Gold
Sir: I have been wondering what is the flaw in Mr Stahl's specious article on the gold market in your issue of November 1.
The answer appears to me to be that the value, not price, of gold is determined by the quantity and variety of the items it can buy, and to measure it in terms of SUS distorts the picture by representing only one field in which gold operates. The fact that $US I million GOLD only bought $US 700,000 paper twelve months later, representing a depreciation of 30 per cent, is irrelevant to gold's intrinsic purchasing power. For it does not follow that this $US 700,000 paper can purchase at that date what $US I million gold did twelve months previously, because
prices of goods and services had, during this period, increased in terms of $US paper.
The ability of any currency to purchase an even quantity of goods and services will continue to be qualified so long as the printing-press is available to governments who have no scruples about devaluing their currency and who cannot be stopped from so doing. Once the hydra of articial control of the means of exchange has been imposed, vested interests are created and politics of the world-wide order become involved.
It is surprising that your broad-minded publication should have adopted the American policy of denigrating the power, and hence the place, of gold, and is especially inconsistent when considered in relation to 'The crime of the National Debt', also recorded in the same issue.
R. Y. Armstrong 4 Livingstone Road, Umtali, Rhodesia
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