Going back to a gold standard will limit the money supply. This means that there will be less capital for building $thing.
A gold standard means that when the economy gets overheated it pops, then contracts and you get deflation. This makes crashes last longer and harder. It requires greater fiscal discipline to overcome.
The problem with the USA "empire" is that for a trading empire to work you need a plan, and stick to it.
China has been quietly debt trapping a whole bunch of nations that have strategic things they need. They have been investing in infra and leasing it back to the host country. That takes planning, money vision and time. Something neither the president or congress have the ability to do.
The USA in the 40/50s played a blinder, neatly using war debt and the martial plan to usurp the exhausted british empire's trading power. The dollar became the global reserve and all of the new global institutions were setup and housed in the USA.
And a dictatorship. Democracy does not fit very well with long term plans, unless you either make huge efforts to ensure everyone gets their fair share (see Scandinavia) or you have a good plan for people being rich with not too much effort (see Switzerland and other tax havens).
Concerning the USA, the divide between the extra rich and the general poor is nowadays too large to have a functioning country.
And even then. Little reported: Switzerland's largest private bank was forced by the government to take over its rival's assets. Why "forced"? Something something Archegos. The truth is that we don't know what UBS saw and didn't like in Credit Suisse's files, and we won't know for a long time, as the report for the investigation into what actually happened during the acquisition has been sealed for 50 years.
Suffice it to say that the debacle presents circumstantial evidence that "rich with not too much effort" might encourage dangerously laissez faire behavior.
And further than democracy, the universe doesn't guarantee long-term anything. Sensible regimes (being democracy or else) seems intrinsically more aligned with that. Except maybe clear catastrophes that require "homogeneous" actions / behaviors (like asia approach to the covid 19 pandemic)
Wrote this a while back on this forum. Long term winning has nothing to do with growth. It has more to do with stability. Just don't fight wars and have smooth transition of power.
This more or less guarantees winning on the very longer run.
You still have gradual decay, which can unfold over centuries, and that is ok, but that is cyclical and you rise back in a century or so.
The real issues with the US/West is wars, too many of them. Even if the dollar standard guarantees a money printer. Its not exactly free. Triffin dilemma de-industrializes your country. Your politics has too much ego to stop fighting. In the meanwhile you lose industry, stability, time and just don't have focus for things that matter. Somebody who is more sane wins in the meanwhile.
UK really needed to build more industries instead of fighting WW1/2. Its a shame that Churchill won above Chmaberlain/Halifax. You get the fake thrill of winning a war, you shouldn't have even gone into, destroyed yourself fighting, all for some fake sense of bravado which led to your disaster.
If things go South for US from here. George Bush will likely have the same standing in history.
tl;dr- If you are winning, keep it that way, and don't fight wars.
Sure. They say the best form of government is a benevolent dictatorship, while the worst form is a malevolent dictatorship. The problem is that the former almost always turns out to be the latter in disguise, or at least devolves into it rather quickly.
What a ridiculous statement. Any dictatorship is a subpar expression of a state. We don't have to figure out the best government. We already have all kinds of ideas about this collected from millennia of thought on this subject. We just have to study and bring it into reality.
> We don't have to figure out the best government. We already have all kinds of ideas about this collected from millennia of thought on this subject.
Except for 99.9% of those millennia, humanity had very different challenges than it does today. One of the biggest being effective communication between people. There's a reason the U.S. constitution talks about sending delegates to Washington D.C. Another being an abundance of basic necessities that simply did not exist when Voltaire was writing. Increased globalization, vast changes in technology, bitcoin, AI, automation, social media, etc. Why would you assume political theory from even 100 years ago holds up in the face of all those differences?
And political theory, like history, tends to be written by the victors. What percent of all laws ever written were about maintaining the status quo for the people currently in power? It's a lot; I wouldn't be surprised if it's over 90%.
There's no reason to believe that humanity has "figured government out" by now. There's still plenty of room for experimentation in what works best in today's world. For example, why can individuals not collectively draft legislation, in the same way they can draft Wikipedia articles or open-source software? What would it take to make that happen?
