Opinion of Hugo Salinas Price with regard to the present situation in Mexico

Monday, 11 September 2006

Hugo Salinas Price

One more voice, my own, amid such confusion…

I have been insisting for several years on the need to reintroduce silver as money into circulation in Mexico, in parallel with the fiat peso.

I have said that we should do this before the chaos arrived because once disorder arrived – and it has arrived in spades! – the confusion and the shouting would be so great that it would be hard to concentrate attention on this measure. And so it has been.

It is lamentable but natural that people cannot see that our social problems, which we share with the whole world, are in great part attributable to the condition which the whole world suffers: that we live making believe that what we use as money is actually money, when it is nothing of the sort: a payment is the delivery of something in exchange for something. Today, “payment” in any currency in the world is not truly a payment, because tendering a peso, a dollar, a euro or any other currency in payment is to tender what is in reality nothing. Such currencies have no value in themselves; they are all “means of exchange” but they are not payment. (China has almost one trillion dollars of reserves, because they have not collected on their exports. They have not been paid. They have only received vouchers.)

We must understand that the financial sector in all parts of the world creates this so-called “money” out of nothing and that it is the financial sector which is the first beneficiary of this fraudulent creation. This is the reason that we see luxurious towers erected in Mexico City and in all capitals of the world. They represent the (involuntary) transfer of purchasing power from the People, to the financial sector. How would it be possible that a 1900 painting by the Viennese painter Klimt, could be sold at auction recently for $135,000,000 dollars, plus commission to the auctioneers, except as a result of the financial plunder that is taking place?

We are very distressed, like ants whose anthill has been disturbed, but we do not comprehend at all the cause of our anguish and of the terrible distortions which the free market has brought us, once money ceased to be money.

The free market, when it operates under the circumstance that one country, the United States, produces the “money” of the world in unlimited quantities, is no longer a true free market. It is the destruction of everything: industry, agriculture, savings, institutions…it is the demolition of the country – of this country and of all (including the U.S.): the so-called “globalization”.

Neither the elected president, Felipe Calderón, nor anyone, can dig us out of the hole caused by false money as long as the root cause of the problem is not addressed, no matter how intelligent and honest the administration of the next president may be.

López Obrador represents the anger and frustration caused by bad money, but neither he nor those who follow him understand this. How could we expect him to begin to resolve our problems if he does not understand their fundamental cause, to begin with?

The monetization of silver would act as a balm for a wounded country. It would provide a base for the beginning of concord, a sign of nationalism that the Left is anxious to see and which would not bother the Right at all – what is more, the Right would also love the possibility of saving in silver. It would be a hope, which the next administration could give us, that our problems were being addressed directly with a measure which is tangible and visible by all.

For this reason I shall continue to insist upon silver as a lifesaver for Mexican salvation. It is not going to resolve all our problems, but it will be a soothing balm that will be very welcome, even though the full cure may take a long time; monetized silver places us on a road which gives us hope.

Let us hope the monetization of silver is achieved; let us hope that the intelligence of our legislators and of our next president, joined to what their hearts and intuitions tell them, will provide us with monetized silver as soon as possible. We would be the first country in the world to take this step, for the Glory of Mexico.