A BUG AT THE BANK? SAY IT ISN’T SO

We don’t have the gold standard. It’s not because we don’t know about the gold standard, it’s because we do. ~ Allan Meltzer    

Gold has been used by humans as a symbol of value and prestige since antiquity. Its purest 24 carat form is a bright, reddish-yellow dense, soft metal. Gold occurs as nuggets in rocks, in underground veins and alluvial (loose sediment) deposits. So-called “gold bugs” – people who reverently believe gold is the ultimate standard of value – have occupied positions of societal power and influence for a very long time, but not recently. Gold bugs haven’t sat at the citadels of US public authority for almost 90 years; that may soon change if #45 gets his way. Oh my.

Consider first some golden history.

The seemingly eternal allure of gold obliged our ancestors to find it. People have mined gold for at least 7000 years in what’s now eastern Europe and the Caucasus, as well as China, India, Mesoamerica, Spain, Ireland and Wales. Because gold served as the primary medium of exchange within the Roman Empire, they developed and used ground-sluicing methods on a large scale to extract gold. Historians believe the Roman invasion of Britain in the first century AD was principally motivated to expand their supplies of this prized metal.

The first precious-metal coins were used as money in several places about the same time, around 600-500 BC; in the Yellow River valley in northern China, in the Ganges River valley of N.E. India and by the king of Lydia in western Asia Minor (modern Turkey). The Lydian coins, shown below, were made from electrum – an alloy of gold and silver. Officials stamped images on bean-sized lumps of electrum that helped guarantee the value of each coin, and discourage counterfeiting. If only.

Lydian coin

Following the lead of Lydia, most nations have employed gold specie to conduct commerce for centuries. During the Middle Ages, Byzantine gold coins were used throughout Europe and the Mediterranean. Twenty-two carat Spanish Doubloons were widely used in Europe and the Americas from the early 16th to mid-19th centuries. During its primacy, the Doubloon served as a multi-nation de facto gold standard, a monetary system in which the standard unit of currency is based on a fixed quantity of gold. The US formally adopted the gold standard in 1873, using its $10 gold eagle coin as the nation’s primary currency unit. The US mint produced gold coins of various denominations from 1872 through 1933. Like many other nations, our country effectively abandoned the gold standard in 1933 during the depths of the Great Depression. It finally and officially severed the link between the dollar and gold in 1971. The image below shows our “lady liberty” gold dollar coin first issued in 1849.

US Lady Liberty gold dollar coin

The late 1840s ring a very special chime in the golden history of the US.

The California Gold Rush began in January 1848 when James Marshall found a placer nugget in a river at Sutter’s Mill in the Sierra Nevada foothills almost 50 miles northeast of present-day Sacramento. Proclamations of his discovery created such a popular incentive for people also wanting to “strike it rich” that over 300,000 people soon headed for California from nearby and far-away places. They came from each of our then-30 states and every territory. They also arrived with the gleam of gold in their eyes from around the world, including the Sandwich Islands (aka Hawaii), China, Latin America and Europe. Because of gold’s draw, California rapidly became a state in 1850 without first being a territory, unlike any other western US region.

There turned out to be a lot of gold in the Sierra Nevada. By the end of 1848, the first year of the Gold Rush, $10 million in gold had been produced. The biggest nugget ever found was a bit larger than a shoebox and weighed nearly 200 pounds. By 1865, $785 million worth of gold had come out of the ground in California, probably making the difference in which side won our Civil War. This multi-million dollar mountain of gold represented 60% of the total US budget in 1865. It significantly contributed to keeping Union soldiers clothed, fed and paid, and bought much-needed guns, bullets and armaments. This massif of gold would be worth $12.9 billion in today’s dollars. Very, very little of this gargantuan sum stayed in miners’ pockets; merchants like Leland Stanford and Mark Hopkins became far richer. Notwithstanding putting California on the US map, the Gold Rush also decimated numerous indigenous Native American communities. Untold environmental damage accompanied the mining, especially the hydraulic variety that used 30,000 gallons of water each minute.

