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	Other results of fiat money and easy credit are rampant consolidation of industries and across the board debt in proportions that were formerly unimaginable.		Other results of fiat money and easy credit are rampant consolidation of industries and across the board debt in proportions that were formerly unimaginable.

	==The gold exchange standard==		<ref></ref>==The gold exchange standard==
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	Towards the end of the 19th century some of the remaining silver standard countries began to peg their silver coin units to the gold standards of the United Kingdom or the USA. In 1898, ] pegged the silver ] to the pound sterling at a fixed rate of 1s 4d, while in 1906, the ] adopted a gold exchange standard against the pound sterling with the silver Straits dollar being fixed at 2s 4d.		Towards the end of the 19th century some of the remaining silver standard countries began to peg their silver coin units to the gold standards of the United Kingdom or the USA. In 1898, ] pegged the silver ] to the pound sterling at a fixed rate of 1s 4d, while in 1906, the ] adopted a gold exchange standard against the pound sterling with the silver Straits dollar being fixed at 2s 4d.

Revision as of 15:21, 14 October 2010

For other uses, see Gold standard (disambiguation).

The gold standard is a monetary system in which the standard economic unit of account is a fixed weight of gold. There are distinct kinds of gold standard. First, the gold specie standard is a system in which the monetary unit is associated with circulating gold coins, or with the unit of value defined in terms of one particular circulating gold coin in conjunction with subsidiary coinage made from a lesser valuable metal.

Similarly, the gold exchange standard typically involves the circulation of only coins made of silver or other metals, but where the authorities guarantee a fixed exchange rate with another country that is on the gold standard. This creates a de facto gold standard, in that the value of the silver coins has a fixed external value in terms of gold that is independent of the inherent silver value. Finally, the gold bullion standard is a system in which gold coins do not circulate, but in which the authorities have agreed to sell gold bullion on demand at a fixed price in exchange for the circulating currency.

Gold certificates were used as paper currency in the United States from 1882 to 1933. These certificates were freely convertible into gold coins.

The gold specie standard

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A gold specie standard existed in some of the great empires of earlier times. One example is the Byzantine Empire, which used a gold coin known as the Byzant. But with the ending of the Byzantine Empire, the European world tended to use the silver standard. An example is the silver pennies that became the staple coin of Britain around the time of King Offa in the year 796 AD. The Spanish discovery of the great silver deposits at Potosí and in Mexico in the 16th century led to an international silver standard in conjunction with the famous pieces of eight, important until the nineteenth century.

In modern times the British West Indies was one of the first regions to adopt a gold specie standard. Following Queen Anne's proclamation of 1704, the British West Indies gold standard, was a 'de facto' gold standard based on the Spanish gold doubloon coin. In the year 1717, master of the Royal Mint Sir Isaac Newton established a new mint ratio between silver and gold that had the effect of driving silver out of circulation and putting Britain on a gold standard. However, only in 1821, following the introduction of the gold sovereign coin by the new Royal Mint at Tower Hill in the year 1816, was the United Kingdom formally put on a gold specie standard.

The United Kingdom was the first of the great industrial powers to switch from the silver standard to a gold specie standard. Soon to follow was Canada in 1853, Newfoundland in 1865, and the USA and Germany 'de jure' in 1873. The USA used the Eagle as their unit, and Germany introduced the new gold mark, while Canada adopted a dual system based on both the American Gold Eagle and the British Gold Sovereign.

Australia and New Zealand adopted the British gold standard, as did the British West Indies, while Newfoundland was the only British Empire territory to introduce its own gold coin as a standard. Royal Mint branches were established in Sydney, New South Wales, Melbourne, Victoria, and Perth, Western Australia for the purposes of minting gold sovereigns from Australia's rich gold deposits.

The crisis of silver currency and bank notes (1750–1870)

To understand the adoption of the international gold standard in the late 19th century, it is important to follow the events of the late 18th century and early 19th. In the late 18th century, wars and trade with China, which sold to Europe, but had little use for European goods, drained silver from the economies of Western Europe and the United States. Coins were struck in smaller and smaller amounts, and there was a proliferation of bank and stock notes used as money.

In the 1790s England suffered a massive shortage of silver coinage, and ceased to mint larger silver coins, issued "token" silver coins and overstruck foreign coins. With the end of the Napoleonic Wars, England began a massive recoinage program, that created standard gold sovereigns and circulating crowns and half-crowns, and eventually copper farthings in 1821. The recoinage of silver in England after a long drought produced a burst of coins: England struck nearly 40 million shillings between 1816 and 1820, 17 million half crowns and 1.3 million silver crowns. The 1819 Act for the Resumption of Cash Payments set 1823 as the date for resumption of convertibility, reached instead by 1821. Throughout the 1820s small notes were issued by regional banks, which were finally restricted in 1826, while the Bank of England was allowed to set up regional branches. In 1833, however, the Bank of England notes were made legal tender, and redemption by other banks was discouraged. In 1844 the Bank Charter Act established that Bank of England Notes, fully backed by gold, were the legal standard. According to the strict interpretation of the gold standard, this 1844 act marks the establishment of a full gold standard for British money.

The US adopted a silver standard based on the "Spanish milled dollar" in 1785. This was codified in the 1792 Mint and Coinage Act, and by the Federal Government's use of the "Bank of the United States" to hold its reserves, as well as establishing a fixed ratio of gold to the US dollar. This was, in effect, a derivative silver standard, since the bank was not required to keep silver to back all of its currency. This began a long series of attempts for America to create a bimetallic standard for the US Dollar, which would continue until the 1920s. Gold and silver coins were legal tender, including the Spanish real, a silver coin struck in the Western Hemisphere. Because of the huge debt taken on by the US Federal Government to finance the Revolutionary War, silver coins struck by the government left circulation, and in 1806 President Jefferson suspended the minting of silver coins.

