Acabei de ler um dos textos mais claros e elucidativos sobre um tema que me é caro: o sistema monetário e o impacto profundo que tem nas nossas vidas.
O autor é Dominic Frisby e escreve regularmente na revista inglesa Money Week. Permito-me citar abaixo o trecho que mais me impressionou. Podes ler o texto completo aqui.
How inflation benefits a very select group of people
We’ve grown used to inflation. Our central bank explicitly wants
prices to rise by 2% a year. Deflation – when prices fall – is deemed a
threat to economic growth.
Yet when gold and silver were officially used as money, prices were
constant. In fact, according to the wholesale price index, prices
actually drifted lower through the 19th century at a time when the
Western world was enjoying great economic growth and prosperity.
They remained constant until the First World War. Then Germany,
France and the UK abandoned the gold standard, and prices shot up.
In 1971, the world made its final move away from gold. The modern
system of government fiduciary money – fiat currency – became the
global norm. It wasn't planned to any great extent. It happened out of
political expediency. The US had issued more dollars than it had gold to
back them, and was facing a run on its gold.
How have prices changed since then? In 1971, I could have taken my
son to the FA Cup final for £2 (now over £100). The Mars bar I bought
him at half-time would be 2p (now 60p). The beer I bought myself would
be 11p (now £5 a pint at Wembley). The gallon of petrol I needed to get
me there and back would be 33p (now £7). And the house we went home to
would be something like 40 times cheaper. One forgets the scale of the
robbery.
Average earnings have increased too, but not by the same multiples.
They have risen from around £2,000 to about £25,000 today. The
differential has been covered up by more debt, longer working hours,
more women in the workplace and so on.
Why does everything – except mass-produced goods – relentlessly
rise in price? It’s this system of fiat currency. There is almost no
limit to how much can be created. And the more money there is, the more
diluted its purchasing power becomes, and the higher prices will rise.
Some benefit hugely from this system: those who control it, and
those who are at or near its point of issuance. Governments and banks,
in other words. As well as enjoying a monopoly, they have the power to
create money (whether by printing or through lending) and to charge
interest on it. They also get to buy assets with their share of the
newly minted money, before prices rise to reflect the new money in
circulation.
Meanwhile, the rest of us find that our savings or wages buy less
and less, so we have to take on debt, and then pay interest on that
debt, to be able to buy the things that we, or our parents, were once
able to afford to buy outright.
There is a constant transfer of wealth and it compounds over time.
The few benefit at the expense of the many. This is why the state and
financial sectors have grown so disproportionately large.
It's led to the horrendous gap between the so-called 1% (the
super-rich) and everyone else. It’s responsible for this gap in the
wealth between generations. It’s why we have a culture based on debt
and spending, rather than saving and investment.
And it will only get worse as this transfer-of-wealth cycle repeats and repeats.
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