Why is this relevant or worthy of comment at this time? How many countries currently base their monetary system on the Gold Standard? How many?

The answer is ZERO. No-one is on the Gold Standard. Why create a thread about it?

Who else thinks the Homestead Act is a scam by the elites?

what i mean is that they could benefit from a gold standard. or actually more from a transition to/from a gold standard. they really make money in the transitions more than anything. so if they can shift anti-totalitarianism/anti-bank into just being pro-gold standard, then they can kind of coopt the movement.

as an aside, what is the usefulness of this extension? it seems to discriminate against heroes like me:
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/comment-snob/gfbnmebccmipejnnlcaenkhfhniaielg

Which "elites" are currently making serious, credible attempts to put a major economy back onto the gold standard? And don't mention Ron Paul - I said "credible".

"Who here thinks"

No one.

How is the world's gold supply controlled? Not even Rumpelstiltskin has ever been able to make gold.

@Blankflag,

That's a rather charming theory that you're purporting, however it lacks credence on a few minor points.

For example, if you've spent much time amongst the rich and powerful, it becomes readily apparent that they are not a cohesive group. The ones that are not incredibly lazy, spend a bulk of their energies infighting.

The next point about the wealthy, is how disorganized they are, especially the powerful ones. These are people that require four assistants just to manage their schedule, wardrobe and exercise regimen, all things that you probably accomplish without any third-party assistance. They lack the organizational ability to accomplish a conspiracy of the magnitude that you're suggesting.

Most organized, sponsored conspiracies are rather obvious. They lack in subtlety.

For example, a conspiracy to promote (rather useless) traffic safety cameras was recently uncovered, sponsored by...you guessed it...the people that manufacture traffic safety cameras.

And in another recent conspiracy, a group colluded to prevent free, simple tax accounting software from falling into the hands of consumers, sponsored by...yep, sure enough...the people that manufacture (bloated, frumpy) tax accounting software.

Anyway, thank you for sharing the conspiracy. It's entertaining enough, as a good conspiracy theory should be.

when i am talking about the elite i dont think they are people you regularly hang out with. they have billions of dollars in assets hidden somewhere but more than that they are the people and organizations that influence. if you can convince powerful people to do something then you dont need to control everything.

new evidence presented! which is interesting even by itself - alan greenspan in a recent interview with fox business was basically attacking the federal reserve! saying that inflation is a huge problem and this quote "There are numbers of us, myself included, who strongly believe that we did very well in the 1870 to 1914 period with an international gold standard" note that the federal reserve was created on December 23, 1913 so saying things were better before 1914 is bashing the federal reserve itself. so my question is when did greenspan become a conspiracy theorist?

What a bunch of nonsense.

Why this is nonsense: WE ARE NOT ON A GOLD STANDARD. <sigh...>

Not will we be returning to the gold standard any time soon.

You might as well be asking why the government is hiding all that alien technology from us and only using it to send left-wing democrats to outer space and back...the scam, of course, being that they never properly shield the ships, and thus all returning democrats suffer from serious radiation damage to their brains and are consequently insane....

yes. predicting what will happen based on the interests of the most powerful people in the world is equivalent to stating that secret alien technology exists. but you might want to consider this slight difference, if i guess that they may support a transition to a gold standard, we can later see if the gold standard gains acceptance among the general public (people like you). if its acceptance does increase, then there was something to it, if it decreases then maybe i was wrong. but you see, it is verifiable. and falsifiable. unlike your aliens or the theory that if we didnt bomb libya and kill tens of thousands of citizens that their leader would have killed some protesting civilians.

1. We used to be on the gold standard; we no longer are

2. The most powerful people in the world are....the most powerful people in the world *without* the gold standard

3. The accumulated wealth of the richest of the richest is growing faster than the wealth of the non-rich...*without* the gold standard -- in other words, they are getting richer faster than ever / the wealth divide is growing faster than ever

4. If they are the rich and powerful and they wanted the gold standard, why wouldn't we already be back on it?

5. Why would anyone that can create wealth with the push of a printer button want his wealth tied to anything real?

Well done, blankflag. Your posts are golden...+1

@blankmind ... This word you keep saying ... I do not think it means what you think it means.

Seriously post one thing without using the word elite. Because its gotten to the point where it seems like everyone who disagrees with you is elite. Do you realize that elite is a very positive term meaning the best of the best? The navy seals are elite ... That is not a negative thing. Why are you trying to make it negative? Just Fucking stop would you?

I have very few pet leaves, but misusing a word so blatantly as you do with elite is one of them.

And by pet leaves I mean pet peaves.

It's spelled pet peeve.

