Yes, he had to confiscate our money in order to protect our money.
LOL
What cost $1 in 1933 would cost $12.49 in 2001. Equivalently, if you were to buy exactly the same products in 2001 and 1933, they would cost you $1 and $0.08 respectively.
Oh that FDR, wasn't he a sly one?
I cannot discuss these issues at length with impertinent illiterates without becoming too acerbic in my replies.
It's hard to grasp the level of cognitive dissonance necessary to believe that FDR saved capitalism from itself by abandoning legal money and imposing Gubmint fiat paper on every American.
Of course, the 'New Deal' was simply the U.S. manifestation of the world-wide infatuation with 'socialism', 'progress', and 'modernism', in the post-WWI era.
Those very words seem mildewed and dusty now, like tracts from the '30s found in your basement. The 2nd and 3rd rate minds staffing our schools and colleges, however, cherish these worm-eaten doctrines as signs of intellectual/ethical grace. If one does not believe in the merits of 'socialism' one is simply too barbaric to break intellectual bread with; you must be either a fascist or a crank or both to question the intellectual and moral authority of the current elites. Call this phenomena a regression to the historical mean-- the grim acceptance of an ordered society, with a place for everyone and everyone in his place.
The market??? EEEEWWWW!!! Who wants THAT grubby thing??? That's the societal norm today.
Reform may be impossible; it's likely that the financial system must suffer an earthquake before people are willing to become rational. Nothing new there.
The attempted smearing of 'goldbugs' by association with tinfoilers and other paranoid headcases is beneath comment.
I'm certain that a century from now, the criminal antics of today's financial actors and the rube-like gullibility of the investing public will be viewed with the sort of slack-jawed amazement with which we see the authors and victims of John Law's schemes, or tulip-speculators, or of course South-Seas Company investors.
Any lurkers out there reading this thread should take one lesson to heart: there is NO certainty in the market for financial assets-- no certainty, that is, except volatility.
Diversify, diversify, diversify...oh yeah, and sell too early. ;^)