The US Treasury was put on a strict hard money standard, doing business only in gold or silver coin as part of the Independent Treasury Act of 1848, which legally separated the accounts of the Federal Government from the banking system. However the fixed rate of gold to silver overvalued silver in relation to the demand for gold to trade or borrow from England. The drain of gold in favor of silver led to the search for gold, including the "California Gold Rush" of 1849. Following Gresham's law, silver poured into the US, which traded with other silver nations, and gold moved out. In 1853 the US reduced the silver weight of coins, to keep them in circulation, and in 1857 removed legal tender status from foreign coinage.

In 1857 the final crisis of the free banking era of international finance began, as American banks suspended payment in silver, rippling through the very young international financial system of central banks. In the United States this collapse was a contributory factor in the American Civil War, and in 1861 the US government suspended payment in gold and silver, effectively ending the attempts to form a silver standard basis for the dollar. Through the 1860–1871 period various attempts to resurrect bi-metallic standards were made, including one based on the gold and silver franc, however, with the rapid influx of silver from new deposits, the expectation of scarcity of silver ended.

The interaction between central banking and currency basis formed the primary source of monetary instability during this period. The combination that produced economic stability was restriction of supply of new notes, a government monopoly on the issuance of notes directly and indirectly, a central bank and a single unit of value. Attempts to evade these conditions produced periodic monetary crisis — as notes devalued, or silver ceased to circulate as a store of value, or there was a depression as governments, demanding specie as payment, drained the circulating medium out of the economy. At the same time there was a dramatically expanded need for credit, and large banks were being chartered in various states, including, by 1872, Japan. The need for a solid basis in monetary affairs would produce a rapid acceptance of the gold standard in the period that followed.

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WHAT HAPPENED?

"None are more hopelessly enslaved as those who falsely believe that they are free" - Johann W. Goethe

"In the long run...we're all dead" - John Maynard Keynes (Keynes commenting on the inevitable exponential consequences of "the long run" of Keynesian economics.)

"An honest man is one who knows that he can't consume more than he has produced."- Ayn Rand

"In the absence of the gold standard there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value without gold. This is the shabby secret of the welfare statists' tirades against gold. Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the hidden confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process that stands as a protector of property rights." - Alan Greenspan - 1966

Mat 7:17-18 Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit. 18 A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit.

GOVERNMENT SOCIAL SPENDING ACCORDING TO DAVIE CROCKETT

Did you ever wonder where a great patriot, frontiersman and U.S. representative like Davie Crockett* would come down on the issue of social spending? But the liberals and neo-cons social spend on. Just look at GAO U.S. Financial Statement or the Prescription Drug "Benefit" projected costs.

Congress has come down now to barely being able to cut a single nickel's worth of spending even as they pass bills like the Medicare Prescription Drug Benefit. On October 18, 2005 the house passed, by 2 votes, spending increase reductions of 50 billion, OVER 5 YEARS. With budgets in trillion figures a ten billion per year cut is absurd, and believe it or not it was laughably a contentious battle. Update 2-3-06 the Senate version cuts 70 billion over 5 years - 12 billion per year - whoopie ding. - Ron Paul The cuts in increases made them feel so warm and fuzzy that on the same day they voted themselves a $3100 pay raise. Congressman Ron Paul puts the Fed's feet to the fire regarding their announcement to stop publishing M3 numbers.

Who killed General Motors?

WOODROW WILSON = INCOME TAX SLAVERY AND PHONY MONEY (anchor)

All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. - Edmund Burke

In 1913 under Woodrow Wilson with his alter ego Col. Mandel House, our constitutional taxes were discarded and we became enslaved with income taxes, while he presided over the setting up the Federal Reserve thereby debasing our currency, followed by our government being heavily influenced by the CFR, that was formed in 1921, the members of whom would seem to have been in control of our country/government ever since. American citizen is enslaved by the government, with the threat of imprisonment, for a "crime" as innocent as "willful failure to file" the necessary paperwork required by the IRS. FDR followed in Wilson's footsteps and was responsible for further destruction of the gold standard, and to top it off made ownership of gold (real money) by U.S. citizens illegal. This was prompted by Americans realizing that their money was a fraud precipitating a run on the banks to exchange their notes for gold. ".....the worst lies that have ever been told to the American people were the lies that were told in the campaign of 1912." (Dr. Martin A. Larson re. Federal Reserve). Here is the Mogambo Guru's take on the repercussions for our future.

"Destroyers seize gold and leave to its owners a counterfeit pile of paper. This kills all objective standards and delivers men into the arbitrary power of an arbitrary setter of values. Gold was an objective value, an equivalent of wealth produced. Paper is a mortgage on wealth that does not exist, backed by a gun aimed at those who are expected to produce it. Paper is a check drawn by legal looters upon an account which is not theirs: upon the virtue of the victims. Watch for the day when it bounces, marked, 'Account overdrawn.'" - Ayn Rand - Atlas Shrugged

What has phony money done to our dollar? The Disappearing dollar - congressman Ron Paul. Here's congressman Ron Paul on paper money and tyranny? And on the "prescription drug 'benefit' plan". What about Greenspan's views on money creation? Here's a link to Ron Paul's subjects.

