Gold

The value of our money comes from other people's belief in our ability to back it up.

That's it.

Gold is used in computers, brush.

The all caps, the tripfaggotry, or the natsoc nonsense that he spews? Take your pick.

So it's just you being an irrational idiot? *yawns*

K

So as long as people think that it's still backed up by something then it's all good?

>press caps lock
>takes off trip
>cracks knuckles
time to samefag

Ironic that you call me samefag when you are the one flagrantly samefagging here.

...

Him and ape are the gods of this board.

>*yawns*
>reddit spacing

I can't tell whether or not leftists are pretending to be what they think stormfags act like to make stormfags look more stupid, or you're just legitimately this cancerous.

Y'all have gone off with your muh 332903293293d chess so I can never tell anymore.

ACTUAL DISCUSSIONS PLEASE

>he doesn't use fiat currency

LMAOing at your macroeconomics

Gold isn't a rock, it's a metal. One of the many precious metals. It faded into existence as countries traded. Here's a little history, for the history board.

First, from the nomadic to the agricultural stage, people traded in cattle. Cattle were the measure of wealth. However big your herd was, that was the amount of money you had. These cattle had a relatively easy upkeep and even easier uses. They could be used for purposes of grazing, milk, and meat. They were the perfect sign of wealth. When people traded goods at the market, they would trade cattle and then miscellaneous goods. For instance, all the way up until the 1800s the Peruvians had an assortment of miscellaneous sewing and handicraft tools in a basket they would trade if they had additional change to trade that wasn't a full cow.

Next, the metals were traded. It started with Darius' reign of the Persian empire. Once he coined copper coins, copper and bronze were common methods of training monetary currency. They later became the ancillary coins (credit money) for silver and gold when these metals were not being circulated.

Finally, as trade extensively and broadly developed, the amount of money necessary to conduct business grew, and so too did the need for a rarer metal to represent larger amounts of the copper and bronze being circulated. Thus, the need for silver and gold arose.

Then follows thousands of years of competition between the two metals silver and gold for what they will be backing in regards to currency. Up until the mid 1800s, certain countries still had silver standards and some had gold. What this meant, is that the foreign exchange reserves were more balanced, but fluctuated greatly with what kinds of metals and what they traded. Then, in the late 19th/early 20th centuries, the silver standard, followed by the gold standard, vanished.

fpbp

/thread

At long last, all that remained was the gold-exchange standard. This implicated, or tied, the fiat currency's value to the metal, but it enabled the financial institutions to trade it away for a profit to the bigger banks, eventually the gold consolidated into the bigger financial institutions.

Then, a World Bank was necessary as the free market rendered the consolidation of gold in the hands of a few (as a free market does with an item which is not capable of innovation [this point will be important later]). So world bank certificates were given to the major countries in exchange for the Gold, and in order to redistribute wealth these were traded and gold never left the hands of the institutions.

Bretton-Woods agreement. This destroyed the Gold-EXCHANGE standard. What this meant was two things
1)the value of the dollar had smaller standard deviations over the same period of time
2)inflation always affected the dollar, never deflation

So looking at the FUTURE (which is an important facet of progression), how does economics work? How does laissez-faire policies towards competition in business reward the part-time monopolists in progressing industry forward, but somehow consolidate wealth in the hands of a few and make an unstable commodity over a long period of time if confined to just one fiat currency backed in contracts by gold? Clearly the free market rewards people only if innovation is possible. And innovation is only possible if the technological improvements are directed to an end. Surely, Keynes was onto something beneficial in particular when he said that investment in a community can create jobs. Why doesn't investment in a certain direction create jobs if that certain direction was designed to benefit everyone? Typically, technology, medicine, and most engineering fields are based on bettering the state of man. But the dilemma with some of these fields is the lack of progression in the direction of bettering the human experience. Overall though, progression still happens. And if technology, medicine, or engineering were anything like trading gold, all of the developments would accrue to just a few individuals. Thank god we don't live in a technocracy. Gold always accrues in the hands of a few though, if trade is prolonged.

So the issue isn't Gold. We know that Gold must be inherently flawed if it accumulated in the hands of a few big banks, diluting the value even further. I mean lets be honest, the precious metals' values were based upon trade accelerating. They were based on foreign account balances going towards an import balance in the favor of the country who had the other countries' foreign account balances.

But there was that second property. That the fiat currency didn't always inflate. Not necessarily the worst thing, right? So it might help to have the large contracts and debts backed by a standard of some sort. A standard capable of imitation.

Like digital commodities. Based on markets. Like how Bitcoin was based on drug operations, you could have digital commodities develop based on ideas, or knowledge, or think tanks based on these things. Like reddit points, but given to ideas that better the state of humanity. This is reaching, but this idea is conducive to reducing the thread of an unpacked fiat currency. It's a radical idea, but mark my words, I'm not getting rid of the idea, and it's already sort of happening. But rare pepes, while ideas, do not exactly better the state of humanity. The concept could be applied better.

