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Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard
A bill recently introduced in Texas seeks to obliterate the Federal Reserve's much-maligned monopoly on currency by establishing gold and silver as legal tender — but the groundbreaking legislation, if passed, would also prohibit those precious metals from being seized by State authorities.
[...] Senator Bob Hall introduced the bill last month, which, the Tenth Amendment Center explains, "declares specifically that certain gold and silver coins are legal tender, and prohibits any tax, charge, assessment, fee, or penalty on any exchange of Federal Reserve notes (dollars) for gold or silver. The bill authorizes the payment of taxes and fees in gold & silver in certain circumstances. It would also prohibit the seizure of gold or silver by state authorities."
Would this matter in a nation where money is mostly plastic nowadays anyway?
Source: http://thefreethoughtproject.com/texas-bill-gold-silver-money-federal-reserve/
(Score: 5, Informative) by Runaway1956 on Sunday April 16 2017, @02:45PM (3 children)
The great depression was the result of buying on credit which was unsecured in any manner. Doesn't matter what the standard is, gold, silver, plutonium, sticks with notches cut in them, unsecured credit is risky. Unlimited unsecured credit is a recipe for disaster. THAT was the great depression - which differed little from the more recent depression of 2008.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 16 2017, @06:11PM (1 child)
There's even a name for that kind of stock market activity: Buying on margin [google.com]
the great depression - which differed little from the more recent depression of 2008
Previous bubbles which had burst were the result of "irrational exuberance", as former Fed chairman, Alan Greenspan named it.
The 21st Century version added another layer: Institutional dishonesty.
Mortgage lenders granted loans to folks they knew were unqualified.
They bundled those and sold them off as quickly as possible to greedy suckers looking for easy profits.
(Companies whose business it is to rate the quality of investments lied about those, compounding the problem.)
If there was any chance of a mortgage lender getting stuck with the crap mortgages, they would place bets against those with hedge funds.
...and none of the folks involved in this at the high levels have been sent to prison.
...or been put on trial, or been charged with crimes.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Sunday April 16 2017, @10:11PM
Perhaps the irrational exuberance was actually intentional exuberance to get people to loan and then bust so the assets later could be bought at a bargain for the people that really runs the show, albeit with huge discretion.
Just imagine if you had a lot of money to buy assets in 1930 when the market had just crashed. And had some insight into future earnings.
(Like in Timecop (1994) 13 minutes in)
...and none of the folks involved in this at the high levels have been sent to prison.
...or been put on trial, or been charged with crimes.
In other words the government is run by crooks. And after all if the congressmen and senators are informed of anything bad happening before the rest of the market because they get to sit on privileged meetings and get to trade without any insider charges. They have little incentive to fix the perverted incentives.
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Monday April 17 2017, @10:01AM
The great depression was the result of buying on credit which was unsecured in any manner
The debt wasn't unsecured, it was secured by something highly volatile. You buy shares worth $X. You can now borrow $X against the value of those shares and buy shares worth $2X. Because people are buying these shares, the value of your shares goes up and is now worth $3X. Your purchasing power is now $3X, minus the $X that you've already borrowed, so you can buy another $X of shares. If you need to repay the loan, then it's fine too, because you can sell the $3X of shares, repay the $X of loan, and walk away with $X of profit plus your original $X stake. The problem wasn't that they the loans were unsecured, it was that the value of the security was intimately linked to whether people were repaying the loans. If one person's loans were called in, then they needed to sell their shares to cover the cost. This caused the share price to drop and so other people now had negative equity and had to sell their shares to make margin calls. This caused a cascading effect and at the end most people's shares were worth far less than their loans. After that, because of the rush of sales, a lot of companies' market value was below their asset value and so people who had available cash or credit were able to buy them up in large quantities, helping to concentrate wealth in the hands of a small set of people.
sudo mod me up