The Doughty Swiss
By GCRU Gold News on Saturday, January 17 2015, 22:20 - Permalink
Congratulations to the doughty Swiss, we say. The decision of their central bank to remove the cap on its currency, allowing it to soar against the Euro, is causing the foreign exchnge markets to be struck with the dreaded turbulence. It may well make things difficult for Switzerland in the short run. But it was a vote of no confidence in the quantitative easing that the European Central Bank is about to undertake. It may have put some starch into the Germans, to whom the ECB just bowed by saying it will do its quantitative easing without making taxpayers responsible for losses.
The bitter truth is that all the sturm and drang over the Swiss franc is a feature of the age of fiat money. The exclamations of horror that have greeted the decision of one tiny country to stop playing the same game as the bigger countries testify to nothing so much as the absurdity of the fiat system. We’ve never understood the virtues of any country running down the value of its money. We’ve long felt that one country or another — Switzerland, Israel, Britain . . . someone — just ought to stop issuing its currency by fiat and return to a classical system. Wouldn’t it be something if it turns out that Switzerland has taken the first step.