How long would it take you to produce a house if you could not borrow the money to pay for it?
How long would it take you to buy a car if you could not get a loan to pay for it?
Living in a debtless society would be like living in a pond… or living in a small village where you would trade a chicken for a visit from the doctor. If you have never lived in a village and have some romantic notion of what it is like ask any of your immigrant friends to describe what they were willing to endure to escape from it.
How could an employer hire you and pay you without delay? A delay in payment even as little as an hour is a loan is it not? A company hires you and pays you every 2 weeks which means at best you have to wait 2 weeks to get paid after delivering your services. Companies pay off this labour debt every 2 weeks. Without debt you could not have any employment. Any delay in the transfer of the bartered services or goods whether it is by using paper money or gold to facilitate the transaction is debt. The recalcitrant gold bugs would have you think that somehow paper money is debt and gold is not. Silliness has no limits. Gold is not money because it is a commodity; a precious metal that is mined. Mining costs a great deal not only in labour and machinery but even more importantly the harm it does to our environment. They tell you owning gold is a must in times of crisis, but if you have gold and need food, you would have to find someone to exchange it for food and the specific food that you need from someone who is willing to part with their food… good luck! In times of crisis who needs gold? You need food, warm clothing, clean water, shelter and guns and ammunition. Gold’s value in a barter system becomes diminished. It is a commodity like any other that is traded. The question is: Who needs it in times of crisis? After the WWII in France, one ounce of gold bought you one ounce of chocolate. Perhaps it would be historically wiser to hoard some Mars bars instead of Gold.
If it is labeled as money and used as the medium of exchange or to back up the paper money as in a gold standard the holy grail of the unscrupulous miners and their minions, the value of gold would increase and would lead to greater mining activity around the world. With the price of gold at $1500 per ounce they can already profitably mine gold at half a gram per ton. What would happen when gold goes up to $5,000 or 10,000 or even 50,000 as some would have you believe? Mining gold at one tenth or one hundredth of a gram per ton? Might as well clear cut all of the rainforest in South America, Africa and anywhere else where tiny specks of gold are found or indicated! Drill baby drill or open pit open pit never had more fervent followers! Have you seen the state of the Brazilian rain forest lately? The gold bugs need to get a grip on their blatant hypocrisy and greed. They are lying to the masses they are worse than the wall street crooks these junior miners and their PR departments are more like a criminal enterprise than a business in my opinion. They consistently misinform and even the brightest and the most educated get sucked in to their campaign of lies regarding the need for gold beyond decoration. They use the banking crisis as proof to back up their claims while hiding under the “monetary responsibility” banner they call for much higher prices for gold and silver and for the reinstituting of the gold standard. Drivel based economics.
They spew out their hyped up drivel at every opportunity. Debt is good! Debt is the basis of our capitalist system. These goldbugs and anti feds or anti central banks smell like closet socialists. Or even worse closet anti-semites since they believe Jewish money lenders were dispersed from the holy temple by Jesus himself… These gold bugs get on their soap boxes and scream bloody murder at the Fed and the Central Banks by criticizing our monetary system as debt based as if it’s a bad thing, it may simply be thinly veiled anti-semitic rants.
Debt exists whether you like it or not. It is useful and plays an important part in our society.
It is not possible to live in a modern monetary system regardless if you use paper money or gold for bartering or clearing debts without going into debt for a period of time. Essentially gold as a tradable commodity represents debt; a debt that is collected when the transaction is complete. Gold has only an intrinsic value that we place on it. Just like paper money. The good thing about paper money is it uses way less of our precious resources to produce… we trade currencies and we trade gold and everything else. Putting so much effort in trying to convince people Gold is somehow magical and will somehow resolve the financial problems of the world is an outright lie!
Gold in itself is useless. Until you trade it for something useful it can be considered a symbol of an unpaid debt. This is where the notion of paper money and gold backed money merge. Gold can be considered debt backed as much as fiat money can be considered to be debt based. They are the means of exchange of productivity whether manual or intellectual as well as property whether building or land, goods, or commodities. Unless you are trading for gold to use as a personal adornment or to eat it as some do for some esoteric healing powers… then gold is a promise to pay at a later time. You hold it until you decide to trade it for something more useful. What a waste to use gold in this way. What a waste of resources!
In the Age of information and electronic transactions to use even paper money or worse metal based coins and worse use gold instead of electronic transactions is like going back to the age of the horse and buggy for transportation. Giddy up GoldBuggies!
gold is not a debt tho Skol - its an asset.
To that extent it is not better or worse than cash. you would never call a mortgage free house a symbol of an unpaid debt.
To me thats where silver operates as an even better version of gold as it has genuine use demand. It's more divisible as well.
Gold back over US$1600 overnight, a determined climb. The US$, not so good.
Lots of reasons in this article about why gold behaved as it did in the last few hours, most to do with exchange rates and short covering. Silver also ramped up.
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Originally Posted by airedale
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