this post was submitted on 16 Dec 2024
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United States | News & Politics
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Coming in hot, I see.
The gold standard was one of the causes of the Great Depression due to deflation. Deflation is terrible for economies and much, much harder to control. Be happy that you can keep your gold, FDR made everyone turn in all their gold (you could keep $100 worth) punishable by $10,000 or 10 years of prison. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102 But guess what happened? Now that the Fed had more gold, they could issue, I mean, printbrrrrr more notes....which allowed more loans to be made, which allowed more industry to happen, etc, etc.
Inflation adjusted, Carnegie was worth $300 billion and we were on the gold standard then. What stopped the Rockefellers and Carnegies for a while? Regulation. What is allowing them to come back? Deregulation. Oh and taxes on the wealthy. Ask yourself what Musk had to lose if Trump didn't win?
Wampum? Think about what you said there standard of any kind. We all have to agree something is valuable, for it to hold value. Wampum was beautiful purple shells used as currency. Gold's elemental properties (electrical conductivity, non-reactive, etc) were not known, it simply looked shiny. There's honestly no good answer here, even bitcoin. For example, I still can't buy a coffee with a bitcoin, it must be converted to something else first. What if I'm somewhere without an internet connection? Cash is king.
I can agree with you here. Property "value" has surged twice recently, Chinese investors in early to mid 2010s (I forget why, I'd have to look that one up again. Something about their construction boom had crashed, too much supply on their market, so they turned to the US to invest. Anyway, there was a $750,000 house near me that stayed vacant for 3 years before it was sold for $1.25 million. I looked up the owners on the county government site) and Covid really hurt commercial real estate so they turned to residential/land.
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