Gold Standard Debate
Comments debate the stability, historical effectiveness, and economic impacts of gold-backed currencies versus fiat money, referencing events like the Great Depression, Nixon's gold window closure, and comparisons to modern monetary policy.
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You do know that we used to have currencies backed by gold, and it was so awful that it caused the great depression right?
read up on the gold standard then.
That's how currency worked when we were on the gold standard, too.
Gold didn't back currency, it was currency.
You mean stable like the US dollar which went from $35 per ounce of gold when Nixon closed the gold window to $668 ten years later? By contrast the aureus, the solidus, the fiorino and many other metal based currencies preserved their value over several centuries. What eventually destroyed those currencies was not the lack of a central bank but on the contrary eventual debasement by the central authority.
Why has gold prevailed over thousands of years while almost all fiat currencies went to 0?
Is this correlated to the gold standard ending in the early seventies?
As of 49 years ago; what does gold have to do with printed currency?
Funny you suggest this as a nightmare scenario, since the US government did that with gold, while debasing the currency by 40%:https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/fdr-takes-united...
There is no evidence for this. When gold and gold-backed currency were used for trade, it fluctuated in value wildly and there were several depressions each decade. After centrally-issued fiat currency was introduced, it had a much more stable value, since it could be issued counter-cyclically.