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France pulls last gold held in US

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Re: France pulls last gold held in US

#301

Post by RealityVoid »

newguy1000 wrote: post #299
RealityVoid wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gold is silly as a measure of value. It's just a piece of shiny metal. The amount of value in the world is increasing so you want to exchange medium to grow with it else you're pulling breaks on the actual economy.

Gold is actually really good at transferring and measuring value. Think about what a "good" measure of value would be have. It needs to last over time, not corrode or dissolve to the forces. It needs to be distributable, Divisible.. to be ubiquitous. Hard to create/refine, hard to find, so supply can't easily be inflated. It doesn't matter what the object that is being used for exchange of value or holding value, tha…

> And even if there wasn't, imagine having an exchange currency that literally never inflated... that's GOOD.

I fundamentally disagree. Value comes from building stuff not from hoarding. I maintain my intense dislike for gold. And I grant that it had the property of having most people on this earth consider it the peak of value. Sure common belief is a useful property. But I disagree that it's a positive outcome or that there couldn't be many many other variations except gold.

Re: France pulls last gold held in US

#303

Post by SR2Z »

newguy1000 wrote: post #299
RealityVoid wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gold is silly as a measure of value. It's just a piece of shiny metal. The amount of value in the world is increasing so you want to exchange medium to grow with it else you're pulling breaks on the actual economy.

Gold is actually really good at transferring and measuring value. Think about what a "good" measure of value would be have. It needs to last over time, not corrode or dissolve to the forces. It needs to be distributable, Divisible.. to be ubiquitous. Hard to create/refine, hard to find, so supply can't easily be inflated. It doesn't matter what the object that is being used for exchange of value or holding value, tha…

Hold on - you say "we find more gold every day" and then go on to suggest that the money supply doesn't actually need to keep up with economic growth?

If we had the technology to maintain 0% inflation, we would do that. We can't, and rather than risk deflation we instead target low positive inflation. This is because deflation leads to nightmare spirals where people start stuffing money into their mattresses instead of investing in useful things because holding has risk-free guaranteed returns that the unpredictable real world can't match.

The amount of gold being mined is not sufficient to keep up with economic growth and gold is therefore inherently deflationary. It's not a good way to store value, because a coin that's going to double in value over two years or whatever is obviously not a stable store of value.

You can argue about corrosion resistance or whatever other physical properties gold might have, but unless the civilization collapses you will find just as much luck storing your wealth in the database of a major bank. Needless to say, designing a civilization around the idea that it could collapse at any moment is unnecessary and expensive.

Re: France pulls last gold held in US

#304

Post by panarky »

RealityVoid wrote: post #286
regnull wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, bear with me for a moment - what if the US would use actual physical gold coins instead of dollars? Then your argument of "gold would flow out" would not hold - so the only reason for it to flow out was that the gold standard was fake - the lax money policy of the US was the issue, not the gold standard itself.

Gold is silly as a measure of value. It's just a piece of shiny metal. The amount of value in the world is increasing so you want to exchange medium to grow with it else you're pulling breaks on the actual economy.

Just because a social construct is silly when you think about it doesn't make it any less real or useful.

A national border is silly as a physical reality; it is just a cartographic whim. These invisible lines, drawn by long-dead men, pretend that the lithosphere is fundamentally different on one side of a coordinate than the other.

Fiat currency is silly as a store of value; it is just a digital ledger or a piece of cotton-linen blend. Its "worth" is derived entirely from the collective hallucination that a central bank’s promise is more substantial than the paper it is printed on.

Re: France pulls last gold held in US

#306

Post by cyberax »

kr1m wrote: post #288
cyberax wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ok, bear with me for a moment - what if the US would use actual physical gold coins instead of dollars? You'll get a bear economy, leading to the eventual deflation and collapse. Fun fact: it was not hyperinflation in Weimar Germany that led Hitler to power but _deflation_ because of its insistence on sticking to the gold standard.

> Fun fact: it was not hyperinflation in Weimar Germany that led Hitler to power but _deflation_ because of its insistence on sticking to the gold standard. Do you have a source for this? AFAIK https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation_in_the_Weimar_R...

"Hyperinflation caused Hitler" is one of the common narratives that "everyone knows". But German economy was actually growing during the hyperinflation era and by the time of Hitler's ascension, the hyperinflation had long been in the past.

