Islands of conscious power in this ocean of unconscious co-operation like lumps of butter coagulating in a pail of buttermilk. - Dennis Robertson

Looking back the great American ‘stabilisation’ [and boom] of 1922-1929 was really a vast attempt to destabilise the value of money in terms of human effort by means of a colossal programme of investment [driven by too easy credit]... which succeeded for a surprisingly long period, but which no human ingenuity could have managed to direct indefinitely on sound and balanced lines. [and therefore it ended dramatically in the huge 1929 stock market crash followed by the Great Depression.]

The value of a yellow metal, originally chosen as money because it tickled the fancy of savages, is clearly a chancy and irrelevant thing on which to base the value of our money and the stability of our industrial system."