Where did all this lustrous California gold come from? Not from fairy dust. According to John McFee’s superb Assembling California that intertwines the state’s geological and human history, the Sierra’s deposits of gold were precipitated 150 million years ago when the third and last giant (10,000 square mile) island-arc fragment of the Pacific plate – the Smartville Block – accreted into the westernmost North American plate near where Auburn, California is now. The Smartville Block not only doubled the width of what is now California, but created its bountiful Mother Lode as well. California’s Mother Lode has produced more gold than any other state – more than 106 million ounces since 1848. In modern times about 38% of gold is used for jewelry; coins and official government uses, 22%; electrical and electronics, 34%; and other uses, 6%.

Now that we’ve scratched the surface of the history and source of most of the nation’s gold, let’s return to the present time and Judy Shelton, who adores gold.

Dr. Shelton has recently been nominated by #45 to fill a vacancy on the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. Although her nomination may not be as far-fetched as the president’s previous attempt to install the totally unqualified Herman Cain on the Board, she is quite controversial. She belongs to the justifiably much-endangered, very conservative tribe of modern-day gold bugs. Like her fellow bugs, she wants to reverse President Nixon’s decision to drop the gold standard and re-adopt it now. She has publicly praised #45’s tax cuts and deregulation policies. She approves of the president’s misguided trade war with China as a means of forcing it to “play by the rules.” As I’ve mentioned before, no one's won this war. So far the president’s tariffs have cost us taxpayers $28 billion. That’s what the Trump admiration has paid the farmers they wounded, with no end in sight. Nice call, Judy. 

Virtually all knowledgeable monetary economists believe returning to the gold standard would harm the economy and its citizens. The Federal Reserve’s principal means of influencing the macroeconomy is by increasing or decreasing the nation’s money supply depending on expected economic conditions. It increases the money supply if a recession is expected, thus reducing interest rates to spur loans and investment. The Fed decreases the money supply causing interest rates to rise, towards the end an expansion, if higher inflation is expected.

Monetary policy is hardly an exact science, but it would be significantly constrained under a gold standard. Why; because our money supply would essentially be determined by how much gold is produced.

Dr. Shelton has stated, “we make America great again by making America’s money great again” through returning to the gold standard. That’s patently absurd. Dean Baker, a macroeconomist who was one of the first to identify the 2007–2008 US housing bubble that lead to the Great Recession, likened returning to the gold standard as prescribing chemotherapy for someone who doesn't have cancer. An apt diagnosis Dr. Baker.

Turning the economic clock back and re-adopting the gold standard, as Dr. Shelton and Mr. Trump have fantasized, would link the money supply to gold production. If they actually thought through this fundamental relationship imposed by the gold standard, they would not at all be pleased. I don’t believe they’ve thought about it at all; it’s simply a sporadic gesture memorializing the unfamiliar “golden days” of the past. It would not please #45 one single golden leaf to learn that China is the world’s largest gold producer. 

Since the end of the last recession, US gold production has increased a meager 0.87% per year. This is why many economists believe that a re-imposed gold standard would act as a limit on economic growth. As an economy's productive capacity grows, then so should its money supply. But because a gold standard requires that money be backed by the metal, the scarcity of gold constrains the ability of the economy to produce more capital and grow. Thus a gold-standard based monetary policy could no longer be used to stabilize or grow the economy.

It’s likely that the Senate, under the imprudent leadership of Mitch McConnell, will confirm Judy Shelton. A single gold bug will then sit on the seven-member Federal Reserve Board. Her practical and institutional influence will be limited. But that’s one too many bugs at our central bank for anyone who wants an independent Fed to be a viable economic counterforce to #45’s feckless thrusts. Where’s the political Terminix when we need it?

IS #45 RELATED TO CTENOPHORES OR PORIFERANS?

