*Edit (I couldn't edit the title of the thread to fix the spelling of Denarius) Ok so that I got this right in my attempts to collect silver ancient roman coins from 59BC to 518AD...Denarius (10 asses) was the main Silver coin up till Gordian III? Then Antoninianus (was to be 2 Denari's but equal to 1.5) coins were made in silver and then switched to bronze around 270AD? What were the silver coins called after the Antoninianus? I def need to get that book on ancient roman coins.
Short answer is that we don't know for sure what that coin was called and despite what you might have read we are not really certain the the new coin denomination of Caracalla was tariffed at two denarii.
More or less correct, but the antoniniani did not "switch" from silver to bronze. It was a long, gradual debasement of the silver coinage that started with the denarii. By the middle of the 3rd century A.D., the amount of silver in an antoninianus had been reduced to about 5%. (Which is still a lot more silver than is found in our current US "silver" coinage. We old-timers can tell you long, boring stories about the days when we really did have silver coins and silver certificates. [Don't get us started.])
What the US Government did in 1964 was to lie through its teeth about the introduction of the clad coinage coming into circulation in 1965. They said it was designed to alleviate a coin shortage caused by an explosion of vending machine usage. They claimed that the new clad coinage and the old silver coinage would circulate side by side and the coin "shortage" would be alleviated. That was a stone amphora of bovine manure. They wanted to inflate the currency to pay for an expanded role for the federal government and to do this they had to inflate the currency. If the dollar were to remain tied to silver they could not do so. That, and the dropping of any tie of the dollar to gold a few years later enabled them to do just that. The only difference between Third century Rome and the US in the 1960's was that it took Rome decades to put this one over on the citizenry and the US Treasury did it here within a few years.
We are in an age of digital dollars. Paper money and coin usage is decreasing, and the ease at which new money is created by the Federal Reserve will eventually lead to inflation, low interest rates at the present notwithstanding. There will be a time when we have to pay the piper.
Traditional economics says this is an inevitable result. However, traditional economics has been unable to explain Japan's lack of inflation for the last 30 years, and does not explain the low (even negative in some places!) interest rates in the western world. The magazine "The Economist" frequently has articles that note the inability of current economic models to fit the accumulating data about money supply and inflation.
I love your post because it makes sence and pretty much what I believe, the gov dont want to deplete its stock and the value of money was starting to plummet, we got off the gold standard. Dam I wished I could collect gold but silver is just as nice to me....i got to show my collection one day.
