"JP Morgan was able to manipulate down the price of silver on February 5th through naked short selling paper silver that doesn't physically exist" Instead of the biased rhetoric of the delusional gold/silver bulls how about the normal English description of the same event: "JP Morgan was able to push down the price of silver on February 5th by selling short silver futures contracts". Imagine that, selling silver futures contracts to the buyers of those contracts. Normal market activity is real evil, isn't it now?
Excellent point. What is also interesting is that before the creation of the federal reserve bank, we had enough gold in our vaults to pay off our national debt. 10 years after the creation of the federal reserve, we owed twice as much as we owned in gold. When the government revalued the gold from 20 per ounce to 35 per ounce we only owned about 10 cents worth of gold for every dollar of debt within a few years. Today if all the reserves are still there, we own about 2.2 cents of gold for every dollar of debt. If you look at other countries like india...they have about 10 cents of gold for every dollar of debt. China, even though their debt is just 18% of GDP still only has 2.3 cents of gold per 1 dollar of debt. No matter which way you look at it...gold should be worth more than it is. Paper is worthless. Gold is real money.
Or, the world economy has advanced a lot since depending on hard goods. Frankly, people really seldom grasp how the Western world has changed in the last 100+ years. Most people were poor, died young, would bury perhaps 30-50% of their young, worked 6 days a week 12+ hours a day, rarely owned much property, where viral/bacterial diseases reigned, had little hope if their situation failed, etc. Now, there is a huge amount of wealth, people live much longer, have much better work, and many other things.
Are you associating these conditions with the creation of the federal reserve? Are you attempting to imply that this variable, the Fed, is the causation of the improvement in conditions? Because that would break just about every rule of statistical analysis I know of. Association =/ Causation. You don't know that we wouldn't be ten times better off at the end of the same period of time without the Fed and with money back by hard assets. Maybe in a world with a single variable, but from what I can see there might be a couple more.