I was watching a video on YouTube about how Roman money went from a large percent of silver to being debased to mostly bronze by the end of the empire. I got to thinking man how long did it take to go from silver to a much lesser value metal. The USA and most of the world government's went from Silver coinage to Aluminum or copper and zink in just under 60 year's It looks like the western civilization is a victim of its own success in many ways. IMO the USA is starting to decline. Our money has been debased from Silver and Gold then to the paper money is backed up by gold and silver to our money is a cotton blend of paper. History is it doomed to repeat or are we just rhyming.
The problem lies with the creation of too much money. It is not with the composition of the money. All the gold standard does is limit the amount of money that can be in circulation. That is not always a good thing. If there is not enough money in circulation, it can stifle economic activity. If you back 60 years ago, only about 1% of the money in circulation was made of silver. Perhaps 19% was made of paper. The rest was in the form of bank accounts. Some of those notes were backed by silver, and there was supposed to be gold backing the rest, but you could not redeem that money for gold. The point is the value of money is tied to good government policies and the ability of the economy to produce the goods people demand. The precious metal that backs a currency will not preserve its value.
I don't agree. I will set aside viability of gold and silver as a world reserve currency, but if it was, it would take it out of the Gov. hands to just make it up or pull it straight out of their rear end deflating the value and it would have then intrinsic value. The US has so much debt and it just keeps printing money and going deeper into debt that we will hit a wall at some point. If the Chinese and Russians and others succeed in taking the US dollar from the World Reserve Currency or removing it as the petro dollar. The value will drop and I don't think by a small amount. Nothing and I mean nothing goes up and stays up forever. At some point the USA will fail and that is looking more and more like not in the to distant future. edited I think Gold and Silver are kept suppressed in value for the reason that those in power do not want precious metals to be seen as a tangible form of value. From what I have read on gold and silver and zinc reserves the world is set to run out around 2035. The other big thing is we have way too many people on the planet. The estimate is that the earth can sustain around 4 billion people. We have 8 and counting. Too many people chasing ever fewer resources and now the third world wants and has cell phones, cars and wants to live like people do in the western civilization. There is not enough of most anything to keep this up. Eventually sooner or later the paper dollar will collapse under its own weight of debt. There has never been a fiat currency that has survived very long. I would bet people living in Wiemar Germany did not think that it would take a literal wheelbarrow load of paper money to buy a loaf of bread. A German mark from that time only has a small collector value. I can buy them for around 3 to 5 bucks for hyper inflationary notes. Now the silver and gold produced coins of that time still have value that goes up both intrinsic and extrinsic. A third Reich 5 RM coin is still 90% silver and will have a minimum value for its silver. It also has collector value but it will never lose its silver value.
The reason we always had paper money more in circulation is people simply prefer it. Silver dollars were minted to back silver certificates, no one wanted the physical coin. Same with gold to a large extent as well. Given how modern economies work for more than a century, PM coinage will never work. The real "dollar" in circulation around the world are US Treasury notes. Given they bear interest, there will always be inflation. Given inflation, at some point the metal contained in the coins will someday be worth more than face value. Its inevitable. Its like saying someday silver will be $100 an ounce. Of course it will, but WHEN is unknown, and that does not make silver a good investment necessarily. Once you lock into the fact the USD is really interest bearing notes and not the currency in your wallet, it makes more sense. The stuff in your wallet is an interest free loan the the US government. I buy coins, US, world, ancients, as a hobby. I own US junk silver coins as a sideline to that hobby and a little of a contra asset, (insurance policy if SHTF scenarios), but never as a main investment. Romans didn't have the ability to print money so they debased and forced acceptance at the point of a sword. Why late Roman coins were bronze for local use and gold for foreign payments is more complex. The Silk Road mainly only wanted silver, so all silver in the Roman empire was sucked out of it to pay for the luxuries from the silk road imports. That is why silver coins from the 4th and 5th century are rare, almost all silver went to Persia and eventually China to pay for imports. If you notice, Parthian and Sasanian coins are almost all silver with local coppers. Gold coins were only for ceremonies. Persian silver was the official currency of the Silk Road because the Persian received them back in tolls, so had to keep their silver coins good silver, which also lead to Chinese merchants freely accepting them.
IMO I don't see the difference between the Roman debasement of their money and ours. Now we are on the threshold of a digital dollar. The gov will know every time you buy piece of gum. This will set up a huge black market of trading. Gold and Silver may well be the default medium of trade. My bet is many will rush the gold and silver market if this is about to go into law. After it is law the gov. will know every gun you buy, ammo and even the gold and silver you buy. Personally I don't do anything illegal but its a huge invasion of privacy that the gov. knows what they do. To add more to that mix is not good at all. They will know what gun you bought and who you sold it to. We will have to see what they do exactly. Could be for the first bit, you don't have to say what you are buying. But in the end I bet you will have to put it down as to what your DD went for. One can lie about it and say I bought a Lawn mower and you bought an AR15. But the more the gov. invades everything private the worse it will be for our ever dwindling freedoms. Fiat currancy has never worked long.