>thread of an unpacked fiat currency
Threat of an unbacked

>Gold isn't a rock, it's a metal

Congratulations, you know grade school mineralogy!

>First, from the nomadic to the agricultural stage, people traded in cattle

Gold was probably being traded by the middle Neolithic where we can date the first worked gold hoards from grave sites and some evidence of gold mining in Georgia. Clearly, it was a status symbol by then (why else bury it with your high dead in elaborate graves?) and I don't doubt it would have been valuable for bartering consider gold nuggets weigh a lot less than a cow.

As hard currency gold would be first minted by the Lydians who used a naturally occurring alloy of gold and silver called electrum to produce coinage. This predates Darius' empire by several centuries and is roughly equivalent to the era of Median domination over the Iranian plateau.

Ape is based.
this guy's just annoying

Fair enough. That bit about Darius I got out of Herodotus' The Histories. I don't read much History, but I read a lot of economics texts.

Cattle had to have been traded during the nomadic stages before the development of agriculture. I mean, you see cultures in the middle east up until the mid second millennium dealing in cattle nd using them as a ranking of wealth, ffs.

"Welp, I've fucked up big time." -Woodrow Wilson

>nomadic stages before the development of agriculture

Cattle weren't domesticated yet. Hunter-gatherer and transitional societies have no need for beasts of burden to till the fields they don't sow. Early Neolithic man used sheep and goats which could survive on harsh scrubland. Cattle were domesticated around the same time man realized that if they hooked these giant lumbering beasts up to a plough, they'd till their fields much faster. This made cattle very valuable as an economic resource. The more oxen you had, the more land you could till, the more food you had, the more power you had.

Domestic animals were pretty much a status symbol throughout all of pre-Industrial history. If you had a herd of cattle in Ireland in the 17th century, you were set. Animal husbandry just gives you a resource edge over anything else. You get milk, you get dairy products, you get eggs. When the beast dies, you get leather and meat and bone for carving or making tools out of. Pre-Industrial societies were heavy about using every part of the animal.

However, my point of contention to make is simply that cattle were used as symbols of wealth when money was not in place. This is something many economists agree on, like Carl Manger and Henry George, so to disagree with that point is just wrong.

The US dollar is worth something. It's backed by the world's largest military, the world's largest prison system, and nuclear weapons.

Think about it. As long as the soldiers and guards think money is valuable it doesn't matter than nothing else backs it.

>the US dollar is worth something
>it's actually not worth anything

Make up your mind

In reality to me its just worth the paper.

However, intellectually it's valuable because if I don't pay my taxes in US dollars, I go to prison.

So yeah... Its worth something and not worth something at the same time.

Yeah exactly, the only thing that gives the US dollar value is force. We need to stage a riot and take the government over and declare everyone to stop accepting US currency.

Oh wait, they have the largest gold reserves in the world bank. We could never win.

Still, what to do. That is the question. The US dollar is completely valueless so when a crash happens there's nothing to receive in exchange. Theoretically, the booms and busts get worse as credit expands, but it's contracting right now which is a good sign. But not at the same time, because the Federal Reserve raising the interest rate has really never happened post WWII.

>because if I don't pay my taxes in US dollars, I go to prison
>the state extorts people for their liberty and property
Such liberty.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_money_(policy)
this might help

Not a lot of it dumbass.

Gold is valuable or useful as a currency coz it and silver are highly stable, so you can keep it for centuries and it won't rot away or whatever. That kind of stability is hard to get back when other items like iron or cattle will decay over time.

This doesn't take away from or add into the gold backed vs fiat currency. But it does make the retards going "it has been used for ages!" point moot since a fiat currency too won't decay by corrosion and shit

Yeah but one of Mises' points was that Gold's use in manufactures actually stabilizes its value, and therefore the fiat currency it's backing.

Err I guess that a fair point, though gold's value in the industry is not good as say silver and diamond, so it is qutie small compared to the much cheaper metals

meuff

escrauff

The conspiracy answer: The actual answer: Trade volumes began to outpace any realistic possibility of commodity a backed currency.

Also just as an example, the estimated worth of the entirety of all gold mined to date is 8.2 trillion. U.S. annual trade volume is 3.8 trillion by itself which means the U.S. needs to control nearly HALF of all gold ever mined in order to reasonably have enough gold to back it's currency. Global trade volume is at 16 trillion USD per year which means we'd need double the gold (or gold would receive a fuckhuge shock and cripple electronics industry by doubling in value and sending the world economy into flames) available in the world. It's just not feasible to have a commodity backed currency today.

Because "they" wanted it that way.

