See, this is why it bothers me when people roll their eyes when I mention the gold standard.
Today’s dollar is a fiat currency. There’s nothing backing it besides the agreement that it represents value. It’s worth nothing intrinsically. That’s why the finance industry can do apparently whatever the fuck they want with it, bloating their portfolios while diluting the actual buying power of the dollar for everyone else. It’s one of the reasons for endless hyperinflation.
If it was backed by something of intrinsic value, say, precious metals, then that would mitigate a lot of this.
People ask what I mean when I sat precious metals have intrinsic value. And the argument could be made that it too is only worth something because people agree that it is. But, it’s a finite resource and so its rarity makes it valuable by default. It’s not like money where we can just print more. And people will always want shiny things. People with a lot of money will always want the prestige of flashy items made of a material that announces their wealth. And nobody is just going to start giving gold away for dirt cheap just because “all it is is stupid metal that never tarnishes.”
And historically as well as economically, it holds true. Gold holds its value. When a currency inflates, diluting its buying power, the price of gold in that currency tends to stay similar to what it was before, when adjusted for the buying power. It’s one of the most stable and standard ways to measure the value of currencies. Much better than the petro dollar.
But people think I’m just being bougie and elitist when I say we should back our currencies with precious metals. There’s a rationale behind it, but people usually don’t listen long enough to hear that rationale…
Also, in the absence of macroeconomic solutions like backing currencies with hard assets, you can take your personal finances into your own hands with a microeconomic solution like diversifying your portfolio (hold a variety of currencies, and some in precious metals). Of course, that requires enough surplus income to be able to save, and enough savings to be able to invest in less liquid assets. But starting with silver instead of gold is a much lower barrier to entry, and although it’s somewhat more volatile than gold, it’s still far more stable than fiat currency.
And if all of your savings are in US dollars, I would highly recommend holding some in Euros or other similar currency. When the dollar inevitably crashes, it’s going to crash hard.
you have a good point, but it’s more complicated than that.
as you say, central banks print money. and they lend out more of it each year to the top banks, so the banks essentially get free money. they get $1B in loans the first year and technically have to pay back $1.03 next year (3% interest rate), in the second year they get $1.06 in loans though, so they pay back the $1.03 from last year and keep $0.03 for themselves. they do this each year, so they essentially get handed free money. it’s a clever scheme and discussed mathematically here (Hilbert’s Hotel).
yet that’s not all. yes they get free money, but all this happens in alignment with the political will. one could argue, that if they did not get free money from the central bank, they would just change tax law to re-distribute the money upwards instead, so it doesn’t actually make a difference. the actual issue is that politics is not acting in the best interest of the people, and this is what needs to be adressed.
Yes it is more complicated. My comment was a wall of text as it is. I wasn’t about to write a dissertation on all the complexities of it.
Of course politics plays a role. If we could get billionaires out of congressional pockets then maybe we could change some things around to serve the people more fairly.
But as it stands, they’re already changing tax law to redistribute the money upwards. It’s what we keep hearing about wealth transfer and concentration.
I don’t see why we can’t fix the tax code (i.e., tax billionaires and corporations; fund social programs that help everybody) and put an end to financial manipulation by banning these circular lending schemes and basing our currency on some type of hard assets. I mean it would require enough elected politicians who are willing to make those reforms, but still…
Yeah big agree. Gold was also easy since it was a lingua franca commodity, instead of maybe a modern version being a basket of commodities backing a currency.
I understand the implicit reason they dumped the gold standard. Your industrialized economy can grow a lot faster than you can mine new gold out of the ground. Deflationary pressure meant there was pressure to print more paper dollars than there were gold backing them to stave off inflation. France calling the US’ bluff on gold backing by repatriating their reserves certainly didn’t help at all.
