Can I be paid in gold bullion, please?
If I had a gold-based salary (rather than U.S. Dollar-based), I’d be doing quite well now.
I just ran the numbers, and sheesh! When I started working full-time as a web designer, my beginning salary was $25k/yr. At the time, gold was trading at $280US/oz., so if I’d been paid in gold, I would have been working for 89.29oz/yr.
Fast-forward to November 2007: the U.S. Dollar has become so devalued (primarily due to the never-ending Federal Reserve printing presses—we’ve got to fund the troops somehow, and that somehow is by printing more FR notes) that if we take that hypothetical “gold-standard salary” and convert it into today’s U.S. Dollar, you end up with $71,500/yr.
Let me say that again: $25,000 in May 2000 equals $71,500 in November 2007.
Somehow those raises don’t seem so much like raises anymore.
October 17th, 2008 at 3:12 pm
My salary, on the other hand, has been going DOWN lately, because the Russian economy is doing even worse than the American economy. Oh, boy. But up to this summer it was good to be paid in rubles (and pay my bills in dollars).
But I’d take gold any day.