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Do you think a gold standard will solve all of your problems?
maybe it will and maybe it wont. the good part is that the money supply would not be finite and there can only be as much cash as there is gold. plus the fact that our dollar will actually be worth something more than the promises of a failing goverment.
It doesn't really matter at all what a country's currency is based on. It could be based on anything at all. The only thing that gives money it's value is confidence. If it were not for the worlds confidence in the USA as the most stable large country in the world the USD would have collasped long ago. Just think about it. If any other country had the horrible balance of trade the US has coupled with huge deficit spending the currency would be worthless. The fact the USD is probably way over valued has both hurt the country and helped it in ways. I remember very well when almost everything we bought was made here in Canada or in the USA. Back in the 50's and 60's and let me tell you this. Everything we bought was many times the cost of goods today. Even the wealthy people did not have the huge amounts of stuff that people have today There was no such thing as yard sales because people did not have any extra stuff and what they had they used until it wore out.
Even the poor today have umpteen pairs of everything and all that stuff was made somewhere in the developing world. I would much rather see these good cost at least double or triple. If that were the case we would start making our own stuff again and it would take hundreds of thousands of people working to do it.
People yearn for those "Good old days" but they forget that life was much simpler and we did without a lot of things people just take for granted today. Before WW1 something like 65% of all the people in the USA and in Canada were employed in some facet of agriculture. Either growing food or processing food, selling food and so on. So just think about it. At that time a huge portion of our economys were based on the underlaying value of food and the absolute necessity of having it.
You could have the biggest pile of gold in the world and you would trade all of it for a few gallons of water and a few bags of food if you did not have any. It has no more real value than anything that just represents value but really has none it's self. If I offered you an oz. of gold or a few pieces of paper that represented $10,000 USD, which one would you choose? It's really a no brainer is it.
The biggest problem the USA faces, not only in it's economy but in all aspects of affairs both domestic and foreign is the loss of confidence in the ability of the USA to get it's act together. The government of the country is becoming more unable to run the country every single electoral cycle. IT'S POLITICAL REFORM THE COUNTRY BADLY NEEDS AND WITHOUT IT IT REALLY DOESN'T MATTER WHAT THE USD IS BASED ON BECAUSE IT'S GOING TO BE NOTHING BUT BAD NEWS FROM HERE ON IN.
The point is moot. After the inevitable collapse of the economy when ongoing efforts to "band aid" it don't help, anyone who wants to buy necessities will have to come up with something real to trade, since wheelbarrows full of fiat currency will only have value in a fireplace or wood stove.
Too bad the ever-rising cost of living in our "modern" economy, combined with stagnated wages back in the 1970s and ongoing dollar devaluation, pretty much wiped out even those of us who still have jobs. But who are we to question the mandates of Big Government, which wouldn't be able to spend infinite amounts and rack up bankrupting levels of debt without fiat currencies?
Location: On the "Left Coast", somewhere in "the Land of Fruits & Nuts"
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Quote:
Originally Posted by BigJon3475
Do you think a gold standard will solve all of your problems?
If it hasn't been mentioned yet, countries based on the gold standard have historically taken much longer to recover from an economic downturn.
"Economic studies have indicated that just as the downturn was spread worldwide by the rigidities of the Gold Standard, it was suspending gold convertibility (or devaluing the currency in gold terms) that did most to make recovery possible.
"After the the Great Depression, the earliness with which a country left the gold standard reliably predicted its economic recovery. The connection between leaving the gold standard was a strong predictor of that country's severity of its depression, and the length of time of its recovery has been shown to be consistent for dozens of countries, including developing countries."
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