The big benefit though is like you said. You can’t fuck with gold the same way as fiat. You can’t magically make more, much like the current Iran conflict is going to crash the world economy because a bunch of idiots in the US think they can print oil…
Knowing you can’t print gold is supposed to be a stabilizing influence on a country’s fiscal policy. Don’t fuck with your own currency lest you ruin it, cause a bank run, and debase it to being worthless and need to start over or borrow a foreign currency’s stability.
A basket of commodities could be the way forward though… That’s basically what the Petro-dollar is informally. But if you made some kind of international trade currency that was basically a warehouse receipt for X amount of gold, silver, wheat, barley, oil, sulfur, ammonia .et, that basically all countries use, maybe that would work?
Digital currencies like Bitcoin or other speculative assets just don’t work long term…
I mean I understand the context behind abandoning the gold standard. Great depression and all that. And it worked temporarily, but it created more issues down the line, like cutting off the head of a hydra.
Now we can defer the consequences of bad fiscal policy by punting it down the road every few years, building the tower higher and higher without reinforcing the base. It’s going to collapse eventually, and the higher we build it between now and then, the further we’re gonna fall.
It’s what enabled the “infinite growth” mentality of Reagan-era economics that still plagues us today.
Also, printing paper dollars doesn’t stave off inflation. It only masks it on paper. The absolute value doesn’t magically increase, it just gets distributed across more dollars. Which means each dollar holds less value, less buying power. Which means things cost more dollars. That’s literally inflation.
A basket of commodities could work, if it’s well-crafted and not hamfisted or skewed by corporate interests. Precious metals should have a significant portion of it for their stabilizing effect. Maybe 20-30%. Fossil fuels should be excluded, or at least minimized. Everything else should mostly be raw materials, preferably finite. Anything that can be produced has the risk of inflation. Crops, livestock, lumber, etc. should be okay to include, but not exceeding say 20-30%.
But things like computer chips should be out; use semiconductors and rare earths instead. Use iron and steel and copper, etc., but not springs and pipes and wires. If that makes sense at all.
And yeah crypto is bullshit, literally nothing that people hallucinate value onto by the magic of consensus reality.
See, this is why it bothers me when people roll their eyes when I mention the gold standard.
Today’s dollar is a fiat currency. There’s nothing backing it besides the agreement that it represents value. It’s worth nothing intrinsically. That’s why the finance industry can do apparently whatever the fuck they want with it, bloating their portfolios while diluting the actual buying power of the dollar for everyone else. It’s one of the reasons for endless hyperinflation.
If it was backed by something of intrinsic value, say, precious metals, then that would mitigate a lot of this.
People ask what I mean when I sat precious metals have intrinsic value. And the argument could be made that it too is only worth something because people agree that it is. But, it’s a finite resource and so its rarity makes it valuable by default. It’s not like money where we can just print more. And people will always want shiny things. People with a lot of money will always want the prestige of flashy items made of a material that announces their wealth. And nobody is just going to start giving gold away for dirt cheap just because “all it is is stupid metal that never tarnishes.”
And historically as well as economically, it holds true. Gold holds its value. When a currency inflates, diluting its buying power, the price of gold in that currency tends to stay similar to what it was before, when adjusted for the buying power. It’s one of the most stable and standard ways to measure the value of currencies. Much better than the petro dollar.
But people think I’m just being bougie and elitist when I say we should back our currencies with precious metals. There’s a rationale behind it, but people usually don’t listen long enough to hear that rationale…
Also, in the absence of macroeconomic solutions like backing currencies with hard assets, you can take your personal finances into your own hands with a microeconomic solution like diversifying your portfolio (hold a variety of currencies, and some in precious metals). Of course, that requires enough surplus income to be able to save, and enough savings to be able to invest in less liquid assets. But starting with silver instead of gold is a much lower barrier to entry, and although it’s somewhat more volatile than gold, it’s still far more stable than fiat currency.
