Trouble now is there are no assets of value left to switch into.

I am long ag but they are getting spanked into near oblivion while unwinding the forward sales. There are bugger all stocks holding the physical inventories or trade financing to allow themselves to go unhedged.

Government ought to mint money (coin) and set the ratio of grams to a coin's name, only.

Minting amounts to stamping coins.

Issuing money amounts to setting value by decree.

Government ought to decree that a assayed number of grains of gold exist within each coin it mints of a declared name, e.g., One Dollar Gold Coin has 1 gram or 5 grams of gold.

However, as soon as government decrees value for money, say decreeing legal status tender or setting the price of money, government wrecks the Efficiency of Money as well as its sturdiness.

Thus, government forced money from natural money into artifical money. In doing so, Gresham's Law follows.

But given that central banks (I'm guessing including the US) sold heaps of their gold over the last few years and that Uncle Sam is in no financial position to be spending dollars that he doesn't have on something that is such a long term fix, it seems politically impossible to imagine this happpening. Could you imagine the next president announcing that one of his first moves to deal with the recession is going to be to spend billions buying gold, to help all those poor suffering souls.

It is going to be just too painful to buy back all that gold at three times or more the price when you need ten times more of the stuff to even come close to backing the vastly expanded current money supply. This is a big call, but it looks to me as if there will need to be a complete meltdown of the current financial system before a return to a full gold standard in the US. And if the US gets that meltdown sneeze what sickness will it infect the world with?

What humans need and what we want are oh so very different. I'd love to be proved wrong, but I'm not sure that what is right will win out.

Money unit debasement from an artificial cheapened price of money (central bank interest rate cuts) results from one cause: Inflation that does not work (no increase in Commercial Credit, thus no Economic Expansion).

When stockpiled money in circulation does not buy capital (claims on future money), that money bids up prices on life-sustaining resources futures (commodities of energy, foodstuff).

Since Central Banks and legal tender decreed money already meddle in exchange (money is the basis of every transaction), Central Bankers ought to force Politicians to change the value relation between commoditity bets vs new commerical credit bets.

Ending taxes on Commercial Paper transaction would be a start.