This is always a contentious topic. I am Always met with resistance to my main arguments. So without further adieu let us delve into why this is aweful and will only get worse. I see gold hitting $3500-4000 by the end of this cunt’s second term. His first term saw the largest growth of gold price / decrease in usd value of any sitting POTUS from $1200 to just over $2000 which is a 66% fluctuation whereas with biden it went from $2000 to $2700 which is 35% increase.
Anyway lets get into this. For the first 172 years of the history of the USD as a standardized currency the price of gold held strong only increasing ≈85% from $19 to $35. But since 1971 when nixon ended the gold standard the price has ballooned ≈8000% from $35 to $2800 today.
Gold has always been considered an inflation proof asset. It retains its value better than any other commodity subject to the rules of supply and demand markets. Gold was the first currency used outside of traditional barter and trade economics and its value is still intrinsically tied to the value of every circulating currency in existence. If you calculate the exchange rate between any two currencies you’ll quickly see that they all add up to good perfectly. But that’s basic and should go without saying.
Ever wonder why at the time of American history portrayed as the era of American working class prosperity (the mid forties till the mid seventies) one working adult making minimum wage could afford to raise a family of four with enough surplus to send their two children to college, save for retirement (if they weren’t part of the 50% of workers that had a pension around this time) and go on a modest yearly family vacation? Meanwhile today even a family with only one kid is struggling to make it by on two salaries totaling $100,000 after taxes?
Now this may just be conjecture on my part but I believe the reason for this massive flip in working class power dynamics over the lasy 54 years was intentional. Sometime after Kennedy was assassinated wall street corporate interest had for all intents and purposes captured our political process and instructed their employees (our alleged representatives) to enact legislation that would effectively eradicate all the progress made by the labor and civil rights movements of the 40’s 50’s and 60’s as well as FDR’s new deal policies which stood as a foundation for the progress that came after. They were successful meanwhile the corporate executive class adequately adjusted their compensation to counteract the intended results of these policies.
In 1938 after conservative policies had been doubled down on which led to the gilded age and left us with the great depression. FDR finally began to repair the damage with common sense fixes that the robber barrons had fought at every opportunity available. 1938 is when the fair labor standards act was passed. This legislated many common sense socialist protections for workers protecting them from ruthless exploitation by profits at all cost models of capitalism. Such as; child labor laws, federal holidays, weekends, the 40 hour 5 day work week and most importantly, minimum wage.
Minimum wage on a federal level in the 87 years since its introduction has been adjusted 22 times with most adjustments occurring within a year of the previous one. Today the last adjustment of federal minimum wage was 16 years ago. And for the 30 year period of 1938 to 1968 7 adjustments were passed after first being set at 25¢ per hour or 14.9 ounces of gold per year at a full time schedule($41,000 today or about $19.50/hour) The 3 most impactful adjustments were in 1950, 1956 and 1968 where minimum wage was respectively raised to 75¢, $1 and finally $1.60 per hour. St the time that ranged from 45 ,60 and 95 ounces of gold annually.
Today the highest minimum wage in the country of $20/hour for some California fast food workers barely produces more than 15 ounces of gold for a full time year of work. And federal minimum wage is approximately 5.5 ounces. So thats a loss in value of 94-85%
And here many people will try to convince you that “the price of gold isn’t an accurate measurement for inflation statistics” but this is incorrect. But go ahead and believe the world bank, international monetary fund and Wall Street’s cooked books. These institutions have no issue committing fraud and them footing the bill to the rest of the world but sure lets pretend they are telling us the truth about something so important as how badly the socio political and socioeconomic policies they’ve supported the last 5-6 decades have brought the rest of the world as well as america into a state of austerity for the working class while they put around in their new yachts supercars and private jets that burn anywhere from $7,000 to $40,000 worth of fuel per trip. They definitely seem credible 🥴
But anyway lets look at the basis of their inflation models. The inflation models peddled by these fine and proper institutions snd definitely not rotting fraud filled pus buckets of society. They are based almost entirely upon a metric known as “consumer price index” or CPI. And cpi is flawed for several reasons but the biggest of those is that CPI does not account for the devaluation of a currency due to the increase in circulating currency supply. Such as what happens when a governing body prints money out of thin air and increases the national debt over 50 times in the last 6 decades. Now if we contrast cpi to the price of gold we will see where cpi fails is where gold excells. The main driving point in gold’s price increase is economic worry caused by poor policy the most common of which being irresponsible and unrestrained Fiat currency printing. Now lets look at currency printing in the last 54 years. There are plotted graphs that solidify my point and you’re free to look them up. Now by the end of 1979 the price of gold had alrrady increased by 2000% to just over $700 and in less than 2 years by 1981 the US had finished printing the first one trillion dollars into circulation adding to the national debt substantially. Fast forward today and the last i checked the us debt was somewhere around 36 trillion dollars and we currently print one trillion dollars every 3 to 4 months which is driving the price of gold through the roof due to decreasing USD value and market worry about the stability of the US dollar in modern times.