Never look back unless you are planning to go there. ~ Henry David Thoreau

I’ve returned from another delightful, multi-state road-trip adventure through the Pacific Northwest seeing family and friends. It was downright refreshing to take many steps away from the on-going tribulations connected with all things political, especially our vulgarian-in-chief and our upcoming presidential election. I recommend hiking through forests and slopes and viewing gorgeous countryside gurgling with snow-melt fed, rushing brooks.

The myopic media-industrial complex makes it seem like we’ll be voting the day after tomorrow, thus every candidate’s quotidian words are vitally important; even though election day is a colossal 453 days away. Equally obscuring is the media’s 24/7 obsession with each uttered and Twittered syllable of #45. This only magnifies his coarseness, crudeness and deceit – and strokes his already over-colossal ego. Please stop, right now.

At the same time, obdurate progressive Dems keep acting as puritanical, self-righteous bluenoses and continue posing as the sole purveyors of certain Democratic victory, while trashing President Obama’s significant accomplishments. With friends like these, who needs enemies?

But I digress.  

Instead, I offer here a much longer perspective about life on this fine, though endangered planet that transcends far beyond the mere 243 years since the USofA was founded.

It seems naturalists have narrowed down the source of the very beginnings of our hoary Tree of Life. They have been wrestling – thankfully not at all in the WWE tradition– with identifying what living creatures are the closest, current counterparts to the first-ever multicellular animal that developed in Earth’s oceans well over half a billion years ago. Naturally, evolutionary biologists haven’t all agreed about which creature deserves this accolade; and represents every human’s (perhaps especially #45) very oldest ancestor. There are two (2) quite distinct animals fighting it out, as it were, in the biologists’ ring.

First, are the beautiful and seemingly fragile Ctenophores, also called comb jellies. As pictured below, they are usually soft, iridescent blobs wreathed by feathery cilia that are sometimes arranged in groups (“combs”). They inhabit many marine habitats around the world. Despite their seeming simplicity, they have central nervous systems, cilia/tentacles to capture prey, and mouths, throats and stomachs to digest their food. Virtually all ctenophores are predators. They can capture and eat krill, shrimp-like crustaceans and even each other. Adult ctenophores range from an inch to almost 5ft in size. Watching comb jellies swim around in the tanks at the Monterey Bay Aquarium is a delightful almost magical experience.

Comb jellies in action.

Second, the other existing animal-type that’s in the running for being most similar to the founder of Earth’s animal kingdom are Poriferans, aka sponges. Sponges come in all sizes, shapes and colors. They are stunning aquatic animals that mostly attach themselves to an underwater surface, often coral reefs, and remain fixed in place, as shown below. The great majority of sponges are marine salt-water species, living in all the oceans. Their habitat ranges from tidal zones to depths exceeding five (5) miles. Their bodies are full of pores and channels allowing water to circulate through them. Virtually all types of sponges are only able to passively eat tiny particles, like bacteria and other microscopic food from the water that passes through their skeletons. They have no nervous system but do have cells in their outer layers can move inwards and change functions. From afar, sort of like stem cells.

Sponges in inaction.

Over several decades evolutionary biologists and morphologists have sort of drawn a line in the sand (on an ocean beach) with regard to the founder of our animal Tree of Life. Some believe comb jellies should hold the crown; other scientists consider sponges to be the closest modern analogue to the first multicellular animal.

For many years, the common scientific wisdom was that sponges were the foundational animal. Then about a decade ago a study using genetic methods argued that comb jellies were the sister group (the closest relatives of another evolutionary branch) of Earth’s first animals. The comb jelly proponents were overjoyed. If they had them, their cilia were wildly fluttering; but it wasn’t to persist. Last week a new study was published that turns the tide and provides “very strong support” for the sponges-first hypothesis. 

It was a tough choice, but my vote goes for #45 having a spongier forbearer. Like them, he’s immovable despite factual reality and has no nervous system. In any case, we must make sure to send him back to the depths from whence he came in 453 days.