You're likely to get a lot of opinions in response to this question, ranging from highly-educated to not-so-highly-educated to strongly opinionated to laughably wrong. The important thing to remember is they're all opinions, not facts. Milton Friedman himself could come in here and expound for a thousand words and it would still be an opinion. Paul Krugman could write a thousand words explaining why Milton Friedman is full of shit and it, too, would be an opinion. Ever see Goldfinger? That awesome James Bond with the air vixen named Pussy Galore and her merry band of Cessna-flying femme fatales? The idea being to knock out half of Kentucky so a dude with a weird hard-on for gold could drive a nuke into Fort Knox and irradiate the US gold reserves thereby driving the financial markets into total chaos because ZOMG what would happen if bank notes weren't convertible into gold? Yeah, turns out the supervillian's name was Richard Nixon. The results were so fucking boring they don't even teach them in history class. Shit, they don't even teach that shit in macroeconomics. Which is not to say it wasn't a monumentally important event in the financial history of the world, but is to say that "monumentally important events in the financial history of the world" tend to play out in a lot less interesting ways than the WSJ business page would have you believe. The takeaway, however, is this: the effects of abolishing Bretton Woods weren't well understood then and are still argued about now. Every election, some Republican or Libertarian floats the notion of returning to the Gold Standard (which we abolished back in like the '30s) because people just don't fucking understand economics, even the ones that have Nobel prizes in them. So what happens now is kind of the big experiment. My GUESS? Excess emphasis and punctuation because it's exactly that - a guess - is that you'd rather have your money in dollars or pounds than in euros. I'm also going to guess that holidays in Greece are about to get a lot cheaper but also a lot less pleasant. Mediterranean Europe has historically shown a penchant for authoritarian strongmen and authoritarian strongmen generally arise out of economic chaos. Then people flee, dissidents go on one-way helicopter flights, poets write banned poems that Amnesty International publishes and 40 years later everyone talks about Greece's "Lost Years." But it's a guess. It's all a guess. My guess counts for as much as your guess counts for as much as Paul Krugman's guess counts for as much as Ernst Stavro Blofeld's guess. Dollars to donuts every capitalist you know is trying to figure out how to monetize it, however, so expect the markets to be rowdy tomorrow.
What to watch for, I wonder? Is it as easy for this to happen in this interconnected day and age? Surely it'll be different this time around...Mediterranean Europe has historically shown a penchant for authoritarian strongmen and authoritarian strongmen generally arise out of economic chaos.
Exactly, what to look for in Greece's case? At which stage do you cancel your holiday? Burnings of northern European politicians in effigy, or something more serious? It's difficult to imagine an EU member state to which I can (almost) hop on a plane without a passport going to pieces like that. Greece seems very much 'one of us', unlike the 'other' that is everywhere East of the Med. Not least their NATO membership. But I'm aware that we blindfold ourselves to stuff we don't want to see until it's too late, and then we all find it terribly inconvenient when we can't get feta and wonder 'how could this have happened?'.
Speaking as a spectator of history: In eighth grade, we went from "Ollie North on trial" to "Fall of the Berlin Wall." In ninth and tenth grade Europe and Asia gained a couple dozen new countries. In eleventh grade Soviet troops shelled the Kremlin and then, four months later, dissolved the USSR. Shit moves quick. In 1998 the only magazine writing about the Taliban was Glamour. Three years later we're bombing them.
For all that talk about opinions (as opposed to facts), you sure don't mind snarkily implying that the gold standard is (factually) a bad idea. So it's bad because "we" [1] abolished it in the 30's (or '71, perhaps)? Or people are only suggesting a return to it because they just don't fucking understand economics? That's rich, considering all you really need to understand about the gold standard is that it prevents governments from printing money as they please, which means for example that there won't be any insiders with first access to newly printed money, benefiting at everyone else's expense. They can use "free money" to buy "non-free" things, and will cause inflation in the process. [1] Who's "we", by the way? People always keep talking about how "we" do this and we do that, as if they couldn't tell the difference between people who have political power, and the rest of us who don't. In reality, WE, the people, are being ruled over. We don't call the shots. They do, and they'll be doing things that are in their self-interest (and against ours), like abolishing the gold standard.Every election, some Republican or Libertarian floats the notion of returning to the Gold Standard (which we abolished back in like the '30s) because people just don't fucking understand economics
And I'm the only one in the world to do so. Got it in 2. And then provided an example. And that's why you're muted and ignored now.For all that talk about opinions (as opposed to facts), you sure don't mind snarkily implying that the gold standard is (factually) a bad idea.
Or people are only suggesting a return to it because they just don't fucking understand economics?
That's rich, considering all you really need to understand about the gold standard is that it prevents governments from printing money as they please, which means for example that there won't be any insiders with first access to newly printed money, benefiting at everyone else's expense.
So lots of people saying that human feces tastes good would make it true in your mind? And making an obviously true statement about the gold-standard's benefits serves as an example of someone not having a clue about economics? Yeah, good riddance, psycho.