Posted on 06/06/2016 4:56:40 AM PDT by expat_panama
Today, June 5th, is the anniversary of the birth of John Maynard Keynes, once upon a time the great foe of the gold standard. Today also, coincidentally, happens to be the anniversary of the date celebrated of FDR’s “taking America off the gold standard.”
These events are not mere historical curios. The current presidential campaign, and underlying political climate, shows we are finally, maybe definitively, emerging from the academic economists’ anathema on the gold standard...
...Trump, the presumptive GOP presidential nominee, is on record as strongly appreciating the gold standard...
...The “interwar gold standard” in fact was a barbarous relic. It very likely was the main cause of the Great Depression.
The classical gold standard had closed shop in August 1914 and was innocent of causing the Depression. FDR in no way took America off the gold standard. Unschooled in economics, he may well have believed that he did. But that doesn’t make it so. As a 2011 Congressional Research Service report noted, “Under the system adopted by the Gold Reserve Act of 1934, the United States continued to define the dollar in terms of gold.”...
...FDR ignored the conventional wisdom of his Washington and Wall Street experts. He followed the advice of agricultural economist George Warren, the greatest expert in commodities prices of his day, who called for rebooting the system by revaluing the dollar to $35/oz as the slow erosion caused by the “interwar gold standard” required.
FDR set the gold standard back to rights, if temporarily. The economy soared.
Alas, FDR did not have a firm grasp ...
...mass confusion ended up giving the gold standard pariah status. Now it is re-emerging from the misconceptions and myths that have enshrouded it for four score years.
(Excerpt) Read more at forbes.com ...
..gold standard had closed shop in August 1914... ...Gold Reserve Act of 1934, the United States continued..." That's controversial. U.S. currency during that period was in fact gold backed (click to enlarge) and FDR changed the gold certificates to federal reserve notes.
He also made changed w/ stuff like paying gov't contracts in gold.
imho this Forbes piece is a good example of a bad example of getting to the facts --but hey, this is how people are thinking these days...
Wasn’t Keynes a raving homo pederast who buggered countless victims?
Rumor is almost all the Gold has been stolen.
Good morning investors! Last week everyone traded the whole time locked in tight ranges for both stocks and metals --it was either nail-biting time or they were all off on vacation. Today's different. Futures traders say metals are to be +2.30% and stock index contracts see 'em -0.47% ---and we got no major econ stats coming out to confuse things.
See you in the funny papers:
A Summer of Shocks Threatens Market Mayhem - Peter Spence, Telegraph
What It Will Take for S&P to Scale 'Wall' of 2,100 - Mark DeCambre, MW
Inconvenient Truth About Treasury Auctions - Scaggs/Hannon, Bloomberg
End the Fed? Fed Ends Itself w/Bank Strangulation - John Tamny, Forbes
Robots are Taking White Collar Jobs Too - Joelle Renstrom, The Daily Beast
How Facebook Is Changing the Rules of Hollywood - Geoff Yang, Fortune
The American Left's Grand, Green Vision - Steve Moore, Washington Times
Jobless Report Dents 'Economy is Great' Narrative - Louis Woodhill, RCM
Graduating & Looking for a Passion? Be Patient - Angela Duckworth, NYT
Why Americans Love Uber Economy - Jared Meyer, Washington Examiner
For Driverless, Citylike Test Sites Too Unpredictable - Neal Boudette, NYT
Don't Push Globalization into Retreat - Robert Samuelson, Washington Post
Trade Restrictions Would Do Terrible Harm, Kill Jobs - Editorial, USAT
Trump Much Greater Threat Than Brexit - Larry Summers,Washington Post
Didn’t Keynes also design the Soviet Union’s monetary system as well?
“In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value. If there were, the government would have to make its holding illegal, as was done in the case of gold. If everyone decided, for example, to convert all his bank deposits to silver or copper or any other good, and thereafter declined to accept checks as payment for goods, bank deposits would lose their purchasing power and government-created bank credit would be worthless as a claim on goods. The financial policy of the welfare state requires that there be no way for the owners of wealth to protect themselves.
“This is the shabby secret of the welfare statists’ tirades against gold. Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights. If one grasps this, one has no difficulty in understanding the statists’ antagonism toward the gold standard.”
From the last two paragraphs of Gold and Economic Freedom by Alan Greenspan. 1966.
see: http://www.constitution.org/mon/greenspan_gold.htm
The Wizard of Oz (ounce) is a political satire about taking America off the gold standard (follow the yellow brick road)
From the Wicked Witch of the East (industrial revolution) who turned normal people into workaholic machines (tinman) and brutalized the little people (munchkins) to the Wicked Witch of the West (the drought) who oppressed the farmers, believing they had no voice in DC (scarecrow)
Even then they knew the power of popular issues (poppies) to put the people to sleep and keep the voters’ attention off the shenanigans in Washington.
The article made me take a little time to watch the following video from Uncle Milt (Milton Friedman) and his comments on the gold standard and the Depression. I get the impression that the wrong lessons were learned as to why the United States took itself off the gold standard. Not surprising Milt’s comments were in about 1979 that the Depression was caused by “too little money, nowadays the problems are from too much money”.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvBCDS-y8vc
"...Trump, the presumptive GOP presidential nominee, is on record as strongly appreciating the gold standard..."
Should be cause for us to re-visit the Presidential aspirations of JFK that (some believe) prompted his assassination
Not to promote Wicki, but there has always been a lot of Conspiracy Theories surrounding the death of John F Kennedy
Suffice it to be true, Donald Trump needs prayerful protection
Gold has no intrinsic worth. Nor does Wampum, dollars, rubles, pounds, real estate, or Euros. Nothing has value without organized, productive WORK to go along with it. So it has always been, and so it always will be.
It was Keynes who came to the US and demanded we should loan to save the UK.
That loan, was finally paid in full in 2007.
If we called in all the money we have gave all the countries in the last 90 years, we would not be in hock like we are now.
Within weeks of his signing the EO allowing the printing of currencies backed by it, he was killed. Soon after, LBJ reversed that EO.
We can all come to our own conclusions.
I believe Trump knows this history
We all know who shot Kennedy. But we do not know who killed him.
I believe LBJ was one of them.
Thanks for the bit of educational info.
Power is the primary one but, thanks to females penchant for adornment, gold, silver, gems, etc. accrue this "intrinsic" value.
Nothing is more valuable than access to females.
I thought we were supposed to blame Nixon for taking us off the gold standard. Who to blame?
“Gold has no intrinsic worth.”
Well, I’ll take any worthless gold off your hands if you want to be rid of it :)
He was married to a Russian ballerina
Thanks for posting~
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.