If you listen carefully, you won’t hear Ron Paul address any of the fundamental economic issues caused by the Gold Standard, you will hear him disagree with Milton Friedman and you will hear him use more emotive please than even Paul Krugman. Krugman, on the other hand, uses a mixture of emotive pleas with overly complex ideas and probably entirely misses his audience.

Simple fact is, a little inflation and currency depreciation would go a long way to fixing the structural problems with the US economy AS WELL as the defiicent-demand cyclical problems.

Watch the video.

What’s interesting is the range of new, government-sponsored digital currencies that are in development. Digital currencies might also be a little bit of a stretch, they’re still more like digital payment methods. Unlike Bitcoins, there is much to recommend about low-cost, high-security, electronic digital payment platforms.

Japan is toying with slightly different ideas. Rather than using a traditional ATM card to withdraw cash, you might simply use your palm. It really is only a matter of time before the ubiquitous plastic card disappears into a cellphone, embedded chip, retina scan or something.

Sweden is moving towards a cashless economy, with one of the driving factors being security – as in personal safety. Maybe I’ve missed some news stories (or not read Dragon Tattoo enough times) but I wouldn’t have thought that Sweden would be first in the world at worrying about personal safety.

To be clear, there are several wide-scale advances in this area around the world already.  These aren’t specifically digital currencies, but rather different, more efficient methods of payment.  The UK Oyster card is a good example of a wide-scale contactless payment system that works well for small payments in a fast-speed transaction environment. The precursor of the UK’s Oyster is Hong Kong’s Octopus card, which is actually used or micro-payments on transport systems, many parking areas and even vending machines.

Google and PayPal have systems allowing small digital payments that are cost-effective, but still linked to an account so your account information is linked directly to the transaction. One of the apparent virtues of Bitcoins is their anonymous nature. Now for the most part most individuals aren’t particularly bothered by anonymity, but it is a genuine concern. Do you really want a vending machine company to know when and where you buy your Coke and Vitamin Water from their vending machines? Would you want this information to be aggregated with your online purchases and fuel purchases and airline ticket purchases? Very soon the information that Google currently stores on you would be a drop in the information ocean from these real world movements and transactions.

So Canada’s proposal for an anonymous, digital currency is really interesting. Government backing is one good way of giving credibility and scale to a system that many competing system will not be able to manage.

For me, one of the most interesting aspects of the story was the Canadian Mint’s IPO of an exchange traded listing for gold receipts for gold stored at the mint. This is basically the oldest form of gold-backed currency – receipts of gold on deposit at an institution where the receipts were tradeable and allowed “gold” to be used for transactions more conveniently and safely that gold bars and coins.

What once was old is now new.

Greece is a complex problem. Paul Krugman points to this Choose Your Own Adventure on the Greek crisis. Much like the original books, there are many, many nasty ends.

Read it, try it, explore a few paths. This is the best resource I’ve seen recently to explain exactly how bad almost all the alternatives are, and how there are no really good outcomes from this mess.

Rest of The World, watch out.

Call me stubborn perhaps, but I firmly believe the agreement is an awful one.  It doesn’t address the primary problems of the Euro Zone, doesn’t restore competitiveness to Southern countries, doesn’t address the problem of a lack of a true, unlimited lender of last resort and most importantly, probably won’t get ratified by the populations of the individual countries.

I may have read the markets incorrectly for today, but I am as convinced as ever that the problems have not been solved.  Watch this space, there is more trouble ahead. (Felix Salmon, amongst others, feels similarly.)

Prediction: Italian bond yields will be above 8% at some point before the end of 2012 or at least one country will have left the Euro.

“Renminbi” is the official name of the currency introduced by the Communist People’s Republic of China at the time of its foundation in 1949. It means “the people’s currency”.

“Yuan” is the name of a unit of the renminbi currency. Something may cost one yuan or 10 yuan. It would not be correct to say that it cost 10 renminbi.

A little confusing, but at least now you know.

There are too many political problems, too much fallout from the Euro and, frankly, too many good reasons not to do it. In some ways, Saudi Arabia may exert enough pressure in the region to make it work, but for the same reason I suspect some may be wary of Saudi gaining any more leverage.