Easy Money feat. Lil POTUS and E-Con
Ayy ayy ayy, Whuddup homies, it’s the gangster E-Con here, cause im dangerous… like a convict.
I’m here to school you fools in cool. You think you’re street? You think you’re tough?
You ain’t tough enough to step to me, dawg.
And I can prove it. What’s the most you ever stole? Yeah, that’s right. I wanna know your heist score. It’s like a high score, but gangster.
…
Mmm-kay, mmm-kay, word? That’s finna be a dope-ass haul, ya hear, but it aint straight nothing compared to the baller that is my BOI mr. F to the D to the R. Frankie D Roosevelt.
That’s right Frankie (The Big D) is a bigger gangster than you could ever be. He’s so cold he make a polar bear shiver… ya honkey.
See, you might have robbed a local liquor and threatened to ice the Po-po, but I bet you aint never robbed the entire worlds supply of gold.
That’s right, Gold. The OG bling bling, ya feel?
But if you think my home boy ganked that gold like some thug with two gats and a frontal attack, ya’ll be tripping. Shawty got brains and that cracker be vegetarian cause and he knew he could swipe them fat stacks without starting no beef.
The years 1933, right? Everybody been hustlin cause aint no one got any cheddar, ya feel? Frankie (Big D) Roosevelt is running this little country called the US of A and he got mad problems. Frankie wished he was Jay-Z cause 99 problems would be easy compared to what he got.
…
OK I’m not talking like that the whole way through. If I cringe any harder at myself, I’ll get scoliosis.
The big problem FDR had was that money was still tied to gold. If you wanted to print money as a government, you needed to have gold in your banks as collateral. This is much like Fractional Reserve Banking that we have now but using gold bars instead of dollars.
Problem is, you can’t just print more gold bars. You might be able to mine a bit of it if you want to go ye old prospector on me, but that’s slow and certainly isn’t enough to keep a country going.
Anyway, at the time, an ounce of gold was worth $20.
If FDR wanted to print $20 to help the economy, then he would have to pull an ounce of gold out of somewhere dark and muddy.
So FDR enacted executive order 6012, which was like Emperor Palpatine’s executive order 66, but like… 5946 times as cool.
This order had 3 big effects:
1. All miners had to sell any gold they found to the government for $20.
2. All citizens had to sell any gold they had to the government for $20.
3. You can’t take gold out of the country without FDR’s permission.
“But E-Con, that sounds like they just bought a bunch of gold. How is that a robbery?”
Holla at ya boi, cause E-con be bringing you them harsh truths, Skkkkkrt.
The Big D had his hands on all of America’s gold and announced to increase the price of gold from $20 to $35 per ounce.
See, by increasing the value of gold what he was really doing was decreasing the value of money through inflation. If you want to know why any dope-ass hustlers would want to lower the value of money, look at our earlier article about the power of trade.
Point is, buying more than 500 metric tons of gold off your citizens and then pricing said gold at nearly double tends to ruffle some feathers.
The bling suddenly became worth more than $15 billion, which is hella mad paper. That was a indirect tax of 15 billion off the citizenry since they lost out on the extra value their gold would have got them.
By selling it back to citizens and other countries, the government pocketed the difference. Easy money.
“L-Izzle, why would anyone buy gold back off the government if it was twice as expensive?”
Ay, dawg that’s a real question.
See, when gold was connected to money, any bank that wanted to lend out cash had to have gold in its bank vaults as a reserve. To banks around the world, they had to buy the gold at whatever price because without it, they wouldn’t be able to trade or make loans.
… and last time I checked, the only things banks are good for is making loans and hanging up on me after being on hold for over 45 minutes, God damn you Westpac.
So the banks didn’t really have a choice, they just had to accept it. Since citizens keep their money in banks, they don’t really get a say in the matter either and since other countries needed US dollars in order to trade for US goods… they also needed to buy the gold. FDR won on all counts.
Today, money isn’t tied to gold in the same way it was in 1933. We have fiat currency, which we will get into in a later article.
Because of this, countries aren’t as desperate to get their hands on your Element 79… they can print their own money at any time.
But people often talk about going back to a gold standard, and it’s important to know that this type of governmental confiscation would still be possible if that were to happen.
The American President could demand seizure of gold (and lets face it, this president seems to have a thing for gold) through another executive order.
And before you boomerang-chucking, budgie-smuggling drop-bear-dodging bastards in upside-down land feel too smug, we technically already have a law that does this.
Since 1959, the Banking Act of Australia allows the Governor-General to demand all citizens to hand over their gold to the Reserve Bank of Australia with a month’s notice. In return you’ll get the market rate for gold, but nothing is stopping Scomo from trying to hit us with a Frankie Big D play of his own.
So that’s the Gold Confiscation of 1933: the trillest gold robbery to ever take place. Several Billion dollars and Franklin D Roosevelt didn’t even need to get outta his jammies. Show Big D some love, he’s more thug than all the other hustlers combined. I guess you could say he’s pretty fly for a white guy.
Originally published at https://quantitativepleasing.substack.com.
