A New Gold Standard? Legislation Brings Monetary Debate to Congress

This week, Congressman Alex Mooney (R-W.Va.) reintroduced legislation to make a U.S. dollar convertible into a fixed weight of gold. Much in the spirit of Jack Kemp’s Gold Standard Act of 1984, the bill restores integrity to American wages by re-committing the federal government to the promise that Richard Nixon broke in announcing the closing of the “gold window” in 1971 — that a dollar today would be worth a dollar tomorrow. The introduction of Congressman Mooney’s gold standard legislation was met with immediate praise from the grassroots conservative organization FreedomWorks. It also received support in the American Thinker in

Mooney Money! How This Rep. Is Reviving a Forgotten Economic “Magic Formula”

This week, Congressman Alexander Mooney (R-W.Va.) put the classical gold standard back into congressional purview with his introduction of H.R. 5404 and his excellent Wall Street Journal op-ed, “Steel and Aluminum? Let’s Talk About Gold.” The op-ed served to introduce the bill to the wider world. Adopting it would make the dollar legally convertible to a fixed weight of gold. Kudos to Representative Mooney for putting forward a bill — modeled after Jack Kemp’s Gold Standard Act of 1984 — to spark an important conversation on across-the-board economic growth. As Nathan Lewis has written for Forbes.com, the “Magic Formula” for

How Bitcoin Is Redistributing Wealth to a New Generation of Innovators

This article was posted originally at the Epoch Times. Normally, the concept of wealth redistribution involves government using force to take from some people and give to others. But the bitcoin revolution is redistributing wealth differently. For the sake of simplicity, and to avoid confusion, we will talk about only the original bitcoin in this article and avoid the likes of cryptocurrency products such as ethereum and initial coin offerings, as well as recent duplicates of the original protocol. On the one hand, at a price of $15,500 and a market capitalization of $277 billion at the time of writing, bitcoin has made many people

Why Does Bitcoin Have Value?

This article was posted originally at the Epoch Times. Up 158 percent against the U.S. dollar this year, bitcoin is now the best-performing currency. Many are confused as to how this mathematical protocol can be worth more than $2,600, and why it keeps going up. The short answer: Bitcoin is money, just a little better and cheaper than the alternatives. If you don’t understand money, you cannot understand bitcoin. For most of us, money is the U.S. dollar, the fiat currency of the United States issued by the Federal Reserve and maintained by the commercial banking system. But even this system

Some Economists are Mad at Amazon… For Lowering Your Grocery Prices

Last week, Jeff Bezos sent Keynesian economists into a frenzy with the announcement that Amazon.com would be purchasing the Whole Foods grocery chain. So why were the Keynesians in despair? Because Jeff Bezos is going to lower your grocery prices. You read that right. Take this coverage from Bloomberg: When online retail giant Amazon.com Inc. announced last Friday that it would purchase Whole Foods Market Inc., a plunge in retail and grocery stocks reinforced the disinflationary tone set by three straight months of disappointing data on consumer prices. It’s an example of the technological forces that are increasing competition and

Do We Have Enough Gold to Return to the Gold Standard?

Lazy economic pundits argue that a return to the gold standard is impossible because “there is not enough gold.” Fortunately for those who want wages as good as gold, this line of attack is completely Fake News. Incurious economic reporters believe the following: since gold is a finite resource, if we make the dollar convertible to it, we will run out of gold. It’s funny how pundits find a world where a dollar is redeemable for gold unimaginable, but they would find nothing unusual about redeeming a dollar bill for 4 copper and nickel alloy quarters at a bank. True,

Greenspan’s Big Reveal: The Secret Recipe for Economic Growth

Former Fed Chair Alan Greenspan praises the gold standard in the February 2017 issue of The World Gold Council’s Gold Investor. Therein he makes what may be his strongest statements to date in praise of the gold standard. Here are some of the highlights. Toward the end of this interview he offers a Big Reveal: I view gold as the primary global currency. Gold, along with silver, is one of the only currencies that has an intrinsic value. It has always been that way. No one questions its value, and it has always been a valuable commodity, first coined in

Will Trump Be the “Gold Standard” President?

Remember when Donald Trump advocated for the gold standard on the campaign trail? GQ remembers: Bringing back the gold standard would be very hard to do, but boy would it be wonderful. We’d have a standard on which to base our money. And as Bloomberg’s Michelle Jamrisko highlighted last May, the GQ interview did not stand alone. Trump also expressed support for gold to New Hampshire’s WMUR-TV in early 2015, saying, “We used to have a very, very solid country because it was based on a gold standard.” Gold standard advocates, often affectionately called “gold bugs,” were thrilled by these

1 2 3 … 12