USA is about to go bankrupt (problem-reaction-solution)

mudfox do you have any prve?

Originally posted by MUDDYFOX
america is going to go bankrupt in the autumn this year. it has been predicted in the bible codes.

ok then......its august and i see on the news the value of gold is rising maybe thats why they keep printing money.......hmmmmm

so many anti-american nutcases on just one thread, it's truly stunning. the euro is certainly a competing currency, but how can't it be, it's the currency of over a dozen modern countries. but, and i'm so sorry to burst many of your bubbles, the american dollar is still backed by gold, and there's plenty of it left over in our reserve. america is not about to go bankrupt, it's simply in an economic slump right now, and really only because it's being compared to our past high's. in about 7 years, at most, we'll have some other kind of boom or jump in economic movement, as has happened decade after decade in modern american history. by the way, for the fools who keep saying all empires must fall, in reference to america...just what are you talking about? several european countries have been around far past the age of america. they have not "fallen", so just why do you persist in believing america will. is it simply anti-american sentiment brought on by anger or jealousy toward america for its current actions?

Originally posted by astroblade
but, and i'm so sorry to burst many of your bubbles, the american dollar is still backed by gold, and there's plenty of it left over in our reserve.

sorry to burst yours I'm afraid, but the American dollar is not back by gold, and hasn't been since the 70's. The last remnants of the Gold Standard disappeared in 1978. Since then gold has been simply a commodity, and the Dollar (like every other major currency) simply fiat money.

As for the metal itself, US gold reserves stand at 8136.4 tons (as of July 2004), out of the roughly 30,000 tons held in reserve in various central banks around the world. ( source : World Gold Council no direct link I'm afraid. You have to register )

That's 237,311,677 troy ounces, which at $400 per ounce equals $94,924,666,800.

i.e the Entire US gold reserves, at $94 billion are worth slightly less than the cost of the war in iraq, less than 1% of US GDP, and only a tiny fraction of what the US owes abroad.

It's not anti-Americanism. It's just the facts.



[edit on 7/9/04 by muppet]

>>>so many anti-american nutcases on just one thread, ,,

oh come on ice, are you telling me you can't feel the eagerness some of these posters have about the faults of america? you can't sense the giddiness some posters have when they think of america failing? they want america to fail, hell it delights them to think that. and muppet, you're right as far as i know, i need to do some research. but if, as you said, all major currencies are just paper, then what makes the backing of that paper different in europe then in america?

I think that we've been like this for so long, thinking that nothing is going to happen, "the united states is the ultimate power". Just like 9-11, we all thought we were going so good with everything, then BOOM! we get attacked on the homeland. Just the thing we thought would never happen. Just know this, The united states, like it or not is going to fall, and the bigger her ego gets, the harder she's going to fall. I'm not Anti-American, I'm just stating what i know is going to happen, and its not like i want it to happen, yeah, i do want america to last forever,but she cant, her principles always be around though.

it was about a year ago i read about this in a book called something like "The Bible Codes" these codes have predicted assasinations and hitler.

i dont think its just america thats gonna fall as if america falls i beleive there will be a domino affect worldwide with all developed countrys and i also think that mybe the world might go to war on this as it is overdue when u think about it economicaly in comparison with the first and the second and then add up the statistics with all aspects of trade and wealth before great wars usualy there is a massive gradual halt then boom all your man power gets used again, u start manufacturing again in massive scales, then after there is peace and prosperity then after so many more yrs ur back to square 1 and until where out in space harvesting whats out there i think this will be a continuing trend as i think the world is far too small for us in this day and age

Originally posted by astroblade
so many anti-american nutcases on just one thread, it's truly stunning. the euro is certainly a competing currency, but how can't it be, it's the currency of over a dozen modern countries. but, and i'm so sorry to burst many of your bubbles, the american dollar is still backed by gold, and there's plenty of it left over in our reserve. america is not about to go bankrupt, it's simply in an economic slump right now, and really only because it's being compared to our past high's. in about 7 years, at most, we'll have some other kind of boom or jump in economic movement, as has happened decade after decade in modern american history. by the way, for the fools who keep saying all empires must fall, in reference to america...just what are you talking about? several european countries have been around far past the age of america. they have not "fallen", so just why do you persist in believing america will. is it simply anti-american sentiment brought on by anger or jealousy toward america for its current actions?

