As economy cycles, so does the value of its faces

In the offices of the Hennessee Group hang two oil paintings and two prints, each portraying the bespectacled visage of former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan.

"What I should do is make them into a dart board," says Charles Gradante, who with his wife, Lee Hennessee, runs the Fifth Avenue firm that advises investors in hedge funds. "All I see when I look at these paintings are two market crashes, a bear market, and the current economic crisis."

The pictures stay on the wall because of Ms. Hennessee, who remains loyal to the paintings and to the man they portray.

"Wonderful," she says, surveying one canvas. Ms. Hennessee paid $2,500 for the portrait by artist Erin Crowe. She believes the works could grow in value.

The paintings at the center of this husband-and-wife disagreement are artifacts of a bygone era: a time when many Americans thought central bankers were cool, and Mr. Greenspan was the coolest, or perhaps hottest, of them all.

Henry Holzer's look back at his old pal Ayn Rand

“In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value. If there were, the government would have to make its holding illegal, as was done in the case of gold [see my Blog of January 25, 2009].

If everyone decided, for example, to convert all their bank deposits to silver or copper or any other good, and thereafter declined to accept checks as payment for goods, bank deposits would lose their purchasing power and government-created bank credit would be worthless as a claim on goods.

The financial policy of the welfare state requires that there be no way for the owners of wealth to protect themselves. This is the shabby secret of the welfare statists’ tirades against gold. Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the ‘hidden’ confiscation of wealth."

http://henrymarkholzer.blogspot.com/2009/03/alan-greenspan-story-from-objectivist.html