Free Republic

The most perfect monetary system humans have yet created was the world gold standard system of the late 19th century, roughly 1870-1914. We don’t have to hypothesize too much about what a new world gold standard system could look like. We can just look at what has already been done. Contrary to popular belief, people generally did not conduct commerce with gold coins. Yes, gold coins existed, but people mostly used paper banknotes and bank transfers, just as they do today. In 1910, gold coins comprised $591 million out of total currency (base money) of $3,149 million in the United...

Ah, so that's what Ben Bernanke is up to! Bernanke, of course, announced last week that he would allow the Federal Reserve to purchase $600 billion more in government bonds over the next eight months. That's referred to in polite society as "quantitative easing," which is just another name for debasing the value of the dollar by printing -- electronically, these days -- piles of additional currency. QE was tried last year and didn't do much for the economy. But QE2 was announced last week anyway, and there are a lot of folks who don't think it'll do much good...