I only showed what the New York Times and an award winning journalist and Princeton alumni stated openly for everybody to read.
If you think that is false, twisted or a technicality remember it was not *me *that said it. Don’t try to display it as my findings or my personal opinion. Besides everything is arguable. We could argue for a hundred years on many things. I rather deal with facts.
If you don’t agree with my source say you don’t agree with my source.
So, what about this vertical technicality do you see paralleled with today that you posit that the US is either about to default on our debt or that the US dollar is about to collapse, and how does this relate to your obviously misunderstanding of German gold?
You told Great Antibob “You are wrong”. Those are your words. They don’t come from your cite, they don’t come from Carmen Reinhart, they don’t come from the NY Times. They come from you, personally, and you don’t get to twist away from them just because they’re challenged. It’s fine to tell us that Carmen Reinhart thinks we’re wrong. But when you step in yourself to say that, then you own the statement.
I don’t agree with your source, and I don’t agree with you when you use that source to tell other people they’re wrong.
I already told you why, but here’s a more detailed cite. It’s fair to say that the US has never defaulted on its debt obligations. You can claim otherwise, but they’re all strange situations very far from what’s typically meant by a default.
Does anyone else in the world agree with your one source? Keep in mind that while your source may be “award winning, etc” has nothing to do with his/her accuracy or opinion here.
As stated by other posters - there was a change in policy during the GD that changed how we paid the debts, there was a delay, not everyone was happy about it (or the change) - but everyone got paid.
Thats not a ‘default’ - it could (possibly) be said that ‘during the delay’ we were technically ‘in default’ of the terms - but that is not the same thing as a ‘full default’ (where no one ever gets paid) and I think you know that.
The NYT article points out that the glitch involved $120 million out of $800 billion in debt. basically 0.015%. For the current debt levels of 14 trillion it would amount to roughly 2 billion dollars.
So 1979 is the hazy after image, of a ghost of a though,t of the possible current explicitly sought for debt default.
And i don’t agree with you and your sources. And yes i said he was wrong because…i think he is wrong.
Once again, i am still not taking a side. Just arguing and displaying what i can find. I am quite relaxed and find it a bit funny some folks seem to get a bit hot.
I’m not yet convinced to a clear yes or a no on this topic. I’d like to be convinced.
[QUOTE=ruben4ruben]
Is the US Dollar about to collapse?
[/QUOTE]
Perhaps, when people discover that the German gold was used to make the billion bullets that Home Land Security bought in anticipation of the uprising of the lizard people. It’s all going to hell when that fecal matter hits the rotary impeller device.
In the wasteland, bottle caps are actually worth more than pre-war money, so it would be a good trade…if you lived in the Fallout universe anyway. I’d hedge with some grilled iguana though…
In spite of it never happening before, what is a US default likely to do to the economy? Surely we can extrapolate from other nations who went through this before and combining that with the size and importance of the American economy. Also, what would the effect be if the US defaults and a day or a week or a month later the government gets its shit together and raises the debt ceiling?
I don’t want to take the side of wingnuts and gold bugs, but there is disinformation in this thread. From this source:
[QUOTE=The Gold Standard Act of 1900]
Be it enacted . ., That the dollar consisting of twenty-five and eight-tenths grains of gold nine-tenths fine, as established by section thirty-five hundred and eleven of the Revised Statutes of the United States, shall be the standard unit of value, and all forms of money issued or coined by the United States shall be maintained at a parity of value with this standard, and it shall be the duty of the Secretary of the Treasury to maintain such parity.
[/QUOTE]
While Congress can take away what Congress has given, changing the redemption rate of dollars printed under the standard of 1900 (based on a price in effect since 1834) can certainly be called a “default.” I’ll let one of the Board’s lawyers summarize Supreme Court rulings related to the 1934 “default”, but some rulings called related actions “unconstitutional;” the main Act was upheld 5-4, by emphasizing the unique nature of “sovereign power.”
Does “more than half” qualify as “a fraction” ? Between its two main vaults, the U.S. holds roughly half a trillion dollars worth of gold, at today’s prices. This may seem like “chump change” to some, but a fella could have a pretty good weekend in Vegas with that kind of money.
Let me expand on this - Lehman owned $500 billion when it tanked. At which point the money market fund went crazy with withdrawals jumping to $145 billion from $7 billion the previous week. It was like throwing sand in the gears of the global economy because it effectively caused corporations to be unable to roll over short term debt that’s typically used to pay for things like paychecks.
Now imagine the impact of only $5 trillion disappearing from the system with no source to back fill it.
Well, if we’re arguing technicalities, I guess it does.
It’s a bit of a distraction, anyway, at this point. Either we have shadowy figures planning for the collapse of the US dollar (and hence the economy?) with DHS agents buying 1 billion rounds of ammunition over the next decade and everything in preparation for martial law (how would orders get fulfilled if martial law gets declared, anyway? not like that ammunition order has even been fulfilled yet) or we don’t.
So far, we have kind of a wishful thinking scenario on the part of the OP where you really have to squint to see these connections. Or we can look at the actual evidence and figure out that the Men in Black don’t exist, or if they do, they’re incompetent enough to let Internet Rangers ™ with poorly cited references see through their nefarious schemes.
When you’re a deadbeat who doesn’t pay his bills on time, the people you ask to borrow money from won’t lend you as much, and will charge you a much higher premium. Right now we can borrow money at pretty close to 0% interest. If we default on our debt, that ability goes out the window.
So we have to start paying more interest, which means we can’t borrow a dollar and pay back a dollar, we have to pay back two dollars. And to pay back our creditors we will need to borrow even more money, or raise taxes higher, or cut popular spending programs like social security, medicare, and national defense, since that’s where the bulk of federal spending is.
Or we just devalue the dollar so that paying two dollars is just as easy as paying one dollar, we can make as many dollars as we want. But that is called inflation, and will lead to all sorts of bad effects we all remember from the 70s and 80s.
It’s not a good start when you have to add “although many deny it” to one of your bullet points, pardon the pun. You could check out this thread explaining that the bulk purchase of ammunition isn’t sinister or as the author of the article puts it “Reports are that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is engaged in a massive, covert military buildup.” As an aside, how is a covert buildup if it’s being done so overtly that everyone notices? I mean its being done on the books with no attempt to conceal it. Then again, it’s not a military buildup either: it’s the purchasing of ammunition for existing weapons for law enforcement agencies. Sounds much more menacing if you call it a covert military buildup though, doesn’t it? Just ask the OP in the other thread, who had his baseless fears assuaged. It was - oh wait. The OP was you.
