re: #151 Wendell Zurkowitz ((slave to the waffle light))

There are plenty of them who want the current economy to crash and be replaced by a new one based on the Gold Standard and without any government regulation or oversight of industry or finances.

There is literally not enough gold in the world to cover this country’s economy.

I remember reading somewhere that at this point, all of the gold that’s been mined since the beginning of gold mining wouldn’t cover it.

Let’s start by looking at how much gold there is in the world. When we look at the world gold council it says there has been about 158,000 metric tonnes of it ever mined out of the earth. Divide that by ounces and you get about 50 billion of them. From this, we can determine that it would be 24.4 trillion grains of gold, which sounds like quite a lot. The problem is we need to divide this by the population of the US to get the most equitable distribution of wealth we can for an example.

So if we divide it by the world’s population we get 80,270 grains per person. This number isn’t as impressive as the 24.4 trillion but it leaves more questions as to what this means. What any gold-based system would have to do next is determine how many grains are in a single dollar. Roosevelt set it to about 15.25 grains per dollar, meaning each person would have about $5,259 of gold per person in the US. Even that is assuming that the US held all the gold in the world.

This leaves the US with a money supply of about 1.6 trillion dollars. Even if this fictional scenario were true it would be totally debunked by the fact the US has a debt of 16.6 trillion dollars. It would be impossible to pay down the US debt. The claim is that the US would never be in this situation if we had a gold standard, but that’s speculation. Right here and now if the US went to the gold standard it would be impossible to pay off the debt.