Might I humbly suggest that by the time this is all over, GDP will have proven to be a bubble like everything else.

There are lots of trades that would not contribute to GDP in a truly free market. Market commentators, who serve masters that rely on more and more resources coming under the control of Money would have you believe that nobody will be able eat or find shelter without those green pieces of paper.

We need to take Money out of the equation for the basic needs of life. This could be socialism, anarchy, punitive taxation under a capitalist regime, whatever.

If people stopped using unearned wealth to purchase beads and whiskey, you’d be looking at a very different economy with much more self-reliance, and energy and materials efficiency on the individual scale.

30 kilotonnes of gold above ground translates to 5 grams of gold for everyone on earth. Most of them would not need it if they were self-sufficient.

I see it as just one more attempt to introduce complexity in an already overly complicated system.

Faster, harder, bigger exponential failure in ever increasingly shorter time frames. I liken it to the fly, used for their short life cycle in order to view genetic out comes. We are introducing this shorter time line in our our activity’s via better tools/efficiency on a incressing scale and as far as I can see its not working out so well for the human race.

Remember the Universe makes the rules not the other way around. We befoul that which gives us life for momentary/monetary gratification on a one life time scale. If we are the fly and the scientist is watching, I would bet he is scratching his head right now. To what end is this behaver productive in regards to its species continuation/evolution.

Exponential out comes with human activity’s is getting on the high end of scale and I believe all here understand that simple mathematical out come. Thats the Universe at work, try and bend its rules and suffer.

Other than that hope you are well Andrew.

Skippy

And I believe Henny because at this rate, all governments with keynesian and monetarist policies stacked on top of trade deficit policies are at risk of defaulting.

I guess we have a choice between Announcements from Authority re: “visible benchmarks”:

“Comrade citizens! Look at this pile of otherwise completely useless gold!”

vs.

“We proudly inaugurate this brand spanking new suspension bridge, linking two communities like a pair of hands! Both form _and_ function are beautiful, are they not?”

One reason gold convertability had such a hard time in the 1800’s was lack of proper long-distance communications. In our digital age we can make this work now.

JustinTheSkeptic

No, it occurs to me that there’s a benefit–we peg the dollar at some huge value, say $5000 to the ounce of gold. This would cause the dollar, and our debt, to be hugely devalued immediately relative to other currencies. Of course, we’d never be able to import another thing ever, but so what.