In this session from Techonomy 2011 in Tuscon, Ariz., Steve Forbes, Chairman and Editor-in-Chief of Forbes Media, highlights why he thinks trashing the dollar will never stabilize the US economy.
Forbes: It’s an absolute illusion that if you tamper with your currency you are going to absolutely improve your standing in terms of economic growth. If trashing your money was the way to wealth, Zimbabwe and Argentina would own the world today. It does not work. You need a steady value. In terms of the dollar, it is the global currency because of the US Economy. Just as it used to be Spanish silver and the British pound, today it’s the dollar. When we muck that up it makes it very hard to do transactions. Again, it focuses investment on existing things, like houses, like commodity, like land, instead of the mind for the future. We saw the same thing in the ‘70s. When we finally killed inflation in the early ‘80s, that’s when we became and innovative country again. And I’ll throw something out to show that I’m truly not running for office, that I am an agitator today, and that is I think in five years we are going to see the dollar relinked to G-O-L-D. It’s gotta be done.