The history of U.S. currency begins with the foreign money of the colonial era and ends with the fiat standard of the post 1971 era. The Federal Reserve Notes that currently circulate as U.S. currency only became the exclusive legal tender of the United States in 1971. Before that, the United States had a number […]
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Key Takeaways The history of fiat currency failure reveals a very predictable pattern. The government starts with a small issue of paper money, thinking that they will just use it the once. Then they use it a second time. Then another and another, and another. Soon they are addicted. The government eventually prints too much,
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Is Russia currently on the gold standard? Despite a lot of speculation to the contrary, the answer is no. In early 2022, in an attempt to defend the value of the rouble, the Russian Central Bank said that it would buy gold at 5000 roubles per gram. However all this meant was that the bank
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The classical gold standard was the monetary system of the 1870s to 1914. The world’s industrial powers defined their national currencies as a fixed weight of gold and paper money was freely convertible into gold by government and private citizens alike. It was a golden age in many ways as the world experienced a sustained
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Gold has a long history and has been used as money for several thousand years. While not formally part of the money system today, central banks still hold gold, giving it a proximate shadow status in the current system. Of all the elements of the periodic table, gold is the one best suited for use
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Gold is important to the economy and the monetary system because its existence on central bank balance sheets gives fiat currency the credibility that it has. Governments and central banks like to pretend that gold is unimportant and is a relic of the past. This is wrong. While we no longer operate on the gold
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The story of the Weimar hyperinflation is a familiar one. But do you know what the rentenmark was and how it worked? Germany, like the other European powers, suspended the gold standard at the outbreak of World War One in 1914, abandoning the goldmark for the papiermark. By losing the war she suffered a greater
There are times in history where the government reluctantly accepts that state money has failed and the market’s money has proven superior. One such example was in the Ming Dynasty and silver. The government had initially banned silver and decreed that the citizens should use devaluing paper currency. Unfortunately for the authorities, the citizens continued
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There is a lot to learn from the inflation in Rome that ravaged the empire towards the end. It is a cautionary tale and one that we can draw many insights from. It’s quite natural that we might look at the story of the inflation in Rome and draw comparisons to our American dominated world
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A financial crisis caused the French Revolution when the debt laden state, in political gridlock, abandoned sound money for one of the world’s most destructive paper money experiments. This act triggered a chain of events that unleashed revolutionary forces that led to the downfall of the monarchy and a complete restructuring of French society and