ENTREVISTA A RON PAUL

El congresista republicano Ron Paul es uno de los políticos más sensatos y con mayor claridad de ideas en el plano económico que ha escuchado en los últimos años. Sus planteamientos económicos son los de un pensador liberal, lo que algunos denominan "libertario". Eso hace que, a menudo, no se case ni con republicanos ni con demócratas sino que sus planteamientos sean independientes del partido de donde nacen. Por ejemplo, se muestra contrario al imperialismo americano, ya sea con las guerras oficiales de Bush o con la guerra sucia de Obama (asesinando selectivamente con drones, incluso a americanos sin juzgarlos, y utilizando la NSA para espiar a todo el planeta).

Como buen conocedor de la economía tiene claro que, como en su día advirtieron los economistas de la escuela austríaca, el abandono en 1971 del patrón oro en EEUU supuso abrir la barra libre financiera a una orgía monetaria orquestada desde su Banco Central (la Reserva Federal). Para él, la Fed es uno de los organismos más poderosos del mundo y que está regido opacamente por unos sujetos no electos por el pueblo y que no responden ante nadie. De hecho, si tú crearas dinero y lo utilizaras para manipular los mercados podrías ir a la cárcel por cualquiera de esos dos actos. Ellos lo hacen sin responsabilidades, ni siquiera por utilizarlo ese dinero público en beneficio de unos pocos, el gran capital. En mi opinión, la forma en que funcionan esas instituciones conocidas como Bancos Centrales son hoy una de las mayores expresiones de falta de democracia.

Te resumo sus comentarios en una entrevista reciente al Birch Gold Group. Sobre el oro:

• As a matter of fact, it was 1971, there was confirmation of the Austrian economic writers who had been predicting that would happen as early as Henry Hazlitt said when the IMF was set up in 1945. He said it wouldn’t work and Bretton Woods would break down. And by the 50′s and the 60′s people were rejecting it and it was so artificial and it was fragile. So people did know that it was coming, and mainly it was coming because the governments pretended that the dollar would be as good as gold at $35 an ounce forever, yet they kept printing dollars and it was pretty simple logic to figure out there’ll be a limit. The governments worked real hard to convince the people that there was no problem, that the dollar would always be valued at $35 an ounce. But finally the market overwhelmed. The politicians and Congresses, and Central Banks can manipulate things for a while but eventually if they are out of sync with the market, the market will overwhelm. And even if the government won’t permit it legally to do it, it just drives the whole system into the underground economy. So fixed exchange rates and different things don’t work, they just hide the fact. But in 1971, it was confirmation that everything that the Austrians were saying as far back as the beginning of the Bretton Woods, that was true. And of course we’ve been suffering the consequences from that ever since.

Sobre la divisa y la inflación:

• Right and the ultimate measure of the value of the currency is what it purchases, so gold is a good indicator long term, I don’t think it’s a good indicator short term, because there are a lot of factors, just like in the 50′s and 60′s, they were able to hold gold at $35 an ounce when it should have been $235 an ounce! But anyway, overall in the long term it’s what the dollar will purchase. And even though our government tells us today there is no inflation, they are trying to get prices to rise at at least 2% a year, yet there are some things in our economy, the prices are soaring: the price of a bond, the price of education, the price of medical care – all of these things are going up. So there is a lot of price inflation, but that’s the ultimate tests. You can measure one currency against another, gold is a long-term indicator. But if none of the prices were affected by printing money, it would be no big deal. But they are and of course the major problem is not only the price increases, it’s the malinvestment, the overinvestment, the bubbles that form and the corrections that have to come. That’s where the real problem is, in addition to the cost of living going up and hurting the poor and the middle class, much more so than it will the wealthy.

Sobre Janet Yellen (sucesora de Bernanke al frente de la Fed): que es más de lo mismo.

Sobre el QE: “The longer [Quantitative Easing] lasts, the worse the correction will be when eventually people give up on our dollar and give up on our debt.”

Sobre a quién hubiera nombrado él como sucesor de Bernanke:

• I would’ve picked nobody. I don’t think we should have a Fed, so I wouldn’t pick a Chairman. But even though in the Presidential campaign when they pushed me – “well, you’ll have to pick someone to unwind it” or something like that – I always threw out Jim Grant’s name. Because I’ve known him, he’s an Austrian economist, he knows that monetizing the debt is bad and if they were trying to work on a transition, somebody like that, you know, would move us in the right direction. But he wouldn’t last either because if he decided right now to only buy $75 billion worth of government debt per month, the markets would crash probably and then they would want to throw him out. So it’s a system that is very friable and unworkable and since they will not work out of it gracefully and deliberately, you know, we will probably go on to having a major crash of the dollar – that’s what I see happening.

Termino con las palabras de un fiscal de Nueva York sobre la democracia en su ciudad:

"Public corruption, based on all the evidence, appears rampant. And the ranks of those convicted in office have swelled to absolutely unacceptable levels. State Senators as well as State Assemblymen; elected officials as well as party leaders; city council members as well as town mayors; Democrats as well as Republicans."

                                    Preet Bharara, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York