Is there enough gold to return to a gold standard?
The “Ron Paul” debate around a return to a gold standard is being revisited after the US Republican Party called for a commission to look at such a system. But there may be too little gold to restore the gold standard, says UBS economist Paul Donovan.
With a gold standard, the regulatory scheme exchanges paper currency for gold at a fixed conversion rate, which would effectively put a set price on the dollar tied to gold. Fans say this would increase confidence in the currency by tying it to something that is in finite supply, thus hobbling the ability of central bankers to create debt-based money at will.
Amid the chorus of opposition to the gold standard, the argument that there is simply not enough gold to do this is well-aired. But that’s not quite the full story, according to Paul Donovan, an economist at UBS.
From The Telegraph UK –
“More accurately, the supply of gold is not growing fast enough,” he says. “This is the fatal flaw.”
Pure US Fiat Money, Up In Smoke
As of this this week we have managed to survive four decades of US fiat money, and its anyone’s guess how much longer we can continue. Recently we read that the average life expectancy of a fiat currency is 27 years. The world’s oldest fiat currency, the British Pound, has survived nearly 318 years, but during this term it lost 99.5% of its initial value.
Given the undeniable track record of currencies, it is clear that on a long enough timeline the survival rate of all fiat currencies drops to zero.
And as Jeff Clark points out: History has a message for us: No fiat currency has lasted forever. Eventually, they all fail.
Since the ’70s gold has risen from $35 to $1740.
Edmund Conway at Daily Mail writes: On 15 August 1971, with the US public finances near broken by the cost of the war in Vietnam, Richard Nixon cut the final link between the US dollar and gold. Until then, the US Treasury was duty bound to exchange an ounce of gold with central banks willing to pay them $35. Suddenly, for the first time in history, the level of the world’s currencies depended not on the value of gold or some other tangible commodity but on the amount of trust investors had in that currency. Central banks were allowed to set monetary policy based on their instincts rather than on the need to keep their currency in line with gold.
It was one of those seminal moments whose significance has only gradually become apparent, obscured as it was at the time by Vietnam and then Watergate. But the more one examines economic history, the more obvious it is that this was one of the most important policy decisions in modern history.
The term fiat money has been defined variously as:
A- Any money declared by a government to be legal tender.
B- State-issued money which is neither convertible by law to any other thing, nor fixed in value in terms of any objective standard.
C- Money without intrinsic value.
D- All of the above.