The baseline theory of the state is exhausted. It's like figuring out how to build a car. We have all the ideas already, and the little innovative improvements are the cherries on top. We have quite a few modern political thinkers as well as ancient ones, not victors, but real critical thinkers and historians. As far as communication problem, yeah you may be right, but this is a problem of implementation, not architecture.
And come on, "Galadriel" and some mythical pharaoh? This is your argument-viable examples? I think a little too much fantasy is overtaking your thoughts; you might want to switch to non-fiction for a few months to balance yourself out.
Galadriel. She would be a great and terrible queen. All would love her, and despair.
> People that don't know any history?
For some reason, I find that people who accuse others of not knowing history tend to be the most ignorant of it themselves. History buffs don't seem to be walking around telling other people they "don't know any history". Just an observation.
For an example of a benevolent dictator, look at King Leopold II of Belgium, the Builder King. Loved by his people. Created the Royal Trust, donating a most of his properties to the Belgian nation. Brought culture and prestige to Belgium.
For an example of the atrocities of a malevolent dictator, look at King Leopold II of Belgium. The butcher of the Congo. Unbelievable exploitation and atrocities committed under his rule.
Or look at Ashurbanipal, the last "Great King" of Assyria, who built one of the greatest libraries in history; a collection of human knowledge surpassed in the ancient world only by the Library of Alexandria. And a genocidal maniac who spent months not just pillaging and raping opposing cities long after they had been defeated, but destroying any trace of the people who lived there, salting the land, and seeding the ground with weeds so that it would be impossible to ever re-build.
A wise builder-king with the power and drive to make the nation and world a better place for all its people would absolutely be the best government humanity has been able to achieve so far. Checks and balances are a necessity for a functioning government, but they do bog things down.
My point, of course, is that this is completely counter to human nature, and has (almost?) never been achieved, even in those times that it appears that it has.
>And a dictatorship. Democracy does not fit very well with long term plans
Say again? If we're talking strictly about the United States as per the article that inspired this post, the U.S. is a case study of a prosperous, remarkably stable democracy steadily increasing its prosperity, wealth, influence and power while also for the vast majority of its history investing for the long term and in vital infrastructure. This process hasn't been constant or evenly incremental but it has been there for (now) literally centuries.
The same could be said of Britain and many other developed countries on shorter but still reasonably long scales. On the other hand when you look at dictatorships in the wider scope of the modern era, the vast majority of them either invest explosively only to fail catastrophically at some point before reverting to some other variant of government, or countries that see their biggest failures happen during periods of dictatorship, and their major socioeconomic successes happen during periods of something at least approaching democracy and openness.
There are exceptions to the above tendencies in favor of democracy, but China can't yet be called such. It has had only 80 years under its present dictatorship (preceded by decades of warlord rule, weakness and chaos) and of those only the last 40 have been ones of relatively stable growth, investment in major projects AND concurrent increases in prosperity. Under Mao it invested in certain major projects, but at nearly cataclysmic social, economic and human cost. Hardly a model, in those days, of dictatorship being applied to patient, wise planning.
>Concerning the USA, the divide between the extra rich and the general poor is nowadays too large to have a functioning country.
Really? Feel like sharing the mechanism by which these claims of overly severe wealth inequality will make the US collapse any time soon?
Note also that as another comment above this mentions, the U.S has had more or less similar levels of said inequality for the last 100 years.... in which it functioned as a stable, relatively peaceful, democratic, increasingly prosperous society in which overall standards of living in absolute terms have gone up enormously.
In the US of 50 years ago, democracy was protected by codes of conduct, honor, and most importantly, strong content moderation in the form of monopolistic legacy media. All of this went out the door with the rise of social networks and the demise of legacy media. I don't see how democracy has the tools to survive populists with direct connection to the voting public.
