American currency, as designed by our Nation’s founders and enshrined in the Constitution, should be unquestionably sound. It was designed to be hard money: only gold and silver were to used to mint currency. Even when paper notes were first introduced, they were always redeemable for real hard money (gold) on demand at any bank. The US currency was weakened in 1933 by President Roosevelt and the gold standard was eliminated in 1971 by President Nixon and we now have what you can call soft money. Governments continue to this day to pass around paper money and print it out of thin air and just give it value. The world consists of paper fiat money that floats in value against one another. This fiat currency experiment is the same experiment that is failing today. The central bankers’ willingness to print and lend money at abnormally low interest rates and the government’s addiction to debt spending will be the undoing of our financial system. We are seeing the US empire blow up in front of our own very eyes.
The history of money
The first example of coinage was in the seventh century BC. Lydia introduced an electrum coin. These coins were a mixture of gold and silver found in the Patroclus River near Sardis. The Lydian coins were not made out of natural electrum but of a manufactured alloy. This alloy allowed the kings to lower the gold content and increase the silver content compared to the natural electrum. To maintain the coins’ artificial scarcity, a variety of laws were created to protect the government monopoly of the production of electrum, gold, and silver.
The temptation to tamper with currency has remained throughout history. The abuse of an empire’s currency points directly to its demise. Leaders cannot resist greed with the dream of making themselves and their close friends rich and powerful. It is as simple as that in most cases. Then you have to defend yourself as someone else is trying to steal your power and wealth. You then need to spend and tamper with your currency even more. This vicious cycle is playing out in front of our own eyes today as the US is losing its grip on superpower status. It all points back to the tampering of currency and the inability to stop spending. These currencies are backed by nothing but a statement that it has value. Our currency is a fraud. The fake currency always brings down the real empire.
Coinage was devalued for some empires
The Roman Empire debased its coinage with a hard money policy thriving, but the devaluation of its currency over time was crippling and debilitating. Near 360 AD the currency had fallen to 30,000,000:1 from its value under Augustus in AD 14. The Greeks had a very healthy period of rule with sound money, but ideas from certain philosophers such as Plato turned out to be financially catastrophic. Plato was actually sent to the slave market to be sold near 380 BC.
Paper currency was then printed and devalued. The Chinese dynasties experimented with paper money but couldn’t control devaluation and reform during the 1200s. The Mongols abused their currency and experienced severe devaluation in the 1300s. The Ming Dynasty began to be dismantled as its silver coinage was debased around 1620. The Dutch thrived in the 1600s due to standardized gold and silver coinage and became the international currency of its day.
Empires then fiddled with paper money and interest rates
The British experimented with low interest rates in the 1700s and had at one time a reliable, full-weight coinage to protect creditors and debtors. France and Napoleon thrived and fell. We saw the same course of events with Germany and the Weimar Republic and their currency and debt. The Weimar Republic chose to use money printing to finance the war. The United States today is on the same money-printing path of destruction. The fall of an empire is inevitable if that empire continues to pile on debt and continues to print fake paper money exponentially. Greed always overrides the lessons learned from history when it comes to politicians and central bankers.
We see an empire, the empire needs to keep power and wealth, the empire spends and devalues its currency to fund itself and fund a war, one empire falls and another empire takes reign temporarily. Of course, this is a very brief summary of monetary history and is much more complex in most cases. It is much more complicated, but the point remains the same. The abuse of an empire’s currency points directly to its demise. When the government controls and manipulates the money, the empire is eventually dismantled and overtaken by someone else. It costs too much to stay at the top, and governments and leaders always turn to fake money. The cycle then repeats itself over centuries.
The superpower eventually goes upside down with spending, the devaluation of its currency, and enormous debt. We are headed down that road right now. Our country is in the last stages of being a superpower. It is just a matter of time before it all comes to a head. It may take years or it could happen all at once. The fact remains the same; financially our country has gone down the wrong path of currency devaluation and money creation. Financially it will not end well. The government and central bankers will just continue kicking the can down the road until the whole system crumbles. When it crumbles, what will you have left? That is the real question here for our purposes. At least protect what you have tried to work so hard for. Don’t let the delusional politicians and forces who control our central bank policy ruin your savings.
The funny thing is central banks today are buying gold but pushing paper. They are buying a lot of gold and printing a lot of paper. The gold will traditionally gain value while the fiat money they are printing and giving to us for our hard work and labor will depreciate significantly. Gold is money under any government, but banknotes could be worthless. Today we have Federal Reserve Notes. Look at your paper money folks, it says it right on there “Federal Reserve Note.” Based on history, the fiat paper notes given to us by our leaders will be toilet paper in the not-too-distant future. The money the central banks are storing away in their coffers will be solid and strong as gold. That’s because it’s exactly always been that. Gold is the only form of real money throughout history. Gold enriches an empire. Fiat paper money destroys it.
