Not sure where you got the idea that I was promoting precious metals as a high yield investment, my point is that both cryptos and fiat currency are completely dependant on confidence to be worth more than the paper (or digital equivalent) that they are printed on.
We've all seen the pictures of people using a wheelbarrow full of banknotes to do a couple of days worth of grocery shopping and burning money as firefighters, and there's nothing tangible stopping the USD and AUD following suit.
I for one have lost all confidence in our current monetary system, got a trillion reasons, and if everyone else catches on, at least you can still light a fire with plastic bank notes!
Except as i noted in #7, there was good reason for loss of confidence in the Deutschemark in the 1920s but no reason for a lack of confidence in the US economy at present. The reason was Germany printing money as you say (I have a 10 billion deutschemark note in my collection) and resulting hyperinflation, but there is nowhere near hyperinflation in the USA (in fact it is well below what it was in Australia in the 1980s and is starting to drop). Germany had its Ruhr coalfield invaded by France and lost much of its trade income, it owed a fortune in WW1 reparations to the allies (the reason Hitler started WW2) and had massive unemployment - USA has a healthy economy and very low unemployment (as do we). I agree completely that paper money is dependent on confidence, but the world is confident about the USA economy (there is more reason to worry about the Chinese economy). One has to look not just at what occurred but at the reasons why things occurred. I haven't seen anyone wheeling wheel barrows full of money down Wall Street so far!
A loaf of bread in Berlin that cost around 160 Marks at the end of 1922 cost 200,000,000,000 Marks by late 1923. By November 1923, one US dollar was worth 4,210,500,000,000 German marks. They just kept printing money and by 1924 there were 1.2
sextillion (1,200,000,000,000,000,000,000) deutschmarks in circulation. There is a misconception about the amount of paper currency the USA has in circulation. As of December 31, 2020, there was $2,040.7 billion ($2 trillion) in circulation, only a tiny fraction of what Germany was circulating 100 years ago, and half of that currency is held overseas, not in the USA. Confidence is the key. If you have a house worth $15 million but only $10,000 in cash in total, everyone will still happily lend you money. You have little paper money but have assets that are perceived as being worth $15 million. That is the way economies work - if you (or a country) is seen as in a position to pay back its debts (even if only over a long time), it is considered good for a loan. The amount of paper money is not the factor - total U.S. assets amount to about $225 trillion, more than a hundred times the face value of its paper currency in circulation. If China sells the US $5 billion in electronics (an imaginery number) and the USA sells China $4.8 billion is soy beans, China only has a balance of payments deficit of $200 million - billions of dollars in paper currency does not change hands, it is sums on paper. Or so it seems to my poor understanding of economics.
