Is the dollar on the verge of collapsing as a national currency and The
international reserve currency?
Is there any truth to the stance that the FED has been printing way too much? And that the stimulus or Quantitative Easing actions that were taken in the past 4 years were counterproductive by devaluing the dollar?
Or is everything well and normal?
I’ve been hearing so much the past 3 years and i’m also seeing some factual events that make me wonder what’s going on. I won’t mention any of the rumors and theories because they can’t be proven and the facts are enough for a debate.
Examples that make me wonder what’s up:
1 Germany asked the US for it’s **gold **and didn’t get it all, nor got a full audit. Der Spiegel Forbes Youtube video
2 The 2013 Budget Sequestration
I can’t really pin it down or judge what’s going on. But i’m hearing the word * collapse* a lot the past 12 months. Even in Forbes magazine now.
Is there any truth to it at all? Is this just bad weather that will clear up?
Very bad weather brought on by poor political planning from on high.
One of the stranger things about the last five years is that, yes, the Fed has been expanding the money supply with QE to promote lending…but inflation hasn’t spiked in response to it.
Rates for government borrowing are still extremely low. Rates for government borrowing have remained lower than I would have expected all through the last five years.
There are definitely troubling signs out there, but most of them stem from either the downstream effects of the recession - the drop in taxes paid due to a diminished tax base and so forth - or from our political disfunction. But I see no true signs of the collapse of the American - and therefore the world - economy.
The dollar won’t become worthless so long as there’s a demand for it. The primary demand is taxes. You have to have dollars to pay taxes. (If you don’t pay taxes, you go to jail.) the second main demand for dollars is banks. Have a mortgage? Credit cards? Car note? You have to have dollars to pay those loans. So long as there’s government and banks people will want dollars, and will be willing to trade them for goods and services.
Edit: also, the government won’t default on Treasuries. The government is the source of money. The Fed has a infinite supply of the stuff.
No. If anything, the dollar might be a bit stronger than we’d like. A slightly weaker dollar might help improve the trade balance between imports and exports.
Ok, this is one of the silliest bits. Anytime you worry about the strength or fidelity of a major international currency and then bring up gold, your credibility tanks.
The total amount of gold all of humanity has ever brought up out of the ground is a fraction of the annual GDP of the US. In other words, it basically doesn’t matter in terms of the strength of the US dollar. It’s like saying Bill Gates suddenly can’t account for $1 Million. While that’s a large sum of money for normal people and some accounting needs to be done, Bill Gates isn’t suddenly destitute or unable to pay his bills.
The ability of the Federal Reserve to safeguard its assets and those of depositors from other nations certainly is important but not the fact that those deposits are electronic bits, or bits of shiny metal, or whatever.
The idea that there is some arcane conspiracy linking gold in federal depositories and the status of the dollar is almost on the level of 9/11 conspiracy theory bad.
Ok, so right off the bat you are distorting the story, which doesn’t exactly lend itself to a honest discussion. ‘Germany’ isn’t asking for it’s gold back or even for the audit, but instead a German politician (Peter Gauweiler, who sounds like a gold bug to me, and a bit of a nut) has been agitating for it within Germany and hasn’t gotten a lot of traction with his own people or banks from the sounds of that article.
Maybe you should click the links and tell the people at Forbes, CNN and Washington Post they are all distorting the story too.
Says who?? What is your proof? Are you some kind of academic or US policy maker we should trust on merit and experience? Any facts to go with your opinion?
I only stated a fact. Being that one government asked another government for a part of their property and before that they were refused to audit all vaults that supposedly contain said property.
Maybe not all the gold, but 20% of what the FED holds for them. The official plan is to have 50% repatriated by 2020.
official Bundesbank statement
But the point is that the FED refused a full audit, and needs years to deliver just a fifth part of the gold. I can’t say why it should take 7 years, if the gold is really there and has not been (re)hypothecated. (as some people keep saying)
But seven years to get just a portion back. Seems a tad bit slow to me.
Please be so kind to back up your posts with a link of internationally respected sources readers can check.
I’m just stating facts and sources. If what i linked to at Forbes, CNN, Washington Post etc is untrue…please tell us and provide proof these sources are giving false info.
I have not taken a side because i don’t know. But a thousand word opinion is still only an opinion. So save your time; just give us the facts and sources and we’ll verify them ourselves.
If i am distorting the facts or simply don’t understand them the easiest way to set things straight is by using verifiable facts with sources we can check.