>Isn't it just pieces of worthless green paper now?
No, who want trade in gold instead of us dollar will meet destiny of Muammar Gaddafi

>88

T H A T - S O U N D S - L I K E - A - J E W I S H - B A C K G R O U N D

...

The US left the gold standard after Nixon. In fact as the US dolar was one of the few currencies attached to gold it became the global currency and the gold standard died when De Gaulle chose to change all the French dollars into gold

good post

Dugalle wanted to exchange all the USD they held for gold so Nixon just took America off the gold standard.

>Isn't it just pieces of worthless green paper now?
Yes us currency is completely worthless and based around imaginary credit

As it should be. It is a pure expression of what money is supposed to be for. It is not a means for trade, not the reason for trade.

FDR took the US off the gold standard in 1933 when he made gold no longer redeemable for dollars, abrogating the gold clause in most contracts (i.e. borrowed money must be paid back in gold) and artificially inflated the price of an ounce to stand at $35 thereby increasing the money supply.

Nixon did away with the $35 price per ounce stipulation.

>Why did the gold-backed US dollar stop being backed by gold

Because America stole all the world's gold, they have the largest stockpile of gold in the world now.

Teddy Roosevelt is nothing but a common crook.
>en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102
>"forbidding the Hoarding of gold coin, gold bullion, and gold certificates within the continental United States"

>you can't
>But we sure as fuck can!
>AND WILL!!

Fuck America.

>The 1 ton of Gold is worth $64.3 Million dollars at $2000/oz. In recent times, Tungsten (heavy 'cheap' metal) filled fake Gold bars, which look like the ones above, have been found in Manhattan.

>64 million * 8133 =
>five hundred twenty billion five hundred twelve million

525 BILLION.

Nixon only made formal what JFK and LBJ already were doing

My point is that America effectively left the gold standard with FDR because of the Great Depression

Essentially.

But we only entered true official fiat currency monetary policy in 1971.

Before that the Federal Reserve had an autistic tendency to kill recoveries early and cause deflation.

How is gold at all more representative than fiat currency of the social and natural capital?
Both are absurd and are not abstracted from the world they are used to represent. This dissonance is the fubdemently flaw of the market economy.
It's why the mainstream views the biodiversity loss of the anthropocene as progress, "economic growth"

people might take your angry ranting more seriously if you could tell the difference between teddy roosevelt and fdr

It's too early for that shit, but yeah, you are right. Too many presidents with the same fucking names.

>Having your currency tied to gold artificially limits your monetary policy
>Having my spending limit tied to the amount in my bank account artificially limits my monetary policy

I couldn't agree more, pity I can't get the banks to agree with me.

>comparing a personal budget to a state's budget

Not him, but I would think that a State budget can be run like any personal one. It's just on a much bigger... bigger... BIGGER scale no?

Can a private citizen print his own money?

Private banks could (way back when before the government stepped in after the GD) but I guess (for me at least) the question is: How much of a risk is it that the fed can print out fucktons of fresh dollar bills before it becomes an 'Elephant in the room' of sorts to where the value of the bill becomes worthless since there's just so much of it? Things that are in abundance aren't worth as much as things that are scarce!

elaborate

I figured the idea now is that with fiat currency it's easy to inject currency into the economy and then withdraw it via transaction, artificial wealth

ie the .com and the housing bubbles

Here's what I got from some Veeky Forums anons on fiat currency:
>With a fiat currency in place, the government could fight the issues of the debt economy by simply printing more money. This of course, leads to inflation, and does not at all address the debt problem, it only allows the system to keep running.

Who the fuck is this guy and why is he in every other thread?

tripfags are by nature attention whores

...

The gold-backed dollar was structured in such a way that dollars could literally be exchanged for gold.

Because of this, other nations started acquiring as many dollars as they could, and exchanging them for gold - depleting US gold reserves.

In a panic, it was realized this needed to be changed, lest our gold reserves dwindle down to nothing.

By 1975 the change was complete, and by 1980 the dollar had already lost a large amount of its purchasing power.

Today, it has less than 20% of the purchasing power it possessed in 1970 - possibly less than 15% (I haven't checked the numbers in a while).

I suspect this entire trend was intentional, for the simple reason that the inevitable exchange of foreign-held dollars for US gold would have been obvious, and I do not believe policy makers failed to forsee this. Instead, they pretend they did not anticipate it because it cannot be proven that they did, thus their plan progresses along smoothly from one administration to the next.

Nor is this merely an American plot. It is a global banking plot whose epicenter is in West.

Sounds like a ponzi scheme

>en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102
Fuck off. Teddy Roosevelt was a great man. You're talking about FDR.

This was intentional. The US now exports worthless pieces of green paper to buy lots of Chinese, Japanese, European things. It's the greatest scam in history.

Bump

He's a user of this board, and he's in threads because he likes to post here... ?