Confiscated?? I wouldn’t want to be one of jackboots walking my driveway for that!
Not gonna happen. There isn’t enough gold in the world to back what the US alone has in cash floating around.
Nationalizing gold is always a possibility. Make it illegal to sell it. Wouldn’t put anything past the kenyan.
ivedone the math in the past... there is something like $70 trillion between M1, M2, and M3 supplies (of the top of my head)
using only gold as a standard, and not a commodity basket, gold would be just under $9500 / ounce
A gray area where people can just speculate, but for the point about the price being artificially fixed, it would have to be initially to say all dollars are worth x ounces of gold. You would also require some sort of centralized funnel to keep outside influences from messing with your currency, something like a Gold Reserve Bank. (Example, a country decides they don't like us, just flood the market with gold or withhold it depending on how they want to affect prices- just like what is done sometimes with oil.) You would also need to somehow re-start the gold industry in the US as most of the major suppliers are other countries, many of which aren't always the most politically stable. You would need to have a domestic lock on the sources if your currency is backed by it. There is a lot to consider.
I’ve heard that Obama has made clear his plans for gold somewhere around July 15 while we were all focused on the debt ceiling vote, according to Townhall Spotlight. I’ve also heard that the banks have been instructed to check all safety deposit boxes for gold or any other valuables; the same goes for storage rental units. Google Obama’s stance on gold.
Private ownership of gold is the normal state of affairs when currencies operate on a gold standard. It doesn’t make much sense otherwise, since the whole point of a gold standard is to make the currency unit fully and freely redeemable for a fixed amount of gold.
And that answers your second question. It’s not the price of gold that is fixed under a gold standard, it’s the amount of gold for which the currency is guaranteed to be redeemable. It only works well when the issuer of the currency has enough gold to redeem all the issued currency. The many failures of which you will hear happen almost exclusively because the currency issuer doesn’t have enough gold to redeem all the issued currency. The only other failure mode is for the issuer to have the gold, but refuse to redeem his currency for it.
Under an international gold standard, each currency unit is really just a different amount of gold, and any fluctuations in the exchange rates occur solely as a reflection of the market’s attitude regarding the risk that the issuer doesn’t have enough gold to back the currency, or might choose not to redeem the currency for the stated amount of gold for some other reason.
Disclaimer: Reader must vet source.
I think this whole thing of feeling secure because I gave gold to replace the paper dollar is kind of spooky and unreliable. In other words, hopeless.
I don’t think you want to be on a gold standard where you have to pay all your bills in gold.
They are not going to make dollars redeemable in gold, everyone would hoard the gold esp. foreigners.
Maybe a two tier monetary system, one currency based on some gold and other things to satisfy international debts and trades. The second currency for the little people to carry on with their daily lives.
Doesn’t much matter until spending is under control, the more debt incurred the lower the US$ will be worth and the higher the spot price of gold will be until the dollar is no longer the world’s reserve currency.
Shortly after taking office sixteen years later, Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed Executive Order 6102 into law, prohibiting the “hoarding” of gold. Under this executive order, Americans were prohibited from owning more than $100 worth of gold coins, and all “hoarders” (i.e. people who owned more than $100 worth of gold) were forced, by law, to sell their “excess” gold to the government at the prevailing price of $20.67 per ounce.
Then, once the government had all the gold, FDR revalued the dollar relative to gold so that gold was now worth $35 an ounce. By simple decree, the government had thereby robbed millions of American citizens at a rate of $14.33 per ounce of confiscated gold, which is why most historians agree that the Gold Confiscation of 1933 is the single most draconian economic act in the history of the United States.
http://www.silvermonthly.com/government-confiscation-gold-happened-beforecould-happen/
The dollar would be defined as a weight of gold. For example, if implemented today, the dollar would be defined as 1/1800 oz. of gold.
Gold's value could fluctuate, but the dollar would always maintain its purchasing power vs. gold.
Would it be confiscated?
If gold were confiscated, it wouldn't be a true gold standard. The genius of the gold standard was that anyone could redeem his paper dollars for the defined weight in gold. It was this condition that kept banks (and governments) from over-inflating the currency.
If people started to doubt the soundness of the paper bills, they would redeem them for gold. Too many gold withdrawals would result in bankruptcy and economic collapse.
It sounds like a fantasy but when the dollar was backed by gold we had no inflation for decades at a time, and unprecedented economic growth
bfl