France pulls last gold held in US • Hacker News Board

Re: France pulls last gold held in US

#371

Post by xorcist » Thu, Apr 09, 2026, 10:03 AM UTC

lostlogin wrote: post #336

mistrial9 wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

France is currently contacting selected partners to build a collective nuclear weapon coalition, probably focusing on Norway due to their location and recent oil wealth. Given recent events, reasonable people may disagree strongly on the directions that is leading.

Europe isn’t pulling its weight in defence spending. But if it tries to it’s also a problem?

The problem is that Europe does not spend enough on US weaponry. Bulding nukes domestically does not help with that.

NATO was explicitly built to keep Europe in line. That worked to the benefit of everyone, until national security intrests and land expansion put a stop to it.

Re: France pulls last gold held in US

#372

Post by habinero » Thu, Apr 09, 2026, 9:39 PM UTC

xorcist wrote: post #370

habinero wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> If your money goes up in value, you have a huge incentive to stockpile it and not buy pizza A lot hinges on this being true, but being deflationary is not unique to gold. It is also true for a lot of other things, including stocks. Yet we think it is good that regular people spend their earnings on stock, and it is generally considered to be one of the things which made American economy uniquely strong. So much so…

> Yet we think it is good that regular people spend their earnings on stock, and it is generally considered to be one of the things which made American economy uniquely strong

I...don't think you know what stocks actually are. Your argument doesn't make sense because stocks are the literal exact opposite of a deflationary good lol.

Companies issue stock to raise money. If you buy stock from a company, you're giving them that money in exchange for a small stake in ownership.

It gets more complicated with stock markets and all the other stuff, but the heart of it is taking money that would normally sit for decades doing nothing and giving it to those who can use it right now.

> Reality seems to disagree here.

It only does if you don't know how things work and don't want to learn lol

Re: France pulls last gold held in US

#373

Post by xorcist » Thu, Apr 09, 2026, 11:39 PM UTC

habinero wrote: post #372

xorcist wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If your money goes up in value, you have a huge incentive to stockpile it and not buy pizza A lot hinges on this being true, but being deflationary is not unique to gold. It is also true for a lot of other things, including stocks. Yet we think it is good that regular people spend their earnings on stock, and it is generally considered to be one of the things which made American economy uniquely strong. So much so…

> Yet we think it is good that regular people spend their earnings on stock, and it is generally considered to be one of the things which made American economy uniquely strong I...don't think you know what stocks actually are. Your argument doesn't make sense because stocks are the literal exact opposite of a deflationary good lol. Companies issue stock to raise money. If you buy stock from a company, you're giving t…

> Companies issue stock to raise money

There is certainly some misunderstanding here, and I am unsure about where it is. Perhaps another example could have been more clear.

When you "buy the S&P500" you do not buy stock from companies. No S&P ETF takes part in private placements or IPOs. They buy "used" shares on the open market, with the single intention of selling it on the open market to someone else.

When you buy the S&P, at no point do you give money to any of the S&P companies (except perhaps a small fee to the ETF issuer, most of which are public companies, but let's not split hairs about that).

There are of course other methods of buying the S&P500, such as tracker certificates, but they only add layers of indirection to the above, they do not change the fundamental facts about it.

> you don't know how things work and don't want to learn

I am not sure how to respond to this.

Re: France pulls last gold held in US

#374

Post by throwawayqqq11 » Sat, Apr 11, 2026, 10:04 AM UTC

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #365

throwawayqqq11 wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To explain why de/inflation is bad: The primary function of money is its trade value, to "lubricate" the real economy to let goods and services flow. When the value is unstable, people are inclined to not spend or not accept that currency, which contradicts the free flow of it and in severe cases harms the economy. Crypto'currencies' have the same problem. By nature, they are no currency but investment for which inst…

> Crypto'currencies' have the same problem. Bitcoin has the same problem. There is no inherent reason you can't have a cryptocurrency where there is no maximum number of coins to ever be mined and instead the limit is that mining them requires a fixed amount of computation. That would give you the characteristics you want from a medium of exchange, because there is a rate limit on how much can be created (doing so re…

You are right, the harm of unstable currencies is a matter of public perception but boiling the frogs slowly still does harm. Inflation is a significant, longterm, bottom-up wealth pump and simply pointing to empirical evidence is a point against unstable currencies, not for them.

How cryptocurrencies are mined is secondary in that regard too because their values is also purely based on perception, since there is no large authoriry backing that currency by eg. demanding , spending and regulating it.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=k3NN_NZOdhY