What do *YOU* really know about money?

Now is a critical time for everyone to give some serious thought to exactly what “money” truly is, and more important still, what it isn’t - and could never be counted on as “money”!

Let's start at the beginning - before money as we know it actually existed in the world - all commerce and trade - was done under the economic system called “barter”. Under the barter system, people throughout the world simply traded their goods for the goods of others. This was a practice which had continued for many thousands of years.  Then, at about 1,500bc people in Libya learned how to test gold (and silver as well) to learn the exact purity of any sample of these metals. That was also a time when rulers of the world had been hoarding these precious metals because of their beautiful and unusual qualities. Then, these kingdoms began to have their metalworkers fashion these metals into tokens or coins of an accurately known purity and weight.

These newly created coins were then used by rulers for the “purchases of the state”.  This practice almost immediately flooded these societies with “royal” coinage.  Then too, each piece displayed the portrait of the ruler - a portrait which then served as absolute certification of the coin’s purity and weight. Each issuing ruler also took exceptional care that the purity and weight of each coin never varied!  The reason was simple. If any subject, who might have mastered the skills of testing metals, might discover faulty coins, with that ruler’s portrait, the word would spread like wildfire, that this ruler’s coins should not be trusted - nor perhaps, should this ruler himself be trusted.

One monumental fact had rocketed the use of coin-money over the practice of barter.  In the act of barter, a person with something to trade, had to find someone who wanted his/her offering, but it also had to be someone who had something that he’d want in exchange! At times, that wasn’t as easy as one might think. Coin money made this exchange “universal” because it was good in trade for anything!

And thus began the 3400-year reign of gold and silver “coin money”.

Now let’s jump forward to the mid-nineteenth century, when paper money first came into worldwide use, money which promised - in print - immediate exchange by the issuer, on demand, for gold and/or silver “coin money”.  Over the next 150 years, for countless reasons, people throughout the civilized world came to actually accept, and have faith in such paper notes, as if they were actual money, in and of themselves.  For many years thereafter, paper notes as IOUs, circulated as "money" right alongside their precious metal counterparts.  Then, in1944 - in the midst of the costliest war in human history - the governments of the world (many of whom had gone bankrupt), ended the gold standard and decoupled this precious metal from its paper “fiat” money counterparts.  In 1964, the resulting inflation led to the end of silver coinage in the us.  In fact, by 1970 no country in the world would strike silver street-coin ever again.  It was all very subtle but in 1968 few Americans thought anything of it, when the “silver certificates” (each of which had promised “a dollar in silver” in exchange) - was replaced with the “federal reserve dollar”, a note which promised in exchange absolutely nothing.  From that moment on, the U.S. Government refused to redeem silver certificates ever again.  This action by the U.S. Government (and similar actions by every other government the world over, thereafter, based the world’s economy entirely on worthless paper - via a system of paper called “fiat” money - that is, money with no material backing of any kind. That was the starting gun that initiated the world’s present geometric inflationary spiral - very slowly at the beginning, but in time this inflation would rocket (in the U.S. And much of the rest of the world) to reach 7000% since the end of World War II.

In brief, then, after the entire world economy had successfully run on gold and silver coin money for well over 3000 years, the world’s governments abandoned that stability for monetary systems of “worthless paper” a system which has since resulted in monumental worldwide inflation.  And now, to correct that disaster, the governments of this world are actually toying with the idea of the crowning folly of all - by putting all monetary systems of the world into numbers, buried in giant computers!!!??? This new monster is known as central bank digital currency (CBDC) and this has already become the official standard in several countries around the planet. It is clearly the plan of certain individuals to now trade our worthless paper money for even more worthless digital currency that you cannot even hold in your hand. This, they believe, is supposed to satisfy the economic needs of nine billion people!!??

If this ultimate folly is ever actually to be fully implemented, the best that anyone can do thereafter is to find a hole, crawl in, and pull the hole in behind themselves - it's “game over”.

Are the rulers of this world sitting on their brains?  Wake up, America!!!