Ha-ha-ha, are you out of touch with reality...............

American dollar still backed by gold eh ??? If I take my American dollars to my local bank and DEMAND my gold in exchange, how much will I get eh ?
There is no legal requirement for any bank to exchange dollars for anything of real value, certainly not gold. That requirement ceased in 1971. You are wrong.

Plenty of gold in the American reserve. How do you know that. The gold has not been officially audited since Truman. For accounting purposes the gold held in the national depositary (Fort Knox West Point etc..) has been re-classified from gold on hand, to custodial gold, and now to deep storage gold. There is VERY strong evidence to suggest that most if not all the gold held by the treasury and the reserve bank has been swapped. It is physically there, but is no longer OWNED by the US. That is why it has been reclassified.

It is simple, gold is rarely moved because of its sheer weight, and security issues. Various countries have gold stored all over the world. If Britain sells 20 tons of gold to Germany for example. The ownership of gold already located in Germany or somewhere else transfers to German ownership.

To me, custodial gold means gold kept for another owner. What the hell is deep storage gold ? But that is what America now claims mostly to have.

As far as nations falling, that can mean many things. England was once the most powerful nation on earth, with a vast navy around the world that made damned sure everyone knew who was boss. England was once a mighty superpower. At that time America was a weak little colony, like many others around the world.

America then rose up in wealth and power and made England look weak. You could say England has fallen from what it was, but it is still there.

America will fall for several reasons, the first is economic, and the second is that it is rapidly making enemies of every other country. Eventually America will be attacked if it carries on like this. Who knows ? No single country can defeat the whole world. Germany tried it, and Japan tried it. America will lose too for all the same reasons.

So many Americans believe the Hollywood image of American superiority, but the truth is rather different. America has been starting and fighting wars all over the world over the last fifty years, and has not won any of them. Tell me about Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq ? And dozens of little wars like The Bay of Pigs. You could not even beat Cuba ! Ha-ha-ha.

You say anyone that tells the simple truth is a Nut case.

[edit on 11-9-2004 by Warpspeed]

Edit for language.

[edit on 11-9-2004 by intrepid]

The oustanding Public Debt as of the time of this posting is

$7,379,928,237,840.66

"The following graph shows how the National Debt has grown year by year since 1940 in actual dollar amounts, uncorrected for inflation:"




The above information, plus a lot more, can be found at www.brillig.com...

Originally posted by smirkley
. The USD is teetering on an edge, that has been there for many years. (I dont see it falling off immediatly though, just a slow gradual decline barring any turn of events or actions by others that would change it all for the better)

Unless OPEC decides to re-nominate oil dollars to euro dollars instead of US dollars

For an explanation of this see Economics 444, Money and Banking at any University

Warpspeed is making a lot of sense to me! What is our Cash BACKED by - NOTHING!!!

Just because someone whips out a $100 Dollar Bill (Which costs 10 Cents to Print BTW) - I hope that you don't actually believe that is is actually worth $100 Dollars - just because it has all of these fancy Colors & Graphics on in & says "This is a Hundred Dollars - Love,
the Federal Reserve Bank".

It is actually more like Negative $100 Dollars of DEBT PAPER - but hey it works right because Everyone Takes it. It used to be backed by Gold & Silver - now its just Monetized Debt based on the Bond Market &
"Interest Rates"!!!

Well I�m not a high-roller in the money game but I have read about this collapse for some time, and do own a small amount of gold and silver just incase,

Surviving the Collapse:
The New Bretton Woods
by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

Here is Mr. LaRouche's speech to the conference on "Surviving the Era of Imperialism," at the Monterrey Institute for Technological and Higher Studies (ITESM), in Monterrey, Nuevo Le�n on March 20, 2004.

