Ok, bear with me for a moment - what if the US would use actual physical gold coins instead of dollars? Then your argument of "gold would flow out" would not hold - so the only reason for it to flow out was that the gold standard was fake - the lax money policy of the US was the issue, not the gold standard itself.
Gold is silly as a measure of value. It's just a piece of shiny metal. The amount of value in the world is increasing so you want to exchange medium to grow with it else you're pulling breaks on the actual economy.
Just because a social construct is silly when you think about it doesn't make it any less real or useful.
A national border is silly as a physical reality; it is just a cartographic whim. These invisible lines, drawn by long-dead men, pretend that the lithosphere is fundamentally different on one side of a coordinate than the other.
Fiat currency is silly as a store of value; it is just a digital ledger or a piece of cotton-linen blend. Its "worth" is derived entirely from the collective hallucination that a central bank’s promise is more substantial than the paper it is printed on.
Gold is actually really good at transferring and measuring value. Think about what a "good" measure of value would be have. It needs to last over time, not corrode or dissolve to the forces. It needs to be distributable, Divisible.. to be ubiquitous. Hard to create/refine, hard to find, so supply can't easily be inflated.
It doesn't matter what the object that is being used for exchange of value or holding value, that's why you can trade and barter random objects. But if you condensate down the properties that make a GOOD money, then gold is more than just a shiny metal.
"The amount of value in the world is increasing so you want to exchange medium to grow with it.." we find more gold every day, so there is an easing already happening naturally. And even if there wasn't, imagine having an exchange currency that literally never inflated... that's GOOD. We have been hoodwinked into thinking that we need inflation to keep up with goods and services, literal stockholm syndrome taught by the FED.
Hold on - you say "we find more gold every day" and then go on to suggest that the money supply doesn't actually need to keep up with economic growth?
If we had the technology to maintain 0% inflation, we would do that. We can't, and rather than risk deflation we instead target low positive inflation. This is because deflation leads to nightmare spirals where people start stuffing money into their mattresses instead of investing in useful things because holding has risk-free guaranteed returns that the unpredictable real world can't match.
The amount of gold being mined is not sufficient to keep up with economic growth and gold is therefore inherently deflationary. It's not a good way to store value, because a coin that's going to double in value over two years or whatever is obviously not a stable store of value.
You can argue about corrosion resistance or whatever other physical properties gold might have, but unless the civilization collapses you will find just as much luck storing your wealth in the database of a major bank. Needless to say, designing a civilization around the idea that it could collapse at any moment is unnecessary and expensive.
> And even if there wasn't, imagine having an exchange currency that literally never inflated... that's GOOD.
I fundamentally disagree. Value comes from building stuff not from hoarding. I maintain my intense dislike for gold. And I grant that it had the property of having most people on this earth consider it the peak of value. Sure common belief is a useful property. But I disagree that it's a positive outcome or that there couldn't be many many other variations except gold.
> that's why you can trade and barter random objects...imagine having an exchange currency that literally never inflated... that's GOOD. We have been hoodwinked into thinking that we need inflation to keep up with goods and services, literal stockholm syndrome
Gahhh. Stop taking your economics advice from bitcoin bros and goldbug weirdos. They don't know how anything works and don't want to learn. It's like taking legal advice from sovereign citizens. It's not even that difficult to understand why it's a terrible idea!
High inflation is bad, sure. Deflation is an economic nuke. You know those people who spent like a whole bitcoin buying pizza way back when? "If I'd just held onto it, I'd have $HUGE_NUMBER now".
Yeah. If your money goes up in value, you have a huge incentive to stockpile it and not buy pizza. It's not just Dominos that loses out. All of the people and suppliers that go into pizza do, too. You need people to spend and lend to have liquidity and money flow.
> we find more gold every day, so there is an easing already happening naturally
That's not how that works. You're tying your entire country's economic growth to the production output of a single mining industry. Gold is not distributed evenly across the globe, either.
And yeah, we did all that in the past, and it caused deflation, which caused numerous financial panics [0], broke the British economy [1] and after two world wars, the US ended up with like 70% of the world's gold [2].
TL;DR: Tying your entire country's economic growth to the production output of a single mining industry is stupid and we don't do it for very good reasons. Everything is a conspiracy if you don't know how anything works.
Yes, it's just a shiny piece of metal. However, it is a pure element and there is a limited amount of it, unlike pretty much anything else except maybe silver.
This is the origin of the entire white collar world and all of its odd bedfellows, and it will die in our lifetime. All of our jobs will go with it, unfortunately.
That doesn't make any sense to me. Under Bretton Woods, a "dollar" was a contractual equivalent to a fixed amount of gold. There's no difference. When people are talking about "flow out" they're not talking about literally motion of currency[1], just who owns it.
[1] Which is backwards in your reasoning anyway. If you're a foreign power wanting to hold dollars, and dollars are physical gold coins, then you quite literally need to move them physically out of the country, right?
> Ok, bear with me for a moment - what if the US would use actual physical gold coins instead of dollars?
You'll get a bear economy, leading to the eventual deflation and collapse.
