Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

France pulls last gold held in US

mining.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

311–320 of 374 posts

Re: France pulls last gold held in US

#311

Post by habinero »

slopinthebag wrote: post #287
doctorpangloss wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

government policy definitely has the greatest power to create (or destroy) wealth, there are a lot of things wrong with economic policy in this country, but floating currency exchange is not one of those problems.

I would argue that any policy that allows the government to print money freely and inflate the currency is a major thing wrong with a country.

And you'd be wrong. It's not even difficult to understand why. Uncontrolled inflation is bad. Deflation is much, much worse. You do not want deflation. It rots your economy and nukes lend and spend. We trade a small amount of inflation to avoid the nuke that is deflation.

This is, like, one of the few things economists -- even most of the crazy ones -- agree on.

Re: France pulls last gold held in US

#313

Post by tw04 »

habinero wrote: post #307
newguy1000 wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 le…

I do find it rather ironic that economists can pretty much universally agree on this concept. And yet when you point out the very existence of the billionaire class inherently causes the exact same issue you're suddenly a communits.

How is it good for an economy to have a small subset of individuals hoarding wealth through property, artwork, and offshore bank accounts - not spending it in the economy from which they extracted it? "Job creators" is a farse, the subset who you can point to who ACTUALLY create(d) jobs a-la Page and Brin have long since stepped away from that job creation and have joined the ranks of: number go up.

Re: France pulls last gold held in US

#314

Post by slopinthebag »

habinero wrote: post #311
slopinthebag wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would argue that any policy that allows the government to print money freely and inflate the currency is a major thing wrong with a country.

And you'd be wrong. It's not even difficult to understand why. Uncontrolled inflation is bad. Deflation is much, much worse. You do not want deflation. It rots your economy and nukes lend and spend. We trade a small amount of inflation to avoid the nuke that is deflation. This is, like, one of the few things economists -- even most of the crazy ones -- agree on.

That's an oversimplification. Demand-side deflation can be bad for the economy, but it's also because our modern economies are basically reliant on inflation to manage our insane debts. Typically, critique of inflationary principles is coupled with a broader critique of MMT and how our economies are run. Deflation is fine or even beneficial when it comes from increased productivity (supply-side). Heck, we have deflation in some sectors of our economy (eg. technology) and consumers greatly benefit from it. Unfortunately the good type of deflation we see in our economies is overshadowed by the money printer going brrrrrrr.

Deflation is bad for the elites and politicians, and good for consumers. When the former are running the show, of course they will claim that deflation is the worst thing ever, despite the immense harm inflation inflicts on the average person. And if you spend like 5 minutes pondering the justification for why that is, you'll see it's mostly BS.

Re: France pulls last gold held in US

#315

Post by DaSHacka »

okanat wrote: post #133
ur-whale wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Germany also needs to pull all gold. We have 1236t there. They had better act fast, before an executive order prevents that from ever happening.

US also has gold reserves and investments in Germany. They can be seized.

The real question is who has more invested in the opposing country

Re: France pulls last gold held in US

#316

Post by DaSHacka »

hackerbeat wrote: post #276

Good. The US is not to be trusted anymore.

Lol "anymore"

Vietnam war: i sleep

CIA regime change: i sleep

MKULTRA on its own citizens: i sleep

five-eyes global surveillance network: i sleep

orange man saying canada/greenland joining as the 51st state would be neat: real shit

Re: France pulls last gold held in US

#317

Post by AnthonyMouse »

regnull wrote: post #273
kccqzy wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to imply that Charles de Gaulle and his policy of converting dollars to gold caused the collapse of the Bretton Woods system. That was a myopic view. The whole Bretton Woods system was doomed from the beginning due to design defects. The system was conceived with the primary goal of maintaining balance of payments equilibrium for all countries at the expense of economic growth and liquidity. It had become cl…

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.

> what if the US would use actual physical gold coins instead of dollars?

The problem here is, what if the demand for dollars increases?

In principle the US would get more gold and mint more currency, but gold is a finite resource. "All the gold ever mined" is around 200,000 metric tons, ~32k troy ounces per metric ton is ~6.4B troy ounces.

In 2022 (just before the recent gold rally) the price was ~$2000 per troy ounce, i.e. "all the gold" was worth ~$13T. Meanwhile the M3 money supply in the same year was ~$20T. What happens if you try to buy $20T worth of gold to mint currency when only $13T worth has ever been mined, and not all of that is even on the market? The answer is that you can't, so instead the result is deflation, which is bad.

Or to put it a different way, what do you think the economic effect of the recent gold rally would be for a country whose currency was still pegged to gold? It just got way cheaper to import foreign products than buy domestic ones, and way more expensive for foreign countries to buy your exports, so how's the unemployment rate looking? The amount everyone owes on their mortgage hasn't changed but the nominal value of their houses just got cut in half so now they've lost their jobs and are underwater. What happens when they start to default and foreclosures don't allow the banks to recover the principal?

Re: France pulls last gold held in US

#318

Post by _heimdall »

bigfishrunning wrote: post #194
_heimdall wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was that the case in the 60s as well? I know trucks of that era had much lower capacity than today, even when comparing across class like "half-ton" trucks.

A half-ton truck is a consumer pick-up truck, not a commercial shipping vehicle. Much much smaller.

Yes I understand, that's why I was asking about box trucks of the day. I'll dig into it myself as I am curious now, I've only ever really looked into cab-over bread trucks from that era and those aren't a great comparison either. I was just curious if the GP already knew what 60s era box trucks would have been rated for.

Re: France pulls last gold held in US

#319

Post by _heimdall »

vel0city wrote: post #190
_heimdall wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was that the case in the 60s as well? I know trucks of that era had much lower capacity than today, even when comparing across class like "half-ton" trucks.

The Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 set the gross vehicle weight limit for trucks at 73,280lbs. I imagine trucks of the day probably at least came close to that limit? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_trucking_indust...

That was likely targeting tractor trailers of the era though, not box trucks.

Re: France pulls last gold held in US

#320

Post by CyberDildonics »

JTbane wrote: post #310
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.

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

That makes no sense, do you think people are talking about using gold coins instead of paper money in their wallet?
Post reply on HN