Your premise, "Nobody has any gold to speak of" is flawed. Listen to talk radio any day, or watch any news channel (especially Fox News). Notice all the advertisers selling gold? Someone is buying the stuff or they wouldn't be paying to advertise it.
Freedom4US wrote:
nobody has any gold today to speak of, so how does your modern 2.0 confiscation work?
They're even selling the stuff in vending machines at high end malls.
Confiscation will be more difficult in todays times. I doubt many people will voluntarily give it up. And smart buyers are buying at least part of their Gold reserves with smaller (on coin at a time) cash purchases. I've heard that one of the recent laws places new reporting requirements on bullion purchases. I can't remember if it was the Stimulus, Obamacare or the Financial Regulation law, but one of those (and the rules and regulations adopted under that law) requires a 20+ page reporting form for every bullion purchase after a certain time.
What is meant by that, the official on-the-books holdings is a pretty nice stash, but represents (at current market price) something around 300 billions.
Do the math. That amount is roughly equal to say, the market capitalization of ONE large stock company, say AAPL. That’s
right - Apple computer stock is worth the equivalent of Fort Knox.
You guys are extrapolating a world that is long gone, in this case the 1930s, and that somehow, the government is going to pull an FDR and confiscate some little kids coin collection and scattered stashes to make payroll after initiating gold standard 2.0. It doesn’t work that way, because the math doesn’t add up, never mind the fact that politicians won’t be constrained by a “barbarous relic” such as a gold standard. That’s the whole point of throwing money around via “democracy” - buying votes, or if you will, an advance auction of stolen goods. The point being of course,
a gold standard currency means that the government through the treasury
stands ready to both buy and sell at a fixed price. That isn’t going to happen.