Maybe arthurus misses America's golden (hehe) days when we were on the gold standard and had perfect price stability.
What do you say, arthurus, is that it?
Ah-- my error, I was tweaking my browser settings and by accident I left the unchecked the sarcasm tag (screenshot at right).
Anyway I'm all rebooted and I can see what's going on; I'm just lucky today isn't a trading day-- who know's what I might've done without realizing it...
Sorry about that guys...
No. A pure gold standard would put gold way beyond the reach of all but the wealthiest who would like to have jewelry. However a Fed policy that targeted gold to keep the price stable would do wonders for inflation and for foreign investment in the American economy. Specifically maintaining the price of gold is not cecessary to attain sound money butt that method is much easier than any other method and does not invite chicanery as "basket of goods" does. With guaranteed noninflation we would have a safer steadier economy to invest in. The Fed can do that with the same type of open market trading that it does now, or by other means. There are NO benefits to inflation. Manipulators have political objectives and the manipulation is always deleterious to the economy because manipulators cannot wait for the results of their manipulation to become apparent. They have a much shorter horizon than necessary to even know what the economy is going to do and the answer is not to simply wait an appropriate amount of time to see the results of the "adjustment" because it is the very nature of manipulators, however august their academic reputations, to be working on a political agenda and such agendas always have political horizons i.e. very short. Inflation is always resorted to for the purpose of repudiating a portion of the Debt. If you do it to eliminate some of your credit card liability you will shortly be a defendant. When the government does it it is still theft even though neither Bernanke nor Bush will be carted off to jail for it. And it is economically bad, morally wrong, and just plain sleazy. The government is trying to delude the rest of the world about the value of its money. Technological sophistication in the methods of inflation do not make the practice any more honorable than the shaving of silver and gold coins as once was the method of inflation.