IT'S HAPPENING
Fortune reached out to Dr. Judy Shelton, one of two economists recently named to Donald Trump’s economic advisory team, and the only woman to hold that title. Shelton is a senior fellow and co-director of the Atlas Sound Money Project, whose mission is to promote the principles of sound money and raise awareness of what they see as the inherent problems of our current monetary system. Dr. Shelton first rose to prominence when she predicted the economic collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, two years before it transpired.
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I’m not opposed to a new Bretton Woods conference, and if it takes place at Mar-a-Lago, I’m fine with that. But anything the U.S. does because we print the international reserve currency, unilateral action would almost instantly be accommodated by other countries.
In terms of gold being involved, some people may think of that as a throwback, but I see it as a sophisticated, forward-looking approach because gold is neutral and it’s universal. It’s a well-accepted monetary surrogate that transcends borders and time. If you look at the foreign reserves of the most important countries, they keep them mostly in gold. I don’t want to read too much into it, but it proves that gold is not some barbarous relic.
>Would the first step in that be issuing gold-convertible bonds?
Don’t attribute this idea to the Trump campaign, but it has been something that I have been proposing for years now. A gold-backed bond was first proposed in 1981 by Alan Greenspan. I think the U.S. should issue them as an experimental pilot program, similar to the TIPS bond, that compensates people who are concerned about the future value of the dollar. For those who are concerned about a big financial meltdown, these bonds would give them some insurance, as gold tends to rise in price during periods of financial stress.
The Chinese would welcome this development, because it would likely be a stabilizing force for the value of the dollar and protect their dollar holdings. I also think they are the most likely country to provide a parallel instrument. If China were to offer a similar instrument where five years from now you can get back x amount in yuan or an ounce of gold, five years from now both the U.S.-issued instrument and the China-issued instrument are worth the same thing, an ounce of gold. So now you start getting projections of a stable exchange rate determined by market forces.
If this practice starts to spread to even more countries, you would start to see the semblance of a future stable exchange rate system with those exchange rates being determined by what market forces believe about the future value of those currencies.
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http: //fortune.com/2016/08/18/trump-gold-standard-economic-advisor-woman-judy-shelton/