And if all of your savings are in US dollars, I would highly recommend holding some in Euros or other similar currency. When the dollar inevitably crashes, it’s going to crash hard.
you have a good point, but it’s more complicated than that.
as you say, central banks print money. and they lend out more of it each year to the top banks, so the banks essentially get free money. they get $1B in loans the first year and technically have to pay back $1.03 next year (3% interest rate), in the second year they get $1.06 in loans though, so they pay back the $1.03 from last year and keep $0.03 for themselves. they do this each year, so they essentially get handed free money. it’s a clever scheme and discussed mathematically here (Hilbert’s Hotel).
yet that’s not all. yes they get free money, but all this happens in alignment with the political will. one could argue, that if they did not get free money from the central bank, they would just change tax law to re-distribute the money upwards instead, so it doesn’t actually make a difference. the actual issue is that politics is not acting in the best interest of the people, and this is what needs to be adressed.
Yes it is more complicated. My comment was a wall of text as it is. I wasn’t about to write a dissertation on all the complexities of it.
Of course politics plays a role. If we could get billionaires out of congressional pockets then maybe we could change some things around to serve the people more fairly.
But as it stands, they’re already changing tax law to redistribute the money upwards. It’s what we keep hearing about wealth transfer and concentration.
I don’t see why we can’t fix the tax code (i.e., tax billionaires and corporations; fund social programs that help everybody) and put an end to financial manipulation by banning these circular lending schemes and basing our currency on some type of hard assets. I mean it would require enough elected politicians who are willing to make those reforms, but still…
Yeah big agree. Gold was also easy since it was a lingua franca commodity, instead of maybe a modern version being a basket of commodities backing a currency.
I understand the implicit reason they dumped the gold standard. Your industrialized economy can grow a lot faster than you can mine new gold out of the ground. Deflationary pressure meant there was pressure to print more paper dollars than there were gold backing them to stave off inflation. France calling the US’ bluff on gold backing by repatriating their reserves certainly didn’t help at all.
The big benefit though is like you said. You can’t fuck with gold the same way as fiat. You can’t magically make more, much like the current Iran conflict is going to crash the world economy because a bunch of idiots in the US think they can print oil…
Knowing you can’t print gold is supposed to be a stabilizing influence on a country’s fiscal policy. Don’t fuck with your own currency lest you ruin it, cause a bank run, and debase it to being worthless and need to start over or borrow a foreign currency’s stability.
A basket of commodities could be the way forward though… That’s basically what the Petro-dollar is informally. But if you made some kind of international trade currency that was basically a warehouse receipt for X amount of gold, silver, wheat, barley, oil, sulfur, ammonia .et, that basically all countries use, maybe that would work?
Digital currencies like Bitcoin or other speculative assets just don’t work long term…
I mean I understand the context behind abandoning the gold standard. Great depression and all that. And it worked temporarily, but it created more issues down the line, like cutting off the head of a hydra.
Now we can defer the consequences of bad fiscal policy by punting it down the road every few years, building the tower higher and higher without reinforcing the base. It’s going to collapse eventually, and the higher we build it between now and then, the further we’re gonna fall.
It’s what enabled the “infinite growth” mentality of Reagan-era economics that still plagues us today.
Also, printing paper dollars doesn’t stave off inflation. It only masks it on paper. The absolute value doesn’t magically increase, it just gets distributed across more dollars. Which means each dollar holds less value, less buying power. Which means things cost more dollars. That’s literally inflation.
A basket of commodities could work, if it’s well-crafted and not hamfisted or skewed by corporate interests. Precious metals should have a significant portion of it for their stabilizing effect. Maybe 20-30%. Fossil fuels should be excluded, or at least minimized. Everything else should mostly be raw materials, preferably finite. Anything that can be produced has the risk of inflation. Crops, livestock, lumber, etc. should be okay to include, but not exceeding say 20-30%.
But things like computer chips should be out; use semiconductors and rare earths instead. Use iron and steel and copper, etc., but not springs and pipes and wires. If that makes sense at all.
And yeah crypto is bullshit, literally nothing that people hallucinate value onto by the magic of consensus reality.