Remonetization of Silver: At What Price?

By Ryan Jordan:

A Very Short History of Silver as Money

Most of the words for currencies in use today derive from names for silver coins. The central European "Thaler," believed by most to be the antecedent to the term Dollar (used by not less than seventeen countries and territories today), was a silver coin. The Peso (used by at least five countries that I can think of) was originally silver, and a Pound Sterling referred to a weight of coined silver, not gold. When the Pilgrims came to Plymouth in 1620, they, like their descendants, were chronically short of precious metal, but if they had any coins with them, they would have had silver in them, and not gold. Fast forward 170 years: Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton, when devising the currency for the United States, mandated 24.05 grams of pure silver for every silver dollar. Hamilton also mandated that the ratio of gold to silver be 1:15. Over the course of the next seventy years this relationship was more or less intact, except that it did oscillate, and people took advantage of trading in their expensive gold for cheaper silver and vice versa when the market distorted the ratio.......read in full