What I shall do is describe the situation: We are now in the worst financial breakdown crisis in several centuries. It's now ongoing. The time that the collapse will occur, the full monetary collapse, is not certain.

There's always the possibility, up to a certain point, of printing money to try to postpone a financial collapse. Right now, as you probably know, Japan and the United States are printing money at rates that have never been seen in history before, all for the purpose of trying to hold up the dollar until the election this coming November in the United States.

I'm not sure that's going to work. As a matter of fact, I doubt that it's going to work. But we're in that crisis. And therefore, since this is an inevitable event, the crisis itself, the question becomes:

How do we get out of it? And in the matter of forecasting: How can we know, whether we're going to succeed in getting out of it, or not?

How do we know that certain method will work, or which will not work?
So, I've divided the presentation into seven subtopics, which may assist you in following me, as I make the presentation more

Originally posted by j2ts2
Unless OPEC decides to re-nominate oil dollars to euro dollars instead of US dollars

For an explanation of this see Economics 444, Money and Banking at any University

This doesnt require Economics 444 to see and understand.

But you make the exact point I was suggesting.

Iraq for example,... traded oil for euro's. We laughed and laughed,... and then it was apparent it worked.

I bet Iraq sells in USD now. Venezuela? OPEC? Russia? They all have considered euro's. But the dollarization of other countries is what helps the USA gvmt finance it's debt and finance it's budget shortfall's. When other countries no longer want to trade their oil for USD, and would rather accept euro's and gold for their product, then the overall demand for US Treasury bills goes down. The overall need to stock up on USD begins to drop. Yes the world finances the US gvmt. Not US taxes, not US citizens. At least not at the moment to any significant degree.

We are already bankrupt, read this. This was 10 years ago...

The fact the usd is not backed by gold is meaningless because the purpose of a currency is to serve as a medium for the transfer of value which is a function of perception and has nothing to do with the medium itself. Gold is just a mineral with no intrinsic economic value and the only reason it was used was because it served as a medium of exchange that everybody could agree upon. Now the Dollar fills that role.

So for the United States economy to go bankrupt there would have to be a global change of perception about the value of the usd that would lead people to exchange it for something else such as euros, gold, etc... The amassing public debt, aggravated by endless wars end demographic shifts could serve as a catalyst but there�s no reason to believe that people will look the other way and let that happen.

So when will America go into another Great Deprission like back in the 30s? Is it even possible for a super power to go that broke? (besides Russia)

The whole world has been using the US dollar as a medium of exchange for a very long time. This all worked fine while the US dollar and other currencies were gold backed. Countries all attempted to balance their international import/export trade, and various currencies would rise and fall with respect to each other and the US dollar. No problem with any of that, fair trading and fair value for everyone.

What caused the problem was that in the 70's Nixon was having problems with the cost of the Vietnam war. The only way he could pay for it was to break the link between gold and the US dollar and just print more dollars. Every other country was forced to do the same thing, and go off the gold standard. So since 1971 the whole world has been running on paper not backed by anything.

This all went well for a while, but the US could just print as many dollars as it wanted to buy oil or other imports, but other countries had to pay for US dollars in REAL goods and real labor. This has given the US a tremendous economic trading advantage over the rest of the world over the last thirty years.

What has now happened is that the US has been having a free lunch. Manufacturing and industry in the US has withered and died. It is far cheaper for Americans to buy cheap imports with paper money that costs nothing to print than to have a viable economy that can earn foreign exchange from hard exports. How many imported cars do you see around on the roads these days ?? Twenty years ago it was either a Ford or a Chevy.

The whole internal US economy is now a service economy, not a manufacturing economy. Just about everyone in the US is working either for the government, or providing services or entertainment for other Americans. Meanwhile the US living standard continues to rise above the rest of the world on all these free US paper dollars. That is what has caused the massive debt and trade imbalance between the US and the rest of the world.

