Excellent.
I would suspect the main objection the Senate would have is that a return to a “gold” standard would not allow them to continue to borrow trillions of dollars to buy votes from the lame and lazy. People could sense a “value” to a dollar, instead of hoping it has some value tomorrow, and we can’t have that!!
I’m ready to put Trump above Lincoln and Washington now as the greatest President ever. Seems everything he does is the right thing to do and all in the face of unprecedented opposition. He just knows what America needs to prevent it’s collapse and he don’t care one bit who stands in his way. Wow........
I’m loving the sound of this already. Never should have left the gold standard in the first place.
This is not the classical gold standard which requires convertibility upon demand.
Shelton appears to be calling for a gold peg, which IIRC is something that Paul Volcker was using when he chaired the Fed. What Shelton is proposing doesn’t sound very controversial.
A debtor nation doesn’t control its destiny under the classical standard, and we most certainly are a debtor nation. The nations who hold our debt can sell that paper and demand gold, draining our monetary base. This was a serious issue back at the outbreak of the First World War.
I heard the JFK attempted this. Pray for Trump.
Anyone who thinks we will return to the gold standard is delusional. The ONLY way that will happen is in the event of another civil war.
And I like the gold standard.
>>>In a post published by the libertarian think tank Cato Institute in 2018, Shelton drew a comparison between cryptocurrencies and gold.
Forget the gold standard, let’s go with the Bitcoin standard.
Average real wages have been on a steady decline since the 1970s.
This “just happens” to coincide with going off of the gold standard.
So gold goes to $21,600.00 an ounce as soon as a new gold standard is enacted? I have to buy more!!
(About $3.42 Trillion dollar money supply/about 150 million ounces supposedly at Ft. Knox).
Need more details on how they would implement it, and how they would deal with having to do an immediate $750 billion cut in the Federal budget.
Both would be very good additions to the Fed Board of Governors.
Not happening.
this makes sense if gold goes to 20,000@oz or more. which it can.
ft knox gold value goes up by a factor of 10.
• The value of gold is based entirely on psychology and psychiatry, and not on economics of physics. There are equally good conductors which are vastly less expensive and nobody uses gold for dental fillings anymore.
• The trick which Archimedes used to distinguish gold from lead is no longer valid. The difference between densities of gold and tungsten is something like 19.2 versus 19.3 (tungsten didn’t exist in 300 BC). They actually find bars of tungsten plated with gold in bank vaults in New York; if those guys can’t use gold in a rational manner, what makes you think YOU could??
• The use of gold as a basis for money created gigantic grief all during the 18th and 19th centuries, creating cycles of boom and bust as money based on gold was lent out and then called back repeatedly. This led to William Jennings Bryan’s famous “Cross of Gold” speech.
• During the 18th century, Benjamin Franklin had become known as the father of script money, creating a super colonial economy based on pure fiat money. This super economy was crashed into depression by the British Crown re-imposing a gold standard on the colonies, leading to the American Revolution. Nobody ever fights a war over a tax on tea, that’s basically a fairytale.
• There is exactly one use for gold for which no other known material would work as well: soft, totally inert, and half again more dense than lead, gold would be the ideal metal for waterfowl shot. You could kill ducks and geese all day long with ordinary two and three-quarter inch shells, and number seven shot. Nobody would need magnum sized shells or magnum chambers in their shotguns anymore.
• The very things which make gold useful as money, also make it easy to steal and totally untraceable once stolen.
• All money is fiat money, as per Ann Barnhart’s lecture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ruiK7A2Xwi8
• Contrary to what bankers would have you believe, governments printing money, by itself, does not create inflation. It depends upon HOW governments create money and what they use that money for.
• Consider: two shipwreck survivors on an island have five dollars in their pockets between them from their previous life and there are five clams on the island. A dollar is plainly worth one clam. Nonetheless, one of the two finds a machete in the remains of their lifeboat; hacks a coconut tree up into a crude printing press; kills an octopus; prints up five more dollar bills with his press and the octopus ink; and pays them to his companion to dig up 15 more clams… To the unbridled horror of the bankers, the guy has doubled the value of money on the island by printing it. The only two meaningful things in that picture were productivity and an element of trust, no gold or any other metal were required.
Time, money, intellectual capital, and energy used in the production of gold are essentially wasted, as is also electricity and money involved in Bitcoin mining. The coin mining feature of cryptocurrencies of is also basically harebrained.
me too
Problem is, there’s not enough gold in the universe to cover current levels of debt.
Gold is no longer adequate to back currencies, *by itself*.
But *in combination* with other precious commodities, it makes a great idea. I’m saying not just with other precious metals, but with other metals, and even non-metals, semi-metals, rare earth elements, radioactive isotopes.
Then break free from that. Things like compressed inert gases, alloys and useful compounds.
Back in the good old days, people knew that gold and silver were valuable, so they had very stable prices. However, today we have computers that can track the value of such commodities instantly, and all at the same time.
This would mean measuring much of the economy, so that the price of commodity-backed currency is going to be very stable. Say there is a war. People will still buy gold, but what about zinc, lead, aluminum, etc.?
Their value is not a “leading” economic indicator, but a “lagging” one. Only if there is an economic downturn will their prices eventually go lower, but until then, they moderate the *value* of the currency.
She’s not pushing for a gold standard [unfortunately]; she uses it as a successful example of maintaining a stable money supply.
That said, she’s one of very, very few economists who understand the importance of a stable money supply.