Except in July 2019, her craziness would have affected Republicans and their own goals. Now they’re on the way out, they have a different goal. Or have I missed the point you were making?
My point was that nominating her to the Fed wasn’t done to hobble Democrats – he mentioned her as a nominee well before the election. The Senate Banking Committee approved her in July, 2020, also well ahead of the election.
So, my question is still, why nominate (and why would the Senate try and approve) someone so obviously unqualified, a gold bug nutjob? Gold bugs are terrible for a sitting president, because they wouldn’t agree with any measures to help the economy, if it meant creating more currency.
Ok, I understand what you’re saying now.
In answer to your question, I don’t know, but I can make an educated guess it won’t bode well for the new administration.
Well, hopefully, Shelton will never get approved and Biden will withdraw her from contention.
I keep reading this thread title as “Trump wants to put nun on fed reserve board.”
Frankly, either version is believable with Trump.
I’m just going to leave this here, for those of you looking for a simple explanation of the gold standard. I mean, if you don’t get it after Beast-Boy-as-leprechaun explains it, you’re not going to get it.
As David Frum writes in the Atlantic, it can be interpreted as McConnell’s first act of sabotage against Biden. Sounds plausible to me. If I had a face like McConnell’s I too would cut my nose to spite it and divert attention from its uglyness.
Which is not the worst way it can be misread!
I keep seeing the same thing.
I must be an innocent. How are you misreading it? Inquiring minds want to know.
Trump to nut on fed reserve board
Had never heard that term with that meaning. Today I Learnt…
That use of “nut” is new to me too. Yuck.
I meant I kept seeing “nun” despite the fact that Trump & nuns don’t exactly go together mentally.
No, that’s nonsense. Going to a gold standard wouldn’t necessarily change anything in the short term. If the spot price of gold is currently $1000/oz (for example) and we go to a gold standard at that price, it just means that the dollar is by definition worth 1/1000 of an ounce of gold. It doesn’t change the value of anything overnight.
What it does change is how the money supply grows and shrinks in the future. And basically all of the ways in which it changes that are worse than what we have now.
It does potentially make people with gold mines a lot richer, but not because they own a bunch of gold that’s in the ground, but because being a central banker is a potentially very lucrative position, and taking that job away from central bankers (who are constrained by law not to make business deals and then screw with interest rates) and giving it to random people who happen to own the machinery by which rocks are turned into gold is really fucking stupid.
I knew perfectly well as soon as I saw the title what the thread is actually about; but nevertheless every time I see it I keep imagining the federal reserve as having a cheese board, on which, in the middle of a varied arrangement of cheese, Trump is carefully placing a single nut. I usually seem to imagine it as a shell-on walnut.
Why wouldn’t the price of gold need to reflect the amount of gold currently available versus the current money supply?
If everyone turned in all their dollars for gold then the price of gold would need to reflect that which would dramatically inflate the price of gold.
Certainly not everyone would turn in their paper dollar for gold but I don’t see why an arbitrary price fixes anything.
You’re saying that the only way to have a gold standard would be to take the amount of gold the US government currently holds and the amount of outstanding currency in $ and divide one by the other to get the price of gold, but I don’t think that’s true.
That is: You can have a currency pegged to the value of gold without giving holders of dollars a right to convert them to gold at that price. That implementation has other issues, but I think that leads us back to what we both tend to agree on: a gold standard is a bad idea.
I thought the underlying tenet of the gold standard was that you had fixed reserves that could cover all outstanding paper currency. If true, then I don’t know how you get around the issue that @Whack-a-Mole spoke about. Otherwise, what’s the purpose of the gold reserve?
I could be wrong about this, but I think the two things are at least somewhat independent.
A very brief summary of my understanding of the US monetary system and gold:
Prior to 1933, the US had gold reserves and anyone could turn in dollars for gold at a fixed price.
After that, until around 1970, the US had gold reserves, the dollar/oz rate changed a few times and citizens were not allowed to demand gold from the government for their dollars, but the dollar was still “backed” by gold, in the sense that there was enough gold around to cover every outstanding dollar.
After that, gold was just a commodity that people like, and the dollar is backed only by the government’s promise that it will put you in jail if you don’t pay it taxes in dollars. We still have gold reserves, because gold is a useful thing to have around sometimes.
So, from 1933 to 1970 we were sort of on a gold standard in that we had enough gold and defined the dollar to be worth some set (but occasionally changing) amount of it, but we didn’t let people buy it, so it was sort of immaterial.
We could, at some point in the future do that again, but without actual reserves to back it. The government simply has to sell dollars for gold at a fixed rate in order to have the parts of a gold standard that most gold bugs want: a central bank that doesn’t have the power to inflate the money supply. Buying dollars with gold is also a feature that some gold standards have, but it’s not a requirement. The fact that the US has more dollars out there than gold in a vault is fine as long as it refuses to make more dollars without getting gold in return.