Thursday, July 15, 2010

Gold & Fiat Money


An epic essay by Sarel Oberholster on Gold & Fiat Money, one to show those doubting your interest precious metals: "I do not under any circumstance favor raising the price of gold. It would perpetuate that "barbarous metal" in international monetary use. We have quite rightly broken the link between gold and our domestic money. We should also break the link between gold and international money. The supply of money, neither domestic nor international, should not be dependent over the long run on the accidents of supply and demand in the marketplace for just one commodity." July 12, 1968 - Darryl R. Francis, President of the Reserve Bank of St. Louis.

And so it came to pass not long after the speech by Mr. Francis that in August 1971 US President Richard Nixon unilaterally broke the US$/gold peg and declared the US$ no longer convertible to gold. The convertibility of US$'s to gold was the last tenuous link between fiat currencies pegged to the US$ and gold. I pick up the tale of Gold and Fiat Money in January 1971 and will tell this tale with graphs. Graphs of fiat money; of consumer inflations and asset inflations; interest rates; central bank activities; gold prices; and official gold movements....read on

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