let's say there's a world bank run on the federal reserve and surprise, we don't have any gold we single handedly ended the world as we know it. what are the odds someone nukes us at least once?

i'm thinking like 100%. right?

1/18/2013 3:56:29 AM

Quote :

"we don't have any gold we single handedly ended the world as we know it"

Can you repeat your question in English?

1/18/2013 7:38:11 AM

I'm thinking somebody was drinking.

1/18/2013 7:44:30 AM

I remember when Dr. Evil single handedly end the world. He had no gold, run on federal reserve and surprise!

1/18/2013 7:54:50 AM

"And when I come back, and bust your ass, we're locking David Ershon in the federal reserve!"

1/18/2013 8:14:22 AM

Nukes wouldn't be needed. It would ruin U.S. credit, which would ruin the currency, and you can guess the rest.

1/18/2013 10:01:01 AM

I agree with that. Not having the gold would be the nuke.

1/18/2013 10:20:23 AM

yeah that's my point, except the dollar collapsing will kill a lot of other currencies. like all of them, i think. we'd blow up the entire world, metaphorically, in this scenario. maybe russia is pissed and just starts launching.

and to clear up the english, it goes like this:
"surprise, we don't have any gold; we single handedly ended the world as we know it," said the federal reserve to world banks asking for their bullion.

1/18/2013 11:43:22 AM

Quote :

"the dollar collapsing will kill a lot of other currencies. like all of them, i think."

I know it's not intentional, but you are outright hilarious.

You know, value is relative. You can't put a price one something without giving it in terms of something else. Right now there is no other "currency" other than... currency. The demand for currency could decrease, and that would cause inflation. For that to happen, people would have to hold less cash in favor of other assets, or banks would have to increase leverage.

Currency could collapse relative to gold and other metals. Sure. But you need a little more information:
- total currency in circulation, the world over, is a little over $4 trillion
- global gold stocks are actually a little over $8 trillion

Gold has a slight (ha) disadvantage over currency that you can't buy anything with it. For the ratio of gold value to currency value to increase, we would be talking about gold VASTLY out-valuing currency. If that happened and the other world banks asked the US for their gold back, the US would tell them to fuck off. Our government already gets crazies asking to trade their cash back in for gold, and the answer has always been to fuck off.

So the only thing left is for the cash supply to increase through increased bank leverage - which is the most hilarious of all!

[Edited on January 18, 2013 at 12:09 PM. Reason : ]

1/18/2013 12:08:24 PM

Quote :

""surprise, we don't have any gold; we single handedly ended the world as we know it," said the federal reserve to world banks asking for their bullion."

It's silly to put the value of the entire world in gold. The world has many more resources than gold, for example food, land, labor, credit, etc. Who says gold is the only thing that has true value? Even more than that, what gives gold it's value? Other people thinking it's valuble. What gives dollars their value? The same thing.

1/18/2013 12:37:29 PM

Quote :

"Our government already gets crazies asking to trade their cash back in for gold, and the answer has always been to fuck off."

Not always. In recent memory, yes, and it's not a coincidence that we're in the biggest global debt bubble in human history. There's almost nothing preventing governments and banks from creating as much credit as they like.

1/18/2013 1:01:05 PM

and also a gold bubble

1/18/2013 1:02:32 PM

^^ true. I should have said since year so-and-so.

1/18/2013 1:05:33 PM

Serious question, and nowhere else really to ask it...

There is gold on the moon. potentially a lot of it. (same with platinum and other metals)

The problem is the high cost of retreiving it and returning it to Earth. What if it was extracted, processed into bullion, and then left in the most secure bank in the world (err), the moon? would people/countries buy in to having gold stored in the moon bank?

1/18/2013 1:13:03 PM

Quote :

"I know it's not intentional, but you are outright hilarious."

is that a slight compliment or an insult? please clarify.

1/18/2013 1:14:20 PM

^^ I for one, am ready to invest

1/18/2013 1:17:21 PM

Quote :

"Serious question, and nowhere else really to ask it... There is gold on the moon. potentially a lot of it. (same with platinum and other metals) The problem is the high cost of retreiving it and returning it to Earth. What if it was extracted, processed into bullion, and then left in the most secure bank in the world (err), the moon? would people/countries buy in to having gold stored in the moon bank?"

