joe t
Silver Member
The basic idea is that if the economy collapses, dollars will be worse than worthless and people will need some other type of currency to trade with. Say I have bread and need eggs, you have eggs and bread but need butter. You probably don't want my bread for your eggs as you already have plenty of bread and my bread will go bad soon. But if I had SomeCurrency, I could give you some amount of SomeCurrency which you could keep in your pocket while you looked for someone with butter. This only works if SomeCurrency is widely trusted and viewed as having some stable value. Sure there will be situations where I have what you need and you have what I need, so we can do a straight trade without worrying about currency. But currency sure makes things easier otherwise. Gold and Silver were used as SomeCurrency in the past so it's easy to see them being used again. Doesn't have to be gold or silver, it could be matches, ammo or rubies. Or all of the above.
The people making the trades at that time (ie, the market) will determine how many loafs of bread, or eggs, or lbs of bacon you can buy with an ounce of silver, gold or rubies. Nobody will care or talk about dollars at that point.
Or, if the economy collapses, we could just find ourselves trading in RMB.
I understand.
But I was being kinda sarcastic because I think it is funny when everyone quotes Gold in Dollars.