Not to mention the eradication of the last radical elements of the labor movement and the murder of civil rights leaders.
You’re wrong tho homie. The end of the gold standard was part of a larger project of capitalist globalization and the stripping of worker’s rights (ie neoliberalism). It wasn’t the root cause but all these dorks that care about the gold standard and the fed are correct in their distrust and anger even if they don’t have the analysis to actually explain why they’re bad things. Not to say that going back is an option, it isn’t, but the change was a link in a chain of terrible events for the US and global working class movement
Caused by the French loading up a destroyer with federal reserve notes, sailing it into New York, and demanding gold for them, as had been promised. The US had been printing money to pay for the Vietnam war and couldn’t give France the gold. Thus Nixon cancelled the gold standard and tragedy ensued for the American people.
I’ve been wanting to learn more about the French ship but details are maddeningly sparse.
Mostly true, but my understanding is they actually did give France the gold.
Then after that they changed the law to stop everyone else from doing it before their reserves ran dry.
"In August 1971, French president Pompidou sent a battleship to New York harbor to remove France’s gold from the vault of the New York Federal Reserve Bank and to transport it to the Banque de France in Paris. Soon thereafter, gold accounted for 92 percent of French reserves.
On August 11, the British requested that the Treasury remove the $3 billion of gold from the U.S. depository of Fort Knox to the New York Federal Reserve vault, where the gold of foreign governments was stored.
As Paul Volcker, who was then treasury undersecretary for monetary affairs, put it: “If the British, who had founded the system with us, and who had fought so hard to defend their own currency, were going to take gold for their dollars, it was clear the game was indeed over.”
When Nixon spoke on August 15, 1971, the U.S. held less than 10,000 tons of gold, less than half of what it once had."
https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3545&context=faculty_scholarship
What is even the argument here? The Fed prints money so therefore people get paid less?
“Printing money” is not what causes inflation but most people think it does
Is there something I could read/watch/listen to understand this better? I feel like I know this but lack the vocabulary to explain it in detail, or maybe I’m big dumb trying to convince myself I’m smol dumb
I don’t have any resources readily available that are easy. Capital, Vol II goes into how money markets interact with the capital circulation process but its extremely difficult and kind of old. I just recently saw a reddit that did do a good job of explaining it.
The problem is that two issues that it seems “common sense” to connect - currency supply and inflation - aren’t as relevant to each other as people think. It just sticks out sharply in peoples’ consciousness that in periods of hyperinflation (say early 1920s Germany oe Venezuela today) money and currency are heavily devalued and so the government response is typically to print larger currency denominations.
In a nutshell inflation is caused because capitalists decide to raise prices for whatever reason - typically because wages rise or the rate of interest fluctuates. The currency supply is controlled by the government, but the currency supply is not the same as the money supply. The currency supply is always a fraction of the money supply, as money can exist in forms other than physical currency.
The money supply is controlled by the banks, who generate, reduce, and issue money based off the demands of the money market and other factors such as inflation and interest rates. The Federal Reserve is essentially a cabal of public-private partnerships between federal and commercial banks that regulates the money and currency supplies, controls the federal interest rate, and attempts the keep inflation low (but not too low) at all costs.
The gold standard had to be ended so the USD could circulate globally as the world default currency. To make sure the USD moved around the world we had to do globalization and undercut a ton of protectionist polices a la NAFTA so that places like Mexico and Vietnam are spending dollars and not pesos or dongs. Now the US is the center of global capital but it’s workers are treated even more harshly than most European nations. OP is wrong and their take is antimaterialist
The argument is that we should go back to sound money because after it went off the gold standard things went bad. It’s wrong because things going bad was in reality a class project of the rich to re-establish a stronger dominance of society which is incidentally one of the same reason the gold-standard was developed.
http://www.supremelaw.org/authors/dodd/interview.htm
I was fortunate enough, to secure a position in one of the important banks in New York. I lived there. I lived through the conditions which led up to what is known as the crash of 1929. I witnessed what is tantamount to a collapse of the structure of the United States as a whole.
Much to my surprise, my superiors, in the middle of the panic in which they were immersed, confronted me. I was confronted with the question, “Norm, what do we do now?”
I was thirty at the time, and I had no more right to have an answer to that question than the man in the moon. However, I did manage to say to my superiors, “Gentlemen, you take this experience as proof of something that you do not know about banking.” And you better go find out what that something is, and act accordingly.
Four days later, I was confronted by these same superiors, with a statement to the effect that, “Norm, you go find out.” And I really was fool enough to accept that assignment, because it meant that you were going out to search for something, and nobody could tell you what you were looking for. I felt so strongly on the subject that I consented to it.
I was relieved of all normal duties inside the bank and, two and a half years later, I felt that it was possible to report back to those who had given me this assignment. So, I rendered such a report and, as a result of the report I rendered, I was told the following: “Norm, what you are saying is, we should return to sound banking.” And I said, “Yes, in essence, that’s exactly what it is that I am saying.”
Whereupon, I got my first shock, which was a statement from them to this effect: “We will never see sound banking in the United States again.” And they cited chapter and verse, to support that statement.
What they cited was as follows: since the end of WWI, we have been responsible for what they call the institutionalizing of conflicting interests. And they are so prevalent inside this country, that they can never be resolved.
This came to me as an extraordinary shock because the men who made this statement were men who were deemed as the most prominent bankers in the country. The bank of which I was a part was spoken of a Morgan bank. Coming from men of that caliber, a statement of that kind made a tremendous impression on me.
