Search The Oil Drum with Google
Recently on TOD:World
TOD:Local
- Streets: Utilitarian Corridors or Livable Public Space
- Summer Streets a Success!
- Plan for Hydro-Fracture Drilling for Unconventional Natural Gas in Upstate New York
TOD:Europe
- Oilwatch Monthly - November 2008
- The 2008 IEA WEO - Production Decline Rates
- The EU Strategic Energy Review: maybe not so depressing after all
TOD:Canada
- The Round-Up: October 24, 2008
- Compressed Air Energy Storage - How viable is it?
- Oil Megaproject Update (July 2008)
TOD:ANZ
Blogroll
Energy Sites
- The Coming Global Oil Crisis
- Die Off
- Dry Dipstick
- Energy Bulletin
- From the Wilderness
- Life After the Oil Crash
- Peak Oil Crisis
- Peak Oil News and Message Boards
- Powerswitch
- Rigzone
- Matthew Simmons
- Wolf at the Door
Environment & Sustainability Sites
- The Daily Green
- EcoGeek
- Eco Street
- Green Car Congress
- Green Options
- green.alltop.com
- Gristmill
- RealClimate
- Sustainablog
- Treehugger
- WorldChanging
Blogs
- The Big Picture
- Casaubon's Book
- Cleantech Blog
- Clusterf
k Nation (Jim Kunstler) - The Cost of Energy
- David Strahan
- The Energy Blog
- Entropy Production
- European Tribune
- GraphOilology
- jeffvail.net
- Mobjectivist
- Peak Energy (Australia)
- Peak Energy (USA)
- R-Squared
- Resource Insights
Finance & Economics Blogs
- Calculated Risk
- Ecological Economics
- Econbrowser
- Environmental Economics
- Infectious Greed
- The Mess That Greenspan Made
- Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis
Organizations
“Government is too big and too important to be left to the politicians.”
—Claire Huchet Bishop
User login
Contact
- Content: editors at theoildrum dot com
- Tech support: support at theoildrum dot com
Personnel
- Editors: Prof. Goose, Heading Out, Stuart Staniford, Nate Hagens
- DrumBeat Editor: Leanan
- Contributors: ace, Engineer-Poet, Gail the Actuary, jeffvail, JoulesBurn, Khebab, Robert Rapier
- TOD:Local: Glenn
- TOD:Europe: Chris Vernon, Euan Mearns, Francois Cellier, Jerome a Paris, Luís de Sousa, Rembrandt, Rune Likvern, Ugo Bardi
- TOD:Canada: benk, Libelle
- TOD:ANZ: Big Gav, Phil Hart, aeldric
- Technician: Super G
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
GAIA Host Collective
Dang.
My tea leaves were saying "undulate".
How could they be so wrong?
I'm returning this jar of tea leaves to Madam Yergana for a full refund.
Dang. Just when I thought I found someone I could trust.
Step Back,
You should get double your money back. "Undulate" comes from the Latin "unda" that means "wave." To undulate is to move in waves or with a smooth, wavelike motion. By way of contrast, to fluctuate means to vary irregularly.
Anyone want my prediction as to trends in the future value of the dollar? By the way, the dollar has not really crashed since the Civil War--just eroded more or less fast since 1913 with a major deflation during the Great Depression.
Fearless Forecast: Pennies and nickels will hold their value.
Fearless counterforecast: Just as with removal of silver coins and removal of all copper pennies, I expect a changeout in metals used by the mint soon (the next 5 years). The result will be that pennies and nickels from before the change will hold their value while those after the change will lose value until the US currency declines to the point where those coins are once again worth more than the metals used to manufacture them.
My guess is that both pennies and nickels will eventually go out of circulation. The coins make no sense, because a penny will buy one twentieth of what it used to, and a nickels is worth far far less than a penny used to be worth. One-dollar bills make no sense either, because in inflation adjusted terms they are "really" only worth between a nickel and a dime, depending on your base year.
We should have five and ten dollar coins and eliminate bills of those denominations. And a hundred dollar bill buys less than ten dollars used to, so why should it be thought of as a "big" bill? It is only to make life difficult for drug dealers that we no longer have thousand dollar bills as legal tender.
Yeah, but.... the US govt mint folks have their collective heads up their collective butts if they think they can get people to accept a dollar coin. Just ain't gonna happen. People just don't like carrying around a pocketfull of worthless change, especially coins that no vending machine takes, especially since most vending machines take bills. Paper money is convenient. We seem to have grown beyond the silly notion that metal money has some kind of 'intrinsic' value.
A dollar is not worthless; it is "really" worth between five and ten cents, depending on your base year and index of price level change.
Note that in European countries large denomination coins work just fine. Coins do not have to be large. For example, the old five dollar gold piece was smaller than a penny (which created problems, because in San Francisco it was the exact same size as a bus token, and by mistake people would put them (now worth more than a hundred dollars)into the fare machine. The twenty dollar gold piece was roughly the same size as a half dollar.
Let the dime be the new lowest denomination coin, then a small fifty cent piece (about the same size as a nickel, maybe with a milled edge), and then also a small (thirteen sided?) dollar coin. The five and ten dollar coins would be larger and worth what fifty cent pieces and silver dollars used to be. I hate carrying around wads of one dollar bills.