You are correct, silver is also implied. Notice on the image at the top of the bill, "silver certificate"
"Effective October 19, 2009, firms will be able to post physical gold to CME Clearing to cover non-segregated (NSEG) Performance Bond requirements." "Gadhafi was trying to mobilize the oil-exporting nations to accept only gold dinars as payment â not printed money." "India is determined to ensure steady crude oil supplies from Iran and is even considering settling payments with gold in the short term before the two countries agree on a mutually accepted currency and a bank to clear the transactions." Once Federal Reserve Notes are no longer viewed as the worlds reserve currency. What will be?
"We need the gold standard back" â which 'gold standard' ? reading http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_standard it's obvious that the gold 'standard' has had many variations, as well there being sometimes concurrent 'silver standards' none of the 'standards' have ever resulted in a panacea for the 'economic' life of any nation or the world economy, or resulted in lasting economic stability excerpt from Wikipedia's 'Gold Standard' "The US adopted a silver standard based on the Spanish milled dollar in 1785. This was codified in the 1792 Mint and Coinage Act, and by the Federal Government's use of the "Bank of the United States" to hold its reserves, as well as establishing a fixed ratio of gold to the US dollar. This was, in effect, a derivative silver standard, since the bank was not required to keep silver to back all of its currency. This began a long series of attempts for America to create a bi-metallic standard for the US Dollar, which would continue until the 1920s. Gold and silver coins were legal tender, including the Spanish real, a silver coin struck in the Western Hemisphere. Because of the huge debt taken on by the US Federal Government to finance the Revolutionary War, silver coins struck by the government left circulation, and in 1806 President Jefferson suspended the minting of silver coins. The US Treasury was put on a strict hard-money standard, doing business only in gold or silver coin as part of the Independent Treasury Act of 1848, which legally separated the accounts of the Federal Government from the banking system. However the fixed rate of gold to silver overvalued silver in relation to the demand for gold to trade or borrow from England. The drain of gold in favor of silver led to the search for gold, including the California Gold Rush of 1849. Following Gresham's law, silver poured into the US, which traded with other silver nations, and gold moved out. In 1853, the US reduced the silver weight of coins, to keep them in circulation, and in 1857 removed legal tender status from foreign coinage. In 1857 the final crisis of the free banking era of international finance began, as American banks suspended payment in silver, rippling through the very young international financial system of central banks. In the United States this collapse was a contributory factor in the American Civil War, and in 1861 the US government suspended payment in gold and silver, effectively ending the attempts to form a silver standard basis for the dollar. Through the 1860â1871 period, various attempts to resurrect bi-metallic standards were made, including one based on the gold and silver franc; however, with the rapid influx of silver from new deposits, the expectation of scarcity of silver ended." attached: GBPUSD 1800 - current - the $ at 13.8686 to the Pound
You are right. Thank you for bringing that up. A true international gold standard existed for less than 50 years (1871 to 1914) but the fact that gold has remained a form of payment for over 5000 years still holds more long term value than fiat currencies. "We have gold because we cannot trust governments." I guess any economic structure is destined to fail because of governments, banks. wars, debts and greed. Revolutions and adaptation are apart of life I suppose. What would be a better solution besides an international gold standard?
Spot on. I would go so far as to say the ONLY purpose of paper fiat money is to transfer wealth from savers to paper money printers, which in the case of our modern economy are banking cartels. Many people realize that they are losing wealth to inflation, and that their money's value is being slowly but steadily stolen over time as it loses its purchasing power. But I think less people notice the even larger theft: the loss of the normal economic growth that is siphoned off through interest payments. Much if not most of the economic growth that occurs does not accrue to the business owners or even savers that help produce it. The expected economic growth that normally occurs in all areas of economic life is largely transferred to the cartel that prints and loans paper money in the form of interest. The price of bread, for example, should not only not increase each year as money is devalued, it should actually decrease over time as the economy gets more efficient at growing wheat and producing and distributing bread. So when the price of bread doubles, we're not only losing half our money's value, we're also losing the value we'd normally get from bread getting cheaper every year as society gets better at producing it. Think for a moment how wealthy you would be if all the interest payments you made in your life were instead accrued to you as compound interest on your business or investments. How much more wealthy would everyone you know be if they did not have to pay 2/3s of the purchase price of their home to a bank in the form of interest on a 30 year loan? How much spending power would people have if the price of everything went down every year as it naturally should? If the economy were generally operating on saved hard money instead of loaned and printed paper money, all the normal benefits of growth and compounding would be accruing to producers and savers rather than money-printing parasites. Isn't it odd that after working for generation after generation, most families don't even have a fully paid-for dwelling to pass on to their heirs? In a hard-money world most regular families would have been able to save and accumulate some wealth for future generations to build on, not just rich families. The financial sector's share of total corporate profits reached over 40 percent before the crash and is still over 1 third. This is one tangible measure of the huge amount of wealth being siphoned off from the productive economy. A huge amount of money (and time and opportunity and years of people's lives) is also wasted by malinvestment during boom periods. All in all I don't think it is unreasonable to say that under any form of honest money system, most of the world's population would be many times wealthier and more prosperous than they are now. In a nutshell, its not just the nominal rate of inflation that's being stolen from society by money printing, its also the normal compound growth that should be occurring that is stolen.
Since 1971 rest of the world started hoarding dollars so that they can buy oil from OPEC. Now due to Globalization, Americans have to compete with the World to earn US dollars.
I don't have an answer when gold hit $800+ in the 1970-80 period and crude hit $40 a barrel I was thinking that it was the 'Arabs' trying to break the $ because they had the money to buy gold so if 'you' were going to peg a currency to a precious metal, what would be the amount ? do you think the US could control the price of gold, that other countries would agree to stopping the price rise of gold and keep it fixed at $xx or xxx or xxxxxx ? a standard only works for everyone if it does what it's designed to do - for everyone we may be living in a global village but the village isn't that small that there aren't some areas to live in that are doing a lot better than others the downsizing process that the US is going thru hasn't stopped yet the portion of 'housing' in the GDP has dropped significantly, there's a number of reasons for that but it speaks to me of how much of everything that contributes to the measure is no longer either, a part of the house build process or, is being created in another part of the village, a major result of which is lower 'housing employment' likewise the rise of China is a process that's continuing, and look at what China's doing restricting heavy metal exports including gold, buying up other commodities sources of supply regardless of any 'issues', burning coal and to hell with global warming and, having a political process that works seems a lot of people believe as you said - ". . . go to the bankruptcy office and face the music ?" and it's a village problem, not just your neighborhood