BANK RUNS

[Mortblanc]

I do not understand your reasoning SS?

No one has backed their currency dollar for dollar, pound for pound with gold or silver since the invention of currency. As soon as the first one pound note, or one dollar bill, was printed the joke was up since there had not been a full value coin minted in decades and note are cheaper to make.

Devaluation of the amount of precious metals in the coin has always been an easy method of expanding the power of the state. It goes back to the bronze age and the thing is that no one could tell the difference between a good coin and a bad one. When all trust was finally lost they recalled all the coin and had a reissue at a very unsatisfactory conversion rate.

In our case over here our coins are all copper or aluminum sandwiches with a good bit of plastic inside. Our one cent piece is no longer made of copper because it takes more than one cent to mint the copper coin.

No one is going to start a new currency based on precious metals because it is too restrictive on the government finance to do so, and they absolutely can not return to specie value based on the present currency. That would require the mentioned complete recall of all specie and a reissue of new, at a very unsatisfactory exchange rate!

Even in the old days there was no requirement for enough precious metal to back each note of currency printed, only a percentage.

As for the digital currency? Are you really avoiding it?

As a retired person do you go to the mailbox once a month and remove a stack of gold bullion?

Do you even get a check mailed to your address?

I don't !!! Probably no one does any longer, anywhere.

My retirement income is transferred directly to my account and by some miracle of technology I am some amount of money better off than I was the night before when I went to sleep. I can pay my bills without leaving the keyboard and I can buy my groceries, have it delivered and pay for it without leaving the house,, but only if I pay with card.

But you don't operate like that??? No you draw your money out as soon as it goes in, carry thousands in your pocket and pay cash for everything, or leave it in (where it is the "at risk" money we are speaking of) and pay by check. A check that when given is instantly scanned and turned into digital money and instantly withdrawn from your account just as if it were a debit card.

I used to refuse to shop in stores where they used a laser to scan the purchase. Too much like "big brother" I said. I got over that in the early 1990s. They don't even put prices on the packages any more, anywhere! It's all scanned! Not a single store, large or small, operates without a scanner.

I am now finding more and more stores that refuse cash and check and operate only on card. At my favorite lumber store there are a half dozen self checkout scanners, only one of them accepts cash.

Dealing with cash at the retail level is now considered a very expensive part of the operation. I requires daily accounting and trips to the bank with deposits. It requires people smart enough to do those jobs also, and they are getting scarce. Scarce and unaffordable! I have a niece, a high achieving student, that turned down a retail job once because the cash register did not compute the change for her. She considered it lack of efficiency in management to waste her time computing change. A sign of bad management that would be a constant issue.

And it is.

More and more of my shopping is done on line and just try to have a shipment from Timbuktu delivered with the UPS man to pick up a fist full of cash and give you back change!

Bubble and bust, the present system is no worse than the systems that proceeded it. There have been bank runs since we stopped using barter and a batch of bad butter or cheese or a plague of hoof and mouth could send barter to he!! and back.

There have also been recessions and booms forever, many of them due to the very precious metals you have such faith in. Just look back at what the big gold rushes of the past did to the world economies. Increase the amount of gold and decrease the value of what you already hold! Yes it works like that.

Come out with a new model smart phone and decrease the value of silver due to the old phones being recycled for their metals.

Thieves don't even steal the whole car any more, just the catytelic converter for its platinum.

No matter what system you come up with there is no 100% guarantee of security. Never has been and never will be.

All you can do is plant more veg and pray for a good crop.

And then there is that famine thing, and plague, and bad weather, and the thatch on the roof catching fire.....

You say it's security you are wanting?