This marks the first installment of Correct Me if I’m Wrong, my personal blog here at EconomicStability.
To my friends and family who clicked on the link in the email, welcome to our new site. This post will update you on how I came to be agitating for monetary reform.
To any others who find themselves reading these words, let this post serve as a more personal introduction (than the about page) to who is thinking and writing the thoughts you will find here.
A little about me…
I chose the name of this blog because I don’t put myself forward as any kind of an expert in economics, finance, accounting, law, or just about anything for that matter (in my other lives I am/have been a theater teacher/Shakespeare nut, a sauerkraut/pickle maker, and an organic dairy/beef farmer.)
I consider Joe Bongiovanni, my partner on this site, as the one with the expertise here.
I am 54 years old, and most of my limited experience with economics has been micro, as a farm operator, small business planner, and volunteer member of several non-profit boards. I really only started trying to understand the role of the monetary system in the overall economy about a year ago, and many old friends and family whom I have not seen recently may be surprised at my newfound interest in the subject of money as I have pretty much avoided it all my life.
How I got interested in monetary reform…
What happened a year ago? That’s where Kettle Pond, as in the Kettle Pond Institute, comes in. Every fall for over 20 years, a group of eight or ten male friends has camped out together at the lean-tos at Kettle Pond State Park. Last year we met right in the middle of the Lehman collapse. The AIG bailout had just been been announced. Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac had tanked the previous month and Hank Paulson was threatening Congress that he’d be forced to shoot the puppy if the taxpayers didn’t come up with $700 Billion on the spot.
In that context, one of the things I was looking forward to most in the run up to Kettle Pond 2008 was having the chance to catch up with my old friend Joe, who I wasn’t seeing much those days, as he had moved from Vermont to Virginia several years earlier. I knew that Joe had studied “The Economy” for years and that he had some crazy sounding ideas about ending the Fed and reforming the system that I’d never paid much attention to before. To make a long story short, Joe hooked himself a new monetary reformer while fishing in a canoe on Kettle Pond.
In the year since then, I have kept in touch with Joe on a regular basis and he has become my mentor on the subject. I have helped him organize the Montpelier talk in April, and last month we launched this website.
My Role Here
So if Joe is the expert here, what is my role? It is to be the novice who is wrestling with this devilishly complicated subject that 99% of the population have been happy to leave to the experts, in part because it is so complicated. Or deceptively simple if you listen to John Kenneth Galbraith:
The study of money, above all other fields in economics, is one in which complexity is used to disguise truth or to evade truth, not to reveal it. The process by which banks create money is so simple the mind is repelled. With something so important, a deeper mystery seems only decent.
I hope some of you find my attempts to make sense of the money system and monetary reform helpful.
What else you can find at EconomicStability
- We offer Joe’s Monetary Reform Primer, a series of six short videos that will introduce you to the dysfunctional and unsustainable debt based monetary system we have in the US and indeed every country on the globe (except maybe the Isle of Guernsey) and to the American Monetary and Financial Security Act(pdf) which contains the reforms we support, and which Congressman Kucinich will introduce this fall.
- Coffee with Joe, a weekly series of Skype video interviews between myself and Joe where we cover the events of the day, that we try to post each Friday morning.
- Joe posts some of his own writings.
- At some point we will fill in the Library section, which will reference books and links around the net, as well as the Debt-Free Money Hall of Fame, but we still have some homework to do on those.
- A series of six short Youtube interviews, Meet Some Monetary Reformers, that we shot at the Monetary Reform Conference in September.
Thanks for showing up. I hope you learn something here, and don’t hesitate to leave a question or to Correct Me if I’m Wrong.
Pete