Even if elections happen in 2028, there's a good chance the pendulum will swing the other way and instead of thinking about moving forward we'll be locked in left/right destructive cycles, with the resulting purging of institutions, dramatic shifts in policies and just chaos all around.
this is EXACTLY it. the rise of social media and demise of legacy media weaponized politicians to create flamewars over issues which are great for winning elections but have no real meaning for our day-to-day lives. wokeness, transgender athletes, how many genders we have on the web forms to choose from, how many "immigrants" are we going to deport... are entirely meaningless for 99.98% of the population. instead of talking about how to move the country forward the public discourse is now filled with meaningless "social wars." I do not see a way out of this and I am about as optimistic of a person as you'll find... I mentioned to my colleague few weeks back when we had to change the gender dropdown from tens of options to just two to just stash the changes till 2028 when we'll get 983 options for that same dropdown :)
Personally I don't see a use or benefit of large gender dropdowns. Either keep any existing m/f or simply remove it if you don't need to adress them as her or him. Imo making lists increases chances for stigmatization.
Most internet forms that ask for gender have absolutely no reason to care about that information. Basically, biological sex should matter to healthcare professionals, and gender should matter to virtually nobody. So yes, "simply remove it" should be the answer to this most of the time.
"Large gender drop downs" is a canard, three is a large number for the purposes of their argument. It's not about gender dropdowns of any size other than exactly two as it's about strict enforcement of a rigid, patriarchal class hierarchy.
Accepting "the purpose of a thing is what it does" is important for these times. So is avoiding the epistemic traps of disingenuous actors.
Didn't Ben Franklin have his own printing press promoting his views?
America's political class got complacent and lazy, and forgot that they have to sell what they were pushing to the American people. They never even FOUGHT the battle of ideas. As they age out/get pushed out new Ben Franklin with their own printing press types will rise.
Other part of it, yes, Benny F was quite an edgelord, but it took patience and drive in those days. You couldn't just drop a shitpost in 30 seconds, no, you had to lay out the shitpost in little tiny metal letters, and make copies of the shitpost, painstakingly, one at a time, to distribute. And people didn't come by much reading material in those days, so the shitpost was cherished when acquired. Generally speaking the supply/demand curve of the written word was very much different than it was now. Now, the writing itself and the distribution is automated by machines
>democracy was protected by codes of conduct, honor, and most importantly, strong content moderation in the form of monopolistic legacy media.
50 years ago? Perhaps some of what you describe applied, in very limited form and only if you view a small segment of the media/political landscape with extremely rose-tinted glasses, but go read more of U.S media history to see how completely off base you really are.
Media in the United states has spent most of its history being absolutely saturated with extremely yellow, scandal-mongering political hack journalism of the absolute most dishonest kind you can imagine (yes even in the age of social media). This was the case throughout the 19th century, the whole early part of the 20th century and it certainly applied 50 years ago, which would be roughly the late 60's to the 70s.
Overall, i'd say you have no idea at all of what you're talking about and pulled this funny notion out of nowhere for the sake of forcing an alarmist point.
50 years ago someone like Trump wouldn't have a way to obtain a platform from which he can amass a big enough public following. Anyone that wanted to play had to play nice with the establishment. 50 years ago, editorials mattered. Any messaging of a politician or candidate would be followed with context, analysis or discussion by journalists.
The establishment gave us the bay of pigs and then when that fiasco got them snubbed it killed the executive (or at least had something to do with it, I don't believe they literally did it). More recent examples include our adventures in the sandbox in the 20yr following 9/11. Or if you want to go further back you can look at the Catholic church in the 1500s.
I get that the establishment also sometimes does good things like create the EPA but it seems like those good things only ever happen after there's a huge amount of public screeching and that the default behavior is for the establishment to wage war and enrich itself.
The establishment should not be in bed with the media IMO. While the current fragmented media landscape is causing turbulence in the short term it is a good thing in the long term IMO.
