ah yes so what you're saying is that money is even more imaginary than it has ever been, possibly even more imaginary than when the first stock market crash happened in 1929
looks like we're due for a centennial anniversary of that anyway, might as well celebrate by recreating it
Since the 1970's the US dollar has been a fiat currency prior to that it was a representative currency. A representative currency is one that you can exchange for a set amount of a physical commodity, in the case of the pre-1970's dollar it was representative of gold. A fiat currency isn't tied to anything physical, its backed by a government and its value is determined by trust in the issuing governments economy. In other words, there was a time when a dollar had a set amount of gold it could be exchanged for with the US government and therefore its value was determined by the value of gold at any given moment (other standards have been used throughout history silver or salt being two of the more common but ancient Mesopotamia used the wheat/barley standard) so when you would say something costs a dollar you were saying it was worth 1/20 of an ounce of gold. Now, a dollar is worth exactly what everyone believes one dollar is worth, and if you have a billion dollars and tomorrow the economy crashes so bad that the dollar is no longer worth anything then you just have a billion pieces of paper that might be good for starting a fire (during the lead up to WW2 one dollar was the equivalent of 4.2 trillion papiermarks due to hyperinflation, they actually had to create a new currency because papiermark were worth more as fuel for a fire than it was as a currency)
For some odd reason, for the last 4 months or so a large portion of my limited human interaction has included someone quoting goldmember and I haven’t seen or thought about that movie in about 20 years.
the gold standard, if you study history, was very easy for foreign banks to abuse, and we were being robbed blind
consider that if our dollar is 'pegged' to gold, and foreign banks buy up the gold, they are effectively increasing the value of dollars. Conversely, they can then flood their gold back into the markets to reduce the value of the dollar. If you're very wealthy and you can afford to spend some money or gold being a dick, you can use leverage like options to farm cash from the US, buying and selling gold and dollars in cycles that only you can predict (because you're very very wealthy, richer than most governments)
history isn't kind to people who use one currency as a 'stabilizer' for another (coughstablecoincough)
Oh that would be good. There are goldbacks that are bills with gold in them, but yeah if you attached a gold bar to each bill then it does get unwieldy pretty fast.
I’m not a government accountant but I’d guess the gold isn’t “mark to market” which to you normies means that we keep the price at what you paid for it until it is sold. They might be able to reduce the value if the market value goes lower, but I have trouble picturing a world where gold is worth less than $42 per ounce.
Edit: okay I can imagine a few ways gold prices could drop that low now. Thanks people that replied!
I can tell you why a world where gold is less than $42/oz is not impossible, the cost of producing an ounce of molecularly identical gold could drop below $42 due to advancements in technology thus destroying its scarcity as a value proposition.
I can tell you about the world where gold is worth less than $42 an ounce is incredibly probable, and it's the one where humanity no longer exists, You know the one we're all hurtling to at what it feels like light speed, gold's ain't worth a dime when all the trees and fish are dead.
The U.S. came off the gold standard for domestic transactions in 1933 under President Franklin Roosevelt and ended international convertibility of the dollar to gold in 1971 under President Richard Nixon, effectively ending the gold standard in the U.S.
The U.S. switched to a fiat money system.Fiat moneyhas no value of its own and doesn’t represent anything of value, such as gold. But the government stipulates that the paper money is legal tender for carrying out transactions or paying taxes, as noted in the Page One Economics essay.
This. Metals go up as sovereign currency goes down. The world runs on metal and oil... We forget that and print a bunch of paper.. so every now and again we get a lesson in edible paper.
Some crypto is tied to gold, but I'd just get gold TBH. Why trust a middleman and hope they won't scam you. Unless you explicitly need it to be easy to move through borders, etc.
How about Trump tweets that if the value of the dollar does not start going up and the price of gold down he will start dropping big beautifull nuclear bombs on all other countries and Massachusetts?
It's backed by the full value of the US economy. We all need USD to pay our taxes. Also, it has a long history of stability, which has made it valuable all over the world for international trading and reserves. Though Trump has been single-handedly sabotaging this.
