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Comment by Turing_Machine | Hacker News Reader

> All currency is made up. Even gold, or bitcoin, or giant rocks

Yes, but gold, bitcoin, and giant rocks can't be inflated at will, which is what the OP was complaining about.

Simulated pieces of green paper can.

Even with the formerly-used real pieces of green paper, there's a physical limit to how fast printing presses can run.

With simulated pieces of green paper, you can just type some numbers into a computer and suddenly there are twice as many of them as there were before. Or a hundred times as many. Or a trillion times as many...

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Okay, but creating money at will is not a bug, its a feature.

I know there is this myth of the "no crisis ever during the gold standard era", but this is false. We had a crisis every ten years or so, sometime way bigger than the 2008 crisis despite the economies being less interconnected. And those crisis sometimes were entirely disconnected from production issues, unlike 2008 that is clearly linked with the conventional oil/gas peak. Because having liquidity that allow easy trading of ressources actually help recover faster and avoid made up crisis like the 1893 one in the US.

From my limited knowledge, I don’t believe hard money advocates would say there are never any crises, but instead that they are shorter lived and not as large.

> […] but instead that they are shorter lived and not as large.

Which of course does not match the historical record:

* https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/08/why-the...

* https://archive.ph/FWKcL

The article presents two graphs of arguably manipulated/unreliable CPI rates, and that's somehow being using as evidence for whether crises are larger or smaller? The article from the beginning uses obviously incredibly biased language throughout, it's a pure opinion hit piece; the author isn't even attempting to present an impartial view on the topic.

It always amuses me how strongly people come out in opposition to the idea of the gold standard, when it demonstrably seemed to work for America, it powered the country from the time it was a collection of colonies to the time it had men driving buggies around on the moon. The country was on the gold standard for hundreds of years. Coming off the gold standard is the experiment, is the outlier. The gold standard obviously worked well enough for that vast majority of the country's history, yet it's somehow regarded by certain people as an obviously horrible idea which is gross, repugnant, "a barbarous relic that belongs in the dustbin of history". It just doesn't add up. If it's such an insanely horrible idea, how did it work so well for so long?

> The article presents two graphs of arguably manipulated/unreliable CPI rates […]

And you can tell this because… ?

> […] the author isn't even attempting to present an impartial view on the topic.

Neither would someone who was arguing the Earth was round.

> It always amuses me how strongly people come out in opposition to the idea of the gold standard, when it demonstrably seemed to work for America, it powered the country from the time it was a collection of colonies to the time it had men driving buggies around on the moon.

No, it caused some huge boom and bust cycles, deflationary periods, and much suffering. It certainly made the Great Depression worse:

* https://www.nber.org/papers/w3488

Gold-as-currency was useful when we didn't know better, but we've moved on. See The Power of Gold: The History of an Obsession by Bernstein for a good history:

* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/249245.The_Power_of_Gold

The Atlantic article mentioned the necessity to abandon gold standard temporarily in order to fund WW1, however the American people did not want to enter the war and were unwilling to fund it directly.

An alternate telling would be that abandoning the gold standard allowed the government to circumvent the will of the people and enter a war there was no appetite to get involved in.

> […] circumvent the will of the people and enter a war there was no appetite to get involved in.

You may wish to re-examine that claim:

> Germany also made a secret offer to help Mexico regain territories lost in the Mexican–American War in an encoded telegram known as the Zimmermann Telegram, which was intercepted by British intelligence. Publication of that communique outraged Americans just as German submarines started sinking American merchant ships in the North Atlantic. Wilson then asked Congress for "a war to end all wars" that would "make the world safe for democracy", and Congress voted to declare war on Germany on April 6, 1917.[4] U.S. troops began major combat operations on the Western Front under General John J. Pershing in the summer of 1918.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_entry_into_World_War_...

The declaration passed 82-6 in the US Senate, and 373–50 in HoR:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_declaration_of_w...

Sound like a fairly popular action.

They are even more wrong than i thought then. The longest crisis was caused directly by hard money, it lasted more than twenty years.

And it was NOT a production or energy crisis. That what people seems to not understand. Yes, 2008 was a bubble, but a lot of bubble bursted since the 70s and none of the burst created a depression like 2008. The only reason 2008 was this big is because it was an energy crisis, almost four time worst than the oil crisis of the 70s (which is also the first energy crisis). The gold/silver standard manufactured crisis (not helped with fractionnal banking tbh) that had no reason existing at all. Just made people poorer by design. This wasn't even caused by a famine or a war.

Here is my advice: unless the expert/advocate is an historian specialist of the 19th century (or even better: specialist of foreign trade or economics during the 19th century), do not believe anything he said. Don't believe me either, but "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it", so look it up, just read on how interesting where the time of hard metal, how easy it is to raise interest rate without impairing trade when you have a gold standard. 19th century financial crisis in the western world despite the huge production boost from pillaging colonies workforce and ressources...

> creating money at will is not a bug, its a feature

Despite the stupid downvotes, this is true.

Of course the mechanism can be abused by printing money that are not backed by real growth (like in the US), but most countries don't do that.

In reality, only 13% of our planet’s population is born into the dollar, euro, Japanese yen, British pound, Australian dollar, Canadian dollar or Swiss Franc. The other 87% are born into autocracy or considerably less trustworthy currencies. 4.3 billion people live under authoritarianism, and 1.2 billion people live under double- or triple-digit inflation. [https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/check-your-financial-pri...]

Since 1920, at least 55 hyperinflation events have taken place, destroying savings and creating economic hardship. [https://assets.website-files.com/614e11526f6630959fc98679/61...]

A stable currency and strong property rights are the exception, not the rule.

> Yes, but gold, bitcoin, and giant rocks can't be inflated at will, which is what the OP was complaining about.

Governments have been fiddling with metal-based currencies going back to Ancient Rome and Han China:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seigniorage

Never mind what the general public has done as well:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methods_of_coin_debasement#Coi...

See Bernstein.

> With simulated pieces of green paper, you can just type some numbers into a computer and suddenly there are twice as many of them as there were before. Or a hundred times as many. Or a trillion times as many...

Yup, and that's how private banks create loans and mortgages:

* https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/quarterly-bulletin/2014/q1/m...

Central banks do not create the money that the public uses in the economy, and the only money that the government creates is coins and bills via the their mints.

Also, have you ever asked what happens when there isn't enough money?

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Slump_(15th_century)

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Bullion_Famine

* http://www.nber.org/chapters/c11482

And it's not like 'hard money' brings any more stability:

* https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/08/why-the...

* https://archive.ph/FWKcL

"Fiddling with" is not the same as "can create arbitrarily without limit". You're still not addressing the OP's actual complaint.

Governments can (and has!) "created arbitrarily without limit" metal currencies too. Given their monopoly on violence, they can just say "this coin now pays for ten pigs, not one, as you thought before". (Of course, they'd also decrease required tax payments correspondingly to maintain stable inflation.)

But haven't such debased currencies fallen out of favor, more often than not, in favor of those currencies that have not been debased, for example, the Florin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florin

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