More M3

From a PBS link:


"A second issue was also now at the fore -- the dollar. The price of gold had been fixed at $35 an ounce since the Roosevelt administration. But the growing U.S. balance-of-payments deficit meant that foreign governments were accumulating large amounts of dollars -- in aggregate volume far exceeding the U.S. government's stock of gold. These governments, or their central banks, could show up at any time at the "gold window" of the U.S. Treasury and insist on trading in their dollars for gold, which would precipitate a run. The issue was not theoretical. In the second week of August 1971, the British ambassador turned up at the Treasury Department to request that $3 billion be converted into gold."

Nixon’s answer was to go off the gold standard in 1972. This is the same date that the ‘M3’ number began to move away from the ‘M2’ number. In 2006, we stopped tracking the ‘M3’ number. Last week the government began to take absurd liberties with the printing press.

A good time to buy farmland.