I am not sure where to go with this so i'll try to speak academically on the subject at hand. The Great Depression was caused by too many regular Joe investors taking their hard earned money and investing it in the stock market...so much that they even leveraged that money to buy more stock in hopes of getting a good return. (leveraging='s borrowing) However, THAT money supply was cut-off ! Then a bank run off where everyone withdrew all of their money out of the banks,etc. That along with alot of monetary policy mistakes such as a non existential regulation guidelines as well. That being said, Yes Nixon removed the Gold Standard as you suggested but then backed the USD with oil, commonly referred to as the "petrodollar". The question is..what is The USD worth now in direct correlation to the price of oil/bbl? Seems as if they both are in a downward spiral...unless some geo-political event should un-fold. Nonetheless, good read!
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Thank you I'm glad you found it to be a good read. :-)
I'll probably at some point post more in depth on the great depression. I will admit there's t many factors for one specific thing to be the cause but I don't think it was just due to over borrowing. Part of it was a perfect storm and bad investors. Also there is the fact that by that time the Fed had already started increasing the money supply then failed to respond to the stock market crash. As we saw the Federal Gov and JP morgan and privte investors were able to inject enough liquidity into the market to prevent the 1907 stock market crash from going on more than a few weeks.
But during the depression the Federal Reserve did little during the initial stock market crash to stop tons of banks from folding. So it was part bad market policy and part bad government policy which made things worse/drag on more. Additional bad government policies around the 1930s such as raising in some taxes and tarrifs for lost revenue only made things worse.
You're right about the petro dollar becoming a thing which I didn't really go into detail on. Though I find that to be somewhat misleading since that is more about standardizing oil prices in US dollar terms which helps maintain it as the world reserve currency. But it doesn't tie/back it to a standard exactly the same as the gold standard. That is part of why the Feds can so freely inflate the money supply now whereas it was much harder to back when we had the gold standard.
And yes you're right both are on a downward spiral. With countries such as Russia trying to cut us out of the petro dollar and trading directly with others in local currency it will only get worse. hence why crytpos such as steemit are truly the answer.