Pecunia cash3/6/2023 ![]() The “Treasury Department” of the jihadist group that is now occupying large portions of Syria and Iraq announced Thursday that it plans to mint its own currency out of gold, silver and copper. Remember my new tattoo, “cuius regio, eius pecunia” or “whose region, his money”? It turns out that it’s their motto too and as they appear be of a reactionary mindset, the money in their region will not be of the kind subject to quantitative easing. M-PAISA went live in Afghanistan years ago, and the US could (I’m pretty sure) have simply insisted that all contractors were paid by mobile money so that they had a rudimentary audit trail as, indeed, they would have with Bitcoin. But I digress. Interestingly, when he says “bags of cash” he isn’t speaking metaphorically: they actually do give him bags of cashĪll of which leaves me wondering why the US chose to work in cash. But in that particular case, when they said “cash” they meant it absolutely literally. In a newspaper story like this, “cash” is usually a simple word inserted to mean money of a variety of forms (bank-created credit, central bank-issued currency and so on). Washington made the problem worse by inundating Afghanistan with more cash than it could absorb in legitimate channels to undertake needed reforms The local currency of every “cash-intensive economy” is nine times out of ten the US Dollar as far as I know, so you can’t help but wonder why on Earth US regulators are chasing their tails on Bitcoin when it is actually US Federal Reserve banknotes that are wreaking havoc wherever they go? I noted in an article about corruption in Afghanistan that dollars or the local currency of a cash-intensive economy,” “In order to remain anonymous, ISIL may most likely be settling transactions for smuggled oil in U.S. They are not using the euro, but the spawn of the Great Satan. ![]() ![]() ![]() The European Union is an obvious case study, where the conservative perspective might be that the currency can be argued to be failing, but there is another supra-national trading bloc of interest at the moment, the new Caliphate. Let’s return to Ben’s comments in a moment but first look at the concept of supra-national money - money that is not connected with national borders - through a conservative lens. Ben is, I suspect, of conservative bent, as he also said that:Īs radical and implausible as it may sound, digitising the earth’s 2,500-year experiment with commodity money may ultimately prove far more sustainable than our recent 35-year experiment with monetary sovereignty. As I said at the time, that’s what I call thinking out of the box. Seven years ago, I wrote a blog post that mentioned some comments from Ben Steil, then Director of International Economics at the influential Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) who had said that Governments “must let go of the fatal notion that nationhood requires them to make and control the money used in their territory” and that “in order to globalise safely, countries should abandon monetary nationalism and abolish unwanted currencies, the source of much of today’s instability”. But surely it’s time for digital dinars isn’t it? I mean come on, just how conservative are these guys? The “ Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant” (ISIL) are apparently about to issue their own currency based on precious metals.
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