A bit about Poland, but first, Freeland says Canadians are Relieved by High Interest Rates

 

I was going to write about Poland this morning, but before I got to it, the Google news feed drew my attention to a speech Chrystia Freeland gave at what appears to be a childcare centre (center for you Americans). In yet another liberal wtf moment, she celebrated that the Bank of Canada’s decision this week to maintain the current overnight interest rate is “welcome relief for Canadians”. Do you feel like celebrating that interest rates will stay high?  She seemed to be saying that if you are Canadian, you are relieved that interest rates will stay up in the clouds. Does she think everyone has the money she has? Maybe not, but you could if you follow her advice: cancel your Disney Plus subscription and stop driving a car. What did you say? Oh….well yeah…I agree that if the government also provided you with a chauffeur and a car, you could do that. Good point. Glad you raised it.

Enough of the nonsense from the most amateur and incompetent federal government Canada has had maybe ever. Let’s say something about Poland. It’s been on my mind for a few years that Poland is becoming positioned to be the prime regional sovereign power in eastern Europe. The notion has been informed by Peter Zeihan and George Friedman. Their arguments make sense. A few days ago, I ran across a youtube video that explains the advances Poland has made in the past 30 years and that explores the trends. It’s worth watching and is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-taT9JfSFAk. Russia has the position of being the regional power there now, but is demographically challenged: Russians are aging and not replacing themselves as quickly as needed. But the Polish birthrate is substantially worse. (1.38 vs. 1.5 children per woman). Poland has gotten a population boost from Ukraine, but that won’t happen every decade, so the thesis of Poland’s rising star might see a challenge on the basis of aging population.

We can look at the population pyramids. First, Poland.              

 

 

 

                

Now Russia.

 

 

     

They are fairly similar, but notice the higher percentage of gen-Z in Russia. Those are the folks entering the labor force in the next 20 years. Nonetheless, the current status of Poland shows what innovative thinking, a relatively free market, hard work and a culture of morality can achieve.

                                      

BRICS and the Dollar

 

I enjoyed oral interpretation in college, and I still like reading aloud. I loved reading bedtime stories to our kids. They are all adults now, but I still get to read bedtime stories to my wife. Lately it is a Baldacci novel. Sometimes I am rather sleepy when I ply this passion, and I mispronounce words or even replace them with other words that can greatly change the story and turn a serious circumstance into a hoot. Last night I read message as messenge. Makes sense when it comes via a messenger. If it’s a message, why not call its deliverer a messager? Sounds a lot like a massager.

I started thinking about how we misappropriate words today in political contexts. So, people that would return us to the dark ages can be called progressive and people of vacuous intellect can be called woke as though they are actually aware. Harsh language perhaps, but keep in mind the damage that has been done by the ideologies of climate catastrophism, euthanasia, gender identity, command economics, politicizing science, and on and one.

Our western democracies have largely been governed by the woke crowd for awhile, and have grown weak and tentative in my opinion. A symptom is the propensity to select government officials based on their ideologies instead of their competence. We the results. A current example is people in Maui being told to shelter in place while fire was heading towards them, and then those people finding the exits from the community blocked by the police. So people have died. Lots of them. And since the woke government decided only to count those dead whose corpses have been identified, the number is 104, ignoring the charred remains of the hundreds of unknown people. What idiots run that show? They provide the fruit of a discredited and dangerous philosophy. It is a philosophy that is intellectually challenged and accordingly must ignore truth or even invent it.

It seems to me that the BRICS nations have largely resisted succumbing to such nonsense. They are rejecting the woke values and seeking to strengthen themselves through unity around practical time tested principles such as having a gold backed currency, the topic of this essay.

The independent financial press is often eulogizing the U.S. dollar, as though it will die or at least cease to be the world’s reserve currency. Here is what I see as the problem with this theory. A reserve currency is what sovereign nations choose as the currency of their saved cash until they need to spend it. It isn’t paper money, but government treasury debt such as U.S. 10 year treasury notes or 30 year treasury bonds. To be a reserve currency, it has to have a related bond market so that it can be bought and sold easily. The USA has an old established bond market that is several times the size of the stock market. London and Tokyo have large bond markets also, but there isn’t enough money supply in the pound or the yen to fund trade of even a commodity like oil, never mind other trade, so it is hard to see how there is a currency to replace the dollar.

Further, the supposedly gold backed bric, for lack of a better word, will not be redeemable in gold. If it isn’t redeemable in gold, then it can be inflated. So far as I understand it, the bric is to be gold backed in the sense of being pegged to the price of gold. So, as gold goes up, it will take more dollars to buy the bric currency. I don’t see this as being sustained. There will probably be eventual dislocation and disequilibrium and the dollar/bric exchange rate will be determined by relative money supplies.

While the dollar is likely to remain the primary reserve currency, it may lose its role as the primary payment currency as BRICS nations price their trade in other currencies to divorce themselves from the dollar. That would reduce demand for the dollar and make it harder for America to export its inflation. Many of the dollars stored overseas may come back home, unwanted and unneeded. The chickens would be coming home to roost, and America would see price inflation that would drive many into poverty. Gold looks pretty good.