Even more amazing when you consider that 50 years ago Trump was embarrassingly in the Enquirer quite often in situations not nearly as respectable as Stormy Daniels, and that was only the gossip they could corroborate. Much more was withheld from publication. People were mainly talking about the way he couldn't be trusted with anything. Plus him & Epstein were eventually running buddies at one point.
For decades the vast majority of those who even knew Trump existed were aware from the beginning he was a fake and it was just so curious to watch him take the pratfalls that he set himself up for. He only became widely known because he was such a complete failure compared to ordinary businessmen, and he would not shut up about how successful he was, it just emphasized how much he didn't have a clue and he was all PR. It was so cringeworthy people could not help but notice. Some things never change.
But under those media conditions he was merely a comic figure for the longest time. Bragging about how rich he is when he's actually bankrupt in more ways than one.
It just wouldn't have been very easy to build critical mass among people who would be willing to take him the least bit seriously. Especially about anything concerning money.
you really don't know what you're talking about. 50 years ago, Trump, or someone like him, being very wealthy outside of politics, could have just bought his own media source, or several smaller ones, and let em rip with yellow attack journalism while promoting his vision. Failing that, he could have made paid agreements with all kinds of supposedly "reputable" mainstream media sources to promote his politics. This is indeed exactly what a lot of dirty politics across the decades did and your vision of some golden age in which it didn't apply is completely false. This is particularly so considering how many mendacious lies and other garbage these same major media outlets sold to the public over decades on behalf of government. We should applaud their golden past? Get out of town.
Today at least, if anything, people have access to a vast plurality of views that despite many of them being absurdly mistaken at least through the mechanism of their existence let massive cracs rapidly open in any official or propagandist narrative. On the whole, this is what major media truly hates, while couching its complaints in fear mongering about misinformation.... Much of that fear mongering surged especially strong during the recent pandemic, while media at the exact same time promoted several major official narratives that were obviously politically motivated rather than being based on any thing resembling solid editorial standards.
This says it improved significantly from 1940 until 1980, then made a turn for the worse. So it's about the same as 100 years ago, but for a big part of that 100 years, it was better.
And what was happening then? In 1916 a socialist got 6% of the vote for president (by 1920 he was in prison, but still got 3% of the vote). You had the green corn rebellion, 1919 bombings, Seattle general strike of 1919, Boston police strike, steel and coal strikes, Palmer raids, first red scare. Then the 1924 immigration act and creation of the US border patrol (echoes of today), cutting off most European immigration. Then up to 1932 and the Bonus Army and sut down strikes and New Deal overwhelmingly affirmed in the 1936 election.
There was the same amount of inequality a century ago in the US, so what happened at that time.
...and about twice what it was 50 years ago. How have Sweden, Japan, France, etc. managed to keep income inequality around postwar lows while America hasn't?
Not sure, but it seems in France the situation in degrading. The same 1% being richer while workers / students waiting in line for food charity stories were common. Part of it might be due to COVID, but I can't shake the feeling that business management (influenced by anglo-saxon/american culture) is harder than before and squeezes employees. Not only a feeling, I worked on precarious jobs that shouldn't exist, and we saw employees having materially impossible daily duties (due to bad software unable to organize things).
I suspect that people self-manage a lot more if the pay is right. If they stop doing that it seems like you need a more expensive manager, or perhaps you do.
well partly but my comment was more systemic, a lot of "new management" was about naive quantitative approaches. measure stupid traces / outputs and forcing people to hit target objectives without looking at the workflow, tooling and team dynamics
people with enough skill and compatible mindsets need no management, they care, they will innovate, improve, repair
if the structure is at odds with that, they will ask to compensate the pain by large salary bumps because pleasure is turned into pain
If you are trying to pin a currency to a standard, gold isn't great. Its value is almost entirely speculative and it lacks meaninful intrinsic value at this point. If you demand to leave fiat currency, an aluminum or steel standard might make more sense. Rare earth metals, or even just petroleum would be my proposal. Maybe someday we will have a duterium pinned currency.