"Let me issue and control a nation's money and I care not who writes the laws." - Mayer Amschel Rothschild, 1790

GLOBAL BABYLON (anchor)

The "End Time Scenario" page deals mostly with how current trends could continue to develop. Through an ethnographic-linear historic view of prophecy there is little, if any, end-time prophecy left to be fulfilled anyway (I am not by any means suggesting preterism here!). There are, however, a few interesting parallels today that suggest candidates in prophecy.

The Club of Rome (offshoot of the CFR / Trilateralists / Bilderbergers ) held its first meeting in 1968, and proposed that their ten global trading areas be designated as ten kingdoms. (Nicolo Nicolov, The World Conspiracy (Portland OR, Nicolov 1974) p220). Gary Kah "En Route to Global Occupation". Creature From Jekyll Island Edward Griffin. Globalization. The 10 kingdoms are to compose the constituents of their "Regionalized and Adaptive Model of the Global World System". World map.

Rev 17:3 So he carried me away in the spirit into the wilderness: and I saw a woman sit upon a scarlet coloured beast, full of names of blasphemy, having seven heads and ten horns.

The elite in the CFR / Trilateralists / Club of Rome view their ten kingdoms with a politically, socially and resource distributive borderless future. Today most important appointed or elected official in Washington, of either party, is a member of one or more of those organizations. Many members of the mainstream media are also members. You can also find the names of families of generations of protected wealth, and many other old familiar names on the list, as well as foundations and corporations who are aligned appropriately.

The United States and Canada are Region One of this Ten-Horned hegemony, with Mexico a likely late addition via NAFTA. Remember the strange and diverse collection of Republican and Democrat bedfellows in government that voted for this and other world trade organizations? Any surprise that the GATT, now WTO agreement uses the same regions defined by the Club of Rome? Next time you see one of the votes that compromises our soverignty check the "yeas" with the member list.

As I write our brothers and sisters in Christ Jesus in many parts of the world are being crucified or beheaded for merely admitting to being Christian. Can anyone view these acts as springing forth from something other than the work of Satanic forces? Looking at the Sudan, Angola or even more "civilized" Saudi Arabia and other Middle East countries, is it hard to believe that we are witnessing the latter day spilling of the blood of saints and martyrs? Comparing these places with the U.S. perhaps we can conclude that Babylon is indeed Babylon. Now the UAE may have been put in charge of port operations of several U.S. ports formerly owned by a British company. Perhaps an early warning system for terrorists. The book of Revelation makes reference to a 10 horned beast:

Rev 17:12-13 And the ten horns which thou sawest are ten kings, which have received no kingdom as yet; but receive power as kings one hour with the beast. These have one mind, and shall give their power and strength unto the beast.

Everson in 1947 followed by McCollum in 1948 removing religious instruction in schools (Mat 19:14 But Jesus said, Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven.), combined with the founding of the World Council of Churches and declaration of independence of Israel, spelled the end of the Church age (the two candlesticks/witnesses), and the beginning of the last generation.

From Jack Van Impe - Henry Spaak, a spokesman for the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications (SWIFT) in Brussels, Belgium, headquarters for the Common Market, commented a few years a go: "We do not want another committee. We have too many already. What we want is a man of sufficient stature to hold the allegiance of the people and lift us out of the economic morass into which we are sinking. Send us such a man, and be he God or devil, we will accept him."

INCOME TAXATION IS MARXISM THAT EMPOWERS PARASITES (anchor)

Karl Marx believed that it was the government's job to take "from each according to his ability" and to give "to each according to his need". The democrats and liberals call this "tax fairness" while the republicans and neo-cons call it "compassionate conservatism". It is not within our government's constitutional charge to act as Robin Hood. In fact the Heritage Foundation reported that of every dollar Babylon confiscated for welfare, only 26 cents actually went to the recipient. The other 74 cents feeds a bloated bureaucracy. Compare this to The Salvation Army, for example, where 89 cents of every dollar goes directly to the benefit of the families in need. Charitable acts are the responsibility of citizens that live in free societies, whether done personally or through Churches and other organizations. I am not, however, referring to our ever increasing acceptance of compelled, or obligatory, government sponsored "community service" that is becoming evermore popular in our educational systems and courtrooms, that reinforces Babylon's role as Nannystate. Most of us would like to think that our philanthropy came from our hearts and was not the result of government suggestion, much less confiscation. The result is having produced a generation of kids that say "I would really love to donate my time for that cause, but how many community service hours do I get in return?". A bit like heads of organizations like the United Way making over a half million dollars per year, as compared to the head of The Salvation Army who gets a few hundred dollars a month. One's an employee looking for a lavish lifestyle and perhaps a pension while the other is making a contribution to a cause through personal sacrifice.

Under our marxist system of taxation from Newsmax: "First, it is important to know that a very large percentage of Americans pay no income taxes whatsoever, owing to various features of the tax code such as the standard deduction and the Earned Income Tax Credit. According to the JCT, this year 48.6 million Americans will file tax returns, meaning that they had income, but pay no income taxes. This constitutes 34 percent of the 142 million returns that will be filed. Although the bulk of these people have incomes below $20,000, almost 10 percent of all nontaxable returns reported incomes between $30,000 and $50,000.

Second, our tax system is very steeply progressive. In the aggregate, all those with incomes below $20,000 have a negative tax liability, meaning that they receive tax refunds even though they pay no income taxes. Those with incomes between $20,000 and $30,000 pay just 1.9 percent in income taxes. From there, effective tax rates rise sharply to 23.9 percent on those with incomes over $200,000.

Looking at incomes in percentage terms, the top 10 percent of tax filers pay 20 percent of their income in federal income taxes, the top 5 percent pay 22.3 percent, and the top 1 percent pay 25.7 percent.

