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Old 09-23-2007, 08:02 PM
tolbiny tolbiny is offline
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Join Date: Mar 2004
Posts: 7,347
Default Re: Explain to an idiot the benefits of going back to the Gold standar

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When future value > present value, interest rates, which are a measure of rewarding the risky behavior of loaning out money, stop functioning, because there is now no reason to loan it out at all; you can just sit on it.

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What? As long as a person can gain more by lending than by simply holding money then they have an incentive to lend/invest.

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You're still ignoring the immediate real world impact on consumer spending. What are these "good businesses" in a deflationary economy with no consumers spending any money?

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This totally ignores reality, since if no one was spending money then prices would drop so low that anyone who had money saved (everyone) would start buying since their purchasing power had hit the point that they were waiting for it to hit. Since individuals have different thresholds for when spending > consuming, and the fact that current consumptions is preferred to future consumption, your hypothetical non consumption economy never comes about. Every lowering of prices due to deflationary pressure adds another group of people who now meet their requirements for spending.
To your point about investing in businesses in the future having a population with large amounts of savings built up means that there is a large incentive to produce newer and better products sine there is a huge market to tap into. Target consumers for businesses are the ones with the most to spend, the more is saved the more can be spent.
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