Fun fact: it was not hyperinflation in Weimar Germany that led Hitler to power but _deflation_ because of its insistence on sticking to the gold standard.
> Fun fact: it was not hyperinflation in Weimar Germany that led Hitler to power but _deflation_ because of its insistence on sticking to the gold standard.
"Hyperinflation caused Hitler" is one of the common narratives that "everyone knows". But German economy was actually growing during the hyperinflation era and by the time of Hitler's ascension, the hyperinflation had long been in the past.
I personally edited this very Wikipedia article several times, but my changes got reverted by goldbugs who want to memory-hole it.
The subject appears to be a single individual of medium to stocky build. Based on
proportions relative to the archway and Nest doorbell mount height, the individual is
estimated at approximately 5’8” to 6’0” tall. Their build is medium to heavy-set, with solid
shoulders and torso. The overall physique and movement patterns suggest a male or
masculine-presenting adult, likely between 20–45 years of age.
Guys, yesterday I spent some time convincing an LLM model from a leading provider that 2 cards plus 2 cards is 4 cards which is one short of a flush. I think we are not too close to a singularity, as it stands.
Why bring that up when you could bring up AI autonomously optimizing AI training and autonomously fixing bugs in AI training and inference code. Showing that AI already is accelerating self improvement would help establish the claim that we are getting closer to the singularity.
I'm working on a project where you can run your own experiment (or use it for real trading): https://portfoliogenius.ai. Still a bit rough, but most of the main functionality works.
These product might be great, but seriously, who's choosing those names? Trainium, Inferentia? It's like let's just take the words from what they do, and put a little Latin twist on them? I know naming things is one of the great problems in computer science, but really they could come up with something a little better.
Just to be fair, they compare every congressperson who becomes a leader with a “regular” (non-leader) congressperson who entered Congress in the same year and is from the same political party. Alternative view: people who becomes leaders are just more capable and better at selecting stocks?
> we find that lawmakers who later ascend to leadership positions perform similarly to matched peers beforehand but outperform them by 47 percentage points annually after ascension
If what you’re positing were true wouldn’t they have outperformed their peers before ascension as well
The very first sentence of the linked article contradicts your alternative theory. These leaders performed similarly to their peers before ascending to leadership.
I wish there was an index where not all countries are weighted equally, but according to their desirability. Multiply each country by some factor which is defined by how many people would list it as their desirable destination. The index where France and Tuvalu are both counted equally makes no sense to me, with all due respect to the latter.
I mean, a major reason the US fell in the ranks is because Brazil has stopped giving the US, Canada, and Australia visa-free access, Vietnam didn't include the US in the list of countries it chose to extend visa-free access to, Venezuela has extended visa-free access to a number of EU and EFTA members, and Papua New Guinea extended visa-free access to a number of nations recently. Also, the UK has begun enforcing the Electronic Travel Authorisation (ETA) on all countries excluding Ireland, which means the UK is no longer visa free.
The UK's ranking fell for similar reasons as well.
If not having visa-free access to PNG or Venezuela is a metric, it's not a fairly relevant metric, or at least a very lossy metric.
Why should Americans, Canadians, or Europeans get visa free access to China, Brazil, or Vietnam when Chinese, Brazilian, and Vietnamese nationals need to get visas to visit America, Canada, or Europe?
Didn't realize Brazil has Schengen access! That's wild (in a good way)!
Out of curiosity, why don't we see the same degree of Brazilian immigration to the EU then versus the US?
Is it solely economic (ie. a Brazilian accountant is more likely to demand a salary significantly higher that that back in Brazil by moving to the US versus an EU state)?
> Out of curiosity, why don't we see the same degree of Brazilian immigration to the EU then versus the US?
There are a lot of Brazilians in the EU, most have legal residency through heritage (Spanish, Portuguese, Italian are quite common 2nd passports) or through work visas.
You can't discount the huge influence the USA has over Latin America, and specially over Brazil, people look up to the USA as a benchmark/role model, many Brazilians dream of "making it" by moving to the USA; Brazilians also suffer a huge influence from the consumerist aspect of the USA, they want to have nice cars (which are cheaper relative to salaries than in Brazil), they want to buy electronics that are expensive in Brazil: consoles, computers, phones, they want to buy clothing that is considered expensive in Brazil, there's a quite markedly status-chasing aspect of Brazilian society that mimics the American one. Brazil was somewhat molded according to the USA: car-dependent, consumerist, etc. so a lot of Brazilians believe that the USA is what Brazil "could be" if it was richer.
There are many support groups from past immigrants to help out settling in the USA, it's also much easier to live in the USA undocumented than in most of the EU: in the USA there's no centralised identification at the federal level, in the EU most countries require you to have a tax ID to do most of the basic bureaucracies you need to settle.
It's a confluence of factors that make Brazilian immigration into the USA very different than into the EU. From my experience most Brazilians in the EU are high-skilled immigrants or have a second citizenship or are spouses of natives/citizens.
For the full context, it looks like Henley & Partners is providing services like obtaining second citizenship, so it's in their best interest to highlight the US passport "decline". Further down they say "Americans Lead Global Rush for Second Citizenships", which just happens to be the thing they are selling.
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