this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2026
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Yeah big agree. Gold was also easy since it was a lingua franca commodity, instead of maybe a modern version being a basket of commodities backing a currency.
I understand the implicit reason they dumped the gold standard. Your industrialized economy can grow a lot faster than you can mine new gold out of the ground. Deflationary pressure meant there was pressure to print more paper dollars than there were gold backing them to stave off inflation. France calling the US' bluff on gold backing by repatriating their reserves certainly didn't help at all.
The big benefit though is like you said. You can't fuck with gold the same way as fiat. You can't magically make more, much like the current Iran conflict is going to crash the world economy because a bunch of idiots in the US think they can print oil...
Knowing you can't print gold is supposed to be a stabilizing influence on a country's fiscal policy. Don't fuck with your own currency lest you ruin it, cause a bank run, and debase it to being worthless and need to start over or borrow a foreign currency's stability.
A basket of commodities could be the way forward though... That's basically what the Petro-dollar is informally. But if you made some kind of international trade currency that was basically a warehouse receipt for X amount of gold, silver, wheat, barley, oil, sulfur, ammonia .et, that basically all countries use, maybe that would work?
Digital currencies like Bitcoin or other speculative assets just don't work long term...
I mean I understand the context behind abandoning the gold standard. Great depression and all that. And it worked temporarily, but it created more issues down the line, like cutting off the head of a hydra.
Now we can defer the consequences of bad fiscal policy by punting it down the road every few years, building the tower higher and higher without reinforcing the base. It's going to collapse eventually, and the higher we build it between now and then, the further we're gonna fall.
It's what enabled the "infinite growth" mentality of Reagan-era economics that still plagues us today.
Also, printing paper dollars doesn't stave off inflation. It only masks it on paper. The absolute value doesn't magically increase, it just gets distributed across more dollars. Which means each dollar holds less value, less buying power. Which means things cost more dollars. That's literally inflation.
A basket of commodities could work, if it's well-crafted and not hamfisted or skewed by corporate interests. Precious metals should have a significant portion of it for their stabilizing effect. Maybe 20-30%. Fossil fuels should be excluded, or at least minimized. Everything else should mostly be raw materials, preferably finite. Anything that can be produced has the risk of inflation. Crops, livestock, lumber, etc. should be okay to include, but not exceeding say 20-30%.
But things like computer chips should be out; use semiconductors and rare earths instead. Use iron and steel and copper, etc., but not springs and pipes and wires. If that makes sense at all.
And yeah crypto is bullshit, literally nothing that people hallucinate value onto by the magic of consensus reality.