by Jason Scheurer 15 Nov 2014
In less than three weeks, the most important election of the year will take place in Switzerland, and you haven’t heard of it. While the U.S. focuses on the recent Republican victory, the financial markets are facing an earth-shaking event on November 30th.
This Swiss election seeks to challenge the paper currency (Fiat/Debt) system of the last forty years and possibly undermine the existing power structures of central banks across the globe by introducing the “Save Our Swiss Gold” initiative.
U.S. elections sway back and forth between Republicans and Democrats, but the monetary system never changes nor is ever up for any real debate. The monetary system of the whole world has been firmly in the hands of Keynesians’ ever since Nixon removed the convertibility of dollars and abandoned the Bretton Woods Agreement back in 1971. A positive Swiss vote would threaten this by once again providing the world with a choice between a hard (gold-backed) currency and fiat.
Up until recently, it was the Swiss who were the last holdouts against the Keynesian school of thought. Traditionally viewed as the last bastion of sensible monetary restraint, the Swiss succumbed to the siren call of “actively managed central banking” in September 2011, fixing their currency to the Euro under mounting European pressure.
Somehow, having what the world views as the strongest currency is a bad thing when everyone else is printing like crazy. It wasn’t so much the success of the Swiss currency during this Depression 2.0 but the failure of the rest of the world to restrain itself that lead to its appreciation.
Central bankers hate gold, or any hard currency restraint, because it limits their ability to tinker with the system (see FDR executive order 6102). On November 30th, Swiss voters will go to the polls to reassert their historical position of backing their country’s currency with gold, and possibly setting off a new revolution across the financial world by giving people a real choice.
