Economics

In case one were wondering about the money supply....  There are claims that the money supply is under-reported.  Apparently there are several measures of the money supply, such as M1, M2, and M3.  Well, it turns out that the Federal Reserve stopped reporting M3 in 2006.  Indeed, the FRB website doesn't have such data available.  M3 includes the repurchase agreements that are what the government expands for "quantitative easing", and thus would be the number to look at to figure out the number of dollars, electronic or otherwise, that are available.  Supposedly, M3 is extraneous and can be calculated from other public data; but finding such information doesn't appear to be so easy.  One report projects that from 2007-2009 the money supply was in double-digit growth.

U.S. Political History Chart

Apparently the xkcd guy put together a chart showing political leanings of Congress and the President along with world events.

It's interesting; in particular this statement:

Farmers and poor people who owed money favored a dual gold-silver standard, because it would lead to inflation, which would make debts easier to pay off. Wealthy bankers—who owned that debt—wanted the opposite.

While the point of using a precious metal standard is that it prevents inflation, which is caused by the growth of the money supply outstripping the growth of the economy, in this case, inflation due to bimetallism was from the exchange rate between gold and silver being tweaked.

Ironically, while silverites wanted inflation because they thought it would lead to economic prosperity, and thus supported bimetallism, later economist Milton Friedman, an anti-Keynesian, supposedly regarded bimetallism as more stable.

Pricing in Gold

This showed up in my FB feed: charts showing the value of various commodities in terms of gold over time.  The one showing the value of the dollar is most telling.  For almost 200 yrs it was nearly constant, except when FDR devalued it in 1934, then from 1970-1980 it tanked, and declined greatly again from 2000-2010.  The 1934 devaluation was 41%—that should put the rest of the chart in perspective.

Capitalist Pigs

A link from Mr. Vanderboegh points to Nazi silver bullion.  Not because we like Nazis (they were evil socialists!), but because it's a reminder where socialist collectivism leads.  The Zimbabwe 100 trillion dollar note is also of interest.

There are apparently sites that sell Nazi silver, such as "luckylukeonline".  I'd imagine that there are a few preppers into that stuff....

Wiki Economics

Of interest:
Britain's Three-Day Week
Keynes' Bancor proposal...
...which lost out to the Bretton Woods system