-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 At 8:53 PM +0100 on 7/2/02, Adam Back wrote:
> Just curious, but what was the rationale under which private > posession of gold was made illegal in the US? It boggles the > mind... Roosevelt wanted to make the dollar a fiat currency, IIRC. Before then, you could redeem dollars for gold, after then you could redeem dollars for, well, dollars. This was slid sideways a bit after the war by the Bretton Woods agreement, which made various European currencies exchangeable into dollars at mostly fixed rates, and *foreigners* could exchange dollars into gold. Which, once Europe was on its feet financially, and Johnson's democrats began inflating the dollar to pay for Vietnam and other fun things, deGaulle's France (did I spell those both right, AAA? :-)) happily started changing dollars into gold, FOB Paris, thank you very much. At which point, Nixon floated the dollar, and, at the same time, allowed the private possession of gold in the US again. Then he did something really stupid and instituted price controls, but, he was always an Nerf-Conservative political opportunist anyway, or at least a Keynesian, which is the same thing, even Le Monde Diplomatique says so ;-)... Fortunately, the rest of the innumeracy that was the New Deal has been going down the shitter since then. They finally got rid of the Glass-Stegal act a few years ago, for instance, the law that bifurcated investment banks and banks of deposit. Cheers, RAH -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: PGP 7.5 iQA/AwUBPSI5NMPxH8jf3ohaEQLH8wCeOlVDblBsF0ZCkqfUH89d2tfXn+QAn0UU Ab7b99fnYcZi+Db1BFivOsu3 =iCZG -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: [EMAIL PROTECTED]> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
