The Beginning - A rush to pull out cash

[E-ville]

heck yes they are, what good would they be if they were not... there in my possesion and freeand clear from any debt or crdit liens... there going to have to take them from my cold dead hands..

[Nicholas Gilman]

   I watched a guy Monday cash out his savings at the bank. 
I hope he follows through and exchanges those FRN's for
real goods. 

[E-ville]

yeah thats what ill do when it starts to get bad... Maybe I should respond to those 3 credit card offers i get almost every week..... But then again I hate credt.. stay away from it as much as possable.

[Lex]

If a lot of people do what you're suggesting and get a bunch of credit cards and start spending we may just slow down the collapse!

[Lex]

For those that do it, lets hope not.  I would only run out and run up a bunch of credit that I couldnt pay off if I was almost certain that the entire system would collapse.  BK laws aint what they used to be.

But most people are already in more debt than they could ever pay off, so going into more debt is not going to change anything but it might postpone the collapse.

[E-ville]

Really if we are in the same situation as the 1930's credit card companies are going down too, becasue when millions can't pay there bills they will have no money either..

You can't get money from people when they don't have it.. its the risk the card companies take when they loan money out... that's there business, to take a risk for a profit..  When the risk doesn't work out eventualy they will have to cut there losses.. they can't keep paying people to try to get the money for them they will go broke if it's a big one like the 1930's

[Fluff and Stuff]

I think yall are making too much of this stuff.  Yes, the housing market is still overpriced and home prices many continue to slightly fall for another year or so but the world is not falling apart.  The stock market will not fall off the edge.  In fact, I just increased the amount of money I put in my 401k.

If you are worried, buy some silver, gold, euros, and useful tools but there is no need to max out credit cards and stuff like that.

[BaRbArIaN]

I'm wondering if gold and silver would be worth anything if it becomes illegal to trade in it and the only real currency becomes food, heating oil and ammo.

[Tom Sawyer]

I'm wondering if gold and silver would be worth anything if it becomes illegal to trade in it and the only real currency becomes food, heating oil and ammo.

Prohibition makes things more valuable, just a little less liquid.

[ThePug]

I think a good proposal for monetary reform would be that any government, state or federal, as well as any bank (or even any person) could issue bank notes as long as it's backed by a 100% reserve of the commodity (any commodity) specified, and that the bank note is freely exchangeable for the specified amount of the commodity in question. It's basically how a 'pure' gold standard used to work, except that there's no coercive monopoly in the issuance of money, and any commodity can be used.The reserves would be verified by the state in which the issuing bank is incorporated, or in which the issuing individual resides. I think that could be said to fall under the minarchist concept of contract enforcement. The government would issue "legal tender" in the form of 100% reserve gold notes, but it was also mandated that they accept any note of equivalent value whose reserves had been verified. Someone wrote all this up into a proposed constitutional amendment that probably explains the concept better than I can.

The only issue I see with it is there's no mechanism to provide for an agreed-upon exchange rate between commodities, though I assume commodity and currency trading (which would be the same thing) would still be a profitable enterprise, so presumably there'd be some central Wall Street-like market for such things that would set exchange rates.

I'm no economist, so perhaps some one else can pick apart that idea better than I can. Made sense to me, though- by having any commodity be potential currency you could avoid or at least make less extreme the swings in inflation/deflation that can occur when you only have on commodity.