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

bad money drives out good, if they have the same value.

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

The year before John Paulson decided, in the spring of 2009, to give investors in his hedge funds the option of having their returns measured and paid in gold, he had made a fortune for himself and his clients by betting on the value of America's housing markets and banks. Now he was betting that an even more basic product than housing — money itse

Maybe innovators in the private sector will produce some entirely new form of money that is not dependent on government at all.

A combination of President George W. Bush's tax cuts and Obama's post-financial-crash stimulus had, in a decade, taken federal debt from 33% of US national income to 62% in 2010. Unreformed, it was projected to keep rising, to 90% in 2020

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,

Silver money can claim a 5,000-year history. Gold money did not make its first appearance until two millennia later around 550 BC when, according to Herodotus, the Ancient Greek 'father of history', the King of Lydia (in modern day Turkey) started minting coins made of it.

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

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