[mothballed]

On a long timescale gold is way more stable than the dollar. Dollar is nonvolatile on a long timescale in the sense the expected returns are negative and it does it reliably at usually anywhere from a return around negative 2-10%. But in terms of price stability gold would be far far far far more stable on anything but the most short-sighted of timescales.

[Dylan16807]

I guess. But you can fix the slow drain of inflation by using long-term treasury bonds instead of actual cash. That's pretty much a dollar and doesn't do badly.

[eru]

Long-term treasury bonds are fairly volatile. That's how Silicon Valley Bank went under: their long-term bond holdings dropped in value enough to make them insolvent.

[Dylan16807]

They can swing a few percent. So can gold. Either one could make a bank insolvent. In the long term treasury bonds are not volatile, especially if you hold them to maturity.

[eru]

What does holding to maturity have to do with their current value?

[Dylan16807]

It makes the current market price irrelevant because you're still owed the same amount on the same date.

[eru]

The current market price is about what it is worth _currently_.

When your deposits are denominated in _current_ dollars, and that's what your customers can demand, then it doesn't matter that your expectation of how many dollars you are going to receive in 2035 is stable. It's about what our assets are worth right now, in case you need to liquidate them to satisfy withdrawal requests.

If you can contrive your deposits to be denominated in 2035 dollars, then long term treasury bonds are 'stable' in that sense.

Similarly, if your deposits are denominated in grams of gold, then gold is a stable backing for those.

If you have a mismatch between what you owe and what you own, then you need a thick equity cushion between your assets and fixed liabilities.

[kaibee]

> On a long timescale gold is way more stable than the dollar.

This is a nonsense claim. How many flat screen TVs could you buy for a pound of gold over a 'long time scale'? Cancer treatments? Acres of land in midwest? Hours of a normal person's time? The fact of the matter is that you cannot actually store labor or time for later, so the amount of stuff you can get your gold is gonna vary wrt the broader economy. Economic reality on the ground is what actually determines the 'value' of your gold. And look, if you want some asset that you're pretty sure you could still trade for bread after the apocalypse or whatever, gold isn't the worst choice. And its deflationary, as the amount of gold isn't increasing at pace with the productivity of the global economy. And people like to hoard it when the future becomes less certain, because of the aforementioned 'tradeable for bread after the apocalypse', so I guess its an okay speculative hedge?

[mothballed]

Non-responsive paragraph.

You've attacked what could interchangeably be dollar or gold asking what it might buy or store, failing to recognize I was measuring relative stability rather than absolute stability.

The dollar has lost over 95% of its value since inception of the federal reserve (at which time dollars nature changed significantly) in 1913 against some imperfect measures of CPI. That gives you a 20x difference over time, downward. Gold has not perform nearly that bad at price stability.

We could go back further than that when the dollar was a lot more stable... but at that time dollar was backed by gold and there wasn't (mostly) a central bank nor gold possession bans that let them mess with the price quite in the same way they did later.

[eru]

The US always had really weird and restrictive financial regulations. Right from when the country got started.

Look to Canada for a much stabler system that didn't have banking crisis all the time. See eg https://archive.is/v13TM

[littlestymaar]

Classical liberals are akin to communists in that when the practical application of their ideas fail, it's obviously because it was only a corrupted version that ended up being really put in practice. “It wasn't really Communism” and “It wasn't deregulated enough”.

[eru]

No, no, not at all.

Communists can say "oh, it wasn't real communism." Classical liberalism and neoliberalism can make much stronger claims: a bit more neoliberalism (stochastically) gives you a bit more prosperity in the long run. You don't need the whole thing 100% to reap partial benefits.

I say stochastically, because in the real world there's a lot of noise from other factors, of course.

And in this case at hand: Canada had much lighter and more sensible regulation in this sector, and they did better. As expected.

[littlestymaar]

> a bit more neoliberalism (stochastically) gives you a bit more prosperity in the long run. You don't need the whole thing 100% to reap partial benefits.

Except in practice it always fail to materialize, neoliberalism has repeatedly been tried everywhere in the western world, resulting in decline instead of prosperity. And people blame the fact that not enough regulations were removed to justify why it failed. So exactly like Communists.

The reality is that the real world is too complex for simplistic ideologies to have positive effects. No matter what kind of ideology.

> And in this case at hand: Canada had much lighter and more sensible regulation in this sector, and they did better. As expected.

As if the only difference was regulations, and not the fact that Canada was at that point part of the British Empire

It's like the commies in the 30s saying that Communism was indeed better, as the USSR had by far the highest growth among industrial nations by then. Forgetting that this growth was mostly due to the fact that Tsarist Russia was lagging far behind before that, and that catching up is always going to cause higher growth.