A Beautiful Mind - John Nash favors Gold Standard

Nobel Economist Says More Stable Currency Needed

Contact: Janet Sassi
212-636-7577
fallersassi@fordham.edu

John Forbes Nash Jr., Ph.D. Photo by Ryan Brenizer

More than 200 members of the Fordham community converged upon the Flom Auditorium on Oct. 14 to hear John Forbes Nash Jr., Ph.D., winner of the 1994 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, talk about solutions to the downturn in the national and global economy.

Nash told the audience that such financial crises would be less likely to occur if there was some international monetary standard, such as the gold standard or competition among worldwide currencies, to curb inflation and prevent the rise of mortgage abuses. He expressed some skepticism about a government bailout as a solution.

“I get the impression that the government is not ready to do anything that is really beyond a short-term basis,” said Nash, a senior research mathematician at Princeton. “[But] we need a natural stability of value.”

Nash said that various interest groups that subscribe to Keynesian, or short-term, economic theories have sold the public on the notion that inflation is acceptable or that “bad money is better than good money.” Such a notion, he said, led to the dangerous proliferation of bad mortgage loans—loans made on the gamble that house values would continue to rise and eventually turn a profit.

“A fixed-rate 30-year mortgage would be reasonable under the gold standard,” Nash said. “Now, there are variable rates, and adjustables, and convertibles, and it is very complicated” for homeowners to figure out what they are getting into. In fact, Nash said, nobody really knows the depth of the financial crisis.

Having an internationally oriented money standard would promote better quality currencies and less inflation, he added.

Nash further said that any such new international monetary system should be democratically determined, and cited the recent vote in Sweden not to abandon the Krona for the Euro.

Nash shared the 1994 Nobel Memorial Prize with two other economists for research in game theory, a method of predicting behavior in strategic social situations and a tool now widely used by economists and biologists. His academic notoriety was catapulted into celebrity status in 2001 when he and his wife, Alicia, became the subject of the movie "A Beautiful Mind." The film was nominated for eight Oscars and won four. The movie, part of which was filmed in the basement of Keating Hall, documents Nash’s seminal contributions to game theory and mathematics and his subsequent 25-year struggle with schizophrenia.

The event was also attended by special guest Charles Soludo, Ph.D., governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria.

Dominick Salvatore, Ph.D., Distinguished Professor of Economics, introduced Nash and Saludo to the standing-room-only crowd and concurred with the need for a new international regulatory system more in tune with today’s global economy. “The entire financial sector has to be regulated, but those regulations cannot be specific,” Salvatore said. “Money is fungible. You have to be comprehensive, but general.”

Reform starts at home, Salvatore argued. “We need less exotic derivatives and much more transparency. And the U.S. has to live within its means. We save practically nothing at the individual level . . . we have a huge trade deficit and we are mortgaging our future.”

The event was part of the Distinguished Lecture Series hosted by Fordham’s Center for International Policy Studies.

Founded in 1841, Fordham is the Jesuit University of New York, offering exceptional education distinguished by the Jesuit tradition to approximately 14,700 students in its four undergraduate colleges and its six graduate and professional schools. It has residential campuses in the Bronx and Manhattan, a campus in Westchester, and the Louis Calder Center Biological Field Station in Armonk, N.Y.
10/08

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What if They Returned to the Gold Standard?

What if They Returned to the Gold Standard?

By: Jason Hommel, Silver Stock Report

-- Posted Thursday, 11 December 2008 | Digg This Article | Source: GoldSeek.com

(They can't, but we can.)
Silver Stock Report

What if the Government went back on a Gold Standard?

Do do that, they would need to use their gold to pay off all their debt.

That would give a price of gold if the U.S. Government backed the dollar with gold.

We only need to know two numbers, and do a simple problem of division.

First number: The national debt.
http://www.treasurydirect.gov/NP/BPDLogin?application=np

The government tells us this is:
$10,656,119,227,403

That's 10.6 trillion dollars.

Second number: The U.S. Gold stock.
http://www.fms.treas.gov/gold/current.html

The government tells us this is:
261,498,899 ounces of gold

That's 261 million ounces of gold.

So $10,656,119,227,403 divided by 261,498,899 = $40,750/oz. of gold.

In theory, if the U.S. government had the restraint to stop issuing any kind of new debt, and if there was a runaway hyperinflation, the government could credibly stop any sort of runaway gold price by offering gold at a price of $40,750/oz.

That's the price that could cap the gold market if the U.S. government sold all their gold to all their bond holders. At that point, all new taxes would have to be levied in gold, not dollars.

It's important to realize that any effort by the government to sell gold below that price will ultimately fail, and will eventually cause the gold price to go even higher than that price, as that would only deplete their limited stock of gold at inappropriate price levels.

The main point is that T-Bills, which are perceived as the safest haven around, are not safe. They are only backed up by gold at a rate of $40,750 per oz. With gold trading today at around $800/oz., the U.S. gold backs less than 2% of the value of the issued bonds, or stated another way, $800 is 2% of the price of $40,750. Gold, at today's prices, is clearly a far superior safe haven.

And silver, which is in short supply, due to relentless industrial demand that has consumed nearly all world silver supplies, is even safer.