Third, as a consequence of these high tax rates, the share of total income taxes paid by those with upper incomes is overwhelming. The top 10 percent of tax filers pay 68.2 percent of all federal income taxes, the top 5 percent pay more than half, and the top 1 percent pay 35.9 percent of the total income-tax burden. For reference, it should be noted that the top 1 percent of tax filers reported only 17.2 percent of total income."

Additionally the bottom 50% of tax filers pay less than 4% of our nations taxes.

If you don't think the IRS is out of control try this for a subject "Issue: Capturing “Phantom” Gain In Zombie Partnerships".

PATRIOTISM

September 11 photo. Photo: september11news.com

To the many that confuse blind partisanship with patriotism, I would suggest that this is more the reverse. Do I hate America? No. I love America. I have lived a very blessed life in this country. Do I believe things could be improved? Yes. Why do I criticize our government and some of our other public and private institutions? Because it is my responsibility through the practice of good citizenship. We have strayed a long way from our constitution, and I believe we have in the past been, and could in the future be, much greater. Isn't this every citizen's desire? Couldn't we always do better? Is it patriotic to keep quiet about that which you believe to be wrong, or to sacrifice your own personal principles simply because the party with which you have been associated has shed it's principles? "Dissent is the highest form of patriotism" - Thomas Jefferson

In regard to "Homeland Security" acts 1 and 2 we might best quote Ayn Rand - "You honest men are such a problem and such a headache. But we knew you'd slip sooner or later - and this is just what we wanted ... Did you really think we want those laws observed? We want them to be broken. You'd better get it straight that it's not a bunch of boy scouts you're up against... We're after power and we mean it... There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What's there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced or objectively interpreted – and you create a nation of law-breakers – and then you cash in on guilt. Now that's the system, Mr. Rearden, that's the game, and once you understand it, you'll be much easier to deal with."

KEYNESIAN ECONOMICS = DEATH OF THE HEALTHY "BUSINESS CYCLE" AND THE LIFE BLOOD OF PORNOGRAPHERS AND SPECULATIVE GREED, WHILE BREAKING THE BACKS OF THE WORKING POOR, THE ELDERLY AND THOSE ON FIXED INCOME

Keynes on Lenin ("The Economic Consequences of the Peace") "Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose." And again: "Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalist System was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, government can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some. – As the inflation proceeds and the real value of the currency fluctuates wildly from month to month, all permanent relations between debtors and creditors, which form the ultimate foundation of capitalism, become so utterly disordered as to be almost meaningless; and the process of wealth-getting degenerates into a gamble and a lottery."

Here is what we have learned about Keynesian Economics today. Instead of narrowing the gap between the highest income earners and the lowest, as advertised, it has indeed DISASTEROUSLY WIDENED THE GAP. The Keynesians of the early 1900s correctly thought, that by debasing the currency and then adding and subtracting from the money supply when the "central bank" deemed appropriate, they could extend the prosperous periods and reduce the effect of the bust, of the boom and bust cycles, that had been a hallmark of a free society and market driven capitalist systems that used sound money. These cycles had previously provided an opportunity for the economy to wring out excesses and break reckless speculators, and vile elements, while rewarding prudent savers and business. Unfortunately, as the Keynesians also suspected, Keynesian economics would culminate in the greatest bubble of raw speculation, debt, and economic excess in world history. "Keynesians believe the short run lasts long enough to matter. They often quote Keynes's famous statement "In the long run, we are all dead" to make the point." Today, no real lessons have been learned for more than a generation through this most recent period of unprecedented economic excess and faux money creation, and a blindsided public will be proportionately "rewarded" for the excesses, as will a nation operating on paper currency created from thin air and debt, a good bit of which is owed to the Chinese. "By focusing on the interrelationships between income and consumer spending, Keynes was able to launch a powerful argument against tolerating huge disparities in the distribution of income.", an argument which he obviously had backwards considering the current distribution of income and wealth. Sadly the conservative savers will be taken down by the greed driven nation of speculators, because of the ethical decline of Babylonian citizens, and the broad acceptance of immoral, enslaving, Marxist-redistributionist income taxation as a part of the Babylonian way of life. As is plainly evident, under Keynesian economics pornographers and reckless raw speculators are rewarded, while lifelong productive, now retired, persons and their savings are crushed. The Mogambo Guru on Keynesians.

"The central bank is an institution of the most deadly hostility existing against the Principles and form of our Constitution. I am an Enemy to all banks discounting bills or notes for anything but Coin. If the American People allow private banks to control the issuance of their currency, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the People of all their Property until their Children will wake up homeless on the continent their Fathers conquered. "... - Thomas Jefferson... No state shall coin money emit Bills of Credit; make anything but Gold and Silver a Tender in payment of debts. U.S.Constitution - This exerpt from The Money Files.org.

The gold bullion standard

The gold specie standard ended in the United Kingdom and the rest of the British Empire at the outbreak of World War I. Treasury notes replaced the circulation of the gold sovereigns and gold half sovereigns. However, legally the gold specie standard was not repealed. The end of the gold standard was successfully effected by appeals to patriotism when somebody would request the Bank of England to redeem their paper money for gold specie. It was only in the year 1925 when Britain returned to the gold standard in conjunction with Australia and South Africa, that the gold specie standard was officially ended.

