Intrinsic Value

No, absolutely not.

Absolutely not. If coins were turned back to gold and silver, we would be worse off than we are now. People wouldn't ever spend the gold and silver and would just hoard it.

NO, of course. However, soon all our monitary systems here and in other countries will be in such turmoil, the only way we will be able to buy anything is with the barter system, animal pelts, Wampum and Beanie Babies. In many areas baseball/bootball cards too will be accepted for payment of smaller items.
Gasoline for your cars will soon be about $30/gallon so a tank of gas would have to be paid for with your wife as collateral. You leave her at the gas station and drive off into the Sunset.
To really answer you, try thinking of paying for anything at Walmart with Gold or Silver bars. Even now those cashiers want to have you arrested for using half dollars or a $2 bill.
Don't worry about our dollar. Worry about the value of a Peso. Soon to be more common in the USA.

Then I'll starve to death if I have to leave her there. My dogs and cats don't know how to cook!

So,what happens when you need another tank of gas?

When the dollar crashes, there won't be enough gold available for the US to go back on the gold standard. China and India have bought up too much of it.

When the dollar tanks, the US will need to have something tangible to back our currency in order to recover. The only asset that is sizale enough and that is available to the US government is land. The gov't will be able to use all the federal lands to back the new "dollar." But that won't be enough. They will also be able to seize your house as they take ownership of all the property that Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae own through your mortgage.

Matt

The dollar might crash or it might not, but you definitely won't go back to the gold standard if it does. Or the silver standard, or any other precious metal standard. There just aren't enough refined rocks to go around anymore.

If the dollar collapses, it can simply be replaced with a new fiat currency once the economy restabilizes. And it doesn't have to be as radical as adopting the Amero or some of the other out-there hypotheses you might see floating around. Just lop a few zeroes off the old dollar to create a new dollar. Simple. Lots of other countries have done it in the past.



That's been tried before too, in France in the 1790s after the Revolution, when the government confiscated all the lands belonging to the Church.

The problem with land as a store of value is that calculations of its value depend on there not actually being much land for sale at any one time, because buyers of land are relatively few and far between. Using it for backing a currency effectively dumps a huge quantity of land on the market all at once. The result is a massive oversupply and resulting collapse in value of the land, with resultant collapse in value of the money backed by that land.

To compensate, the French government printed more and more "land-backed" money, safe in the knowledge that no-one was rich enough to actually redeem it anymore. The result: the world's first period of hyperinflation. The problem was admittedly made worse in France because all the people who could have theoretically afforded to buy up all that land (ie the nobility) were being rounded up and executed.