So why could someone working a minimum wage job from 1945 up until the mid 70’s support a family of four? Because money was worth far more and leftist organizing held the feet of the wealthy legacy families in wall street to the flames (these fsmilies all had supported Hitler so blatantly in the 1930’s they held a rally for him at madison square garden and made him person of the year on Times magazine’s cover in 1938) lets do some math here. To earn equal value to 1950’s minimum wage you would need to make the equivalent of 45 ounces of gold which today is worth $126,000 or $60.57 per hour. In 1956 it was 60 ounces or $168,000/ $80.76 then for 3 years before nixon shock was put in motion by withdrawing from the bretton woods agreement, arguably the worst financial policy the us has ever made, us minimum wage peaked at $1.60 which produced 95 ounces of gold or $266,000 or $127.88/hour.
To come anywhere near this both adults need to work 80 hours a week with overtime at a base pay of $20 just to reach $208,000 before taxes. And yes you can live better than a majority of people on thst wage and even $120,000/yr is decent but with 4 kids good luck saving anything meaningful and living anywhere but highly undesirable urban areas in super red states.
So these are facts that i know at least several will comment to debunk on this post. But the facts I’ve mentioned remain. None more so telling than the reality that the rich who are well versed in the markets of investment banking, have always considered gold to be an inflation proof asset that is not just a status symbol or a usefull material for technological applications but also a store of wealth in chaotic economic times.
anyone saying or asking why would they lie to us about this? I mean, are you not paying attention? If they told us the truth, that someone making quadruple federal minimum wage today is making 20% of minimum wage just 54 years ago then people would see the root of their economic frustrations in life and be much closer to starting the class warfare our society so desperately needs.i and others before me who have done the math have also figured out that the minimum wage workers of today are payed less than it cost to purchase and maintain enslaved people under chattel slavery. But since we have this illusory sense of choice, that we could just quit at anytime we are delusional to believe in our freedom under democracy (which is in reality class dictatorship) so from 1950 till today the share of wealth has gone from the top 20% having 10% of the wealth to the top ten percent having 66% and the top 20 having 74% while the bottom 60% have less than the 3 wealthiest men who collectively control $1,000,000,000,000 in assets.
The American working class have been robbed before their very eyes to the point where we are just glorified slaves. Many millennials snd gen z will have to work till we are to sick to do so or have to clock in on the day we expire. Many will never own a home snd have to hope that social security isn’t completely gutted in the next 25-50 years but i am not hopeful.
Have a good weekend regardless. Plan a boycott and some strikes and lets at least try and make things better than they are as dauntingly impossible as it may seem
Then why do absolutely no countries on the planet use the gold standard?
That was the Red Scare, globalization, and automation. It had absolutely nothing to do with the gold standard.
I agree that what you are identifying is a problem, but proposing a gold standard to fix it is absolutely bonkers. The wealth gap can be closed by taxing the wealthy, increasing minimum wages, providing universal services, and investing in poor communities.
Immediately going back to the gold standard would not fix 54 years of disastrous economic policy that has devalued money to this point. We would need to make it illegal to hoard wealth, seize the assets of the 1% in America and redistribute at least half their wealth leaving them with on average $5.5 million each and giving 337 million Americans $69,500 each (which would be more once you figure in children and dependents) that is what the 43.5 trillion the 1% are hoarding could do and that $5.5 million on average left for each of these 3.4 million wealthiest people is more than generous.