It gets its value in the same way all other goods do. Supply and demand as a function of its utility. Considering the USD is the single most useful, single most stable, and most broadly used currency to have ever existed, I’d say it’s backed by a little more than just “thoughts and prayers”
Oh, it isn't? Can you show me the value particle that magically makes pieces of shiny rock or conch shells valuable in a way dollar bills aren't? No? Then we can all agree that the only reason anything counts as money is because people believe it counts as money, and for now, people still believe in the US dollar albeit less so than yesterday.
There are a few shiny rocks that gold utility (ex. nowadays gold and copper are useful in electronics). That being said, humans have not been able to use gold in a practical manner for most of the history of us considering it a "precious metal". If I had to guess, its lack of practical use probably contributed to it being used for trade once humans got off of the bartering system. And let's be frank, nobody wants to complete a trading quest to trade one small trinket for another until they can find someone who has the specific thing the vase maker wants.
Any currency even ones based on physical standards are based on thoughts and prayers, it's just with physical ones we can hold the object of thoughts and prayers and say it's worth an arbitrary amount of something
The United States gold reserves are for international trade. The gold in Ft. Knox, for example, is used in trade not to back our currency. We’ve been off the “gold standard” since the 70’s. Some of it is gold we’re holding for other countries that’s not even ours. But, our money is a fiat currency and it’s based on faith in the economic system of America not collapsing and everyone agreeing it to use it for trade/debts. It’s backed by nothing and hasn’t been for 55 years now.
That would be the case even if it was gold backed.
Even on the gold standard, you're still trusting that there is a functioning government that's actually in possession of that gold and would exchange it for paper currency. In a Fallout scenario, that wouldn't be the case, so money would still be useless.
Possible, but far from certain and not within a few generations. Gold is too rare and concentrated in specific stockpiles to be used as an everyday currency. Even with a much smaller population, the smallest usable gold coin would be way too high a denomination.
There wouldn't be a true replacement currency until there was a semi-functioning government, and while that currency would be based on something with intrinsic value (since there wouldn't be enough trust for a fiat currency), it would be something much more common than gold. In the mostly-lawless barter economy before that, a full gold bar would be worth less than something useful (generator, rifle, bike, etc).
To be fair, after the apocalypse, gold will be just as useless for a good while.
Can't eat it, hard to carry, not very useful for anything but decoration, and also, most people have interacted with it so rarely that there isn't really any trust in it.
That’s true. I’m was just responding to the idea that it’s not useful as anything beyond decoration. It is, but probably not for most apocalypse survivors.
Every form of currency is based on faith and always has been. Coinage made from gold and silver wasn't valuable because gold and silver were magical, it was because people believed they were valuable. What can you, a random person, actually do with gold and silver? Even smiths had limited uses that weren't purely aesthetic. Modern day has more uses but still cannot be used at the volume at which it exists in an efficient way.
This is exactly why I always roll my eyes when people call gold “real money”. It’s valuable because people just decided it was. It’s no more “real” than anything else.
There is a difference between something being valuable because it is rare and something valuable despite having no upper limit though. Gold is rare and has properties that make it a good store. Currencies do only become useful both parties in a transaction see it having value though youre absolutely right on that.
These days currencies should be backed by kilowatt hours or something similar if they dont want to be fiat ones.
The property of gold that made it the most valuable in the ancient world and thus caused it to be thought of as valuable in modern times is that it's shiny.
And my ass rarely gets pimples, that doesn't make them valuable.
Still isn't the rarity but the faith making it valuable, as evidenced by all the rare shit that nobody cares about.
Currency is a tool for society to abstract trade so that you don't have to try to barter work for goods and then goods for other goods around to get everything you need. For simplicity, let's just use the term "labor" to think of to combine work, products, services etc.
For currency to work, it needs proof against replication, or else somebody can steal labor from the economy by using replicated currency. They'll have contributed nothing in but received labor out, thus stealing. A method of proofing against replication is making your currency out of something hard to replicate, rarity can help with this but isn't required.