The US prints the dollars, and Americans spend them on cheap imports, and the money just goes straight overseas. Now normally when you have a situation like that two things should happen. The first is rapid inflation, and the second a rapid fall in value of the US dollar with respect to other currencies.

Inflation is caused by too many dollars trying to buy too few goods, the price goes up. However the US government has been manipulating the statistics that would clearly show this inflation. If it cannot be seen it does not exist, simple logic. Inflation has stayed low because the world is a big place. As long as the abundance of dollars can be soaked up, inflation will remain low. Inflation within America will remain low because all those new dollars are headed strait overseas.

One of the most prominent and reliable indicators of a fall in value of the US dollar is the price of gold (in US dollars) that is the indicator that everyone watches. Since 1997 the US has been secretly selling gold on the international market to suppress the gold price. It is simply supply and demand economics. If you flood the market with gold, the price falls. If the gold price falls, there must be no inflation and the US dollar is seen to be strong. If it looks strong it is strong.

What has been happening is that the US has been selling its gold in secret. This has been done many ways, but particularly by gold swaps. The Fed might agree to swap an agreed amount of gold with a foreign bank. Suppose ownership of fifty tons of gold in the basement of the NY fed is transferred to a Swiss bank, and fifty tons of gold in the basement in Switzerland then belongs to the Fed.

It can be done in secret because even the employees that work in the gold vault at the Fed see the gold is still there and believe nothing has changed.

The gold has not moved from NY, but that gold no longer belongs to the US. The Swiss then through an intermediary sell the US gold to another intermediary on the open market. Nobody knows it was US gold or who has bought it. It may have been bought by a Saudi businessman, or the Chinese government, nobody knows for sure. Gold like a lot of financial transactions are kept very confidential.

So what happens the gold price drops for a while and the US dollar strengthens. That is how it is done. The gold is still in America, it just now belongs to a Swiss Bank (in this example). It is believed that most of the US gold has either gone or is now owned by foreigners. This gold belongs to the American people, or at least it did.

Foreign governments have also been coerced into selling their gold by the US government for all sorts of reasons. Meanwhile the gold keeps appearing on the international market, and the US dollar stays strong. The only problem with this little scheme is that eventually the US is going to run out of gold, and that is going to cause a massive problem for the US dollar. We are starting to see this now. Gold is rising and oil is rising, and it does not look good.

None of this is bashing America or Americans, it is simply the way it is.

America is headed for an economic collapse of epic proportions. While it will effect the whole world, it is going to be far more painful within America than anywhere else. Anyone that is smart, will be buying gold while it is artificially being reduced in price with US dollars that are being artificially increased in value. Eventually the situation will correct, and those that hold gold will do extremely well, while the not so fortunate are going to really hurt.

I expect pretty soon it will be made illegal for Americans to own gold. After all, only terrorists and criminals trade gold. The government will do this in the interest of all Americans of course, and most people will believe it.

It will be fascinating to watch George Bush on TV explaining how in repressive Communist China and Russia and those horrible Muslim countries free honest trade in gold is not only allowed but encouraged. And how trade in gold in supposedly free America is to be made illegal.

My own belief is that America will just simply default on its foreign debt, and confiscate all the foreign gold now held in America. That would be the end of America, as all the imports America now totally relies upon, including oil, would just stop. That will mean world war three, America versus everyone else. I hope not.



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Quote: " the purpose of a currency is to serve as a medium for the transfer of value which is a function of perception and has nothing to do with the medium itself."

You are EXACTLY CORRECT. So what if I were to tell you that I perceive CASH "Federal Reserve Note" "Dollars" as Trash with Not much Value - Certainly not the Value that it claims to have on its Face. Would you try to convince me that I am wrong? What if I said "No Sale/Deal" to you?

You are correct - Cash has Value because "everybody agrees upon it". It is PERCEIVED VALUE. The question then becomes "What can I Buy with it"?