The British act of parliament that introduced the gold bullion standard in 1925 simultaneously repealed the gold specie standard. The new gold bullion standard did not envisage any return to the circulation of gold specie coins. Instead, the law compelled the authorities to sell gold bullion on demand at a fixed price. This gold bullion standard lasted until 1931. In 1931, the United Kingdom was forced to suspend the gold bullion standard due to large outflows of gold across the Atlantic Ocean. Australia and New Zealand had already been forced off the gold standard by the same pressures connected with the Great Depression, and Canada quickly followed suit with the United Kingdom.

Dates of adoption of a gold standard

1704: The British West Indies 'de facto' following Queen Anne's proclamation.
1717: Kingdom of Great Britain 'de facto' following Isaac Newton's revision of the mint ratio, at 1 guinea to 129.438 grains (8.38 g) of 22 carat crown gold .
1818: Netherlands at 1 guilder to 0.60561 g gold.
1821: United Kingdom 'de jure' at one sovereign to 123.27447 grains of 22 carat crown gold.
1853: Canada in conjunction with the American Gold Eagle coin equal to ten US dollars and also the British gold sovereign equal to four dollars eighty-six and two thirds cents. The Canadian unit was made equal to the American unit in the year 1858.
1854: Portugal at 1000 réis to 1.62585 g gold.
1863: Free Hanseatic City of Bremen at 1 Bremen thaler to 1.19047 g gold; the only state within the German Confederacy to introduce the gold standard before the introduction of the 1873 mark.
1865: Newfoundland The only country in the British Empire to introduce its own gold coin apart from the British gold sovereign. The Newfoundland gold dollar was equal to the Spanish dollar unit that was being used in the British Eastern Caribbean Territories and in British Guiana.
1873: German Empire at 2790 Marks (ℳ) to 1 kg gold.
1873: United States 'de facto' at 20.67 dollars to 1 troy oz (31.1 g) gold. (See Coinage Act of 1873).
1873: Latin Monetary Union (Belgium, Italy, Switzerland, France) at 31 francs to 9.0 g gold
1875: Scandinavian monetary union: (Denmark, Norway and Sweden) at 2480 kroner to 1 kg gold.
1876: France internally.
1876: Spain at 31 pesetas to 9.0 g gold.
1878: Grand Duchy of Finland at 31 marks to 9.0 g gold.
1879: Austrian Empire (see Austrian florin and Austrian crown).
1881: Argentina at 1 peso to 1.4516 g gold.
1885: Egypt.
1897: Russia at 31 roubles to 24.0 g gold.
1897: Japan at 1 yen devalued to 0.75 g gold.
1898: India (see Indian rupee).
1900: United States de jure (see Gold Standard Act).
1903: The Philippines Gold Exchange/US dollar.
1906: The Straits Settlements Gold Exchange/pound sterling.
1908: Siam Gold Exchange/pound sterling.

Suspension of the gold standard

Governments faced with the need to fund high levels of expenditure, but with limited sources of tax revenue, suspended convertibility of currency into gold on a number of occasions in the 19th century. The British government suspended convertibility during the Napoleonic wars and the US government during the US Civil War. In both cases, convertibility was resumed after the war.

Gold standard from peak to crisis (1901–1932)

Suspending gold payments to fund the war

As in previous major wars under the gold standard, the British government suspended the convertibility of Bank of England notes to gold in 1914 to fund military operations during World War I. By the end of the war Britain was on a series of fiat currency regulations, which monetized Postal Money Orders and Treasury Notes. The government later called these notes banknotes, which are different from US Treasury notes. The United States government took similar measures. After the war, Germany, having lost much of its gold in reparations, could no longer produce gold Reichsmarks, and was forced to issue unbacked paper money, leading to hyperinflation in the 1920s.

Following Germany's example after the Franco-Prussian War of extracting reparations to facilitate a move to the gold standard, Japan gained the needed reserves after the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895. Whether the gold standard provided a government sufficient bona fides when it sought to borrow abroad is debated.

For Japan, moving to gold was considered vital to gain access to Western capital markets.

Great Britain, Japan, and the Scandinavian countries left the gold standard in 1931.

Depression and World War II

Prolongation of the Great Depression

Some economic historians, such as UC Berkeley professor Barry Eichengreen, blame the gold standard of the 1920s for prolonging the Great Depression. Others including Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and Nobel Prize winning economist Milton Friedman lay the blame at the feet of the Federal Reserve. The gold standard limited the flexibility of central banks monetary policy by limiting their ability to expand the money supply, and thus their ability to lower interest rates. In the US, the Federal Reserve was required by law to have 40% gold backing of its Federal Reserve demand notes, and thus, could not expand the money supply beyond what was allowed by the gold reserves held in their vaults.

In the early 1930s, the Federal Reserve defended the fixed price of dollars in respect to the gold standard by raising interest rates, trying to increase the demand for dollars. Higher interest rates intensified the deflationary pressure on the dollar and reduced investment in U.S. banks. Commercial banks also converted Federal Reserve Notes to gold in 1931, reducing the Federal Reserve's gold reserves, and forcing a corresponding reduction in the amount of Federal Reserve Notes in circulation. This speculative attack on the dollar created a panic in the U.S. banking system. Fearing imminent devaluation of the dollar, many foreign and domestic depositors withdrew funds from U.S. banks to convert them into gold or other assets.

The forced contraction of the money supply caused by people removing funds from the banking system during the bank panics resulted in deflation; and even as nominal interest rates dropped, inflation-adjusted real interest rates remained high, rewarding those that held onto money instead of spending it, causing a further slowdown in the economy. Recovery in the United States was slower than in Britain, in part due to Congressional reluctance to abandon the gold standard and float the U.S. currency as Britain had done. It was not until 1933 when the United States finally decided to abandon the gold standard that the economy began to improve.