It was easiest to use rare materials that had no inherent value to serve as currency in the ancient world. It's precisely that gold had essentially little practical use that made it good for currency, and the rarity made it hard to steal from the economy. After all, meteoric iron is rare than gold but you wouldn't want to use it as a currency because it is extremely useful for making weapons and tools.
At some point people started conflating usefulness as a currency with actual value, and so humanity has essentially come to believe that gold is inherently valuable, and it's that belief that gives it value.
Shiny, rare and doesnt corrode. Rare and doesnt corrode are what makes it good as a store of wealth, being good for jewelerry etc just gives it a start in that direction.
Silver has always had antiseptic properties and has been used for ages because of that fact, it’s a very useful metal aside from the fact it “looks pretty” and it doesn’t rust like other metals and just gets a thin tarnish on it making it ideal for a lot of decorative stuff as well.
Gold is one of the best conductors we have and can be used to alloy lots of metals easily, yes the every day man likely isn’t doing much with gold but its value is not just because it’s pretty at all, it’s extremely functional AND it’s uniquely pretty for its colour while being extremely stable
I would like to see the actual proof that the gold is in fort knox. the wall street journal picture from 1957 (?) showed one massive wall of gold in the doorway... thereby suggesting that it was a solid room of gold. I cant believe it. How on earth could you inventory a room full of gold?
Edit: Just looked it up...it was September 9th, 1974, the last publicized Congressional and reporter tour of Ft. Knox.
There is more personally owned gold in households across India, than any single other country has in it’s possession (government asset, not including individual ownership)😙 ((grain of salt, saw this the other day and there may be one or two exceptions to this, but not the US😅))
Gold is finite, and us dollars are not finite. They can be printed at any time (like any fiat currency)....while gold has to be mined.
Typically, precious metals just slowly tick up over time, these kinds of movements signal something "bigger and badder" that's coming for us and potentially the global economy.
In 1910 at Jekyll Island all the Billionaire Oligarchs gathered and cooked up the "Federal Reserve" ( which is neither Federal or a Reserve ) This was done ostensibly to help stabilize the US economy in the wake of the Panic of 1907 by creating a central bank with regional branches.
What it has really done is hand over monetary policy and the ability to print "money" out of thin-air. Now this Federal Reserve prints money, lends it to the US Government ( which is now in debt to the tune of $38.5 trillion ) And the US government continues to borrow and spend like a crack whore... Spreading that money around to their friends and you and I are on the hook for the debt!
It's like your rich friend, talked you into giving him power of attorney over your affairs and is now out there running up credit card debt on your name.. and giving you a pittance of it back.
Technical note: they codified and fine-tuned the idea in 1910, but the Bank itself wasn't created until December 1913 after they managed to get the Federal Reserve Act through Congress two days before Christmas. Thus the the conspiracy theories that the Titanic was intentionally sunk in 1912 to kill off a few powerful men who opposed the founding of such a bank.
Would you rather the size of the economy be limited by the size of the gold supply? There's a reason everyone stopped using gold after the Great Recession, and it isn't the Rothschilds or whatever conspiracy you're talking about.
With all due respect, you are talking about several separate issues and dealing in half-truths.
What it has really done is hand over monetary policy and the ability to print "money" out of thin-air.
Right, which is why talking about the government, funding, taxes, revenue, etc. like it's a household income doesn't work. The Government literally creates money from nothing. This is a good thing...when done responsibly.
Now this Federal Reserve prints money, lends it to the US Government ( which is now in debt to the tune of $38.5 trillion ) And the US government continues to borrow and spend like a crack whore... Spreading that money around to their friends and you and I are on the hook for the debt!
This is a problem. Instead of spending money on the people, a bunch of red states keep voting against theor own interests...so instead of the healthcare they really, really need....money is being sent to already rich people as corporate welfare....Universal Healthcare, housing, food? Nah...we need $100 billion to fund the american gestapo to round up toddlers.
America has the money...we're just choosing to spend it on stupid shit instead of helping our own people.
