As I recall, the argument Will Rogers made went something like this, "Buy land. God ain't making any more of it."
Record Dow Jones Over 37,000
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Yes.
The local bank down the street must keep a certain reserve, let’s say five per cent, in the federal reserve system.
Mama has been on Daddy to build her a house for the wee little ones, for years.
Powell has quit hiking rates, and the mortgage rates are falling.
Daddy is out of excuses now.
So they call a builder, buy a lot, and go the bank and like magic $300,000 is created out of $15,000 held in reserve.
That is fractional lending.
Without it there would be few new homes built.
The ones who kept their gold and sustainable property
Roosevelt flat out took away the gold.
There were folks traveling abroad that left wealthy people and returned felons. There were a few amnesties but possession of gold and gold bullion was a felony.
Five $20 gold pieces were exempt.
Foreign gold coins of collector value were spared.
The only persons that could deal in gold were for industrial, jewelry and medical uses.
It took forty one years before it was legal to own gold coins and bullion again.
But if you’d kept a thousand dollars in gold coins in a safe from 1933 to 1974 when you opened the safe the coins were worth 19 times what they had been.
But the money would only buy about a fourth of what it would in 1933 so your actual inflation adjusted return would be about 500%
Yet the same thousand invested in Dow stocks in 1933 would have yielded an inflation adjusted real return of 1,500 per cent in 1974.
Dow Jones Industrial Average Return Calculator, Dividends Reinvested
A Dow Jones return calculator for total, dividend reinvested return on the Dow Jones Industrial Average from 1896 until this month, including inflation!
dqydj.com
Gold never grows. An ounce of gold today will be an ounce of gold in a hundred years.
Since the rich get richer by growing their businesses an investment in blue chip stocks grows with the economy.
It is fascinating to research what if we backed all the dollars with gold.
It could be done, theoretically.
First, how much gold is there in the world?
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The best estimates currently available suggest that around 208,874 tonnes of gold has been mined throughout history, of which around two-thirds has been mined since 1950. And since gold is virtually indestructible, this means that almost all of this metal is still around in one form or another. If every single ounce of this gold were placed next to each other, the resulting cube of pure gold would only measure around 22 metres on each side.
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All the gold ever mined would fit inside one big high school basketball building.
Of the 200,000 or so metric tons of it, who owns the gold?
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Which Countries Have the Largest Gold Reserves in the World?
The holders of the largest gold reserves in the world are the U.S. (with 8,133.5 tons), Germany (with 3,359.1 tons), Italy (with 2,451.8 tons), France (with 2,436.5 tons), and Russia (with 2,301.6 tons).Xxxxxs
Hmmmm.
America has bigger gold reserves than the next three biggest gold holding nations combined and 8,100 tons is only about 4% of the total gold.
How much of gold is used for jewelry?
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About 78% of the gold consumed each year is used in the manufacture of jewelry. Special properties of gold make it perfect for manufacturing jewelry. These include: very high luster; desirable yellow color; tarnish resistance; ability to be drawn into wires, hammered into sheets, or cast into shapes.
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They use a lot of gold to make electrical connections and to gild buildings and such. There’s a lot of jewelry. That gold might as well be gone, for backing up money.
Let’s say if we wanted to, we could just buy up maybe eighty thousand tons.
How much is a ton of gold, at $2,000 an ounce?
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It is difficult to give an exact value for a ton of pure gold, but a current, and very approximate, figure would be $55,886,360.
An exact price is difficult to give because the price of the yellow metal, usually quoted in troy ounces, is constantly changing. Plus, to further complicate the calculation, there are three different measurements using the term 'tons'.
In the United States, a ton is 2,000 pounds. Traditionally in the UK, a ton – or long ton, to differentiate it from a US ton – is 2,240 pounds. In Europe, and modern UK usage, a metric 'tonne' is 1,000 kilograms, or 2204.62 pounds. All the weighing methods for a ton are very close to each other and today in the UK the tonne, or metric ton, is most commonly used.
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Let’s round to 50 million dollars a ton.
If we bought a lot they might give us a discount.
Wait a minute.
America holds 8,000 tons, and times 50 million equals 500 billion dollars.
We just spent over 850 billion on the defense budget, for one year.
If there were 80 thousand more tons we could buy, that would only be five trillion dollars. We spent five trillion fighting Covid 19 and we’ve still got Covid 19.
Five trillion dollars won’t grease a skillet in an economy with 26 trillion a year output and with assets of maybe one thousand trillion.
There’s not enough gold to back our money.
Our present dollars are worth many times all the gold ever mined. It would require raising the fair dollar market price of gold by fiat to match the value of the money supply.
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Thats crazy. Have you ever tried DMT?
I looked up how many ounces of gold are stored at Fort Knox, and the government knows down the last ounce.
