Chapter Quotes

WORLD COMMODITIES and 

WORLD CURRENCY

Benjamin Graham

"It passes the boundaries of sanity when men stand in fear of the good earth's bounty, damned with the epithet 'surplus.'"

- Henry M. Wriston
"Challenge to Freedom," p.15.

"We know from experience what government cartels mean.  They are worse if possible, than private cartels."

- Senator J. C. O'Mahoney

"The answer to each and every problem, if the high opportunity of this and the succeeding generation is to be seized, is collaboration with the United States, not to restrict trade but to free it; not to stake out vested claims but to raise the world's share of goods and services in every place and by every means."

- The Economist,
London, June 6, 1942, p.782.

"Let no one feel that precious surpluses will bear down upon us and engulf us. . . These are assets of tremendous value."

- Bernard M. Baruch and John Hancock
Report on War and Postwar Adjustment Policies,
February 15, 1934, p.30.

". . . Uneeded stocks of raw materials, beyond the margin of military safety, will hang over the postwar market, depressing future production, employment, and prices.   It will be stockpiling trouble for the future."

- Same report, p.72.

"The only effective alternatives appear to be fairly unrestricted competition with its attendant evils, or complete and individual dictation to millions of producers, with its attendant evils."

- R. F. Martin
"International Raw Commodity Price Control,"
The Brookings Institution 1937, p. 14.

"It is probably true to say that all the rational arguments which can be advanced in favor of the gold standard apply even more strongly to this proposal, which is at the same time free from the defects of the former."

- F. A. Hayek,
"A Commodity Reserve Currency,"
The Economic Journal, June-Sept, 1943, p. 184.

"For a world that is happy and at peace is a world of well-filled barns."

- Clare Leighton
"Give Us This Day," New York, 1943.

"Experience shows that one-commodity planning invariably tends towards restriction by one or more such devices as restrictions on current output or exports, the destruction of supplies, restrictions on new productive capacity, the financing of producers so that they can with-hold supplies from the market, and the allocation of markets."

- International Labour Office

"Indeed as the articles into which it is convertible are those needed for continual consumption, the purchasing power of the note must remain steady, compared with that of gold and silver, which metals are employed for only a few specific purposes."

- W. S. Jevons

"What matters most to the rest of the world is that the United States should enjoy a stable prosperity without any disturbing fall in the price level and without alternate booms and slumps, which spread havoc far outside American boundaries and by themselves would suffice to wreck any international currency scheme."

- The Times,
London, April 22, 1944

"The stability of the Soviet currency is secured primarily by the tremendous volume of commodities in the hands of the State, and placed in circulation at stable prices.  What economist can deny that such security is more real than any gold reserve?"

- Joseph Stalin
1933

"If we fix our minds upon the fact that the capacity to produce is the nation's wealth, and upon the dislocation of that capacity as the supreme evil to be avoided, we shall, I believe, have hold of the saving truth."

- Walter Lippmann,
New York Herald Tribune,
January 8, 1944.