The Republican Party is considering adopting a platform that includes an audit of the Federal Reserve and the establishment of a committee to look into a return to the gold standard. http://www.cnbc.com/id/48770752 Apparently what's in the platform is simply the establishment of a commission to look into a return to the gold standard. The 1980 Republican platform also included the establishment of such a commission, but ultimately it was decided to maintain the status quo.
The grand mysticism at the center of the Republican political movement has no more telling symptom than the fascination with gold.
To bad they won't look into the SEC toi find out what they are doing because it seems they don't do their jobs very well to let all that happened, happen. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
Bill Gross, who runs the world’s biggest bond fund at Pacific Investment Management Co., said private credit-market debt is too high and the age of credit expansion that led to “double-digit” returns is over. Instead, investors face an “age of inflation, which typically provides a headwind, not a tailwind, to securities prices -- both stocks and bonds,” Gross wrote in his monthly investment outlook posted on the Newport Beach, California-based company’s website today. Pimco's Gross: I'm Leaning Toward Gold Over Bonds “Those days are over,” Gross said later during an interview on Bloomberg Television “Pension funds and individuals and investors that expect 10 percent consistent returns to pay those bills are going to be disappointed.” Gross’s outlook follows his commentary last month, which sparked debate among investors and analysts after he declared that the “cult of equity” was dying. In his August comments, he compared long-term returns from equities to a “Ponzi scheme” and said returns of 6.6 percent above inflation, known as the Siegel Constant, won’t be seen again. Since offering equity funds in 2010, Pimco has attracted about $3.2 billion to its four main funds as of the start of last month, less than 1 percent of the firm’s $1.8 trillion in assets. “If central banks are successful in terms of reflating, if Bernanke is successful in terms of a new QE, then an investor should be focused on reflationary assets,” Gross said. “That would be real assets such as commodities and gold -- to the extent that they reflect future inflation." http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-...f-credit-expansion-led-fund-returns-over.html
In other words, they need to invent another purported controversy which capitalizes on the ignorance of their constituents and tries to cumulatively disparage on the only agency actively fighting both inflation and recession. Forget the corporate thugs who ran amuck while Republicans created a diversion. Blame the Fed. Forget the oil cartels, the drillers, refiners, and distributors who hold everyone hostage. Blame the Fed. Forget the shenanigans with brokers who bundled the mortgage backed securities which created the crash of 2008. Call it a gold standards issue, and blame the Fed. Forget the history of economic decisions, and the rationale for leaving the gold standard in the first place, just blame the Fed. Forget that economics is a technical field which requires an education in economic analysis, higher math and computer programming. Just lay claim to things you never studied, and blame the Fed. In fact, while we're at it, let's blame the Fed for all of our collective ignorance. After all, without that, the Fed wouldn't really have that much to do. Just stand on a hill, beat your chest like a monkey, and blame the Fed. Typical Republican platform.
Well said. But it's far, far from being just Republican thing. I've seen plenty of idiots right here shouting/complaining about such things while having absolutely NO clue about the Fed system, fractional reserve banking and several other such tools. Republican OR Democrat - they should either put forth some effort to understand some very basic things OR else be taken out back and shot.
In the arena of public discussion, in particular (re the OP) national political platforms and agenda, Legislative or Executive, it's pretty much just a Republican thing. Who else?
There is a funny side to it ... I think Michael Kindt noted, "On the surface, this plank is simply an ass-kiss to the Ron Paulians, who tend to be big supporters of the gold standard ...." Bearing in mind that it is something of a humor column .... The desire to link the dollar with gold, whether it be by Republicans or the Ron Paulians (who, by the way, are not libertarians), is simply a desire to turn our money into something real. It still won't be real, of course, but it will seem, at least, more real: Gold is shiny! Therefore, it actually has value! There is in existence about $8.5 trillion dollars. Our national debt, however, is $15.9 trillion. This debt is entirely the fault of Obama and has absolutely nothing at all to do with the fact that 53 cents of every dollar taken in taxes is spent on the military. Nothing at all. Ahem. So, if we use all the U.S. dollars currently existing, including the 23 bucks in your purse and the change on your dresser, we will only be able to pay about half the debt. All of the money in the world will be gone, paid to our creditors, and we will still owe them about $8 trillion dollars. How is it that we can owe more money than there is money? Easy: we made it all up. Money is a figment of our imagination, and its divisions into amounts and denominations are simply divisions and denominations of nothing. 15.9 trillion units may seem like a lot until you remember that it is 15.9 trillion units of absolutely nothing. We philosophers contend that modern human society is at bottom nihilist, they ain't a-kiddin'. Tying our money to gold would mean that we'd need to find a lot more gold. The U.S. holds 8,133 metric tons of gold reserves, according to the World Gold Council—about 260 million ounces. The current market price for gold is about $1,667 an ounce, making our reserves worth around $435 billion. So, instead of there being $8.5 trillion dollars worth of pretend money, there'd only be $435 billion dollars worth of real(er) money. Instead of paying down half of the pretend debt with every last cent of the pretend money, we'd only be able to pay down three percent of the pretend debt with every last cent of the real(er) money. In fact, all of the gold currently in existence, owned by the various countries of the world, would not add up to enough to pay off our pretend debt. The gold standard would make every dollar in "existence" convertible to a tiny amount of gold. Since we have all agreed that there are so many dollars (remember, all of these dollars exist only in our mind by collective agreement), there's simply not enough gold on this planet, mined or unmined, to cover everything. Still, it's pretty straightforward. And this also seems like a good time to remind that in 2009, Ceyla Pazarbasioglu of the IMF put the sum of "all the money in the world" (i.e., fixed income securities) at around $70 trillion. Gold standard, anyone? ____________________ Notes: Kindt, Michael. "Reductio ad Absurdum: Money, Gold, and a Little Known GOP Plank". The Cagle Post. August 30, 2012. Cagle.com. September 6, 2012. http://www.cagle.com/2012/08/reductio-ad-absurdum-money-gold-and-a-little-known-gop-plank/ Pazarbasioglu, Ceyla. Interview with Adam Davidson. "The Giant Pool of Money". This American Life #390. September 25, 2009. Transcript. ThisAmericanLife.org. September 6, 2012. http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/390/transcript
It would actually be easier if ALL the money in the world was converted to a gold standard because each currency would be revalued relative to gold in a way that maintains their individual values relative to each other. The problem is converting ONE currency to gold...because it would lower that currency's value relative to other trading partners. This can be solved however by linking only a 'percentage' of the currency to gold...like a 10% backing. This means if the central bank wants to create a trillion dollars it must secure an additional 100 billion in gold reserves.
No, that just means that you have linked the currency 100% to gold, and also devalued it by a factor of 10.
