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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: 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