Saya wrote:Yet gold will buy you what it bought thousands of years ago, now it costs 10 times the price for things, and that's just from the 30s and 50s.
The amount of inflation we've seen since our switch to fiat money is so off the scale that, and the sad thing for me is that I've seen the "but the inflation" argument so often that I can't even laugh at it anymore, because so many people take that crap seriously.
The facts do not agree at all.
Well, I guess you've seen the argument so many times that you didn't actually read what I wrote,
Sincere sorry there, I must have misread the hell out of something.
Any textbook that claims overspeculation as a singular cause is really oversimplifying the issue. And if their singular cause for overspeculation was the decline of the gold standard they'd also have a weird Austrian school of economics bent that I've never seen in a standard history textbook.
Overspeculation always refers to the market place, though they'll blame stocks. The end problem, as I've said, is the banks were allowed to create all the money they wanted, so they made loans like no tomorrow for farms, businesses, carts, etc, and America was swallowed in debt, but things looked okay for years because all that borrowed money was being spent in the market, making a temporary boom.
Then the bills came due, the stock market crash was just a trigger for the break up of the lie at the time, those in power couldn't keep the illusion going any longer than that, just like today.
This is much more political and opinion-y and super-debatable, but I think that the American "common laborer" is going the way of the American farmer. We're sort of in a transitional period right now, so some people are kind of screwed. I do think we should deal with this issue and not sweep it under the rug, but I don't think switching back to gold will change structural economic changes or immigration fraud.
No, but no matter what people want to call our society or whatever, humans are still humans, they need to eat, sleep and have a home. So they need jobs badly.
And modern economies haven't really been around for that long, so I don't really see how "thousands of years" of banking could prove anything.[/quote]
Easy.
Systems based on a non-counterfeitable currency had good trade.
Fiat money has a 100% historical failure rate.
Fractional reserve banking systems have a 100% failure rate.
The full reserve banks? The three famous ones that held up for a generation and ran on real assets, not paper money?
World renown and 100% solid. None of those banks failed until fractional reserve policies and fiat cash was introduced.
The reason we don't allow counterfeiting is damn near the same argument against fiat, because counterfeiting causes far less economic damage as it inflates the money supply, but it's not generated by putting anyone into debt.
My point is, it can be sort of shaky to apply historical paradigms to modern situations.
I'll agree to that last point in general, but here it holds, especially in light of our current problems. I haven't found an economic disaster America's face where FRB policies or overprinted fiat money weren't concerned.
