The headline thesis seems reasonable, but they lost me as soon as they started comparing USD to gold. Gold is just such a weird special-case thing in economics that it seems very hard to draw interesting conclusions about anything else when you're opening up the discussion with using gold as a benchmark.
Gold can be a crazy irrational form of money, but how is that different from USD or other (crypto)currencies? Everything is on the table in this moment of geopolitical uncertainty.
How's that invaluable? Even if someone's a quack or a little crazy, he may still be mostly right.
Don't get me wrong, there were days when the paranoid fever dreams of borderline schizophrenics clearly belonged to the realms of unreality. But those days are gone. I miss them, but pretending they are still with us won't help.
Take the pizza-parlor related conspiracy theories from a few years back. Thanks to the revelations concerning the late great J. Epstein, we know they were for the most part wrong. Except, for the part where a significant portion of the ruling class regularly engages in sex with underage girls.
The quacks were wrong about everything except the most essential part of the story.
I can give you other examples, if you wish, but few are as prominent and as unarguable as this one.
Silver has such an interesting history as a unit of exchange. I remember reading that China started demanding payment in silver around the 1500 for goods leading to the boom in Spanish silver mining in the Americas to pay for imports.
The lack of silver also lead the British to start the opium trades to get around the Chinese state.
Is that still true in modern times with more people, but also better technologies? They make gold notes now that are 1/1000th an oz. Two of those would get you lunch. Also...if it was the main source of currency, wouldn't the value go up to where you would need very little (example - $15,000 an oz)?
I'd even guess you could keep it in a form of bank and then have a debit card you could use where most items were tiny tiny fractions of an oz. Is it still too little gold at that point?
I'm not suggesting a gold standard btw...just curious. I'd also point out that it might be crazy, but our current system seems incredibly risky and many nations have had their currency collapse through over supply. I don't think a perfect solution exists here.
> Gold is just such a weird special-case thing in economics that it seems very hard to draw interesting conclusions about anything else when you're opening up the discussion with using gold as a benchmark.
Especially since the gold standard did nothing to help in stabilizing currencies:
even over the long-term, per Roy Jastram's The Golden Constant: The English and American Experience 1560 to 1976:
> Andre Sharon, head of the international research department at Drexel Burnham, Inc., notes, “the value of gold essentially derives from its capacity to preserve real capital and purchasing power.”† I select this particular quotation because of the prestige of the organization and the position of the spokesman, but statements in this vein can be found in great numbers. They can be traced back for generations and in many countries. How can this proposition so contrary to statistical fact become so widely believed and quoted? Possibly because gold has preserved capital in cataclysmic cases it is easy to infer that it can be trusted to do the same in less severe circumstances. To extrapolate from gold’s protection in singular catastrophes to its use as a strategy against cyclical infation is an example of faulty inductive reasoning.
The author starts with 8 paragraphs on gold, and the word gold is mentioned 33 times throughout the article, spread about evenly throughout. By no means did the author "move on" from talking about gold, let alone "quickly".