147 million ounces, or about 300 billion dollars.
300 billion dollars would not buy all the coffee we drink each year.
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The total economic impact of the coffee industry in the United States in 2022 was $343.2 billion, a 52.4% increase from 2015. Consumers spent nearly $110 billion on coffee in 2022. The coffee industry is responsible for more than 2.2 million U.S. jobs and generates more than $100 billion in wages.
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There are thirty companies that make up the Dow Jones, with a market value of about 12 trillion dollars.
companiesmarketcap.com
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All the above ground gold ever mined in the history of the world is worth about the same:
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Therefore the calculation would be:
197,576 tonnes x 1000kg x 1000gm x $61.97 (gold price per gram) = $12,243,784,720,000.00 11,076,110,560,000.00.
That is almost US$12.25 trillion. Up US$1.16 trillion since we last did this calculation in March 2021.
Xxxx
Gold is wonderful stuff.
But there’s not even close to enough gold to back all the money.
147 million ounces, or about 300 billion dollars.
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300 billion dollars would not buy all the coffee we drink each year.
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The total economic impact of the coffee industry in the United States in 2022 was $343.2 billion, a 52.4% increase from 2015. Consumers spent nearly $110 billion on coffee in 2022. The coffee industry is responsible for more than 2.2 million U.S. jobs and generates more than $100 billion in wages.
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There are thirty companies that make up the Dow Jones, with a market value of about 12 trillion dollars.
Largest dow jones companies by market cap
List of the largest companies included in the Dow Jones index by market capitalization. The market capitalization sometimes referred as Marketcap, indicates the value of a publicly listed company.
companiesmarketcap.com
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All the above ground gold ever mined in the history of the world is worth about the same:
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Here’s the Value of All the Gold in the World in US Dollars
To determine the value of this World Gold Council estimate, we need to convert the total tonnes into grams. Then multiply this by the current gold spot price in dollars per gram.Therefore the calculation would be:
197,576 tonnes x 1000kg x 1000gm x $61.97 (gold price per gram) = $12,243,784,720,000.00 11,076,110,560,000.00.
That is almost US$12.25 trillion. Up US$1.16 trillion since we last did this calculation in March 2021.
Xxxx
Gold is wonderful stuff.
But there’s not even close to enough gold to back all the money.
"The new law will create inflation whenever the trusts want inflation...they can unload the stocks on the people at high prices during the excitement and then bring on a panic and buy them back at low prices...the day of reckoning is only. a few years removed."
-Charles A. Lindbergh Sr.
-Charles A. Lindbergh Sr.
“We have what is known as the Federal Reserve Bank System. That system is not owned by the Government. Many people think that it is, because it says 'Federal Reserve'. It belongs to the private banks, private corporations. So we have farmed out to the Federal Reserve Banking System that is owned exclusively, wholly, 100 percent by the private banks. we have farmed out to them the privilege of issuing the Government's money. If we were to take this privilege back from them, we could save the amount of money indicated in enormous interest charges”
That is not true. Not true at all! To explain, I will quote G. Edward Griffin from his 1994 book, The Creature From Jekyll Island, specific to a section called "The Misleading Theory of Quantity":
"Remember that the primary function of money is to measure the the value of the items for which it is exchanged. In this sense, it serves as a yardstick or ruler of value. It really makes no difference if we measure the length of our rug in inches, feet, yards or meters. We could even manage it quite well in miles if we used decimals and expressed the result in millimiles. We could even use multiple rulers, but no matter what measurement we use, the reality of what we are measuring does not change. Our rug does not become larger just because we have increased the quantity of measurement units...if the supply of gold in relation to the supply of available goods is so small that a one-ounce coin would be too valuable for minor transactions, people simply would use half-ounce coins, or tenth-ounce coins. The amount of gold in the world does not affect its ability to serve as money, it only affects the quantity that will be used to measure any given transaction."
So there's your answer. Buyers and sellers would naturally gravitate toward smaller units of gold for their transactions. Or use a different metal, like silver.
QED!
Not exactly. It belongs to no one. It's a hybrid:
"There are actually 12 different Federal Reserve Banks around the country, and they are owned by big private banks. But the banks don’t necessarily run the show. Nationally, the Federal Reserve System is led by a Board of Governors whose seven members are appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate."
Of course, the argument can be made that its controlled by the wealthiest, for the wealthiest, and one would not be wrong.
If you could accurately predict future interest rates, inflation and deflation, you would know when to buy or sell stocks and make a bundle of money. The Federal Reserve has meetings to determine future interest rates and the amount of money to be inserted or taken out of the economy. The Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) by law, supposedly stops insiders from profiting by privileged information. However, also by law, they have no idea who is in on the Fed's secret meetings. The Federal Reserve has never been audited, and its operations are 100% a secret kept from the public. It is the Fed that decides if we are going to go into a boom or bust period in the economy, and the people on the inside know this in advance and profit from it.
