Friday 16 December 2011 Page 17
Continued from Page 12 take a map and look at how many options there are of getting out of our region, whether by car or even with a backpack over the mountains, and how many possibilities to hide, it makes it difficult for the police to catch them directly after such an incident. Most often delinquents like this gets arrested after they make more burglaries. Do you think that the Promenade of Gstaad would benefit
from a security camera system? MB - To put cameras only on the Promenade would not be a solution. It would be necessary to develop a complete concept with principal roads, railway stations, and a lot of important places. Before one speaks about cameras and solutions, you need to have a concept what you want to achieve with the cameras. Is it prevention, do u want to be able to identify a person in a night while it’s snowing? Do you want just to evaluate
after an incident, or monitoring in real time? Are there so many incidents that it’s necessary to invest so much money? Who is going to pay? Is it not cheaper to make two more security patrols every day? To make it short: At some point a camera for prevention may be a benefit. The current situation requires it not to be necessarily. JO - Cameras alone: No. Cameras are only effective if constantly monitored and combined with a rapid intervention force. Anybody
Money Matters familiar with Monte Carlo will tell you that they have cameras everywhere. However, the true deterrent factors are the police officers strategically placed throughout the city. The cameras, which are monitored at all times, are used to pick out suspicious activities and persons, and the police can react to the information that is relayed to them. By Peter Sonnekus-Williams
Crucial moment in European and global history Countries gradually removed gold and silver from their national monetary systems, and replaced them with paper, the result was inflation. The world probably and unfortunately will not return to the Gold Standard. But it can return to a world in which most of the world’s currencies are linked to several currencies, such as the Dollar, Euro and Yen, or possibly to a single Eurodollar currency. Whether these reserve currencies return to relative price stability, and can avoid the problems of the 21st century, remains uncertain, but it is a goal to aim for. I certainly do not believe that we, or the U.S. will be running into a hyperinflation, such as Germany, Hungary and Yugoslavia or recently Zimbabwe has experienced. However a slow steady inflation, which in difficult times increases in speed, is within a lifetime often destroying all your savings. And of course it is highly questionable, how for instance the U.S. will ever cover its
trillions of obligations going forward. These obligations now exceed even by far a 100 % tax rate should it be imposed on the Americans. Like gold, U.S. dollars have value only to the extent that they are strictly limited in supply. But the U.S. government has a technology, called a printing press (or today, its electronic equivalent), which allows it to produce as many U.S. dollars as it wishes at essentially no cost. By increasing the number of U.S. dollars in circulation, or even by credibly threatening to do so, the U.S. government can also reduce the value of a dollar in terms of goods and services, which is equivalent to raising the prices in dollars of those goods and services. We conclude that, under a paper-money system, a determined government can always generate higher spending and hence positive inflation. Today we are watching a crucial moment in European and global
history. A possible breakdown of the Euro and the ensuing sound of helicopters dropping drachma, peseta, lira and escudo keep me up once a while at night. Current policies from Europe have the potential to create riot, revolution or worse. But there is a silver lining here - all of the peripheral European nations can act unilaterally to solve their own problems. Exit and devaluation works for any one of them. The road will be bumpy, but the Greeks can drop the right stuff from their own fleet of helicopters! Let’s just hope they (and the rest of Europe) figure this out soon and don’t end up using 1930s European policies to generate 1930s European outcomes. Let me pause for one short illustration of the character of one single destructive force arising. That was its effect upon the financial structure in Europe. Foreign countries, some also in the face of their own
failures, the failures of their neighbors, not believing that Europe has either the courage or the ability or the strength to meet this crisis, withdrew from Europe’s most significant investments, including a significant amount of gold. The alarmed European citizens withdrew also significant amount of currency from the banks into hoarding. These actions, combined with the fears that they generated, caused a shrinkage of credit available for the conduct of industry and commerce. Its visible expression was the failures of banks and business, the demoralization of security and real property values, of the commodity prices, and of employment. And that was but one of the invading forces of destruction that we have been compelled to meet in the last 18 months. WRITTEN BY MR TONI KNECHT, MEMBER OF THE EXECUTIVE BOARD OF MANAGEMENT, SAANEN BANK AG, TELEphONE +41 (0)33 748 46 47.