Tuesday, November 29, 2016

Koch Brothers' Operative Says It Is No Longer Practical to Have a Gold Standard

Former Cato Institute president and Ex-BB&T chief John Allison just told CNBC that it's no longer practical to have a gold standard, though, he is in favor of it on a "theoretical" level. a position he once held.

"There are a lot of gold bugs out there some are not very sophisticated," he said.

Imagine my surprise.

Allison met yesterday with Donald Trump and is under consideration for the Treasury Secretary position in the Trump administration.

The Koch brothers are co-founders of the Cato Institute. Allison remains on the Board of Directors.

It doesn't sound like Allison is in favor of ending the Fed either.

 -RW

Note: This is a corrected version. Early reports said that Allison said it was no longer practical to end the Fed and he did seem to imply that. He, in fact, said that a gold standard was no longer practical.





4 comments:

  1. Good, I'll be selling my relics for some crisp paper ASAP.

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  2. As long as you are correcting: Charles Koch, Murray Rothbard, and Ed Crane founded Cato. Some time in the mid- to late 1980s Charles lost interest in Cato, and David was appointed to make the Koch contributions and sit on the board.

    Probably, Allison just did not want to get dragged into a debate with CNBC at this stage of the "horse race style" of MSM reporting over what is obviously a difficult-to-explain viewpoint, even if correct. "Sound money" as opposed to "stable money" is the proper code terminology for a market-determined commodity money (or "monetary base" if one allows money substitutes in the Mises' sense).

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  3. I'm concerned about the physical quantity. I think there's only enough public and private gold available for Americans to have maybe 2 ounces each. Granted it's digitally divisible, but that's not a lot. You could bring silver in too.

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    1. Anyone who says there is "not enough gold" should go take econ 101. This is one of the most ridiculous anti-gold statements ever made and any economist that says it should be considered a hack. It doesn't matter if it is "digitally divisible" whatever that means.

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