I think this shows the problem of non fiscal pegs - the value of rare earths or duterium is going to be impacted by technical change. For example let's say that a new processing technique means that a rare earth can be extracted at 20% of the current cost, or a new deposit is discovered. The whole economy is now flexed around this change... which has nothing to do with the economy.
I don't think that there is a fixed asset that could be suitable as a proper peg.
Helium? Finite supply that is only going down until we get off planet.
It seems like the actual value of gold is that it is useless, and thus not used up, and all the easy gold is extracted. We could just use numbers instead.
In fact there is no figurative gold standard for value or money. A pokemon card or let's say a banana duck-taped to a canvas can have a lot of value. All there is, is reputation and trust.
I think we need to move away from thinking of money as a store of wealth, but a indication of value. (wealth is a side effect, it will of course always be a store of wealth.)
Pegging currency to gold or silver gives it the illusion of being of a fixed value, that can't be gamed or changed. However history says otherwise. Its continuously mined, and there are industrial uses so Gold and silver's actual value will still fluctuate.
plus whilst tradeable gold is normally stored in vaults, there is still a boat load of "free" gold that can move around and cause monetary problems. Its a side plot of one of the James Bond books.
You also have to remember that even if there is a physical backed standard, banks still need to lend, which means that in practice it'll still be a fiat currency, just not centrally controlled.
"Intrinsic value" has not been considered part of the definition of money since The Wealth of Nations. Gold is good money, not because it has some sort of innate value or use, but because it has all of the properties that constitute what makes good money.
rare Earths have a pretty big downside of having huge swings in the supply when there happens to be a discovery. you want a pretty stable supply for a reserve currency / backing commodity.
oil is fairly difficult / expensive to transport and store, certainly at volume.
With the current communication capacity, "transport" isn't horribly relevant. Free exchange of any currency backing substance would be as bad as bitcoin for fraud. So why bother moving it? Oil changes owners all the time without going anywhere.
> Going back to a gold standard will limit the money supply. This means that there will be less capital for building $thing.
That's precisely the solution. The current state of the hollowed-out US economy is because of the zirp enabling a hollowed-out financialized economy riding on bloated stock prices and valuations. That is where that 'capital' came from. And like in every case of printing money, the bill eventually came due.
> A gold standard means that when the economy gets overheated it pops, then contracts and you get deflation
That can be fixed with other measures and regulations than enabling a scammy free cash economy that causes only hollowed-out bloat.
Not actually the case. The gold standard linked the expansion of the money supply to the price of gold, not the actual supply. So as the money supply expanded, every time gold was bought or sold through direct bank transfer, the price was influenced by the expanding deposit supply, not by the asset gold supply, and slowly increased, creating a nice little feedback loop. If you look at the figures for the gold standard period in the 19th-20th century, otherwise known as the British Monetary Orthodoxy, you will see a slow and steady expansion in the deposit supply in all countries using it. Trouble was, the expansion was a different rates in different countries, and so by the 1910´s the differences were tearing the invisible financial fabric apart. The rest as they say is history.
Banking systems being somewhat unstable and prone to credit crises is actually an entirely different problem, and unrelated to how the expansion is being regulated.
One wants the money supply to expand to match a growing economy. One way is to permit fractional reserve banking. Bank deposits can grow beyond the amount of gold, both increasing the money supply and creating the possibility of a bank going bankrupt. An alternative is fiat money: the King prints a limited amount of extra money to match the money supply to the growing economy and avoid deflation.
This is nice for the King because he benefits from the seigniorage. (But also potentially fatal, as he gives in to temptation to print too much and then some more, leading to hyper-inflation and the guillotine.)
Fiat money can be combined with fractional reserve banking. Now the monetary authorities can create extra money to overcome banking crises. Notice that society has a trade-off to make. Perhaps high reserves, so that the banks do not create much money, in which case the King/President will have to print extra fiat currency. Perhaps low reserves, and a small base of fiat currency. Now the banks create most of the money in circulation and get to charge interest on it, as an kind of on going seigniorage.
