and more talk about digital currencies. To me this is fraught with danger with the powers that be still running things. Can today’s society at its present level of consciousness make it into the golden age without the gold as its standard?
Answer from the Ascended Master Saint Germain through Kim Michaels. This answer was given during the 2023 Easter Webinar.
Well, I have previously commented on the gold standard and basically what we can say is that in today’s age it is not practical anymore. Because with the level that the economies have grown to, you would have to have huge amounts of gold. There just is not enough gold in the world to really make this practical.
I know that there are many spiritual people who look at the gold standard with a somewhat romanticized view. And of course, gold and the golden age sounds like they are related. I understand this. But nevertheless, from a purely pragmatic viewpoint, the issue is not whether you have a gold standard or not. The issue is whether you have fiscal responsibility on the part of the government. In other words, is there something that limits how much money a government can print or create in order to finance its projects, its ambitions. And this is what there needs to be. And this is what there will be in the golden age.
You could say that in previous times it was practical to have a gold standard where the amount of money a government could create related to how much money they had in their vault, in their central vault or in their system. And therefore, you could limit the size of the money supply, limit inflation and so forth. But this was only necessary before computers. Today with computer technology you do not need to have the gold standard because now you can use computers to calculate how much money can you create without creating runaway inflation. I am not saying this has already been done but it can be done. Therefore, based on this you can come to a point where governments can see that a certain amount of money keeps inflation at a manageable level. If we go beyond it, inflation becomes too big and that becomes a problem.
If you have that dedication to fiscal responsibility, you do not need the gold standard. And then you can say: “Well what if you do not have that dedication, would not the gold standard then force governments to be responsible?” No. And you can see that in the world. Why did they abandon the gold standard? Because they did not want to be responsible. The gold standard cannot guarantee it. And there were various ways that governments could subvert the gold standard.
But the other aspect of this is that it is not just governments that create money. Banks have been allowed to create money by issuing loans based on either a fractional reserve standard as the saying was in older times or today where nobody even has fractional reserves. Nobody even cares about maintaining a fractional reserve because banks issue much more loans than they have money for in their accounts. The gold standard can prevent the government from creating money, but banks are creating and destroying money all the time. When they issue a loan, they create money out of nothing. When it is paid back it disappears but, of course, what does not disappear is the interest. The interest still has to be paid back and this is part of what drives inflation.
What you need to have is a society where the government recognizes its responsibility to have a responsible fiscal policy not only for the government but for society as a whole. Which in practice means that you cannot have the current situation where after decades of neoliberal policy, many governments feel that we should stay out of the economy, we should stay out of the financial sector and let it regulate itself as the neoliberalists always say. Because it becomes increasingly clear after the 2008 financial scandal, the recent bank failures and the newest issue of shadow banks and non-banks that first of all the market cannot regulate itself. Well, actually it can but the way the market will regulate itself is it will create a bubble and then a bust and then a very slow growth until you can again create a bubble and there is another bust. It will be a crisis economy going from crisis to crisis, that is how the market will regulate itself.
But of course, what has not been seen and what needs to be seen is that the cycle of boom and bust while it wipes out some companies, it actually benefits the really big companies, the power elite. The power elite will make money on a boom cycle, they will also make money on a bust cycle and it strengthens their position all the time and therefore weakens democracy and essentially weakens the entire economy because in the even greater scale, the elite cannot stop themselves. They never have been able to and it can lead to the destruction of a society and the entire world economy.
The only way out of this is that governments become more responsible, become more transparent so that the people know what is going on, understand what is going on and there are checks and balances on the money supply and the fiscal policy.
And your question mentions the powers that be in terms of digital currencies, but you have to realize here that the powers that be, there will always be the powers that be because there will always need to be somebody who is in charge of running things in a society because the entire population cannot be involved with determining how much money to print. The question is who are the powers that be? Are they responsible to the people? Or are they under the influence of the power elite? And that is the dynamic.
Government is not inherently a problem. The function of government is to protect the people, the population, from being ruled by a small power elite. Now even a democratic government can, of course, be taken over or influenced in subtle ways by a power elite so that they are not fulfilling their function to be of the people, by the people and for the people. But that does not mean there is anything inherently wrong with the government. And that is why we have talked before about conspiracy theories that make it seem like the government can only be wrong and the deep state does this and the deep state does that.
But anything that sows distrust in a democratic government comes from and works to the advantage of the power elite. It can be no other way. If you have a fundamental distrust in democratic institutions, this only works to the advantage of the power elite because they want to overthrow the democratic institutions so they can put themselves back in power. They did not want democracy and they have been trying to undermine it ever since. And the recent populist revolutions or whatever you want to call them are, despite the claims, only working to the advantage of the power elite. They were inspired by and financed by them and so forth. It is not a matter of getting rid of government influence. That is exactly what the neoliberalists have been trying to do for decades. And you can see that the rising tide has not lifted all boats.
In terms of digital currency, I have also spoken about that before, and you already have digital currency. You may say you have a national mint who is printing dollar bills or euro bills or whatever it may be and that creates a certain amount of money. But banks are creating money beyond this printed money supply. They are doing it every day. And how are they doing it? On computers. So you have digital currency. They create $100,000 to give somebody a loan. They do not have that money in their bank vaults. Isn’t that digital currency? There will come a time where there is no printed money just for practical reasons and all currency is digital. It is just a matter of how it is implemented, who is in charge of it and who benefits from it. The real question is how much can the power elite influence digital money and that is, of course, a whole other question.
Copyright © 2023 Kim Michaels