Utah to allow gold and silver as currency

Gold, silver coins to be legal currency in Utah
May 23, 2011 – 6:20 am


By JOSH LOFTIN
Associated Press

SALT LAKE CITY (AP) — Utah legislators want to see the dollar regain its former glory, back to the days when one could literally bank on it being “as good as gold.”

To make that point, they’ve turned it around, and made gold as good as cash. Utah became the first state in the country this month to legalize gold and silver coins as currency. The law also will exempt the sale of the coins from state capital gains taxes.

Craig Franco hopes to cash in on it with his Utah Gold and Silver Depository, and he thinks others will soon follow.

The idea is simple: Store your gold and silver coins in a vault, and Franco issues a debit-like card to make purchases backed by your holdings.

He plans to open for business June 1, likely the first of its kind in the country.

“Because we’re dealing with something so forward thinking, I expect a wait-and-see attitude,” Franco said. “Once the depository is executed and transactions can occur, then I think people will move into the marketplace.”

The idea was spawned by Republican state Rep. Brad Galvez, who sponsored the bill largely to serve as a protest against Federal Reserve monetary policy. Galvez says Americans are losing faith in the dollar. If you’re mad about government debt, ditch the cash. Spend your gold and silver, he says.

His idea isn’t to return to the gold standard, when the dollar was backed by gold instead of government goodwill. Instead, he just wanted to create options for consumers.

“We’re too far down the road to go back to the gold standard,” Galvez said. “This will move us toward an alternative currency.”

Earlier this month, Minnesota took a step closer to joining Utah in making gold and silver legal tender. A Republican lawmaker there introduced a bill that sets up a special committee to explore the option. North Carolina, Idaho and at least nine other states also have similar bills drafted.

At the moment, Franco’s idea would generally be the only practical use of the law in Utah, given the legislation doesn’t require merchants to accept the coins, either at face value – $50 for a 1-ounce gold coin – or market value, currently almost $1,500 per ounce. And no one expects people will be walking around town with pockets full of gold and silver

In the 19th century the gold standard was loved by the big banks. It caused deflation, decades of deflation, every year things get cheaper and cheaper, you make less money but still have to pay the same mortgage with interest which becomes more and more expensive as you make less and less money. This was great for the big bankers because it allowed them to really squeeze the life out of the average farmer then they ended up with the farm as the farmer would often be unable to pay. The story Little House on the Prairie is from this period. Yes they too lost there farm.

This was such a big deal that a Democratic candidate for president ran on taking us off the gold standard.
William Jennings Bryan "Cross of Gold” Speech
[video=youtube;HeTkT5-w5RA]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HeTkT5-w5RA[/video]

Modern paper or digital money is created through a mechanism know as “fractional reserve banking”. In short, this means that new paper money is created when a private bank issues a loan. This means that virtually all money that circulates in the world has been created through debt. All paper money is debt and all debt has interest payments attached to it. To keep the Ponzi scheme afloat bankers need to constantly increase the amount of money in circulation. This is why they fear deflation (a decrease in the amount of money in circulation) and love inflation (the opposite). However, they need to control inflation at a level that they see fit. If inflation is cut loose the dragon is free to destroy the debt the bankers created.

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Quote is from a Swedish investing firm. I love how they come right out and mention the words 'Ponzi scheme.'

The Ponzi scheme usually entices new investors by offering returns other investments cannot guarantee, in the form of short-term returns that are either abnormally high or unusually consistent. The perpetuation of the returns that a Ponzi scheme advertises and pays requires an ever-increasing flow of money from investors to keep the scheme going.

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Funny thing, this Swedish firm is waiting for the US government to destroy its dollar through inflation. They know that they will make a killing off of it.

maylee said:

In the 19th century the gold standard was loved by the big banks. It caused deflation, decades of deflation, every year things get cheaper and cheaper, you make less money but still have to pay the same mortgage with interest which becomes more and more expensive as you make less and less money. This was great for the big bankers because it allowed them to really squeeze the life out of the average farmer then they ended up with the farm as the farmer would often be unable to pay. The story Little House on the Prairie is from this period. Yes they too lost there farm.

This was such a big deal that a Democratic candidate for president ran on taking us off the gold standard.
http://historymatters.gmu.edu/audio/1901c_MSTR.mov

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Misleading, the reason Farmers took the brunt was because the deflation shows up first in Commodity prices, farmers produce commodities for the most part. They were making less, but prices of things they needed were going down too, in effect canceling things out. But the payments on the farm were too great and many lost their hopes and dreams to the big bankers. Since the Big Banks controlled the majority of the gold at the time , they had Carte Blanche to run schemes that manipulated commodity prices in their favor so they could more easily eliminate indebted farmers.

Sound Familiar? The Federal reserve did the same thing during the Great Depression, they reduced the supply of money to such a degree that it caused horrid deflation and people who had debt were wiped out. Banks have been figuring out how to make you pay for a farm and then giving it to them for hundreds of years now, they do all of this through the insidious process of debt creation. We should all learn that debt, by any standard or interest rate, is not a good thing.

Inflation can also be bad for debtors, payments for items essential to living (energy and food) can become so expensive that payments on debt are impossible and again, you lose the farm. That is happening right now, especially after a RE bubble has popped and everything else but RE is inflating.

WJ Bryan wanted Bimetallism, Gold AND silver to circulate as a medium of exchange, with gold being worth a certain amount of silver. Silver was much much more common and would have put more purchasing power in the hands of the common man, something the banks were against. WJB lost the race to Big Banker Backed McKinley and the gold standard won.

And McKinney was followed by Teddy Roosevelt who was very big on busting up the big money monopolies. McKinney was assassinated. The idea that we should go back to the gold standard of the 19th century would be political and likely literal suicide for any politician who actually did it today.
This is a short explanation of the federal budget and deficit.
[video=youtube;Ei_B5MTJofI]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ei_B5MTJofI&feature=player_detailpage[/video]

The Great Depression was ended by massive government spending which lead to full employment. There were the debtphobes who opposed, but they were overrode by the fear of military conquest of Japan and Germany.

Think of this, Los Angeles County lost 778 billion in home property value. That's almost a trillion dollars. Part of that is debt owed, part of it was potential money that could be spent and part of it was spent making the economy go. That's just one California county. For the whole county it's a hell of a whole lot more. My friend crunch the numbers for the whole country, I forgot what it was. In the light of that a trillion dollars of stimulus money is really more like pissing on a forest fire, it's just is not going to cut it.