Steve Forbes Advocates Gold Standard

It kind of starts out on a fallacy that we faced no economic trouble on the gold standard. The US Government used to have to be bailed out by private citizens back in those days it just wasnt advertised at the time. When you think about it gold standard and fiat are the same. Gold and silver only have value because people say it does just like money. Its impractical to have gold or silver coins with the price of those metals today and youd see A LOT of money being lost by banks and investors if you all of a sudden say okay gold is 20 dollars an ounce and silver is 1 dollar. Its just not doable.

He does make a good point though about government expansion being to great. But at the same time we have no one to blame but ourselfs. Were the ones who elect big government politicians and want the social programs and reelect people that vote for huge government projects. I forget who said it but a great quote is "Democracies get the government they deserve". And that quote is very true. It wont matter what system of economics you have as long as a large percentage of people want a huge government and the government to run everything youll have financial problems.

I don't see any plausible reason why our money cannot be backed or at least partially backed by something that has real value. Something has to limit the amount of paper money that is printed and forcing the government to have on hand some commodity or a basket of commodities to back the paper money is not at all unreasonable. Without this, money can and will be printed to extinction ala Weimar Germany and Zimbabwe... plus numerous others. Even if the money is only backed by the production capacity of the issuing nation, that is at least some kind of a brake on runaway printing presses and the inflation that results. Printing money to solve a liquidity problem is about as effective as taking pain medicine for a severe illness instead of taking a medication that will actually cure the problem and not just temporarily treat the symptoms.

To those who say that "there isn't enough gold and silver to serve as money", I disagree with that as well. Typically, they will make assumptions about the price equivalent between current dollars and gold or silver. This is incorrect because we have had a LOT of inflation baked into this cake over the years that would not be anywhere as much under an honest money system as it has been under the fiat system. Without this self-induced inflation, prices would me MUCH lower than they are today and the amounts of gold and silver would be much closer to being workable.

To those who believe that there has been price suppression of gold and silver, this only exacerbates the problem of knowing what the real equivalent is between fiat dollars and PMs. What would the price of gold and silver be today without any government or central bank interference in prices? Hard to say but it is pretty clear that if there has been price suppression and it has been successful, prices would be MUCH higher today than they are. As a stacker, I appreciate the incredible buying opportunity that has been presented to us. At the same time, I also favor honest, free, and fair markets so am conflicted by this part of the PM story.

None of us has the entire answer to the fiat money / inflation problem and I don't pretend to have it either. But we do know that a significant portion of what we have done and continue to do is not working. If we keep doing the same things we will achieve the same results. We have a marvelous example of what not to do via Japan. They are on, what, QE9 now? Their economy is stuck in a rut and has been since about 1990. How much of this is enough to prove that they are not on the right track? How long must we follow their example before deciding that this is not the right way to go and that we must go elsewhere if we are to be economically and financially successful? This is definitely a topic that needs and deserves a national discussion.

Which is exactly why it can and will never be done. Where is that money that gets removed supposed to come from? Either the banks will lose billions if not trillions or youll be confiscating wealth that goes against everything this country stands for.

Im probably in the minority in this section of the board but gold or silver are no more valuable than a bill unless the government dissolves. In an anarchy trade system you would want gold or silver. As long as the government is there money is just as valuable if not more valuable. Money has value because we say it does, gold and silver has value because people say it does. Theyre both backed by the fact people say it has value.

Its also important to remember we went bankrupt in the gold standard too as a government, they had to get loans from private citizens to bail them out. They even mention that on the next episode of the men who built america on the history channel that JP Morgan has to loan the government a billion dollars of todays money to keep it from doing into debt.

Gold standard fiat money it doesn't matter. What matters is the type of government you have an how the money is spent. As long as people keep getting voted in that are in favor of expanding the government youll have the same problems under any system. History has taught us time and time again massive governments that control everything collapse under their own weight and thats true from the USSR to early empires that literally used gold and silver for money

It could be done, but we'd have to do something we've never done before. Demonetize our current currency and issue a new one. Create a new more valuable currency. Have commerce repriced in the new currency. Would be pretty neat to be paying 10 cents a gallon for gas. Only thing is that if we did go to a metal backed currency again, it would have to be a single metal. The rest of the world would still trade them as a commodity and the ratios wouldn't be stable enough to be bi-metallic. Also, the our exchange rate with other currency would be at the will of the metals market. say you backed it with silver and silver prices dropped, prices would rise, etc. There's no way the government could peg the price of silver or gold anymore. They are too much of a global commodity anymore. The government would lose it's ability to control inflation rates, etc.

When specie ruled the monetary world it didn't stop the Southsea's bubble, tulip speculation or the 1929 crash. Its management of risk and speculation that is more important. I also get amused when people slam Keynes.......he was the one who recommended that in good times governments should save and then should usin those savings to maintain the economy when things got bad. Some how politicians only swallowed half the message......they borrowed when times were good and borrowed even more when they were bad.

Yes, there is Merc but we don't need to scream about it. What most of us mean when we say democracy is not mob rule but the democratic 1-person 1-vote system of representation. Being a republic is pretty much a separate issue... at least to us. And yes, we DO know the difference. Shorthand typing on the Internet being what it is, however, corners are cut... IMHO.

Inflation and deficits happened under the gold standard. The problem isn't how you have the money backed or unbacked its how its spent. No large government can survive forever. When the government takes things over the price soars, the only way to survive long term is to have the government get out of things and leave it to the states or private industry. Gold standard wont change any of that

Plus a major reason people like the idea is they think that if the dollar loses value they can turn it in for gold. Would never happen. Gold standard or not if the country fails and goes bankrupt your going to have what you have and nothing else

I don't think that the issue is whether they did or not but of magnitude. A $16 TRILLION debt, not to mention upwards of $125 TRILLION in unfunded liabilities? Wow! That the debt alone is more than 100% of the US GDP. No person, local government, state government, national government, or world government can possibly operate that way and be financially viable. This is not so much about a gold standard or politics as it is about basic math and economics.