Countries that use the gold standard set a fixed price for buying and selling gold to determine the value of the national currency. It's even possible to borrow money from gold at low interest rates, freeing up liquidity and essentially giving you an option against the dollar. Furthermore, you can even start a Gold IRA to diversify your investments and protect your wealth. President Roosevelt's famous confiscation of gold forced all banks to hand over their gold to the government's Fort Knox, and forced private citizens to hand over their metals at huge discounts in exchange for dollars. After all, people have historically flocked to gold when they don't trust the local bank to keep their money safe.
That means those paper notes can be exchanged at will for real metal; you can take paper money to a bank and get real gold in return. While “politics is likely to intervene to prevent gold from skyrocketing until it reaches this destabilizing price, that doesn't mean that bullion can't continue to rise from current levels as devaluations continue,” Brodsky said. Whether or not he participated in a confiscation of real gold, government policies have impoverished him. The media have often spoken of the opulence of being able to buy gold with a debit card, presenting it as the domain of wealthy sheiks who have nothing better to do than buy a few gold bars on a Tuesday afternoon.
Farmers traded fragments of gold and other metals in strange ways as a primitive method of payment; if you've ever visited a museum, you've probably seen these examples of these early means of exchange. Either way, you can trade dollars, euros, or just about any other currency as you please, and if you buy gold correctly, you can enjoy fairly tight spreads. Gold boosted exploration in the 16th century and helped to standardize world trade when it flourished in the 19th century. According to this system, Jim says that the dollar (and Bitcoin) would be the big losers, and he says that gold is as relevant as ever considering that many of the world's developing countries are accumulating gold.
According to the gold standard, anyone who owns paper money can deliver it for a fixed amount of gold from the country's gold reserves. Not surprisingly, Brodsky's gold prediction was one of the most talked about on the sidelines of this conference at the New York Athletic Club. Several years ago, near Abu Dhabi, one of the world's first gold ATMs was set up, allowing customers to withdraw fiat currencies in the form of all kinds, from one-gram gold nuggets to larger gold bars. Again, I am not referring to an ETF, but to a new concept of so-called paper money containing gold.
While there is no benchmark in which you can participate anywhere in the world, you can diversify your wealth into new asset classes and internationally to achieve some of the benefits of a real gold standard.
