Monetary theory

[mkm5]

I should add, you all do know the big banks are buying up real assets like homes, apartments, farmland, etc right?

Unfortunately, my retirement savings are in an account held by one of those three big banks.

So, they're using OUR money to buy real property and grossly inflating the price of buying a house or renting or farming.

This is the part of fractional reserve banking that really sucks. Instead of investing our hard earned dollars in stable markets, they're flipping the script and buying us out of our own homes with our own money/investments.

Think about that for a minute.

Mike

[gadders]

I think this gold thing might be a little more complicated than it appears.

Having a fixed amount of dollars leaves your currency, and country, vulnerable to speculators who can buy large amounts of the available currency. This is how Soros "broke the bank of england" he shorted the pound, and borrowed pounds to sell for other currencies, lowering the demand for pounds. The central bank of england had to raise interest rates to try to keep demand for pounds high. All in all it wasn't actually that profitable for Soros, he made 1 billion but had to sink 10 billion to do so. If it didn't pay off he was toast.
I'm sure some people here lived through it so would have actual memories of it, and we all know how unreliable "history" is of events like this so I'm all ears as to what it was like at the time. I'm probably in the minority but I think a hard pegged currency, gold or otherwise is a bad idea as it leaves you vulnerable to attack by international bankers and financiers. And things like that tend to get art school dropouts elected.

The reason the Bank of England had to raise currencies to keep demands for pounds high was because of the Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) that the UK had entered that forced it to keep the pound within a fixed-ish exchange rate to the Deutschmark. The UK entered at too high a level and struggled to keep their currency in the target range.


(The ERM was a pre-cursor stage to currency union and the Euro. Forcing Britain out probably did them a favour. This is probably the only time in history Soros has done something that is a net positive for the human race.)