Remembering the Mogambo Guru | Mises Institute

To the Mogambo Guru—pen name of financial analyst Richard Daughty who passed away in 2022—the Federal Reserve were a gang of drunken arsonists locked inside the nation’s monetary basement, ecstatically spraying gasoline on the future while court economists in bespoke suits assured the public there was nothing to worry about. His style developed over the years from pointedly critical, no-words-wasted prose to theatrical, hyperbolic, hilarious, manic, and impossible to ignore alarm. To Mogambo, Fed monetary debasement was a five-alarm fire no one hears.

Yet beneath the comic explosions and mock hysteria lay a serious Austrian critique of fiat money and central banking that almost all other voices failed to instill in their readers.

If we look at the first of his Mogambo Newsletters, “The Way We Were,” published in October 2001, wherein he lays the foundation of his financial world view, we find clarity but without the distinctive flavor of his later writings:

Since before the time of the Pharaohs, all nations have contended with the same financial forces in existence today. They had (in one form or another) money, debt, and taxes.

They all had government spending. And every single one of these nations, in all of history, was eventually ruined by its government. Their money was debased to the point of worthlessness by the government spending too much to do too much, and then the country collapsed.

Why should we expect to be any different?

His favorite archenemy was the arch-counterfeiter, the Federal Reserve, which for Mogambo no amount of abuse was undeserving:

The Fed, you’ll recall, is a government-mandated, semi-secret club of the banks, all meeting together behind closed doors. Their “job” is to safeguard the banking system. They set monetary policy for the government in the name of “the common good.” Meaning: “making sure the banks are profitable.”

Since the Fed does not actually have any money to pay for anything, they invent magical money. It literally appears on a whim, out of thin air, onto account balances at the bank. The Fed says, “I have – presto! – money! Take this money and sell me some of that government debt you are holding. Look, now you have money to lend!”

But he’s still just getting warmed-up. If we look at an August, 2003 article, we find a slightly more distinctive Mogambo viewpoint:

Recently, I received intelligence that central banks plan to continue manipulating everything concerning gold, or money, or anything remotely connected with gold or money, until – and you may want to make a note of this in your planning calendar – long after we are all dead.

Later yet, in 2010, Mogambo tells us,

Just the other day when I was taking a little walk in the morning and I ran across a group of kids waiting for the school bus, which was just pulling up as I got there.

So I am telling the kids, “You brats might as well quit school right now because there is no future for you since your own federal government has borrowed and spent this country into the ground, made possible by the loathsome Federal Reserve creating all the wildly excessive amounts of dollars that made it all freaking possible, which became, because it is, an inflation in the money supply, which is what will cause terrifying inflations in prices as all this money is used to bid for a relatively static supply of goods and services so that prices will always be going up and up, all your miserable lives. . .

The idiosyncratic Mogambo style—overloaded with asides, recursives, and invectives—appears in his February 2010 article “Money Supply Flood to Drown US Economy,” in which he reacts to an editorial by Dr. Ron Paul. He opens with a one-sentence paragraph of 159 words that takes the reader to JFK’s visit to Germany and the cream-filled heads of voters and Congress. It’s as if the prose itself were in a panic.

Yet he is never without an important message grounded in Austrian insights. His language mirrored the monetary insanity of the Fed and Congress.

“We’re freaking doomed!” as a result of the abject stupidity of Congress and the Federal Reserve in the last 90 years or so since the Fed was created, and especially as a result of the stupidity of the last 40 years when Nixon refused to exchange dollars for gold, and doubly especially since 1997 when Alan Greenspan really started getting insane with monetary policy, and triply especially since 2008 when the unbelievably preposterous Ben Bernanke and his loathsome Federal Reserve doubled the money supply at a stroke! At A Freaking Stroke (AFS)! Doubled!

Medieval kings sometimes tolerated jesters because power secure in itself can survive laughter. Modern technocratic systems are less comfortable with ridicule. Central bankers speak in carefully calibrated abstractions designed to project expertise and inevitability. As the Mogambo, Richard Daughty shattered that tone completely. He treated the monetary priesthood not as wise custodians but as dangerous lunatics with printing presses. Such mockery could not easily be absorbed into respectable discourse and was therefore largely ignored by it.

Mogambo, thus, was not the court jester of the financial kingdom. He was the jester locked outside the gates, laughing so loudly that those inside pretended not to hear him.

Perhaps the Mogambo was not carefully invented so much as emotionally compelled into existence. A sober analyst looking at the accelerating debt, monetary expansion, and financial distortions of the modern age might conclude that ordinary language had exhausted itself and become inadequate. Calm prose could describe the machinery, but not the madness. Hyperbole, mock panic, and comic outrage became Mogambo’s way of restoring emotional proportion to a system he regarded as criminally absurd.

Mogambo’s greatest strength and greatest weakness may have been the same thing: a style so emotionally charged that it could awaken readers to danger while simultaneously exhausting their ability to follow the argument to its end.

Conclusion

“We’re freaking doomed!” If you recognize that outburst you remember Mogambo and likely remember his total contempt for the Federal Reserve. How many economists will be leaving a parting message equally strong and important?