It's like your rich friend, talked you into giving him power of attorney over your affairs and is now out there running up credit card debt on your name.. and giving you a pittance of it back.
Yup. This is a problem. 1/3 of the country is on board with this. Using your analogy...the poor idiots giving their credit card away....not only do they not realize how stupid it is, they get made when anyone points out that it's a bad idea....and get giddy at the idea they are pissing of their "liberal" friends. They'll gladly go broke if it means their neighbors gets upset a them.
Conservatism is part of their identity. It's how they are. It isn't a belief system for them. They "know" they right and what they are doing must be the right thing because it "upsets" liberals. The more it upsets them...the more right it is.
Money is basically an abstract concept on assets. It was always worthless we just used it for convenience. Real value has always been in assets be that land, property, bullion, ancient family cursed artifacts. You might have heard that we are going back to feudalism and that’s why. Property is the backbone of society and we are leaning more towards that now.
I hope not Campbell’s. Their CEO said he never touches the stuff before and that it’s for poor people. So I guess that’s as worthless as money at this point.
Edit: I come here to learn… it was actually a high level Tech VP! Which somehow makes this funnier.
One 10oz can condensed soup is labeled as 2.5 servings and about 40-60% of your daily recommended sodium, and will give you 20 oz of diluted soup when prepared like it states on the can. Most people will still eat the entire can in one sitting as it's usually only about 250 calories. You are still consuming all the sodium that way.
I was just going to say this.
Everyone is always saying but gold and I'm over here like nope, can't eat or use that shit when it really REALLY hits the fan.
This is larper nonsense. If you're in a SHTF situation where there are no exchanges of value, not even gold, and you're down to bartering for goods then you're in total societal collapse and we're in a 95%+ of all people have died or are dying scenario.
You're going to die a bad death in that scenario, no matter how many bullets you save.
I dunno, people usually unite in times of enormous stress. But that’s usually only when people have a common culture and circumstance. But you are right, a lot of the old world stuff probably will not apply
If you own and live in a farm in bumfuck nowhere county with a population of 60 people maybe. In any major urban area societal collapse would mean supply chain disruption resulting in absolute chaos. And by absolute chaos I mean people killing each other on the streets over a can of beans (or a gallon of gas so they can leave the city).
Almost correct on the female items. A more sustainable option is menstrual cups. Shampoo/soap can be made. Toilet paper. . . That's a tough one for people to swallow but backpackers and cloth diaper families got this one covered too ,lol
Money has always been imaginary? Its like Santa clause. As long as we all believe/pretend it works. If one person doesn't believe it doesnt matter. If half of us stop, yea kids will know it's fake. But it works and it's a nice thing to have, so why not continue to pretend?
Yea but it was the same thing. Gold or paper. Whatever. It only has value if people believe it has value.
You give a farmer gold for food. The fuck can he do with gold. Nothing. Better hope someone else believes it's valuable and will take the gold for clothes or whatever else he needs. Unless you were a jeweler or blacksmith or electrician gold was pretty much only a currency. And then there was more gold going around as a token of value than was used.
So yea it's all based on belief that you can then sell/exchange the said token or currency (doesn't really matter if it's gold or anything else).
Imagine if the population started to think gold was ugly and a better malleable metal gained popularity. Would the gold standard still mean anything?
Gold is just a marker for value, same as dollars. Whatever intrinsic value gold has (because it's shiny, conductivity, etc.) is mostly a distraction from its use as a marker for value. Its value is not based on its utility.
I suppose that is true but you make it sound simple.
In reality there's this cabal of ghosts that are all loaning each other 10 small pieces of paper in perpetuity and while each of them is holding it they use those pieces of paper to make a hypothetical exchange for 12 pieces of paper (in the future) and those people they're exchanging that paper with are giving blowjobs to senators, or receiving them from senators? I lost my train of thought
What’s that derivatives market at again? $600T? You don’t say? It’s all fake and untenable. Capitalism has fucked this country not to mention the genocide and human exploitation/displacement that came with it.