Pedantically correcting someone is a pet peeve of mine.

again you arent getting my jokes. using the term elite is partly serious but partly a joke. in any event i can say whatever i want.

but as per mod suggestion i will try to limit my posts to my blanknews thread. i figure if i am posting all the news content on my site anyway then it doesnt cost me any time to just copy the stories to this site. and it may enlighten some people. so i will probably not respond too much to these other threads as a time-saving measure.

@ulytau: that explains the Autocorrect, then :-)

Well done Krellin!

Getting back on the gold standard would do wonders to balance out the currency and knock down inflation, all of it good things.

@ Yuul: "Getting back on the gold standard would do wonders to balance out the currency and knock down inflation, all of it good things."

Yeah because inflation in the USA is currently running out of control.... at 2%. No offence to your understanding of economics but when inflation is LOW (and 2% is pretty low) you do not want policies that "knock down" inflation. A small amount of inflation is no bad thing.

2% is usually the rate targeted by central banks around the world, so we're in a good state now.

Also, re: gold standard. A major problem with it was the misvaluation of currencies. In the 1920s, the British Pound was overvalued based on the gold standard, and that was a huge contributor to the economic woes of Britain in that decade and into the 1930s (until it left the gold standard in....'33 I think?). Nowadays, the free market correctly guides exchange rates to their natural levels.

http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/GoldStandard.html

Great article explaining the gold standard.

Arizona Senate bill 1439 will make gold and silver acceptable legal tender in Arizona if passed. Merchants won't be required to accept it.

Who is blankflag's multi that +1's every goddamn post of his anyway...

"Nowadays, the free market correctly guides exchange rates to their natural levels"

How beautifully naive is that.

+1 to that.

And if we're only at 2% inflation, why is money worth so much less than it was a couple decades ago?

@ Randomizer: So.... um..... the Arizona Senate bill will.... erm... do nothing, basically. There's already nothing to stop a merchant accepting gold as payment for goods or services, based on its weight value, if they wish to. The majority of businesses aren't set up to weigh gold at the counter, so since they won't be *required* to accept it as payment, most presumably won't. What a pointless waste of time. I'm glad to see Arizona clearly has no real problems that need to be discussed or solved in the senate. It must be nice to live in a utopia like Arizona where there are no social problems and nothing for politicians to do but lounge around murmuring to each other about the price of shiny metal...

"Who is blankflag's multi that +1's every goddamn post of his anyway..."

That isn't a multi, that's our +1 fairy Atom Foltz. Also, no cheating accusations!

@bo_sox - Al Swearengen has posted on the blankflag news thread that he is a part of the blankflag news team, so...

Woops. My bad. I was NOT making a cheating allegation. I was saying that Al was a suspect in +1ing all of blank's posts.

Well first off, I think the use of the term "elites" is entirely appropriate. What we are talking about here are financial and and political global elites. The term doesn't necessarily imply anything positive, only a high skill level in some endeavor. For example we may have an elite group of murders or an elite group of drug dealers, neither of those being positive things.

Blackflag, I do give some credence to your theory, but that is only because I believe we are on the verge of global economic collapse. At which point gold will be a mighty fine possession to have and reverting to the gold standard would seem quite obvious if our current system fails us. Lot's a financiers are already putting significant portions of their wealth into commodities like gold, silver, diamonds. We've all seen those GOLD FOR CASH NOW advertisements. That's because gold is going up. And gold will always have value, whereas post-collapse our paper won't be worth squat.

Nigee, unless you're talking about China I don't really know what's wrong with that statement....

And at 2% inflation, price levels double every 35 years. This doesn't mean all prices rise equally. Some prices, such as that for gas or movie tickets, may rise faster than prices for other goods, such as lumber or nails.

@ goldie - why would the powers that be just leave something as important as exchange rate to chance, to the vagaries of market forces, that would be a crazy gamble. There is constant market intervention to manipulate exchange rates.
Arguably the most valuable resource in the world is oil, and oil is traded in dollars, oil rich countries have no interest in seeing the dollar plummet.
The USA is one of Chinas biggest export markets, what would the effect of a sharp fall in the dollar be to the Chinese economy?
The value of the Euro is being determined by the strength of the German economy and the actions of the ECB in conjunction with the Bundesbank.
If Germany left the Euro what do you think would happen to the currency?.
Both the Euro and the dollar are vastly over-valued and need to fall in world markets.
Of course if you hold a lot of assets in dollars a fall in the currency will not help you, it could lead to a large drop in wealth/company & private net worth.
If you are a net exporter of goods it helps if your currency is relatively undervalued.
Some countries in the EU need a weaker currency to make them more competitive but because they are indebted to the German & French banks leaving the Euro and subsequent fall in domestic currency values could lead to the inability to service Euro debts. The consequences for Germany, France and the ECB are too financially catastrophic to imagine, so the debt-ridden countries must be protected to stop the collapse of the European banking system.
So to assume that only the Chinese exchange rate is being manipulated would mad-crazy-bonkers.