I don't disagree I dislike the lack of privacy. As for the digital dollar, that could be an issue in the future if they discontinue physical dollars. That is where I would draw the line. As long as they have physical money, I will continue to use it in order to have both some privacy as well as being able to purchase things when electronics inevitably go down at times. I cannot tell you how many times people are lined up waiting to pay via credit card and the system is down, but they do not have any cash on them. I simply walk up, pay cash, and am on my way. Anyone not having a few hundred on them at all times I considered not a prepared adult. My wife does this, it drives me crazy, walking around without cash then needs me to pay for things at Asian markets, etc. With the advent of 3% service fees at places to accept credit card, it also saves a lot of money. I am sure this makes me a dinosaur though. I did a poll of my IT department, and the most any of them had on them at the time was less than $20.
Don't get me wrong. I also use money for investments. I.E. Annuity's the Market ect. These help with inflation. Also physical gold and silver. I would not spend a dime on paper gold or silver. IMO it defeats the purpose of gold and silver. I feel its best to diversify. I also prep with long term food storage. I see food shortages in the near future. Its starting now. My local Walmart is always short on something and I just went to pick up my meds at CVS and the pharmacist said they are having a hard time getting anything and are have to wait for most drugs. I was buying 24 hour Sudafed and was told they had on non genaric box left and I was lucky to get that.
I'm one of those people that never have any cash. I've lived that way for years now. It happened organically, I didn't plan it. I just realized one day that going to get cash had become more of a pain than just using plastic, it didn't even occur to me. Some stores and restaurants in my area even started preferring credit to cash. Once vending machines became swipe-able I didn't need to carry a pocket full of jingly change around, either. I find it a lot easier, honestly, but I do miss cash and coins, yet I now find them both more annoying to deal with. I still have a jar of cents collected from change fermenting somewhere. It's not even worth cashing in and my bank removed their change counter service from all locations anyway. I have not experienced a system going down in years, either, and many stores now have backup plans for that, so I don't think that's generally as large of a problem as it used to be (though it can still happen, of course). As for privacy, I'm not sure what to do about that. With increased surveillance on just about every street corner, even tracing a cash transaction may come down to no more than knowing the time a person entered and exited a store and which transactions the store made that day. Many stores have cameras trained right on the registers. Surveillance has become pretty cheap. If someone with the right access wanted to trace something paid with cash, they probably easily could. I would prefer more privacy as well, but cash will provide only limited, and sometimes no, protection at this point. As for the analogy between the US and Roman money debasement, I think one could argue about the details and the nuances endlessly. In some ways they resemble each other, in other ways they don't. But metal in and of itself doesn't guarantee value. Gold and silver don't have value merely because they exist. People still have to want them and agree on an exchange value. I don't think reverting to a gold or silver standard at this point would work, and it could arguably backfire (I've read in more than one place that given the population rise, there isn't enough gold to even support a feasible gold standard anymore). And if everything collapses, then I'm not even going to want silver. I would much rather have a chicken or a pile of beans. Hopefully things will never go that far down the drain, though. That said, I do agree that we have too many people on the Earth, and we keep stretching things beyond capacity as if it will never matter. We've been saved by technology (i.e., Borlaug's "Green Revolution" of the 1960s, but even he thought that was a band-aid) in the past, but there is no guarantee that technology will save us again. It might, it might not. In any case, I have no idea if civilization is heading for a crash-boom or not. Things certainly seem and feel shaky, but who knows? Surviving a crash-boom, depending on the size, seems to take a lot of luck. Things don't usually degenerate or crash in easily predictable patterns (plenty of books exist on past collapses for the curious, many even remain unsolved or hotly debated). I have chosen to not live in fear over things that I can't control. I'll prepare where and when I can, but how does one really prepare for the unknown? All you can hope is that you diversify enough or just happen to do the right thing to "make it through," whatever that may end up looking like.
Tell me we're NOT going down the same road as ancient Rome!!! Rome's government was constantly threatened with deficits and bankruptcy and no statesman could find a way out of the difficulty. The cost of its huge military program was only one of its headaches. To encourage industry in her satellite nations, it attempted an unrestricted trade policy, but this nation's working man was unable to compete with the cheap foreign (slave) labor and demanded high tariffs. When the tariffs were passed, the satellite nations were unable to sell their goods to the only nation that had any money, which was Rome. To break the deadlock, the government was finally forced to subsidize the working class to make up the difference between their "real wages" (the actual value of what they were producing) and the wages required to keep up their relatively high standard of living. As a result, many lived on this subsidy and did nothing whatever, sacrificing their living standard for a life of ease. The wealthy class owed their riches to great factories where cheap labor produced enormous masses of goods via assembly line methods. The dispossessed farmers and unemployed workers demanded the government to "soak the rich". The government responded by increasing taxes year after year on the rich but there was a point beyond which even the government dared not go. Attempts were made to abandon the cheap (slave) labor in the factories but the free workmen's demand for short hours and high wages had grown to the point where only the cheap labor could be used economically. Also, the big factory owners were politically powerful and fought every effort to break up their holdings by bribing senators, hiring lobbyists, and securing the support of unscrupulous labor leaders. The factory owners found it far more profitable to spend small fortunes in such practices rather than lose their cheap labor force. And the average citizen would far rather have his dole and his sporting events than work for a living. Rome fell from within, folks. So will we.
The gloom and doom guys have around for a long time. When I was in high school in the mid 1960s, our science teacher told us oil would run out in 50 years. The doom and glumers never take into account the advances in technology. Thomas Malthus told us the world would starve in the early 1800s. It didn’t happen because of technological advances in agriculture. The real danger comes if someone or a small group takes charge and tells us how things MUST BE DONE. Then we have a problem.