[QUOTE=ruben4ruben]
I only stated a fact. Being that one government asked another government for a part of their property and before that they were refused to audit all vaults that supposedly contain said property.
[/QUOTE]
No, you didn’t. Let’s try it this way…show me where it says that the German government asked the US government about anything to do with ‘their property’ and that this request was refused. Feel free to cut and paste either from the article you linked too or from other cites.
Ehmmm… you do know that you can click on the blue highlighted text? It’s called links… It will lead to other websites…
Try this one: http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/17416/does-germany-want-their-gold-back
Now when you are there there will be more links so you can get all your questions answered.
I’m done with the German Gold, it’s a fact. The main topic is if the Dollar will collapse.
PS There is also Google, there will be hundreds of articles if you search on " German Gold" for example.
Nowhere does it claim that German officials were denied access to their own gold. Actually, the opposite was claimed in the Der Spiegel article:
[QUOTE=Der Spiegel]
In fact, auditors from the Bundesbank made a second visit in May 2011. This time one of the nine compartments was also opened, in which the German gold bars are densely stacked. A few were pulled out and weighed.
[/QUOTE]
In fairness, the article goes on to complain about the transparency of the process, but that’s not the same thing as (a) denying access to the gold or (b) the US doing anything with it.
We don’t need additional sources - your own sources contradict your claims.
Planned change in gold stocks from 31 December 2012 to 31 December 2020
Frankfurt rises from 31 % to 50 % (+19%)
New York drops from 45 % to 37 % (-8%)
London remains stable at 13 %
Paris drops completely from 11 % to 0 % (-11%)
So, in other words you can’t find it. I already read the article, chief, and I didn’t see anything in there that says anything like what you are claiming, and since you can’t be bothered to FUCKING CLICK THE LINK YOURSELF AND CUT AND PASTE THE RELEVANT PASSAGES THAT MEANS YOU ARE FULL OF SHIT. Clear?
Of course people are worried about the risk of a default collapsing the US economy. But nobody knows if it will happen for sure - because it’s never happened before. Wild guesses are fine, but they’re no substitute for evidence.
Local communities going bankrupt? Happens all the time and has happened throughout US history. What does that have to do with the US dollar?
As for the nsnbc link - wow, that’s delusional. DHS declaring martial law is pretty laughable on the face of it. But also, it’s just another repeat about ordering a billion rounds of ammo. We’ve already done that debate, and there’s no meat to that story. I have no interest in rehashing the debunking of this story and don’t see how that relates to a collapse of the US dollar.
The dollar is not going to collapse. This gold, if it’s missing, is important to the people who signed for it, but not nationally important.
Gold is basically irrelevant to modern economic theory. People want gold to be the basis for something, but it’s not. Oil sort of is/could be.
Are you claiming the US defaulted on its debt back then? Because that didn’t happen. Nor was the Great Depression precipitated by a sudden drop in the value of the US dollar. Nor did the Great Depression cause the US dollar to collapse.
So I’m rather confused about what exactly you are trying to claim here. Because what you are posting and what you are referencing are two entirely different things. Could you clarify at all? Your thesis appears to be a disjointed set of observations that have, at best, a tenuous link with reality and often contradicted by the evidence you yourself present.
Again, the US has never defaulted on its debt obligations and nobody really knows the consequences if it does. Most people don’t even want to find out.
Check processing got clogged in 1979. Payment to some was delayed for a couple weeks.
I see the OP is now claiming that 1933 represents a default. That’s arguable. People got paid back, they just didn’t get paid back in gold like they were wanting.
The problem with citing that is that 1933 was the exact year when the US economy started recovering. 1933 was the end of the Great Contraction and the first turn toward a more healthy economy. That kind of “default” is hardly a thing to be afraid of.
Did you even read the cases? The case during the Great Depression was almost purely a technicality. The money was there, but the government wanted to pay in US dollars (which was getting off the gold standard) instead of gold.
Nor was that precipitated by nor cause a collapse in the US dollar.
Do you have a coherent thesis? Because it really seems that rather than presenting an argument based on any actual merit, you are tossing around articles that have the right words in them and hope they say what you want.
[QUOTE=ruben4ruben]
It has happened before. Twice. And the last time wasn’t that long ago and was linked to ehm…gold.
[/QUOTE]
Yeah…it was the government refusing at the time to pay war bonds (from WWI IIRC) in gold, and instead they paid in dollars. This is seriously your cite that the US government has defaulted in the past?