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Gold/Mining/Energy : Gold Price Monitor -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: long-gone who wrote (80213)	12/26/2001 9:22:55 AM
From: ahhaha	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 116931

The important thing about Argentina to know if you're somehow concerned is that they will have competing currencies. This is of the essence of the free market. When you have free markets no lasting structural problem will exist. The only remaining problem in all of economics is the failure of the FED to implement a free market in money. Instead they insist on fixing the price of money. They insist of interventionism. All the problems that are blamed on all manner of things has its root in this failed philosophy. Even so, the FED has proved that they can navigate around the intrinsic problems associated with interventionism. There is a cost and the cost takes the form of increased market and economic cycle amplitudes, but that is the only cost. A few get wiped out so FED can continue to believe that they govern and do good. With Argentina there will be two currencies, the Peronist one and the dollar backed one. If Argentina forced their citizens to convert into only the Peronist one, then you would have trouble. There is no way they can realistically do that. As long as authority provides alternatives to officially determined representations of value, there won't be financial upheaval. Indeed, the existence of alternative currencies instills financial discipline in its own insidious way. We hear a lot about the gold standard even from extremely competent economists like Robert Mundell. The whole point of such strategies is to force central banks into discipline. One need not go back to an extremely inefficient method like the gold standard in order to accomplish it send. If the FED allowed the market in money to solely determine the cost of money, then all the discipline in the world would always be applied with all the efficiency of electronic funds transfer retained. On a gold standard somewhere bullion has to be physically moved. Otherwise, the purpose of the standard is specious because movement is necessary to confirm possession.