Northwestern Mutual Makes First Gold Buy in 152 Years (Update2)

By Andrew Frye

June 1 (Bloomberg) -- Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Co., the third-largest U.S. life insurer by 2008 sales, has bought gold for the first time the company’s 152-year history to hedge against further asset declines.

“Gold just seems to make sense; it’s a store of value,” Chief Executive Officer Edward Zore said in an interview following his comments at a conference hosted by Standard & Poor’s in Brooklyn. “In the Depression, gold did very, very well.” FULL STORY

Only Criminals Use Honest Money

Mises Daily by Christopher P. Casey | Posted on 6/3/2009 12:00:00 AM

The article "Mackerel Economics in Prison Leads to Appreciation for Oily Fillets" published in the October 2, 2008 issue of The Wall Street Journal, revealed the new monetary system in prisons: cans of mackerel, or "mack" in prison nomenclature. Just as a various goods (e.g., gold, silver, copper, rice, salt, peppercorns, large stones, etc.) have long competed in the marketplace to be the standard of currency, so mack had to fend off books of stamps, PowerBars, and cans of tuna.

Fiat money does not exist in prison. Prisoners do not dye sheets of paper green and attempt to circulate them as money. No inmate would accept this as money, not even if the penal equivalent of a Bretton Woods agreement existed between the toughest gangs.

Why is it that criminals continue to use real money in their transactions? Because they have not been fooled otherwise. In The Case Against the Fed, Murray Rothbard detailed the process by which people have been fooled into thinking those green pieces of paper are a proper store of value (the key purpose of money). Once government changed the law to recognize monetary warehouse receipts (dollar bills) as a debtor relationship instead of that of a bailment (the temporary possession of another's property), fractional-reserve banking was born. Fractional-reserve banking is inherently fraudulent. FULL STORY