Do you understand the alternatives to fractional reserve banking?
Do you think inflation, deflation, business cycles, and depressions don’t occur on the gold standard?
Did you know that in the 1850’s we had hyper-inflation in the U.S. while on the Gold Standard?
I’m not a banker, but I do have an MBA in Finance, and yes, I do feel pretty good about the FED. I don’t feel good about wasteful government spending and borrowing, but that would have happened regardless of the monetary system. And it will continue to happen until we elect men of good character as representatives. This last election was a nice move in the right direction, but we still have far to go.
A small amount of inflation in the dollar every year doesn’t bother me. The recent FED moves concern me a little, but Bernanke is right, they do have the means to remove the liquidity and prevent high inflation once the economy has rebounded. It’ll probably be a little higher for a couple of years, but compared to 10%-20% unemployment depending on whose numbers you believe, that is a price will worth paying.
Keep in mind that in 2005 All US monetary assets M2 totaled about $6 trillion, compared to an estimated $65 trillion in US household assets including real estate. So money is less than 10% of the total US Household assets. And that doesn’t include government or business assets. My guess is that monetary assets accounts for < 2% of our total wealth.
That that 2% of assets gets inflated by 1% a year on average, doesn’t really excite me. The Average U.S. household has $100,000 in total net assets. So applying the statistic above, the average household probably keeps about $10,000 in monetary assets. 1% inflation on that costs them about $100 a year in purchasing power. If they put it in a bank and drew interest, they made more than that $100 back. If they put it under their mattress, they lost $100. Big whoop-de-do.
The problem is that there are costs and risks to any monetary system. This one seems to me to be working well for us.
There is an estimated 5 billion oz of gold in the world. There are 6 billion people. I hope you like really really small coins.
Delicious and diabolical!
I understand the Fed can increase the par numbers at the drop of a hat without any real oversite and the dollar gets weaker leaving Americans poorer and they get no say whatsoever about it.
If you want to call such "GOOD" be my guest but I think we both know "GOOD" is about the last thing it is...
two problems with your attempted gloss over of the built in loss on owning American Dollars...
1. Trying to separate out CASH from REAL assets in attempt to show less of a monetary loss is not only mildly amusing it would give any CPA worth his salt a severe case of the giggles being that any asset that is valued in Dollars suffers the same loss (and I notice you conveniently left out the devastating effects of compounding being such also works when you compound a loss over time.)
2. I would like to know if you would invest 100K dollars in a financial opportunity that would suffer a compounding loss of 1% or more per year for the next 20 or more years?