The reason no country currently backs their currency to gold is primarily because central banks control all the currencies in circulation and these are ultra greedy institutions that want to eat their cake and have it to. Its not that difficult to understand. Switzerland was the last country to abandon the gold standard in 1999. They also have one of the largest gold reserves on the planet and are one of the wealthiest countries in the world per capita. Just because no currency is directly tied to gold in any official capacity does not mean the value of all currencies is not still intrinsically tied to gold. You can still trade currency for gold obviously but when the gold standard was in practice banks and official financial institutions by law had to produce the equivalent amount of gold upon demand whenever a citizen (or foreign entity) presented the currency and demanded to convert it to gold. Ending the gold standard was an intelligent calculated strategy for the us economy when it did so because after doing so and refusing to pay out the debt held in us reserve notes by other countries they could as i said eat their cake and have it to. Now They could print the rubber money out of thin air and would no longer have to suffer any loss of their gold reserve when other nation states demanded the US pay the debt they owed in gold because they no longer had to oblige to those demands. The value of gold didn’t just go up because we ended the gold standard it went up because when we ended the gold standard we began printing paper currency irresponsibly and acquiring foreign debt faster than ever and did so with reckless abandon for the last 54 years and now divided up evenly between every American we owe just over $105,000
I think you've really misinterpreted my words into thinking that I have said “we need to immediately go back to the gold standard” that is not feasible. Slowly transitioning back to the gold standard would make some bit of difference but would take a monumental effort that would be far more difficult than what FDR did when he temporarily suspended the gold standard some 90 or so years ago buying up the majority of the gold supply in the us to store at the newly built fort knox and then revalued gold to almost double its price overnight which intentionally caused inflation. This made it so that more money could be printed while minimizing the inflationary impact that would be caused by just irresponsibly printing money out of thin air to fix the mess made by wall street banks. Fdr foresaw what has happened in the last 53 years happening much sooner due to the great depression as citizens were already starting to hoard gold after the banks crashed and were less trusting of the us dollar but this didnt cause any rapid inflation because the wealthy were hoarding the bank notes since they were just as good as gold at the time. It did wreak economic havoc in other ways such as extreme unemployment levels and homelessness. Weve seen poctures of the central park shanty town houses and breadlines of the time. but fast forward to the inflation we are seeing now and the us dollar either needs to be deflated intentionally, or we need to start from scratch entirely adopt a new national currency potentially by developing a new blockchain based stable coin or just adopting bitcoin. (Before you go and knock bitcoin you need to understand banks have digitized currency already and that blockchain technology is a far superior model when compared to the digital representation of currency that almost all banks have used for the last 3 or so decades, if goldman sachs and all the other wall street banks were correct in their public sentiments that bitcoin/crypto currencies are illegitimate Ponzi schemes then they would not also be investing billions behind the scene to develop their own blockchain technology to replace their current digital ledger systems) What we need is a radical solution and just going back to the gold standard isn’t it. We are well beyond that. One thing i can say would help is to outlaw the domestic influence of foreign international central banking institutions which have been opposed by several presidents most notably Abraham Lincoln and John F Kennedy. Lincoln himself said “I have two great enemies, the Southern Army in front of me and the bankers in the rear. Of the two, the one at my rear is my greatest foe.“
The numbers i had previously quoted on our national debt increase were only estimates. I just checked and in 1971 our total national debt was $400 billion and today it is $36.22 trillion so that is in increase of 9000% compare that to the 8400% increase in the value of gold since we ended the gold standard and it speaks for itself. Consumer price index inflation models are used because they intentionally downplay the scope of the issue. As i said already cpi does not account for the devaluation of a currency due to the increase in circulating currency supply. Gold has already gone up another $85-90 since i last checked to $2944 an ounce. Rents are definitely going to rise as a result. Near me in providence Rhode Island 2 bedroom apartments in the neighborhood i grew up some 15 blocks from brown university are now unaffordable at $2700-3000 a month. Even 14 miles outside the cityin some of the more poverty striken areas you are looking st $2300-2500 a month. For a 1 bedroom which were about $700-900 just 6 years ago you are looking st $1500-1600 today. I just had to move out of an apartment last year that we were renting for $825 because the slumlord was selling the property and the new owner wanted $1500 without doing any improvements on the property or individual unit. Back in 2011 i rented a 2 bedroom 2 floor townhouse in providence about 3 miles up the street from brown for $900 and that same apartment today is $2800 but state minimum wage is barely 50% higher
But yes just going back to the gold standard would not be a feasible solution to the extreme inflation and austerity the American working class have been saddled with. Something radical needs to be done since this reality has been ignored and outright obfuscated for the last 3.5/4 decades which is about when it became a real problem. But we have gone from snowball to avalanche in my 35 year lifetime and unfortunately i only see it gutting worse. Gold will likely be $4200 or potentially higher by the time trump leaves office. Last time he took over the oval office after obama gold spot price was around $1200/oz and it peaked at $2050 when trump left it was $1950 so that’s approximately 66% increase which is just a little less than the increase seen under the bush administration.
I dont have the answer for what to do unfortunately. I just see the signs. Maybe my ideas for repairing this could mitigate some of the mayhem that has resulted but i can say for sure the direction we are headed with MAGA and even the direction we would have been heading with Blue Maga would both be the wrong directions. The former more so than the latter. What we need is a proletarian revolution and an end to class dictatorship. We have a kakistocracy , which is a government led by the least educated and the least capable among us. And we need the opposite of that. We need a meritocracy where one’s achievements and level of success are not measured by how ruthlessly they exploit those beneath them and how much wealth they can amass and hoard. But unfortunately those in control will die before they relinquish their death grip of power to maintain the exact opposite system of what we need as a society.
I do not intend to be insulting or adversarial but sometimes we need to just realize that what is needed is to think outside the box and reject those who continue to feed us the everything is fine narrative while we are sitting inside a building thst is clearly burning while the temperature increases and the sweat beads off our forehead. There have been more than enough red flags to suggest that wall street, the IMF world bank and the propaganda outlets masquerading as journalistically integrous institutions making excuses for the former are anything but. Sometimes the most basic questions that others consider childish and dumb can provide a perspective that is both refreshing and borderline ontologically shocking.