Comments on " Fears over Treasury losing control of gold left in..."

[rs]

its vaults.

"The whole point of gold is that it's not somebody else's paper currency. It's the stuff that keeps you alive when everything else goes wrong," he said.

Wait a cotton pickin' minute... You cannot EAT gold, you cannot make tools out of it (because it is way too soft), you cannot wear it for clothing.

The only thing gold is good for is to make shiny trinkets for adornment and to make tarnish resistant electrical connections. Other than that, this whole "gold has been the currency of last resort for thousands of years" stuff is just horse hockey.

"We" are just being set up for the next bubble. The smart money (i.e. the treasury from above) has already set up to sell into the ongoing and coming gold buying frenzy, and when the dust settles, the rich will only be richer.

But it HAS been the currency for thousands of years. It weighs a lot so it makes for very portable wealth. It has held its value well.

The bubble point is well taken, but remember that gold doesn't rise in value, paper currencies fall in value. Gold pretty much buys the same amount of goods it always has.

Try carrying 200,000 dollars worth of food or anything useful on your person. Especially now that they can make synthetic diamonds that are virtually indistinguishable from real ones.

I'm guessing the "It weighs a lot so it makes for very portable wealth." was somewhat tongue in cheek...

More to the point, it is true that gold has been a stable currency for a considerable period, however it is also true that simple childhood diseases have resulted in a massive death rate for the same thousands of years. My point is "things change".

Gold had (true) value when it had two basic attributes:

1) it was shiny and maintained this property. Shiny things are nice and the malleability of gold allowed it to be manipulated into objects of beauty.
2) it was difficult to obtain.

Now the first attribute remains true, but the second one is no longer true. Bear in mind that a significant fraction of the world's gold remains tied up in reserves. While that fraction has been reducing, I maintain that that reduction is based on the realization of governments that the "gold standard" has outlived its usefulness.

If the apocalypse comes and someone offers me a stack of gold coins for my food supplies, I will just laugh at them. I need food, I do not need gold because I cannot do anything with it. Perhaps if they have lumber or a good saw I will trade my food for those things, but gold I have no use for.

The whole gold mining industry is now being done on a scale unimaginable in previous eras. We can literally turn a mountain upside down to extract the tiny flakes of gold embedded in the rock.

So the bottom line is that I think the whole gold fever thing is a Yet Another Setup. The gold reserves will be eliminated and sold to the suckers, who will fall over themselves to "invest" in it. The gold reserves will simply move from government vaults to individual's safe deposit boxes, but the simple bottom line is that they will not be able to do anything with it. I cannot take a gold coin to Safeway and buy vegetables. I cannot take a gold coin to Home Depot and buy lumber, or take it to Costco or WalMart.

I am not saying that fiat money has more intrinsic value than gold. The only intrinsic value is in things, and specifically things that take effort to produce, human sweat effort. Gold has lost its cherished position as the investment of last resort because of technology, and the next thing to happen after the stock market bubble and housing bubble will be the gold bubble. Like all bubbles, the smart money is selling, not buying, and they are selling to the suckers who are going to get taken.

The only real commodity that separates the haves from the have-nots is power. I have become convinced that all financial markets are rigged. All of this is just a big game to make sure that the thin layer at the top retain control. Money is just the current alias for that control, and gold is just a shiny trinket that will be shown to the masses: "look you can have this, it is valuable". Seems like I heard about that same game being played but in a different context ("fall of Lucifer") from the C's transcripts... Its likely to have a similar outcome.

 

[PopHistorian]

rs wrote: << If the apocalypse comes and someone offers me a stack of gold coins for my food supplies, I will just laugh at them. I need food, I do not need gold because I cannot do anything with it. >>

I think Peter and Donald's points are that if paper money lost its value, you might take gold in exchange for food if you were a food supplier with more than you could eat. Also, if you had no food supplies at all, you might be more likely to acquire them with gold than with paper IOUs.

 

[ScioAgapeOmnis]

rs wrote: << If the apocalypse comes and someone offers me a stack of gold coins for my food supplies, I will just laugh at them. I need food, I do not need gold because I cannot do anything with it. >>

I think Peter and Donald's points are that if paper money lost its value, you might take gold in exchange for food if you were a food supplier with more than you could eat. Also, if you had no food supplies at all, you might be more likely to acquire them with gold than with paper IOUs.

I think we have to consider the context and human history would help. What sort of nations, groups, and/or civilizations considered gold valuable? Did natives of the Amazons, of North America, or the Mayans/Aztecs/Incas/others also consider gold valuable? What about the tribes living in Africa and South America today and in the past? Are there certain conditions where a group of people, or even a civilization do not consider gold valuable? Do they have other "shiny things" instead? Were there ever civilizations and/or groups of people that did not have any currency or universal "medium" of exchange outside of things that DO have intrinsic value like food?

I think the nature of life post-cataclysm would depend on the situation on the ground. I think that current paper money would be the first to go. But it doesn't mean that there won't be a universally accepted/recognized/valued medium of exchange because they do make it easier to carry a lot of value in a small space - something that food does not allow. But will civilization be technologically advanced enough to still extract gold at all, or, will there be other circumstances preventing this from being done? For example, there may be large areas of nuclear radiation and other issues that might prevent gold extraction from being feasible, and if humanity is forced into a hunter/gatherer form of life and is worried about where to get food the next day, there might be little time left for anything else.

If gold has been used for thousand of years, was there a time before gold was used, and if so, what was used then? I think understanding human history and what various civilizations tended to do under various circumstances would at least help get an idea of what is more probable. But even so, the circumstances of the future may be unlike anything that history ever experienced. Let's not forget the efforts of this group, and if they pay off, we may see an STO civilization, or 4th density, or other things that may fundamentally change any concept of "currency" and how things are done. Most things in our civilizations were created by psychopaths and so if psychopaths, again as a result of the efforts of this group, are recognized and no longer in power in the future, that too means it's even more difficult to predict how things will turn out, how a group of people with empathy would structure civilization etc, something that is basically non-existent on the planet today and we'd be hard-pressed to find historical examples of this as far as I know.

But I think in the end, the most important thing is for everyone to understand how the pathocracy works and to remove it from power. Because if this DOES happen and "normal people" take charge of their own existence and civilization, then there is absolutely nothing to worry about for anybody in terms of food and survival and money. Nobody will be "left out in the cold" just because they "guessed wrong" and "stockpiled" the wrong stuff and do not have the "chosen currency" to afford to survive. Everybody would work together for the benefit of everyone else, and no one would perish or "left to die" because of a wrong guess. "Survival of the fittest" will not be the law of the land, osit.

If psychopaths are in control, *then* you gotta worry about whether you have the right currency or risk being screwed and dying. But if this is the case, if all the efforts of this group fail and post-cataclysm psychopaths return to full power and the pathocracy is in full swing again, then I'm not sure I'd even want to still be alive. I think all our efforts should go into preventing this from happening and instead of stockpiling any resources to use those resources for this goal NOW, as the C's say to "invest" instead of stockpile and save, and if we're successful, I honestly don't think it would make one bit of difference if you stockpiled gold or not because things just wouldn't work as they do now. "Luck" would no longer be the difference between life and death. Striking gold/oil would not make people filthy rich, and that means there will not be a "disenfranchised" class of people because a small group is hoarding all the money and power and control.