Gold Standard

Could new gold discoveries cause a (small) boom-bust cycle if the gold hit the loan market before other sectors? Bill Barnett and Walter Block join Bob Murphy to discuss. 

That Bretton Woods was called a gold standard was an exercise in obfuscation. It happened for the same reason that NAFTA was called free trade. The state has long used the language of the market economy as a plow to push through its opposite.

Reinstating the mark, a peaceful act by a sovereign country, would create a cascade of monetary reform throughout the world. Europe's trading partners would find the cost of necessary imports rising in terms of their local currencies, forcing them to adopt fiscal and monetary responsibility.

Americans have benefited mightily by holding and trading with the world’s reserve currency, though most people haven’t given it a thought. No one remembers when the pound sterling held this distinction a hundred years ago. 

Mises grounds his balance-of-payments analysis on the insight that it is a monetary concept.

Americans have benefited mightily by holding and trading with the world’s reserve currency, though most people haven’t given it a thought. No one remembers when the pound sterling held this distinction a hundred years ago. 

A store of value is not necessarily a medium of exchange, and in our current fiat money system, gold is not money. But it has most of the desirable properties of money, and there is much to learn form the process of how it became money in the past.

A store of value is not necessarily a medium of exchange, and in our current fiat money system, gold is not money. But it has most of the desirable properties of money, and there is much to learn form the process of how it became money in the past.

Yes, it can happen here. Only a fool thinks otherwise.

A free market in money means real freedom to choose what money we use.  This may mean people turn to gold and silver. Or they may turn to crypto. What's important is that it's market-based money.