March 15 will be an important day.

[Kinser79]

(03-31-2017, 10:07 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: Kinser

Hmm...  How much gold and silver does the treasury have locked in the mint vaults?  Even if the treasury still had EO 11110's authority to print sliver backed currency, you need to have silver in order to back silver based currency.  As Wiki reports it, those silver dollars were sold to collectors.

If the Treasury still has stocks of precious metals, and supposing they no longer have the authority to issue metal backed currency, they could still sell the metal, buy down the debt, and generate a little room under the debt ceiling.  The room you could generate, though, would be limited by the amount of metal you have in your vaults.

I remain dubious that the executive branch can negate Congress's power of the purse by issuing executive orders.  I know various partisan web sites advocate various schemes.  When I see them tried, or even reported by a wide spectrum of news sources, I might take them seriously.

Again, no source of news should be accepted blindly.  For me, the smaller and more blatantly partisan a news source, the more skeptical I get.  This doesn't mean I'm not skeptical about the big main stream sources.  I'm just more skeptical about the fringe extremists.

This thread reflects my view of things.  The small partisan site predicted a big brouhaha in mid march.  The main stream source ignored the story until the end of March, predicting things would come to a head at the end of April.  You can give the partisan a bit of credit for trying to bring a real issue to the surface early, but they seem to have got the timing way wrong, which made me inclined to ignore this thread.  The more sources and more diverse sources of news that start covering the possible shut down, the more seriously I will take it.  Meanwhile, if Chicken Little runs around saying the sky is falling, I'll be dubious until the sky starts falling.

Which is why I put a link to CNN on the thread.  Not everyone is as enthused about the same small partisan sources as you.  I assume having a diversity of sources reporting different angles on the issue is a good thing.

US notes were not and never were backed by silver.  They were and always were pure fiat currency.  So having a ton of silver or no silver isn't a factor.  That being said I wouldn't mind going back to sound money either, but I don't think that likely as Boomers seem particularly wedded to the Welfare-Warfare state concept.  I fail to see how the concept of printing up greenbacks to pay the bills escapes people who are part of one of the best educated generations in history.

As to sources, I don't think that Zero Hedge has it wrong.  Currently the treasury is draining the emergency funds--it has that power obviously.  It is ignoring a super power that would break the Fed once and for all though.