British hesitate to return to gold standard

During the 1939–1942 period, the UK depleted much of its gold stock in purchases of munitions and weaponry on a "cash and carry" basis from the U.S. and other nations. This depletion of the UK's reserve convinced Winston Churchill of the impracticality of returning to a pre-war style gold standard. To put it simply the war had bankrupted Britain.

John Maynard Keynes, who had argued against such a gold standard, proposed to put the power to print money in the hands of the privately owned Bank of England. Keynes, in warning about the menaces of inflation, said "By a continuous process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method, they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some".

Quite possibly because of this, the 1944 Bretton Woods Agreement established the International Monetary Fund and an international monetary system based on convertibility of the various national currencies into a U.S. dollar that was in turn convertible into gold. It also prevented countries from manipulating their currency's value to gain an edge in international trade.

Post-war international gold-dollar standard (1946–1971)

Main article: Bretton Woods system

After the Second World War, a system similar to a Gold Standard was established by the Bretton Woods Agreements. Under this system, many countries fixed their exchange rates relative to the U.S. dollar. The U.S. promised to fix the price of gold at $35 per ounce. Implicitly, then, all currencies pegged to the dollar also had a fixed value in terms of gold. Under the regime of the French President Charles de Gaulle up to 1970, France reduced its dollar reserves, trading them for gold from the U.S. government, thereby reducing U.S. economic influence abroad. This, along with the fiscal strain of federal expenditures for the Vietnam War, led President Richard Nixon to end the direct convertibility of the dollar to gold in 1971, resulting in the system's breakdown, commonly known as the Nixon Shock.

Theory

Commodity money is inconvenient to store and transport. It also does not allow the government to control or regulate the flow of commerce within their dominion with the same ease that a standardized currency does. As such, commodity money gave way to representative money, and gold and other specie were retained as its backing.

Gold was a common form of money due to its rarity, durability, divisibility, fungibility, and ease of identification, often in conjunction with silver. Silver was typically the main circulating medium, with gold as the metal of monetary reserve.

It is difficult to manipulate a gold standard to tailor to an economy’s demand for money, providing practical constraints against the measures that central banks might otherwise use to respond to economic crises.

The gold standard variously specified how the gold backing would be implemented, including the amount of specie per currency unit. The currency itself is just paper and so has no intrinsic value, but is accepted by traders because it can be redeemed any time for the equivalent specie. A U.S. silver certificate, for example, could be redeemed for an actual piece of silver.

Representative money and the gold standard protect citizens from hyperinflation and other abuses of monetary policy, as were seen in some countries during the Great Depression. However, they were not without their problems and critics, and so were partially abandoned via the international adoption of the Bretton Woods System. That system eventually collapsed in 1971, at which time nearly all nations had switched to full fiat money.

According to later analysis, the earliness with which a country left the gold standard reliably predicted its economic recovery from the great depression. For example, Great Britain and Scandinavia, which left the gold standard in 1931, recovered much earlier than France and Belgium, which remained on gold much longer. Countries such as China, which had a silver standard, almost avoided the depression entirely. The connection between leaving the gold standard as a strong predictor of that country's severity of its depression and the length of time of its recovery has been shown to be consistent for dozens of countries, including developing countries. This partly explains why the experience and length of the depression differed between national economies.

Differing definitions

A 100% reserve gold standard, or a full gold standard, exists when a monetary authority holds sufficient gold to convert all of the representative money it has issued into gold at the promised exchange rate. It is sometimes referred to as the gold specie standard to more easily identify it from other forms of the gold standard that have existed at various times. A 100% reserve standard is generally considered difficult to implement as the quantity of gold in the world is too small to sustain current worldwide economic activity at current gold prices. Its implementation would entail a many-fold increase in the price of gold.

This is due to the Fractional-reserve banking system. As money is created by the central bank and spent into circulation, the money expands via the money multiplier. Each subsequent loan and redeposit results in an expansion of the monetary base. Therefore, the promised exchange rate would have to be constantly adjusted.

In an international gold-standard system (which is necessarily based on an internal gold standard in the countries concerned) gold or a currency that is convertible into gold at a fixed price is used as a means of making international payments. Under such a system, when exchange rates rise above or fall below the fixed mint rate by more than the cost of shipping gold from one country to another, large inflows or outflows occur until the rates return to the official level. International gold standards often limit which entities have the right to redeem currency for gold. Under the Bretton Woods system, these were called "SDRs" for Special Drawing Rights.

Advantages

Long-term price stability has been described as the great virtue of the gold standard. Under the gold standard, high levels of inflation are rare and hyperinflation is impossible as the money supply can only grow at the rate that the gold supply increases. Economy-wide price increases caused by ever-increasing amounts of currency chasing a constant supply of goods are rare, as gold supply for monetary use is limited by the available gold that can be minted into coin. High levels of inflation under a gold standard are usually seen only when warfare destroys a large part of the economy, reducing the production of goods, or when a major new source of gold becomes available. In the U.S. one of those periods of warfare was the Civil War, which destroyed the economy of the South, while the California Gold Rush made large amounts of gold available for minting.

The gold standard limits the power of governments to inflate prices through excessive issuance of paper currency. It provides fixed international exchange rates between those countries that have adopted it, and thus reduces uncertainty in international trade. Historically, imbalances between price levels in different countries would be partly or wholly offset by an automatic balance-of-payment adjustment mechanism called the "price specie flow mechanism."

