Gold was just a curiosity until urban society created a wealthy class that could afford to prize such pretties. It wasn’t functionally useful for anything, until well into the bronze age they found that it retards corrosion, and the electronic age needed an extremely malleable material of high electrical conductivity. In meso-America at the time of the European invasion, gold was still considered less valuable than textiles or jade.

Asimov (I think) once suggested making money from Uranium, as a means to encourage spending. Spare change (he proposed tongue-in-cheekishly) would literally burn a hole in your pocket. Big piles would be dangerous, and therefore banks and other misers would rather lend than hoard.

Money is just a symbol of effort, or desire, or energy.

I’d like to see money based on kilowatt-hours, rather than on a mass of some commodity such as pepper, tulips, or gold (all once “gold standards”).

Kilowatt-hours don’t degrade, can’t be forged, and won’t go out of style. They are stored in conversion media like fossil fuels, acre-feet-of-water (dams), hydrogen, etc.

A kilowatt-hour standard would also have the effect of stabilizing energy prices. A gallon of gas (petrol/heptane) is (can produce) approximately 33 KwH (depending on the blend). How volatile would the price at the pump be if the dollar were locked to $0.10/KwH (about a current summer daytime electrical rate). Notice that this is $3.30/gallon. If you are paying less, then you are getting free energy.

But I digress.

Noone - elucidate me on how you could enforce a gold standard? When gold was ‘rare’ it worked (somewhat) as a standard. Gold is not ‘rare’ any more, and cannot really act as a standard bearer, unless you wish to give mining companies the power that central banks currently hold. gold is not simply currency - it is a useful commodity (go look at nanotech, at electronics fabrication, at medicine, at catalysts). How would you differentiate between these uses? Your money supply problem would be insanely complex and challenging.

think again.

The Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP, isn’t large enough to recapitalize the banking system, and the administration hasn’t been direct in addressing that shortfall, he said. Stiglitz said there are conflicts of interest at the White House because some of Obama’s advisers have close ties to Wall Street.

“We don’t have enough money, they don’t want to go back to Congress, and they don’t want to do it in an open way and they don’t want to get control” of the banks, a set of constraints that will guarantee failure, Stiglitz said.

U.S. taxpayers need to know the risks behind the Federal Reserve’s $2 trillion in lending to financial institutions because the public is now an “involuntary investor” in the nation’s banks, according to a court filing by Bloomberg LP.

The Obama financial program — the rest of his agenda, remember, will almost certainly depend on his retooling failed finance — shows hints of a flawed combination. Its first weakness, in both policy and retention of prior government officials, involves an appearance of extending the mismanagement and pro-Wall Street bias of the 2008 Bush regime bailout. Its second Achilles heel, rather than representing the hopes and demands for change from the Democratic Party’s grassroots and net roots, involves re-enlisting and banking on the big names of the Clinton administration’s regulatory and bubble-managing failures of the late 1990s, especially former treasury secretary Larry Summers and many proteges of former treasury secretary Bob Rubin.

A congressional panel overseeing the U.S. financial rescue suggested that getting rid of top executives and liquidating problem banks may be a better way to solve the economic crisis.

I’ve followed the writings of Warren over the past couple of years and find her credible and trustworthy. She was the Harvard economist featured in the documentary “Maxed out.”