Why even bother extracting it? People aren't going to really be using it for anything other than trading it for goods, why not just have them lay claim to that gold, then just trade it on ledgers with one another? Why stop at the moon? Why not just start splitting up the gold that's probably on Jupiter? Each one of these is an improvement approaching the system we already have, which doesn't have to pretend that there is the same amount of resource whatever to back it up.

1/18/2013 3:05:17 PM

^

1/18/2013 3:26:20 PM

Yeah I don't think nuking the keystone nation of the world economy is the best way to respond to that.

1/18/2013 3:50:09 PM

Quote :

"Each one of these is an improvement approaching the system we already have, which doesn't have to pretend that there is the same amount of resource whatever to back it up."

It's almost as though our current system is designed so that we can purposely manipulate our currency's value to counter the business cycle and prevent recessions from turning into deflationary spirals.

[Edited on January 18, 2013 at 3:59 PM. Reason : .]

1/18/2013 3:58:50 PM

Quote :

"is that a slight compliment or an insult?"

I'm fairly certain it was a conceited insult.

1/18/2013 4:30:06 PM

Quote :

"It's almost as though our current system is designed so that we can purposely manipulate our currency's value to counter the business cycle and prevent recessions from turning into deflationary spirals."

So, now that we confirm that the system actually exacerbates (read: creates) the problems it is supposedly meant to prevent, we can scrap it. Great.

Worst depressions in the history of the U.S. happened under the Federal Reserve. Worse financial crisis also happened under the Federal Reserve, and the people running it had literally no idea that it was coming and insisted that no crash was coming.

[Edited on January 18, 2013 at 4:47 PM. Reason : ]

1/18/2013 4:45:46 PM

^I'm gonna take this opportunity to beat the "GDP targeting" drum (or some related metric targeting)

[Edited on January 18, 2013 at 5:31 PM. Reason : Gives the FED political cover to operate as it should]

1/18/2013 5:30:17 PM

Is that anything like the "dual mandate" of keeping low unemployment and low inflation?

1/18/2013 7:28:18 PM

Quote :

"Yeah I don't think nuking the keystone nation of the world economy is the best way to respond to that."

you didn't read anything i said. in this scenario we would not be the keystone nation of the world economy, we'd be the nation the ruined the world economy and had no capacity to produce or buy. we'd be an impovershed nation.

1/18/2013 7:47:09 PM

This is one of those threads I wish I'd seen earlier so as to kill it in infancy.

Now, despite itself, it has a modicum of legitimate discussion, so for now, it lives.

1/18/2013 8:44:01 PM

why would you kill this thread?

1/18/2013 8:59:48 PM

Quote :

"had no capacity to produce or buy. we'd be an impovershed nation"

When did that happen in your scenario? How did all of our resources disappear? How did all of our workers disappear? Where did our machines go? What happened to our land and buildings?

Quote :

"Worst depressions in the history of the U.S. happened under the Federal Reserve."

That's like saying the most car crashes happened in the first world. Being first world doesn't make you have more car crashes, it's just something that comes along with having more cars.

Think about this, no country in the world has the gold standard. Is it more likely that this is the result of a global banking conspiracy or simply because the gold standard doesn't work for shit?

1/18/2013 11:16:13 PM

If there's one thing conspiracy theorists are not capable of it's parsimony.

1/19/2013 8:03:52 AM

Quote :

"Is that anything like the "dual mandate" "

It would be simpler than the dual mandate. It would force the FED to react to conditions on the ground instead of attempting to "create" certain conditions.

1/19/2013 9:34:02 AM

^I agree with trying the automatic targeting measures, I just worry that they could be manipulated.

1/19/2013 3:46:36 PM

lets hope they dont nuke our gold.

makes a hell of a salted bomb.

1/19/2013 7:08:31 PM

^ I think there are more efficient elements to use for that.

Actually, come to think of it, no way of destroying the world is any better or worse than another.