The gold standard makes chronic deficit spending by governments more difficult, as it prevents governments from 'inflating away' the real value of their debts. A central bank cannot be an unlimited buyer of last resort of government debt. A central bank could not create unlimited quantities of money at will, as there is a limited supply of gold.

Disadvantages

A gold standard leads to deflation whenever an economy using the gold standard grows faster than the gold supply. When an economy grows faster than its money supply, the same money must be used to execute a larger volume of transactions. The only ways of achieving this are for the money to circulate faster or to lower the cost of the transactions. If deflation drives costs down, the real value of each unit of money goes up. This increases the value of cash, and decreases the monetary value of real assets, since the same asset can be purchased with less money. This in turn tends to increase the ratio of debts to assets . For example, assuming interest rates remain unchanged, the monthly cost of a fixed-rate home mortgage stays the same, but the value of the house goes down, and the value of the money required to pay the mortgage goes up. Thus deflation rewards cash savings.
Deflation rewards savers and punishes debtors. Real debt burdens therefore rise, causing borrowers to cut spending to service their debts or to default. Lenders become wealthier, but may choose to save some of their additional wealth rather than spending it all. The overall amount of expenditure is therefore likely to fall. Deflation also robs a central bank of its ability to stimulate spending. Deflation is considered to be difficult to control, and to be a serious economic risk. However in practice it has always been possible for governments to control deflation by leaving the gold standard or by artificial expenditure.
The total amount of gold that has ever been mined has been estimated at around 142,000 metric tons. Assuming a gold price of US$1,000 per ounce, or $32,500 per kilogram, the total value of all the gold ever mined would be around $4.5 trillion. This is less than the value of circulating money in the U.S. alone, where more than $8.3 trillion is in circulation or in deposit (M2). Therefore, a return to the gold standard, if also combined with a mandated end to fractional reserve banking, would result in a significant increase in the current value of gold, which may limit its use in current applications. For example, instead of using the ratio of $1,000 per ounce, the ratio can be defined as $2,000 per ounce effectively raising the value of gold to $9 trillion. However, this is specifically a disadvantage of return to the gold standard and not the efficacy of the gold standard itself. Some gold standard advocates consider this to be both acceptable and necessary whilst others who are not opposed to fractional reserve banking argue that only base currency and not deposits would need to be replaced. The amount of such base currency (M0) is only about one tenth as much as the figure (M2) listed above.
Many economists believe that economic recessions can be largely mitigated by increasing money supply during economic downturns. Following a gold standard would mean that the amount of money would be determined by the supply of gold, and hence monetary policy could no longer be used to stabilize the economy in times of economic recession. Such reason is often employed to partially blame the gold standard for the Great Depression, citing that the Federal Reserve couldn't expand credit enough to offset the deflationary forces at work in the market. Opponents of this viewpoint have argued that gold stocks were available to the Federal Reserve for credit expansion in the early 1930s, but Fed operatives failed to utilize them.
Monetary policy would essentially be determined by the rate of gold production. Fluctuations in the amount of gold that is mined could cause inflation if there is an increase, or deflation if there is a decrease. Some hold the view that this contributed to the severity and length of the Great Depression as the gold standard forced the central banks to keep monetary policy too tight, creating deflation. Milton Friedman however argued that the main cause of the severity of the Great Depression in the United States was the Federal Reserve, and not the gold standard, as they willfully kept monetary policy tighter than was required by the gold standard. Additionally three increases by the Federal Reserve in bank reserve requirements in 1936 and 1937, which doubled bank reserve requirements lead to yet another contraction of the money supply.
Although the gold standard gives long term price stability, it does in the short term bring high price volatility. In the United States from 1879 to 1913 the coefficient of variation of the annual change in price levels was 17.0, whereas from 1943 to 1990 it was only 0.88. It has been argued by among others Anna Schwartz that this kind of instability in short term price levels can lead to financial instability as lenders and borrowers become uncertain about the value of debt.
Some have contended that the gold standard may be susceptible to speculative attacks when a government's financial position appears weak, although others contend that this very threat discourages governments' engaging in risky policy (see Moral Hazard). For example, some believe the United States was forced to raise its interest rates in the middle of the Great Depression to defend the credibility of its currency after unusually easy credit policies in the 1920s. This disadvantage however is shared by all fixed exchange rate regimes and not just limited to gold money. All fixed currencies that appear weak are subject to speculative attack.
If a country wanted to devalue its currency it would generally produce sharper changes than the smooth declines seen in fiat currencies, depending on the method of devaluation.

Advocates of a renewed gold standard

The return to the gold standard is supported by many followers of the Austrian School of Economics, Objectivists, strict Constitutionists, and libertarians largely because they object to the role of the government in issuing fiat currency through central banks. A significant number of gold standard advocates also call for a mandated end to fractional reserve banking.

Few lawmakers today advocate a return to the gold standard, other than adherents of the Austrian school and some supply-siders. However, some prominent economists have expressed sympathy with a hard currency basis, and have argued against fiat money, including former U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan (himself a former Objectivist), and macro-economist Robert Barro. Greenspan famously argued the case for returning to a gold standard in his 1966 paper "Gold and Economic Freedom", in which he described supporters of fiat currencies as "welfare statists" intent on using monetary policies to finance deficit spending. He has argued that the fiat money system of his day (pre-Nixon Shock) had retained the favorable properties of the gold standard because central bankers had pursued monetary policy as if a gold standard were still in place. U.S. Congressman Ron Paul has continually argued for the reinstatement of the gold standard, but is no longer a strict advocate, instead supporting a basket of commodities that emerges on the free markets.

