Forex Foray

Posted: May 9, 2025 | Author: | Filed under: Chronicles of a First Time Parent, Money & Banking | Tags: , , , , | Leave a comment

For your next dinner party, an interesting parlor game is to ask the question, “What is the strongest currency in the world?”  The answer will stump many, and most likely, will surprise all.  


My son and I talked about this recently.  We were at our Credit Union and he asked about gold in their vaults – they have none – which lead to gold backing the United States Dollar (USD) – there is none.

I quoted the old joke, “There is not enough gold in Fort Knox…” and explained the Nixon Shock, when on the hot summer night of 15 August 1971, Richard Nixon – by Executive Order – suspended the convertibility of US dollars into gold.  With a stroke of his pen, Nixon unilaterally ended the post World War II Bretton Woods monetary system.  

In Latin “fiat” means “let it be done,” an authoritative decree and in monetary terms the USD is a “fiat” currency; there is no underlying asset base because it is secured only by “the promise to pay.”   In an era of rising national debt and hyper-partisan politics, that promise to pay can seem frightfully uncertain.  

“Isn’t the USD the strongest currency” my son sagely asked?  I explained that the USD is the world’s reserve currency, and so the strength of all currencies is in comparison to it.  Some currencies are weaker (less value) while others are stronger.  

As most people would, my son reasoned the strongest currency must be either in Europe or Asia, “Asia produces so much.”  Economic output logically focuses on the “Group of 7” leading industrialized nations: Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and the USA.  Our bias inherently is G7-centric.  

We continued to talk, and he said, “No, it must be in the Middle East!  They have so much oil.”  He was onto something, and I told him, in fact, the Kuwaiti Dinar is the strongest currency in the world.  The next three strongest currencies are also from the Middle East: Bahraini dinar, Omani rial and the Jordanian dinar.  All are net exporters of oil, with a strong inflow of foreign currencies and stable governments.  

A few years ago we drove north to Montreal, Canada.  Before the trip my son and I went to a currency exchange to buy Canadian Dollars.  He paid $1.00 USD to purchase about $1.25 Canadian Dollars.  In other words, when he bought a Lego set in Canada it cost less than it would back at home; his money went further.  A valuable lesson, and we had many fine meals on the cheap.  

The lesson here is that the value of money is relative, not fixed. Long ago money was backed by gold, now it is fiat, while oil is becoming a dominant base of value. All oil sales are settled in United States Dollars – known as “petrodollars” – but China and Saudi Arabia have begun to settle in Chinese Yuan. The USD now is declining. The global movement seems away from fiat to asset-backed currencies. The omnipotence of oil backed currency would seem to make the transition to clean energy more difficult by an order of magnitude.

In the age when gold was the standard, there were arguments for both Gold and Silver to serve as the underlying basis.  William Jennings Bryan’s historic speech advocating bimetallism, delivered in 1896 in Chicago, ranks among the finest examples of oratory in world history.  

The gold proponents were the monied class on the East Coast.  The silver constituency were the workers, the masses, the common man.  Bryan reasoned:

“The man who is employed for wages is as much a business man as his employer; the attorney in a country town…the merchant at the cross-roads store…the farmer who goes forth in the morning and toils all day,.. the miners who go down a thousand feet into the earth…are as much business men as the few financial magnates who, in a back room, corner the money of the world. We come to speak of this broader class of business men.”

He then addressed the gold proponents, and argued against supply-side economics:

“There are two ideas of government. There are those who believe that, if you will only legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, their prosperity will leak through on those below. The Democratic idea, however, has been that if you legislate to make the masses prosperous, their prosperity will find its way up through every class which rests upon them.”

He rhetorically cut down the gold position, advocating the bimetal monetary basis to support the common man, and then in crescendo, rose to his time-honored conclusion:

“Having behind us the producing masses of this nation and the world, supported by the commercial interests, the laboring interests, and the toilers everywhere, we will answer their demand for a gold standard by saying to them: “You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns; you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.” 

Dead silence filled the Chicago Coliseum.  Bryan feared he had missed his mark, until pandemonium broke out and he was raised onto the shoulders of delegates.  “Bedlam broke loose, delirium reigned supreme” the Washington Post reported.

Gold, silver, fiat, or oil…in a world of constant change, the lesson for my son is that integrity need be his bank account, his word his bond, character alone counts. By that true standard he will do well regardless of the rising or falling tides of money and banking.    

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In our home school chemistry class, solid progress had been made, my son has made his mark.

Habeas Corpus, Habeas Vox

Posted: April 11, 2025 | Author: | Filed under: Child Centered Activities, Chronicles of a First Time Parent, consciousness | Tags: , , | 2 Comments

One recent morning, my son stood in the kitchen, riveted, listening to the radio.  Briskly he spoke, “Dad, how can the President deport citizens for what they say?  Isn’t this a violation of their First Amendment rights?  When someone enters the country legally, they gain the right of free speech!…upon entry, but they are being deported for saying things the President does not like!  They have the right to speak!  I don’t understand this!!?”  My son’s concern for Free Speech coincides with the right of Due Process. 

