I think much of that is quite backward. For instance, it’s the demand for US dollars that creates the status as reserve currency, not the other way around.
That site is peak-oil.org and is a perfect example of the adage that if all you have is a hammer then everything looks like a nail.
Peak oil is not quite a myth - he does refer to Peak Cheap Oil, which has some truth to it, but isn’t a looming crisis - but the collapse of the international banking system is. You can’t seriously write that the system has been in place since 1944 and should have collapsed 42 years ago when Nixon cut the last strings to the gold standard and be taken seriously for even five seconds. Once you have that as an assumption, every following conclusion will be wrong. Lo and behold, every following conclusion is.
Moral: if you see a reference to the gooditude of gold in an article purporting to be about economics slam it shut as quickly as a porn site with a virus.
Well, it’s not his argument - or Peak-Oil.org’s argument, for that matter - it’s just the first cite I chanced across: ‘exorbitant privilege’ is not exactly a new notion.
It’s only 18 billion a year. That’s less than the interest on the debt we incurred from the Iraq war.
At any rate, if we don’t have the money for a no fly zone in Syria, like others have said, we also don’t have money for infrastructure improvements or basically any thing in the budget. But we could eliminate everything except interest, Defense, SS and Medicare/Medicaid and still have a debt. We’d have to eliminate most of Defense as well if I recall correctly.
If we don’t have the political will to raise taxes, we will never have anything close to a balanced budget without reducing expenditures on the other three, whatever your thoughts on the morality of the situation.
It’s not a new concept. That does not make it right or wrong. Today there is no foreseeable counter to the U.S. dollar’s position. Is it true that in the long term it’s sure to happen? Sure. Which is why Keynes wrote, in the long run we are all dead.
None of that makes that particular article more accurate as a picture of today’s world.
Yep there are “forseeable counters”. It’s just not a subject you seemed informed about.
One relevant old adage goes like this:
If you owe your banker $1,000,000 then he owns you.
If you owe your banker $1,000,000,000 then you own him!
When I give an answer that is agreed upon by virtually all mainstream economists and you give an answer backed by a reference to someone who believes that going off the gold standard doomed the economy, the question of which of us is the informed one pretty much takes care of itself, doesn’t it?