Clearly, the government cannot offer gold at $40,750 per oz. today. There would be no buyers. But, over time, the gold price may rise to such levels, and beyond, as a generation of people slowly wake up to the monetary fraud of the last 29 to 95 years, depending on whether you count from 1980 or 1913.

I am not an advocate of a return to a gold standard, where gold backs up paper money. I'm in favor of a return to using silver and gold coins and bars as money, as measured by weight, and traded at their intrinsic value according to the price in an open and free market place.

Sincerely,
Jason Hommel

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More on commodity money

And from the Christian Science Monitor:

Forget Bretton Woods II – we need a gold standard
Without the integrity and restraint a gold standard provides, America may be headed on a path to hyperinflation.
By Walker Todd

from the November 17, 2008 edition

Chagrin Falls, Ohio - Too much credit and easy money. Those were the biggest culprits behind this financial crisis. Yet, apallingly, the government's rescue attempt is built on more credit and even easier money. That's like giving a procrastinator a deadline extension. By choosing this course, Washington has steered us on to the "road to Weimar" – the road to runaway inflation.

It didn't have to come to this. And it still doesn't. But the proper remedy will take tremendous political courage: Bring back the gold standard. That, more than any byzantine regulations that emerge from the Bretton Woods II conference this weekend, would provide stability and safety for nations and individuals around the world.

Sadly, current policy seems to reflect a desire to weaken the dollar as quickly as possible.

The Federal Reserve's own data tells the story. The headline is the doubling of Federal Reserve credit, the main component of the US monetary base. Since Labor Day 2008, it's risen from $894 billion to $2.2 trillion.

That's the greatest monetary expansion in the Fed's 95-year history. How the Fed is doing it matters almost as much. It has nearly abandoned its traditional instrument for monetary policy, open-market operations, which involves the purchasing and selling of full-faith-and-credit US Treasury securities. With increasing frequency and amounts, it has relied primarily on "discount window operations" – lending to specific institutions for specific purposes instead of general injections of funds into an open market – since August 2007. This shift may weaken its ability to "tighten" monetary conditions should inflation reach dangerous levels.

A gold standard offers exactly the kind of discipline that's missing from the Fed. But its impact would be wider: Both in substance and in symbolism, gold provides integrity to the entire global financial system. Governments, however, have historically bridled at the constraint and accountability a gold standard brings. After all, when currency can be exchanged for gold, it's harder for governments to inflate the money supply, which they're tempted to do in order to spend beyond their means or cheat on their debts.

Before 1933, you could, generally speaking, trade a US dollar for a set amount of gold. That gave the dollar strength and stability. During World War I, when European governments abandoned gold and inflated their currencies to pay for the war effort, the US maintained its gold backing.

In 1933, however, to enable the Treasury to finance massive new government spending hailed as an economic recovery package – sound familiar? – President Roosevelt suspended domestic transactions in gold, and reduced the dollar's gold value. Finally, in 1971, President Nixon officially abandoned the gold standard. The dollar – and inflation – has fluctuated wildly ever since.

Today's Fed thus faces virtually no constraints. Were a gold standard in place, it could not possibly have doubled its balance sheet in only seven weeks without triggering a wholesale flight from the dollar analogous to the summer of 1971.

Weimar Germany experienced one of the greatest inflations in modern history in 1922 and 1923. Eventually, the official exchange rate reached 4.2 trillion marks per dollar. Some Germans heated their homes by burning cash, since it was cheaper than buying wood. The inflation finally was tamed by government bonds promising repayment in gold, backed by land taxes also payable in gold.

Today, if the US price level responded directly with the Fed's current rate of expansion of its own credit, then the technical conditions for Weimar-style hyperinflation could be upon us. Fortunately, Fed credit expansion acts on the domestic price level with a significant time lag. But could it tighten monetary conditions if it had to, having shifted its reliance to the discount window and the specific projects being financed there?

That's why a conversation about a gold standard is needed. But could it realistically make a comeback? Anna J. Schwartz, who co-wrote with Milton Friedman the highly influential book, "A Monetary History of the United States: 1867-1960," suggested at a 2004 gold conference at the American Institute for Economic Research that only a crisis of sufficient depth and magnitude would provoke the public to demand the stability of gold or a gold-linked currency. Such a crisis, which appeared remote at the time, may soon be upon us.

There's another significant point that Ms. Schwartz raised in 2004: The size of government itself would have to shrink radically to permit a complete return to gold. Before 1933, the share of gross domestic product represented by government at all levels was about 10 percent. Today, the national average of that share is about 35 percent. Any adjustment to economic shocks has to be absorbed by a proportionately much smaller private sector than was the case 75 years ago.

Some critics worry that a return to gold would make credit harder to come by. It's true that the kind of ultra-loose credit that fuels housing bubbles would be marginalized, but normal credit in a gold system would tend to be cheaper because concerns about the future value of repayments are diminished.

America faces a stark choice. The path back to a gold standard is rocky and uphill. The current inflationary path is slippery and downhill. One leads to integrity and stability. The other could lead to financial ruin. Which will we choose?

• Walker Todd, an economic consultant with 20 years' experience at the Federal Reserve Banks of New York and Cleveland, is a research fellow and conference organizer for the American Institute for Economic Research in Great Barrington, Mass.

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