Knowing it takes a village, I reached out to his cousin WMMK – my nephew – a young law professor who, as it were, is an expert in habeas corpus, which is to say Due Process.  WMMK has been published, arguing that habeas corpus is the “…Great Writ of Popular Sovereignty — a tool for We the People to insist that when our agents in government exercise our delegated penal powers, they remain faithful to our sovereign will.”  WMMK argues “…the implications for the law of habeas are profound…Paradoxically, shifting from a libertarian to a popular-sovereigntist conception of the writ might yield habeas doctrine more capable of protecting individual liberty.”

My son having raised questions of individual liberty, and given his cousin’s strong clear voice, I decided to create a homeschool Humanities Seminar.  Habeas corpus in Latin means “you should have the body.”  And where there is a body, there is a voice.  Thus we prepare to homeschool “Habeas Corpus, Habeas Vox: Due Process and the 1st Amendment.” 

All roads do not lead to Rome.  Plato and Aristotle taught that justice within the state held civic virtue (“arete”) as its key; they did not teach specific legal mechanisms to protect individual liberties.  

It would take a peasant boy, born in Dardania (present day Balkans) to craft those mechanisms. Justinian – Emperor of the Byzantine Empire – not only built the Hagia Sophia but codified the great Roman jurists; his Corpus Juris Civilis (“Body of Civil Law”) (529-534 AD) endures as the basis of European and International law.  But the heavy lifting came in medieval England.  

King John was arbitrary and autocratic, and so his Barons spoke up and rebelled. They forced him, in 1215, to sign the Magna Carta which guaranteed “No freeman shall be taken or imprisoned or disseised or exiled or in any way destroyed…except upon the lawful judgement of his peers or the law of the land.”  Given habeas vox, so then habeas corpus; the Habeas Corpus Act was codified in 1679 and remains on the statute book to this day: prisoners cannot be held indefinitely without a judicial review of their detention.  

The origins of free speech – in the Western tradition – go back to Athenian democracy, in the late 6th or early 5th century BC.  They had two concepts of free speech; isegoria was “equality of speech” where all freeborn males had a direct voice in debating and passing laws, while parrhesia was “uninhibited speech,” a culture of tolerance and the free exchange of ideas and criticisms.  Erasmus (circa 1500) and Milton (1644) weighed in, but again it was the English Parliament, whose Bill of Rights in 1689 established the constitutional right of freedom of speech.  On that recent weekday morning, my son honored that tradition, arguing on behalf of individual liberty.  

What then shall our seminar entail?  I have begun assembling a reading list to include:

  • In Classical Greece justice was the proper functioning of the state as a whole, with community and mutual respect valued higher than individual liberties.  The greatest punishment was for the intransigent to be exiled, which is to say to have their voice taken away.  
  • Justinian’s reign occurred at a hinge point of history.  Considered among the greatest, and the last, of the Roman Emperors, his achievements marked the apex of Roman expansion, until a flea carrying the bubonic plague brought massive death:  between 25 and 100 Million deaths and the downfall of the empire.  The armies of Mohammad easily ransacked both Rome and Persia, and history moved from late antiquity to the medieval world.  
  • The Magna Carta was foundational to British Common Law, as developed through judicial decisions rather than written codes; “Stare Decisis” means that courts shall follow earlier rulings in similar cases, with precedent as the governing basis.  Stability is a virtue.  The British Bill of Rights built upon this tradition and became the basis for much of American law.  
  • The Judiciary Act of 1789 established the American judiciary – the mechanism of due process – and was followed by Amendment One to the USA Constitution, ratified on December 15, 1791:  “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
  • Abraham Lincoln suspended the right of habeas corpus at his sole discretion when he signed The Habeas Corpus Suspension Act of 1863.  He argued the public safety required it, such as during rebellion or invasion of the Civil War.  
  • And finally, we will come to the present day, to discuss the fundamental meaning of freedom of speech with American habeas as the vindication not of individual physical liberty, but of popular sovereignty.  How does the state protect the voice of “We the People”?  WMMK will lead this discussion.  

We need pay heed to the fact that for every minute we ponder such noble thoughts, in El Salvador, Kilmar Abrego Garcia is detained wrongfully, without due process, by an administration driven not by justice but reptilian id, anger and revenge for its own gratification; how frail is the law to those who shall not heed its calling.  The Magna Carta is but words on paper in the face of any regime that abuses human rights, and these rights must belong not to the privileged few, but to all people created equal.  

We study the past to inform our future; patterns of discrimination are the reality against which this philosophy need be understood, in order to raise my son with both an intellectual understanding and the emotional intelligence of a 21st Century global citizen.

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Persephone returns…