Which is best for the country? One off seigniorage accruing to the national treasury (due to printing), or the recurring seigniorage of interest paid to the banks on the money created by the fractional reserve system? There is something to be said for fractional reserve banking, as a kind of automatic stabilizer. If the economy contracts, there is a credit squeeze and the money supply contracts. Pick the reserve ratios and minimum lending rates correctly and it contracts the correct amount for price stability. And this works in reverse, expanding the money supply as the economy recovers, avoiding needless restrictions on growth due to deflation.
Experience shows that reserve ratios are too low, leading to economic instability. Why do we ignore this experience? Follow the money, low reserve ratios are profitable for bankers. We could have have a much more stable economic system with a two part strategy of 25% reserves and the monetary contraction implied by raising reserve rate being countered by printing the right amount of money.
This is why America is so schizophrenic with money and government spending. People who behave like they are in a gold standard when it's not and advocate for treating the government spending like a household are so loud. This is not how the system works as described by MMT. The abandonedment of the gold standard is explained by economic concepts like gresham's law and triffins dilemma.
And if you're willing to accept it for what it is, ask yourself about your own supply of money, what it is and where it comes from.
What are the current limitations if not gold any more?
And it hasn't been gold in quite some time, not just theoretically for a while.
How has that "unlimited" money supply worked out ever since?
Is there any other bottleneck somewhere that maybe is holding back that limitless supply of money from ending up in your pocket worse than if it was gold, which we know has always been so hard to come by that most people have never had significant amounts whatsoever since the beginning of time?
> How has that "unlimited" money supply worked out ever since?
It works very well when your currency is the world's reserve currency. You get way more latitude for printing money with much lower inflation vs some isolated economy win no deep reservoirs of unused currency in "reserves".
If the US loses the status of being the dominant reserve currency, the link between money supply and inflation will become much stronger. The USD is currently backed by the US hegemony , of which foreign policy is a big part of.
> What are the current limitations if not gold any more?
Inflation on one side, employment rates on the other. It's literally in most central banks' headline policy goals.
> How has that "unlimited" money supply worked out ever since?
Pretty well, seeing how it's largely coincided with unprecedented growth in living standards and helped us avoid what could have been a repeat of the 1930s due to Covid's impact on economies, among other things.
You're right, of course there are all kinds of of American families who have not suffered any downturns, some going back more than 100 years, without the "Great Depression" even slowing them down much.
But they're in the same boat as everyone else now, as far as guessing how many years til the next depression, whether or not it is overdue, by how much, and what happens this time.
None of this is settled economic theory. Even just the conclusion in the second sentence is highly debatable. Capital investments are a market and it is completely plausible that they will clear like any other with a fixed money supply, just at a different price level than with an expanding money supply.
yeah, it's really bizarre people think economics at this scale works with gold.
People really think humanity operates on some kind of fixed physical properties, when everything we rely on in modern society is not real. Borders are not real, the value we place on a human life is not real, the stocks and bonds arn't real.
They're all relative relationships with historical and future promises, reliant upon the trust we place in the means of proof and veracity, all of which are entirely human figments.
Nerds trying to fix problems that nerds seem to have created a wind on will go nowhere.
This not a problem of fixed economies of precious metals. This is entirely about what form of governance can tackle climate change, and the zeit geist has determined fascism everywhere, zombie apocolypse where huamnity needs to be as brutal as possible will win.
Europe is now the "heros" of the zombie apcolypses interacting with the "evil" humans who want to brutalize everyone into either submission or death.
> A gold standard means that when the economy gets overheated it pops, then contracts and you get deflation. This makes crashes last longer and harder. It requires greater fiscal discipline to overcome.
Kenyesian economics, through inflationism and fiscal policy, has been trying to solve this problem since the New Deal. When they actually make any progress on that front, why don't you let me know?
