Gold standard as it were will never be coming back... But the idea of setting the value of money to a commodity is gaining strenght in economical circles over the last few years, for reasons obvious: the anarchical speculation is insane. Banks are leveraging more than what their own country's GDP's and everyone is ok with that... So some economists are thinking about setting the price of the dollar to Wheat, Barley, Alcohol, and other renewable commodities, effectively indexing the Dollar to more than one indicator, so that the system is more rigid and resistant to climate changes(generally when one area experiences a bad crop of something, another area receives a better-than-usual crop of something else, so nature tends to "balance out"). Now, there are advantages, and there are disadvantages to a system like this, and 70 years of Keynesian economy to justify keeping things the way they are. But all economists know one thing, and that is that the capitalist system is trying to balance an elephant on the head of a toothpick. A wooden toothpick. What we're seeing are the first cracks on the toothpick, but EVERYONE knows the toothpick will cave someday. Such is the nature of speculative capitalism. It's a spring collecting energy, the energy being a massive inflation/deflation cycle, and the crisis are the spring showing just a tiny little bit of the collected energy.
The day the toothpick caves, money will suddenly value close to nothing. Next a lot of money will disappear as people sell desperately, and we go to a massive deflation, plummeting the prices of everything, and breaking everything. Yes, this will happen. Yes, there are checks and balances keeping it from happening right now, but it will happen if we keep on like we are. Systems relying on a single currency are a growing trend, for instance. If you take away the floating speculation between currency prices, you take away a nice, big, FAT chunk of the problem of current capitalism. This can be achieved by a World Government, something that's gaining more and more strenght everyday. The world is organizing into blocks, mirroring the Euro block, and that's one way of bettering things... (But of course, there's no free lunch. Someone's gotta pay the bills, and that someone's usually the country with most debts and problems... Hello Portugal. Hello Greece.)
I for one gravitate towards the idea of a world government, because i think it's a feasible and doable thing in a few years, and i'm confident that i'll see something close to that in my lifetime yet. As for a single world currency... I think that i'll probably never live to see it flourish, but i'd really like that... The indexation of a single currency to a lot of stuff, and other currencies to that first one, is basically achieving the same goal a single world currency would achieve, only with much less stability. (Although a single world currency would suffer heavily from major wars, mass riots or plagues in certain parts of the world[The ones that supply the commodities]). In the end, it becomes a question of ideological preferences, because current world economy is too complex to make accurate models of off it, and that tends to escalate with the lenght of time you're trying to predict. Every system has it's holes, it's flaws, and there's no perfect system... Except the utopical, unfeasible and undoable idea of everything being available free of charge for everyone, and everyone working for the betterment of everything else, in a perfect 100% cooperative way with no outside influence... Physicists know this as the perfectly round sphere in a perfect vacuum... Yeah. It also would obsolete the idea of a economist AT ALL...
[rant]
And i'm sleepy and too pissed off thinking about the wrong fiscal, monetarial and political decisions made in my country... How i wish i was born Superman. I would make things right in one day. One single fucking day, i tell you.
[/rant]
Ok now seriously. I'll go watch Princess Mononoke and sleep. Peace out. Don't kill me for my naive conceptions of economy...