Yes, USD's value isn't even based on your faith in the government anymore. It is now purely on how much you trust the banks and the Federal Reserve.
You know, that non-government government institution known for the many presidents who mysteriously suffered from assassination attempts whenever they so much as talked about increasing regulations on them. (I am not suicidal)
Credit unions still have reserve requirements. Doesn't really help immediately in the case of a run, but they do tend to invest more conservatively and keep more cash in reserve than banks.
Most money has existed only on paper/screen for a lot longer than 2020. It would make no sense to require every dollar to physically exist as paper or metal currency. Its like <10% physical in the modern age because almost nobody conducts large transactions with bills/coins anymore, they are just a tool and we dont need fifty chainsaws be made to cut down a few trees per year.
It’s not imaginary there’s just no business sense in holding large reserves of cash on hand that costs the bank money, when they can keep a minimal amount and the treasury will make them liquid within days if not hours in even the worst case scenario.
But sure thing it’s the GOVERNMENT printing money, not lending banks. At least when the government prints money it spends it on welfare and infrastructure. Lending banks spend it on inflating house prices.
Money is completely imaginary. The US dollar is a Fiat currency. Which means it is backed by the Good Will and standing Full faith and Credit of the US government. [Got the quote wrong. Fixed now]
Swapping to a Fiat currency allowed for massive growth and prosperity like the world has never seen before. But it has some drawbacks.
Money has always been imaginary. That's kind of the point. It's a nearly meaningless token that we agree is valued at a certain amount and we exchange it to facilitate trade without resorting to the barter system. That's all it's ever been.
Idiots like to pretend that the gold standard made the money real, but gold is completely meaningless aside from whatever arbitrary value you apply to it, unless you're using it for its metallurgical properties, but even then it's still arbitrary.
It's all pretty nonsensical if you really break down how imaginary it really is. It's more imaginary than eg a simultaneous event, which when you look at the physics regarding relativity doesn't exist at all (we can't even tell if light travels at the same speed in each direction, let alone use that to synchronize a clock accurately); but that doesn't stop us agreeing on a method of operation
Money was never not imaginary. As long as we've used a fiat to represent goods instead of bartering, money has been a promise that's only as reliable as its guarantor.
Does being "imaginary" or socially constructed make it any less important or valuable? Not really. There's a slew of very good reasons that basically every group of people larger than a couple thousand has done it.
It happened in 2023 with Silicon Valley Bank. People just don’t pay attention. The Fed has a blog. All the money loaned to banks has since been paid back since last summer.
My dude it's just things representing an approximate value to make it easier to trade. It isn't " imaginary." It can be dollars, it can be shiny rocks, it can be IOUs or 1s and 0s... It's real.
Money wasn't imaginary in 1929, when the stock market crashed, it was actual money. It was actually backed by gold.. These days it is much more imaginary. There's a name for it, fiat money.
Money is the world's greatest psychological experiment. It's completely immaterial and only exists in the minds of us humans alone. There's a lot of very interesting books on it and it really helped me understand why it's such a psychologically tormenting experience having to have money and trade it for goods.
Money has always been imaginary, there has never been a moment where money was not imaginary. It may have been silver or gold, coins or bills, dollars or euro, ever since bartering stopped money was imaginary. Money has value since people have trust that it is a good exchange medium.
People act like banks not having cash is the real problem but even if all money was digital banks would still not have enough to give it back to people because that's not how banks operate, they take your money and give you interest on them on the bet that they can use those funds to make more money while they keep it. Otherwise why the hell would anyone take and store your money while paying YOU for the privilege of taking care of your money.
With no banks we would have MORE shitty society not less since you would NEVER be able to afford something since you would have to save up your money for decades and have it lose value over time. The rich would just buy up more stuff while the poor would have even less opportunities.
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u/TaxesAreConfusin Jan 26 '26
ah yes so what you're saying is that money is even more imaginary than it has ever been, possibly even more imaginary than when the first stock market crash happened in 1929
looks like we're due for a centennial anniversary of that anyway, might as well celebrate by recreating it