Around that time Hunter S. Thompson was writing for a magazine and had just attended an oil industry conference where the attendees were terrified that the United States was about to experience an "oil peak" for domestic production.
His editor killed the story because it seemed too alarmist.
We know the story now that the whole world economy was reorganized around this event
> Since the collapse of the Bretton Woods system, IMF members have been free to choose any form of exchange arrangement they wish (except pegging their currency to gold)
I had no idea gold-backed currencies were actually forbidden. Seems suspicious - why should the IMF use its vast influence to prevent countries from trying out gold-backed currency? Can such attempts somehow unfairly damage other currencies?
Certainly before the managed Bretton Woods standard the US economy had "the panic of XXXX" every few years. Price stability might have been better but unemployment, investment, and everything else was unsteady.
Apologies for being ludicrously off-topic, but the typesetting of your comment on my iPhone created a nearly perfect 7-line typographical river (starting after "blame"), and it seemed a shame to not share: https://imgur.com/0w5rWqI
Of course it’s suspicious. A floating fiat based system is a great tool to enslave the global population. Backing a currency by gold erodes this tool by constraining the ability to grow and manage debt
The American populists thought that the gold standard was a great tool to enslave the American population. Back then it was unthinkable that farmers would be able to invest to say, buy fertilizer:
The "goldfinger scenario" that goldbugs dream of is the collapse of the global economy which is orders of magnitude too big to be served by the amount of gold we have, they hope that they'll get to live like French aristocrats before the revolution.
What? Having debt in a gold standard is worse because your debt grows every year without your agreement just from the price of gold going up. Inflation is basically a crude continuous debt jubilee which is good for debtors.
Around that time Hunter S. Thompson was writing for a magazine and had just attended an oil industry conference where the attendees were terrified that the United States was about to experience an "oil peak" for domestic production.
His editor killed the story because it seemed too alarmist.
We know the story now that the whole world economy was reorganized around this event
https://www.imf.org/external/about/histend.htm