OT: US Pres election

[lch]

Originally Posted by JimMorrison

Until the creation of the Federal Reserve, all US currency was backed and valued with hard assets - gold and silver.

And horse-drawn carriages were still a common sight on the streets. Just saying. Pssst, when I was talking about "no real value", that included things like gold and silver, too. Or pebbles or shells or whatever else you use for your monetary system.

Originally Posted by JimMorrison

However, what I am not so confused about, is the creation of the Federal Reserve. It is a private organization, that was handed the right and responsibility of printing all US currency. They also have the right and responsibility to alter interest rates, and other economic factors - with the express purpose of NOT allowing this sort of thing to happen. But you know what? 16 years after the creation of the Fed, in 1929, we entered the darkest financial times in our nation's history - the precise situation that the creation of the Fed was supposed to preclude.

Which only shows the complexity of the system, to me. I have confidence that the people that print money are doing their job correctly of making some sense out of this and provide some working system for us. Which I considered extremely difficult after thinking about it for a while. Nowadays, all the money you have is just some data blip on some bank server. Not that it's to be expected, but ever considered what it would mean and what would happen if some disaster would take out all of these records? Only regarding monetary values, not any kind of chaos that might start, I mean. You seem to be under the impression that money is something that is real and can just be counted.