4 out of 5 of our Presidents who opposed a privately-held central bank while in office were assassinated: Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, William McKinley, and John F. Kennedy, These were the only U.S. Presidential assassinations in history . The fifth, Andrew Jackson, miraculously survived his attempted assassination when both of the assassin's pistols jammed...
That's because the guy made the mistake of drying out his gunpowder less than his baccy.
He also should've rubbed it out instead of fold & stuff, but that's a different matter entirely...
Of course they do, as does your representative or congressman. This isn't news. Many, many years ago, one of my uncles, a geologist who founded his own oil company, owned his own investment firm with seats on the NYSE, and counted amongst his friends some of the most powerful people in the country at that time, sat me down to explain how it works. It's been working this way since the founding of the country.
Let’s see how much silver there is in the entire world.
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It is estimated that, by 2018, over 1.6 million tonnes of silver had been physically mined throughout history. All this metal would fit in a cube 55 meters on each side. Now at 1.74 million metric tons, that would be equivalent to roughly 55,942,740,000 troy ounces of silver.
There’s roughly 200,000 tons of gold ever mined and almost nine times more silver.
55 billion ounces is a good silver estimate.
What is 55 billion ounces of silver worth?
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The price of silver today, as of 8:20 am ET, was $23 per ounce. That’s down 0.60% from yesterday’s silver price of $23.
Compared to last week, the price of silver is down 6.20%, and it’s up 0.62% from one month ago.
The 52-week silver price high is $26, while the 52-week silver price low is $22.
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Let’s use $25 silver and take it times 55 billion.
10 billion ounces times $25 is 250 billion times five is just a trillion 250 billion plus 125 billion equals 1.375 trillion.
Damn
We are running backwards here.
There’s about 12 trillion in all the gold ever mined and not even a trillion and a half dollars worth of silver.
All the gold and all the silver ever mined combined is worth less than 15 trillion dollars.
Our gross domestic product is now 26 trillion every year and it goes up every year.
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26.24 trillion U.S. dollars
According to the CBO, the United States GDP will increase steadily over the next decade from 26.24 trillion U.S. dollars in 2023 to 39.23 trillion U.S. dollars in 2033.
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And if having a currency backed by gold or silver was in that nation’s best interest out of 195 nations surely one would do it.
None have in fifty years except Switzerland who gave it up about 25 years ago.
There’s more real wealth than silver or gold, is why.
All these figures and numbers merely serve to blunt and defray three main premises:
1) You're still evading the fact that all people would have to do is use smaller denominations to account for any "economic" fluctuations (I use quotes because most of these are artificial manipulations). It's irrelevant how large or small an economy is.
2) It's important to know the difference between value and price. The former is real and fixed; the latter is fictional and can be manipulated at will. Measuring the "worth" of precious metals in a fiat currency is an inherently flawed concept, because the value of the metal stays the same. It's the value (and price!) of the dollar that is going up and down relative to whatever good or service you're measuring! That's why it doesn't work.
3) Real wealth? Precious metals are real wealth, by definition. They hold their value, unlike fiat currencies, which hemorrhage value. Metals are different commodity than, say, cows, or wheat, but they are still real wealth. All the stuff you're erroneously referring to as "real," like stocks, bonds, real estate...these are all paper assets. Yes, even real estate! You can't own land, you can only hold it as a tenant, via a title. You hold title, you don't own it--it's contingent on paying the owner (the county), and if you don't pay your rent (property tax), the owner evicts you. Sorry...tangent...but considering the novel you posted above there, I think I'm allowed a little slack. It's in my avatar, after all...
And then there is the so called "derivatives" market... the fictional value of which is said to be anywhere from 600 trillion to over 1 quadrillion...total science fiction.
Some timely commentary from Kunstler this week:
"The Fed digital currency will be used to cover-up the failure of end-state financialization of the economy. Finance, you understand, used to be a module of the economy, with a particular role to play. The purpose of finance, formerly, was to marshal surplus wealth from prior productive activity to make new productive activity possible. Financialization, however, does not do that. Financialization was an effort to replace the economy of real production with a hologram of production. Financialization is a racket — and a racket, remember, is an effort to get something for nothing, that is, dishonestly. The blob feeds and thrives on dishonesty, its favorite food.
Financialization seeks to replicate value not from wealth-producing activity but from things that only claim to represent wealth: stocks, bonds, currencies, and anything else that can pretend to hold value, clear up to notions and wishes. Its operations are based on “derivatives” because they aim to derive additional “wealth” from things that signify wealth, but which are not wealth itself. Each iteration of a derivative further abstracts its value from the real things originally signified, such as revenue-producing businesses, interest-bearing loans, leases, and contracts for delivery of commodities. Derivatives can be understood as false wealth, and when enough of them accumulate in a financialized economy, they will blow up the economy, spewing wreckage across an economic landscape."