1/19/2013 8:06:45 PM

I know at the least that on 23 September 1974, the world was able to see that Fort Knox still had its gold: http://www.numismaticnews.net/article/Gold_all_there_when_Ft_Knox_opened_doors

Also the United States has large gold reserves elsewhere, and at the New York Fed (with even more gold than Fort Knox) it holds gold for other countries: http://data.newyorkfed.org/aboutthefed/goldvault.html

America still has plenty of gold, even though its currency hasn't been based on it for many decades.



BTW the reason gold was historically so significant was that it doesn't react well with other materials (unlike silver, copper, or iron, which rust or tarnish), is easily divisible into smaller units, and has a high value-to-weight ratio because it is so rare (and it helped that until the rise of electronic devices, gold had little industrial use); the utility of counter-cyclical monetary policy following the Great Depression led to the loosening and eventual abandonment of the gold standard.

1/19/2013 10:00:34 PM

Quote :

"^ I think there are more efficient elements to use for that."

how much more efficient can you get than walking into someones gold horde with a nuke?

1/20/2013 12:11:30 AM

Quote :

"how much more efficient can you get than walking into someones gold horde with a nuke?"

I suppose you can't. It's definitely the most direct way to blow up gold and yourself. I can't think of anyway to blow up more gold than this plan. You would blow up so much that you wouldn't need to blow up any more.

Just think of all the vaporized gold raining down from the mushroom cloud. And they said I wouldn't do it. HA! They'll be eating those words as gold is raining down. They said I was crazy! They said the plan was pointless and completely arbitrary. They'll see just how pointless it is after all that gold is blown up.

1/20/2013 6:22:54 PM

I suppose you don't know much about isotopes of Gold.

1/20/2013 6:40:58 PM

The number of primary and secondary neutrons from the blast will be an insignificant fraction of the total gold atoms. I said it rains gold. If you don't know what you're talking about you should leave the conceit at the door.

1/20/2013 7:13:20 PM

I suppose you don't know much about Gold 198 specifically.

Maybe you should take your own advice.

1/20/2013 8:28:58 PM

Oh, so one neutron can transmute more than one Gold 198?

Please, go on.

[Edited on January 20, 2013 at 10:56 PM. Reason : ]

1/20/2013 10:55:23 PM

Please go on about how you know the size/configuration of the hypothetical weapon used in this retarded scenario?

1/21/2013 12:16:29 AM

Tell me more...

[Edited on January 21, 2013 at 8:53 AM. Reason : ]

1/21/2013 8:52:05 AM

What the fuck kind of thread is this?

1/21/2013 8:54:52 AM

Quote :

"Please go on about how you know the size/configuration of the hypothetical weapon used in this retarded scenario?"

The fact that you think the size/configuration matters shows that you didn't understand the very simple argument of "there aren't enough neutrons". No, there aren't enough neutrons from any nuclear weapon that's ever been made to transmute the gold bullion of any sovereign-scale Gold Depository.

1/21/2013 9:16:22 AM

Quote :

"So, now that we confirm that the system actually exacerbates (read: creates) the problems it is supposedly meant to prevent, we can scrap it. Great. Worst depressions in the history of the U.S. happened under the Federal Reserve. Worse financial crisis also happened under the Federal Reserve, and the people running it had literally no idea that it was coming and insisted that no crash was coming."

Lmao you're so insanely ignorant I can't even entertain it anymore. I might if it weren't so goddamn repetitive and predictable but goddamn. Now you're denying the existence of a business cycle unless the Fed is creating it.

[Edited on January 21, 2013 at 10:03 AM. Reason : .]

1/21/2013 10:01:29 AM

We had booms and busts before the Federal Reserve, they've just been much worse after. If there is a credit boom, there will be a contraction. You're overly concerned with treating the economic contraction and preventing any kind of market correction. I'd rather see policies that don't fuel the boom.

You can call it insane, but what I'm saying is perfectly reasonable. This isn't a conspiracy. The Federal Reserve does have periods where interest rates are extremely low, which means that money is flowing into some area of the economy and pushing up prices. Eventually, the people that bought products that had "too high" prices are going to get hurt when prices fall back to market clearing level.

1/21/2013 10:18:25 AM