This is me letting you know that Keynesian economics solved deflation, making it less difficult to get out of market contractions (Note, the comment you refer to specified specifically deflation to be an issue, and did not claim that it solved bubbles and poppings completely nor reduced their frequency). The last time the US had faced significant deflation has been 100 years ago. We used to face deflation much more frequently before Keynesianism since our country’s founding.
Inflation sucks but deflation is a death spiral. There is some more nuance, but most economists would agree that deflation is a lot scarier in general than inflation due to its feedback loop.
Moreover, the reason why we keep getting rampant inflation is more due to neoliberalism and neoconservative economic/fiscal policy rather than modern monetary theory and Keynesian monetary policy. If anything, these monetary policies have massively reduced the amount of inflation we have been feeling for the past several years.
> Inflation sucks but deflation is a death spiral.
Do you actually have any evidence for this? Considering that we haven't experienced deflation in nearly 100 years, and all. The USA certainly wasn't "death spiraling" before we went off the gold standard, quite the contrary. But now it seems we are.
Because the kind of USD used in global trade (Eurodollars) has been decoupled from the Fed and its gold standard for a while before Bretton-Woods was abandoned through various mechanisms.
> This makes crashes last longer and harder. It requires greater fiscal discipline to overcome.
Isn't this a good thing? Otherwise, what incentive is there for financial discipline?
> The problem with the USA "empire" is that for a trading empire to work you need a plan, and stick to it.
Have stuck with it for over 75 years. Not too shabby. Also why is empire in quotes?
> China has been quietly debt trapping a whole bunch of nations that have strategic things they need.
I know the US and Europe has for centuries. Which ones has china "debt trapped"? Or are we sticking to the propaganda that china helping develop other nations is "debt trapping".
> Something neither the president or congress have the ability to do.
Neither the president nor congress sets the "plan" for the US. Do you really think trump gets to decide geopolitics? Do you really think congress decides the direction of the nation? Or do you think they listen to the elites who fund and control them? One has to be extraordinarly naive to think that a superpower with nukes is run by the masses.
The president and congress sells the plan decided by the powerful to the masses. It's why they exist. They don't plan or decide anything. Most of their time is spent raising money for elections. When do you think trump or congress has the time to develop any expertise in anything.
> Getting reelected because you managed to not tank the currency and economy.
That clearly that hasn't worked has it? Also, are you arguing against term limits?
Having to get elected is reason not to enforce financial discipline because people don't vote for those who promise financial discipline. People vote for those who promise more stuff.
> what incentive is there for financial discipline?
there isn't one. Banks need to lend as much cash as possible to make as much money as possible. A gold standard doesn't stop that, it just means that bailing out customers of those banks much much harder. hence why the FTC was setup. Its a rich history and well worth looking into
> I know the US and Europe has for centuries.
Not really, the last "european" style colonial system died in 1989 with the collapse of the USSR. Sure France does the whole "we'll administer your currency for a huge fee", bu that only works because they are ex colonies. Invading another country and turning it into a puppet state is much more costly than people think (see Syria, Georgia, Iraq, Afghanistan)
What china is doing is far more clever, far more effective, much less bloody and extremely profitable. just build a road, port, rail line, factory, mine. charge the host country a fee, bish bash bosh, massive growth for the host and china.
> Do you really think trump gets to decide geopolitics?
I mean he's not far away from deposing a president, and he's allowing another country to ethnically cleanse another(Biden did that too). Biden crashed russia's economy, Trump will un-crash it and let it re-arm to invade another country.
A gold standard means that when the economy gets overheated it pops, then contracts and you get deflation. This makes crashes last longer and harder. It requires greater fiscal discipline to overcome.
The problem with the USA "empire" is that for a trading empire to work you need a plan, and stick to it.
China has been quietly debt trapping a whole bunch of nations that have strategic things they need. They have been investing in infra and leasing it back to the host country. That takes planning, money vision and time. Something neither the president or congress have the ability to do.
The USA in the 40/50s played a blinder, neatly using war debt and the martial plan to usurp the exhausted british empire's trading power. The dollar became the global reserve and all of the new global institutions were setup and housed in the USA.