--James Howard Kunstler, December 2023
If you think that the USD has more value than real gold and silver, you must believe that there is no better smokers than a Marxman
Remember what a gold standard was, all over the world.
Money under a true gold standard is not based or pegged against gold.
Money is gold. Paper money and bank accounts represented a certain amount of gold.
If you’d like you take your gold coins to a bank and they’d exchange paper for it, or put in in an an account.
And when there was a crisis of confidence, and that happened quite often, the people went to banks or the post office (that used to offer savings accounts, until 1966) and demanded and got gold coins.
You’ll hear that a dollar today is worth what a nickel was in 1913 when the Federal Reserve began. But a 2023 dollar is worth a dollar in 2023.
How many dollars are out there?
We know that all gold, and all silver ever mined is worth less than 15 trillion 2023 dollars. We know there is about 300 billion dollars of gold held in Fort Knox and another 200 billion or so in the New York Federal Reserve bank. That 500 billion in gold reserves is by far and away the largest government gold reserve on earth, and its less than 5 per cent of all the above ground gold.
We also know there is about 2.3 trillion of greenback cash dollars outstanding and pocket change.
But if the United States government went over to the classic “gold is money” gold standard, they’d have to have gold reserves sufficient to back at least what is called M2, which is all cash and small deposits under $100,000.
That’s over 20 trillion dollars.
And the M2 money supply figures do not consider if the holders of 32 trillion in United States bonds decided they wanted gold.
This is why the entire world, all 195 nations, abandoned the gold standard.
There isn’t enough gold or silver to back the money.
And if the government tried a gold standard, the first time anybody who had a dollar could not redeem it for gold the skies really would fall.
I’m too conservative to gamble on that.
The advantage to a gold standard was, when all major nations used it settling international money exchanges was simple. A Troy ounce of gold was the same in Germany, Britain, France, Russia and the United States.
But when Russia fell to the Bolsheviks they went off gold.
When the British ran out of gold in 1931 the writing was on the wall. Germany followed.
If Roosevelt had not closed the gold window in 1933 all our gold would likely have left the country. All the major nations have to use gold for it to be a true medium of international exchange.
Nixon first devalued the dollar and finally we had to let it float or France would have all the gold in the New York Fed.
So to further complicate a return the gold standard, we’d have to persuade most of the larger nations to return to gold as well.
Money under a true gold standard is not based or pegged against gold.
Money is gold. Paper money and bank accounts represented a certain amount of gold.
If you’d like you take your gold coins to a bank and they’d exchange paper for it, or put in in an an account.
And when there was a crisis of confidence, and that happened quite often, the people went to banks or the post office (that used to offer savings accounts, until 1966) and demanded and got gold coins.
You’ll hear that a dollar today is worth what a nickel was in 1913 when the Federal Reserve began. But a 2023 dollar is worth a dollar in 2023.
How many dollars are out there?
We know that all gold, and all silver ever mined is worth less than 15 trillion 2023 dollars. We know there is about 300 billion dollars of gold held in Fort Knox and another 200 billion or so in the New York Federal Reserve bank. That 500 billion in gold reserves is by far and away the largest government gold reserve on earth, and its less than 5 per cent of all the above ground gold.
We also know there is about 2.3 trillion of greenback cash dollars outstanding and pocket change.
But if the United States government went over to the classic “gold is money” gold standard, they’d have to have gold reserves sufficient to back at least what is called M2, which is all cash and small deposits under $100,000.
That’s over 20 trillion dollars.
M2
View data of a measure of the U.S. money supply that includes all components of M1 plus several less-liquid assets.
fred.stlouisfed.org
And the M2 money supply figures do not consider if the holders of 32 trillion in United States bonds decided they wanted gold.
This is why the entire world, all 195 nations, abandoned the gold standard.
There isn’t enough gold or silver to back the money.
And if the government tried a gold standard, the first time anybody who had a dollar could not redeem it for gold the skies really would fall.
I’m too conservative to gamble on that.
The advantage to a gold standard was, when all major nations used it settling international money exchanges was simple. A Troy ounce of gold was the same in Germany, Britain, France, Russia and the United States.
But when Russia fell to the Bolsheviks they went off gold.
When the British ran out of gold in 1931 the writing was on the wall. Germany followed.
If Roosevelt had not closed the gold window in 1933 all our gold would likely have left the country. All the major nations have to use gold for it to be a true medium of international exchange.
Nixon first devalued the dollar and finally we had to let it float or France would have all the gold in the New York Fed.
So to further complicate a return the gold standard, we’d have to persuade most of the larger nations to return to gold as well.
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