Editor: Crass Cash
There's a reason the USA and many other industrialized countries went off the gold standard 40 years ago. It works fine when things are humming along, but it really sucks when the shit hits the fan! Case in point, the Great Depression.
During the Great Depression countries had to increase their interest rates in order to attract more gold to their country, thus increasing currency, liquidity, and hopefully inflation. This would be similar to the Fed pumping money into the economy, except they have to do it by buying short term paper and this lowers interest rates, since price and rates move in opposite directions.
Well if you know anything about interest rates, the last thing that you'd like to do during a final crisis or recession the last thing that you would want to do is raise interest rates. Rising interest rates drag down prices of all asset classes rather than creating inflationary pressures like you'd want during this time.
A commodity based currency system was suggested by Ben Graham, the legendary investor, many decades ago in which he outlined how many different types of commodities would be used. For instance currency would fluctuate based upon the prices of wheat, oil, gold, nickel, pork bellies, etc all combined into a basket of goods. I like this plan, but it has pros and cons. The con being that you can't go and trade in your currency for those commodities like a person could when they redeemed cash for actual gold. That in and of itself makes it more like a fiat currency, which we currently have. The pro to this is that it takes out the ability of the govt to print money and therefore, depreciate the currency. Thus reducing or eliminating inflation.
Make no mistake about it, you will still have volatile swings in prices, so price stability or a steady increase, like we currently have, will go away. Just know that there is no perfect/no-brainer, system or else we'd be using it.
During the Great Depression countries had to increase their interest rates in order to attract more gold to their country, thus increasing currency, liquidity, and hopefully inflation. This would be similar to the Fed pumping money into the economy, except they have to do it by buying short term paper and this lowers interest rates, since price and rates move in opposite directions.
Well if you know anything about interest rates, the last thing that you'd like to do during a final crisis or recession the last thing that you would want to do is raise interest rates. Rising interest rates drag down prices of all asset classes rather than creating inflationary pressures like you'd want during this time.
A commodity based currency system was suggested by Ben Graham, the legendary investor, many decades ago in which he outlined how many different types of commodities would be used. For instance currency would fluctuate based upon the prices of wheat, oil, gold, nickel, pork bellies, etc all combined into a basket of goods. I like this plan, but it has pros and cons. The con being that you can't go and trade in your currency for those commodities like a person could when they redeemed cash for actual gold. That in and of itself makes it more like a fiat currency, which we currently have. The pro to this is that it takes out the ability of the govt to print money and therefore, depreciate the currency. Thus reducing or eliminating inflation.
Make no mistake about it, you will still have volatile swings in prices, so price stability or a steady increase, like we currently have, will go away. Just know that there is no perfect/no-brainer, system or else we'd be using it.
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