The current global monetary system relies on the U.S. dollar as a reserve currency by which major transactions, such as the price of gold itself, are measured. A host of alternatives have been suggested, including energy-based currencies, market baskets of currencies or commodities, gold being one of the alternatives.

In 2001 Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir bin Mohamad proposed a new currency that would be used initially for international trade among Muslim nations. The currency he proposed was called the Islamic gold dinar and it was defined as 4.25 grams of pure (24 carat) gold. Mahathir Mohamad promoted the concept on the basis of its economic merits as a stable unit of account and also as a political symbol to create greater unity between Islamic nations. The purported purpose of this move would be to reduce dependence on the United States dollar as a reserve currency, and to establish a non-debt-backed currency in accord with Islamic law against the charging of interest. However, to date, Mahathir's proposed gold-dinar currency has failed to take hold.

Gold as a reserve today

Main article: Gold reserves

The Swiss Franc was based on a full gold convertibility until 2000. However, gold reserves are held in significant quantity by many nations as a means of defending their currency, and hedging against the U.S. Dollar, which forms the bulk of liquid currency reserves. Gold remains a principal financial asset of almost all central banks alongside foreign currencies and government bonds. It is also held by central banks as a way of hedging against loans to their own governments as an "internal reserve".

Both gold coins and gold bars are widely traded in liquid markets, and therefore still serve as a private store of wealth. Some privately issued currencies, such as digital gold currency, are backed by gold reserves.

In 1999, to protect the value of gold as a reserve, European Central Bankers signed the Washington Agreement on Gold, which stated that they would not allow gold leasing for speculative purposes, nor would they enter the market as sellers except for sales that had already been agreed upon.

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^ Metzler, Mark (2006). Lever of Empire: The International Gold Standard and the Crisis of Liberalism in Prewar Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press. p. . ISBN 0-520-24420-6. Cite error: The named reference "ease" was defined multiple times with different content (see the help page).
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The original Federal Reserve Act provided for a note issue which was to be secured ... by a 40% reserve in gold
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"In the 1930s, the United States was in a situation that satisfied the conditions for a liquidity trap. Over 1929-1933 overnight rates fell to zero, and they remained on the floor through the 1930's."
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Bordo, Michael D. (2008). "Gold Standard". http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/GoldStandard.html. The great virtue of the gold standard was that it assured long-term price stability.
http://eh.net/encyclopedia/article/ransom.civil.war.us The Economics of the Civil War the Union also experienced inflation as a result of deficit finance during the war; the consumer price index rose from 100 at the outset of the war to 175 by the end of 1865.
http://eh.net/encyclopedia/article/whaples.goldrush California Gold Rush from 1792 until 1847 cumulative U.S. production of gold was only about 37 tons. California’s production in 1849 alone exceeded this figure, and annual production from 1848 to 1857 averaged 76 tons. ... Soaring gold output from the California and Australia gold rushes is linked with a 30 percent increase in wholesale prices from 1850 through 1855.
Gold and Economic Freedom by Alan Greenspan http://www.constitution.org/mon/greenspan_gold.htm
http://online.wsj.com/article/NA_WSJ_PUB:SB10001424052748704779704574554830014559864.html deflation rewards savers who hoard cash
http://208.106.154.79/story.aspx?82504cb2-de36-4934-bd4f-6912fbca58cc Deflation rewarded those who saved
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=am.gkYZFlB0A “Deflation hurts borrowers and rewards savers,” said Drew Matus, senior economist at Banc of America Securities-Merrill Lynch in New York, in a telephone interview. “If you do borrow right now, and we go through a period of deflation, your cost of borrowing just went through the roof.”
http://www.dailypaul.com/node/120184 which in contrast rewards savers and penalizes debtors, and governments most of all, they being the largest debtors in the modern era.
^ http://www.economist.com/node/13610845 Inflation is bad, but deflation is worse
http://www.economist.com/node/16590992?story_id=16590992&CFID=136849207&CFTOKEN=92989586
http://fraser.stlouisfed.org/docs/meltzer/fisdeb33.pdf. Irving Fisher The Debt Deflation Theory of Great Depressions "the above named factors have played a subordinate role as compared with two dominant factors, namely over-indebtness to start with and deflation following soon after" and "I have, at present, a strong conviction that these two economic maladies, the debt disease and the price-level disease, are...more important causes then all others put together"
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Data from http://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/h6/hist/ as interpreted in File:Components of the United States money supply2.svg
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http://www.pbs.org/fmc/interviews/friedman.htm "One of the explanations given for the Federal Reserve action was that they were tied to the ideology of the gold standard. The gold standard is not a limiting factor, and the Federal Reserve at all times had enough gold so they could have maintained the requirements of the gold standard at the same time that they expanded the quantity of money.
http://www.jstor.org/pss/4538817 The Federal Reserve doubled reserve requirements between August 1936 and May 1937
Michael D. Bordo and David C. Wheelock in The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis Review September/October 1998.
http://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/crises.html The classic example of this strategy is, of course, George Soros' attack on the British pound in 1992. As argued in the case study below, it is likely that the pound would have dropped out of the exchange rate mechanism in any case; but Soros's actions may have triggered an earlier exit than would have happened otherwise.
McArdle, Megan (2007-09-04). "There's gold in them thar standards!". The Atlantic Monthly. Retrieved 2008-11-12.
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"End The Fed & Consider Outlawing Fractional Reserve Banking". 2009-11-14.
al-'Amraawi, Muhammad (2001-07-01). "Declaration of 'Ulama on the Gold Dinar". Islam i Dag. Retrieved 2008-11-14. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)

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What is The Gold Standard? University of Iowa Center for International Finance and Development
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