MacLorry -
Your understanding of this subject is far to simplistic. The links that you site are quite accurate but they do not conflict with what I am saying in any way. It is obvious to me that you have no idea of what role the worlds reserve currency plays in helping to establish the exchange rates between the currencies.
I've shared a few links with you that you claim are accurate, but don't deal with the role the world's reserve currency plays in helping to establish the exchange rates between the currencies. Well you can fix that by posting some links to that information. BTW, did you know the Euro is also a world reserve currency and now makes up over 25% of reserve currency holdings compared to 62% for the dollar.
History is very clear on this. Every fiat currency ever devised by man has failed. The average life span of a fiat currency is 40 years. We went off of the gold standard in 1971 and thus as the worlds reserve currency, so did all of the other currencies in the world.
The part many miss is that all paper or computer currency is fiat currency, even if it's backed by gold because the government establishes the exchange rate by fiat. Don't think so, check out this link to the
Gold Reserve Act of 1934. You'll find that gold went from $20.67 per troy ounce to $35 by law (fiat). Once you understand that then it shouldn't be surprising to learn that all gold backed money ever devised by man has likewise failed. So what are you suggesting, that we go back to caring coins around? It's going to be real hard to order something on the internet with only physical money.
However, the country would have been much better off to take our lumps now and get on with a real recovery. All the Fed is doing is delaying the inevitable. Japan was in a similar situation 30 or 40 years ago and also tried to avoid the financial pain needed to recover. As a result an entire generation of Japanese have had to suffer through a lifetime of depressed economics and they are still no better off today
I hear that a lot, but it's too simplistic. Our economy is complex and in some ways like a living organism. A hard enough blow would collapse the economy just like a hard enough blow can kill a living organism. All the same elements that were in place prior to the hard blow are still there, but once the process is stopped the economy collapse just like the organism dies. Better to spread out the hard blow to tolerable levels so that economy can survive, heal, and grow just as with the living organism.
SodFarmer, one thing I like about folks like you is that we can disagree without all the personal attacks. As you can see from my links, such a discussion does send me into research mode, and sometimes I do find that I'm wrong, and even when that's not the case I still learn things. Of course some people don't want to be challenged by other views so they put people on their ignore list.
I'll just add that it's understandable that people are worried about the debt, which is basically borrowing from the future, but if you study up on just what wealth is and how it's created you'll discover that mankind lived in relative squalor until they learned how to take from the past at a grand scale at a place called Coalbrookdale. We could have another long discussion about that and what it means for the future, but I would end up on a lot more ignore lists.