I personally edited this very Wikipedia article several times, but my changes got reverted by goldbugs who want to memory-hole it.

This article has a nice explanation: https://www.hertie-school.org/fileadmin/user_upload/20191101...

If you don't believe the numbers from it, they can be corroborated easily.

Re: France pulls last gold held in US

#307

Post by habinero »

newguy1000 wrote: post #299
RealityVoid wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gold is silly as a measure of value. It's just a piece of shiny metal. The amount of value in the world is increasing so you want to exchange medium to grow with it else you're pulling breaks on the actual economy.

Gold is actually really good at transferring and measuring value. Think about what a "good" measure of value would be have. It needs to last over time, not corrode or dissolve to the forces. It needs to be distributable, Divisible.. to be ubiquitous. Hard to create/refine, hard to find, so supply can't easily be inflated. It doesn't matter what the object that is being used for exchange of value or holding value, tha…

> that's why you can trade and barter random objects...imagine having an exchange currency that literally never inflated... that's GOOD. We have been hoodwinked into thinking that we need inflation to keep up with goods and services, literal stockholm syndrome

Gahhh. Stop taking your economics advice from bitcoin bros and goldbug weirdos. They don't know how anything works and don't want to learn. It's like taking legal advice from sovereign citizens. It's not even that difficult to understand why it's a terrible idea!

High inflation is bad, sure. Deflation is an economic nuke. You know those people who spent like a whole bitcoin buying pizza way back when? "If I'd just held onto it, I'd have $HUGE_NUMBER now".

Yeah. If your money goes up in value, you have a huge incentive to stockpile it and not buy pizza. It's not just Dominos that loses out. All of the people and suppliers that go into pizza do, too. You need people to spend and lend to have liquidity and money flow.

> we find more gold every day, so there is an easing already happening naturally

That's not how that works. You're tying your entire country's economic growth to the production output of a single mining industry. Gold is not distributed evenly across the globe, either.

And yeah, we did all that in the past, and it caused deflation, which caused numerous financial panics [0], broke the British economy [1] and after two world wars, the US ended up with like 70% of the world's gold [2].

[0] https://www.federalreservehistory.org/essays/banking-panics-...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_crisis_of_1914

[2] https://www.imf.org/external/np/exr/center/mm/eng/mm_dr_01.h...

--

TL;DR: Tying your entire country's economic growth to the production output of a single mining industry is stupid and we don't do it for very good reasons. Everything is a conspiracy if you don't know how anything works.

Re: France pulls last gold held in US

#308

Post by bruckie »

therealpygon wrote: post #265
lazide wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most delivery trucks (like a box truck) have capacities more like 10 or 20 tons. A heavy freight truck, like used to load ships? Even more.

You don’t generally just throw gold in a box truck… it typically moves by armored freight.

The Hope diamond was famously transported by... USPS.

"The postage cost him $2.44, plus $142.85 for $1 million worth of insurance." —https://about.usps.com/who-we-are/postal-history/hope-diamon...

Re: France pulls last gold held in US

#309

Post by dmoy »

kr1m wrote: post #288
cyberax wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ok, bear with me for a moment - what if the US would use actual physical gold coins instead of dollars? You'll get a bear economy, leading to the eventual deflation and collapse. Fun fact: it was not hyperinflation in Weimar Germany that led Hitler to power but _deflation_ because of its insistence on sticking to the gold standard.

> Fun fact: it was not hyperinflation in Weimar Germany that led Hitler to power but _deflation_ because of its insistence on sticking to the gold standard. Do you have a source for this? AFAIK https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation_in_the_Weimar_R...

Hyperinflation in weimar Germany ended by what, 1924-ish with a return to gold standard? Hitler came to power 8+ years later

Re: France pulls last gold held in US

#310

Post by JTbane »

RealityVoid wrote: post #286
regnull wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, bear with me for a moment - what if the US would use actual physical gold coins instead of dollars? Then your argument of "gold would flow out" would not hold - so the only reason for it to flow out was that the gold standard was fake - the lax money policy of the US was the issue, not the gold standard itself.

Gold is silly as a measure of value. It's just a piece of shiny metal. The amount of value in the world is increasing so you want to exchange medium to grow with it else you're pulling breaks on the actual economy.

Yeah I don't get why people don't understand this- there is not enough gold to base the entire global economy on it.
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