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by kolinko 4542 days ago
tl;dr; gold standard was abandoned a long time ago, we survived, and therefore it was a good choice to do so.

Or, in the words of the author: "no plans for its return have emerged across a large number of economical cycles"

First of all - it's a weasel-talk. What is that large number of cycles he's talking about? Why is this number sufficient enough to come to the conclusion? Also, the plans to get back to the gold standard come up all the time, they are just unsuccessful.

(even if I agree with the claim of the article, the argumentation is lousy)

2 comments

I like how he ignores recent past of almost the whole global economy imploding due to debt based fiat system, and only being "resolved" by issuing even more debt and printing more dollars
Proponents of the gold standard also ignore the slightly-less recent past of currency crises in Europe and Asia in the 80s and 90s, all due to fixed currency exchanges (which is basically just a variant of the gold standard, with gold being replaced by whatever basket you're using). The fact that we were able to print our way out of a crisis of confidence is a good thing, because in a gold standard world we couldn't do anything of the sort. A credit freeze would have lasted a lot longer.
The confidence is not in the currency or the central bank.

The confidence (of the markets) is that the central bank (on behest of the government) will use currency as a tool in order to ensure that economies dont sink due due to negative outlook on the future.

There is nothing stopping central banks from creating their own cryptocurrency and controlling it by controlling all the mining (and hence being able to change the rules of deflation/inflation set into protocol). In fact a "bit-dolla" could probably be used much more effectively as such a tool since everyone would know what everyone else has as blockchain is public. Would these banks have gotten "too big too fail" if their "wallet addresses" were public?

Yeah, every business cycle except the current one, when bitcoin takes over :-)