Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Prologue
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 The History of Money
- Chapter 2 Central Bankers: The Alchemists of our Time
- Chapter 3 The History of the Dollar
- Chapter 4 A Planet of Debt
- Chapter 5 The War on Gold
- Chapter 6 The Big Reset
- Epilogue
- Appendix I Demonetized Currencies (1700-2013)
- Appendix II Wall Street Fines (2000-2013)
- Bibliography
- Register
Chapter 3 - The History of the Dollar
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 December 2020
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Prologue
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 The History of Money
- Chapter 2 Central Bankers: The Alchemists of our Time
- Chapter 3 The History of the Dollar
- Chapter 4 A Planet of Debt
- Chapter 5 The War on Gold
- Chapter 6 The Big Reset
- Epilogue
- Appendix I Demonetized Currencies (1700-2013)
- Appendix II Wall Street Fines (2000-2013)
- Bibliography
- Register
Summary
Our American bankers have found that for which the ancient alchemists sought in vain; they have found that which turns everything into gold - in their own pockets; And it is difficult to persuade them that a system which is so very beneficial to themselves, can be very injurious to the rest of the community.
– William Gouge, A Short History of Paper-money and Banking in the United States (1833)History shows that once an enormous debt has been incurred by a nation, there are only two ways to solve it: one is simply declare bankruptcy, the other is to inflate the currency and thus destroy the wealth of ordinary citizens.
– Adam SmithRising prices of precious metals and other commodities are an indication of a very early stage of an endeavor to move away from paper currencies. We have at this particular stage a fiat money which is essentially money printed by a government and it's usually a central bank which is authorized to do so. Some mechanism has got to be in place that restricts the amount of money which is produced, either a gold standard or a currency board, because unless you do that, all of history suggest that inflation will take hold with very deleterious effects on economic activity… There are numbers of us, myself included, who strongly believe that we did very well in the 1870 to 1914 period with an international gold standard.
– Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, (2011)How did central banking get started in the US?
Many of the Founding Fathers were strongly opposed to the formation of a central bank because England had tried to place the American colonies under the control of the Bank of England. Robert Morris, a former government official, founded the first central bank in the US in 1781. He is seen as the father of the system of credit in the United States. His Bank of North America was based on the model of the Bank of England and could create as much money as needed through fractional reserve banking. Interestingly, the bank's collateral was a large quantity of gold that France had lent to the US.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Big ResetWar on Gold and the Financial Endgame, pp. 63 - 104Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2015