In Gold We Trust? The Future of Money in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Single)

Whether the gold price will continue to rise will depend not just on whether faith in fiat money continues to decline, but on whether the search for an improved form of money will produce, as we should all hope, something not just as good as gold, but better than it.

Inflation has been an economic taboo since the 1970s but maybe not for much longer. Government and citizens alike are now much more indebted than they were at the start of the Great Depression. In such circumstances, inflation could come to seem positively desirable, especially for borrowers, as it would erode the value of their debts in real terms

Today, gold bugs talk about gold having been money for millennia, which is actually rather misleading. For most of human history, the metal that was typically used as money was silver. By contrast, gold was too rare to be widely used in a liquid market (a necessary condition for a commodity to be money). Silver was more abundant and deposits of it

I think it's as clear as the nose on my face that the fiscal path we're on is simply not sustainable. And when I'm asked to describe the situation we face, to me, it's always like a cancer, and it's a cancer that truly is going to destroy this country from within." This was not some crazed right-wing extremist speaking, nor even Alan Simpson,

Carrying bulky bags of barley when on a shopping trip is not very practical. Moreover, barley is perishable, so not a good store of value over long periods of time. That is why, around 5,000 years ago in present-day Iraq, some forgotten financial innovator came up with the brilliant idea of expressing a fixed weight of barley, 11 grams, in terms of

A different version of dollar collapse, described by analyst and trader Jim Rickards in his book, Currency Wars, comes complete with deliberately wicked foreigners.

"coin clipping"

"To cure its addiction to debts, the United States has to re-establish the common sense principle that one should live within its means."

It was a fear of the economic and social upheaval that might be caused by money losing its value that drove Britain to adopt "sound money" policies nearly 300 years ago. This move coincided with an unplanned switch to using gold instead of silver as the basis of money and, ultimately, to the accidental birth of the gold standard. Its &quo