End of the Road: How Money Became Worthless

The strength of a nation's currency is based on the strength of that nation's economy, and the American economy is by far the strongest in the world. Accordingly, I have directed the secretary of the treasury to take the action necessary to defend the dollar against the speculators. I have directed Secretary Connally to suspend temporarily the convertibility of the dollar into gold or other reserve assets, except in amounts and conditions determined to be in the interest of monetary stability and in the best interests of the United States. August 15th, 1971, will stand as an important event in

economic history for many generations. In fact, hundreds of years from now, people will look back to that day. The sun rises today as it has a million times before. Commuters wake up and travel to their offices to begin the day's work. Farmers tend to their crops. Construction workers build new infrastructure. Today is a day like any other, or is it? In 2008, the world experienced one of the greatest financial turmoils in history. Markets around the world started crashing, and major financial institutions, once thought to be invincible, started showing signs of collapse. Governments responded quickly, issuing

massive bailouts and stimulus packages in an effort to keep the world economy afloat, and it worked. The global economy recovered much quicker than most predicted, and soon it was back to business as usual. Yet, something still isn't quite right. A growing sense of unease fills the population. In the world of finance, indeed in all facets of modern life, cracks have started to appear. There's angst out there, and I think if you talk to people on the street today, they would tell you, I don't know what's causing all this, but this just doesn't feel normal to

me. The government's running a trillion dollars worth of deficit. Why isn't the economy improving? The government's going to spend almost $3.7 trillion. Why don't I have a job? Why is the unemployment rate at nine percent? I even think that number is understated. A lot of people are feeling unsure about the world today, concerned that something terrible is waiting in the wings. We're told that the global financial crisis of a few years ago has been fixed. However, what if the crisis isn't the cause of the angst so many of us feel, but rather the symptom of

a much deeper problem? At Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, delegates from 44 allied and associate countries arrived for the opening of the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference. Our story begins in 1944. With World War II coming to an end, the allied nations met at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, to create a new financial system which would stabilize the world once the war ended. With America poised to enter a golden age of prosperity, the US dollar was chosen as the world's reserve currency. The Bretton Woods System was created after the Second World War at the Bretton Woods

Conference in New Hampshire, and rather than using gold as the means of exchange between countries, as was the case under the old gold standard, the dollar was going to be used. The dollar was chosen because back then it was as good as gold. Under this new system, countries agreed to fix their currencies to the US dollar, and the US dollar would be tied to gold at a price of $35 per ounce. This meant countries around the world could trade their currencies for US dollars, which they could then exchange for gold. This created a system where

all currencies were essentially backed by gold. To avoid the logistics of shipping physical gold across the world when countries did exchange their currencies for gold, it was usually stored safely in the US. Under the Bretton Woods system, you could exchange your currency or your dollars for gold now only apply to foreign countries and central banks. We began to run budget deficits. We were running the Great Society program under Lyndon Johnson and we were fighting a war in Vietnam, and all of a sudden we were running these deficits, and countries were changing their dollars. They said

they wanted gold, and it began with the French, and then it started to spread. With all the new spending programs in the United States, other countries became concerned that the US was spending more money than it had gold reserves. They started exchanging their dollars for gold and demanded physical delivery as they felt that there were more dollars being printed than the gold that backed it. To prevent this outflow of gold from American vaults, President Nixon called for an emergency suspension of the gold convertibility system. I have directed the Secretary of the Treasury to take the

action necessary to defend the dollar against the speculators. I have directed Secretary Connally to suspend temporarily the convertibility of the dollar into gold or other reserve assets. All of the problems that we see today in the monetary system are a direct result of the decision made on August 15th, 1971, to abandon a fixed link back to gold. What gold did is it provided discipline in governments and provided discipline on government spending. Under the old system, if you run a budget deficit, then what would happen is gold would flow out of your country until there was

a balance again. Well, without any gold backing, then countries ran perpetual deficits. If you look at, for example, this country, from 1971 on, the US has never run a surplus. Ever since we went off the gold standard, it's just been a perpetual stimulus. Good times, bad times, always run a deficit. What led Nixon to abandon the gold standard in 1971, he claimed it was temporary. We've been waiting 40 years and we're still off of it. We ran up huge deficits during the 1960s. We had the guns and butter economy where the government was simultaneously fighting

a war in Vietnam abroad. In addition, we were funding manned missions to the moon and the whole space program. We were creating more money than we had gold reserves to back it up. A lot of our foreign creditors saw this and began to demand gold rather than their Federal Reserve notes because they sensed that Washington simply didn't have enough gold to make its commitment to back the dollar. By removing the link between gold and the US dollar, President Nixon created a system where all currencies were backed by nothing. This is what is known as a

fiat currency. Fiat currency is a currency that's backed by nothing except government promises. The word fiat is a Latin word, and it basically means the currency that's circulating by force. If people have confidence in their currency and if there's enough government force that will enable the currency to circulate for a period of time until people lose confidence in the currency. There is no nation on this planet that currently uses money. We all use currency. There will come a day when everybody knows the difference. Money is a medium of exchange, and the way it has evolved

is that it's always something of intrinsic value. Until the modern age, when politicians say, well, we don't need anything of intrinsic value anymore, all we need is a political decree. We can say this is money, this piece of paper is money. Now money has a new characteristic, but underneath it all, there's this same concept in place that nobody ever seems to challenge, and that is that governments have a right to declare something of no value to be money, and you must accept it. That's really the problem and it's still the problem today. It's destroying the

economies of the world. With currencies no longer backed by anything real or tangible, their value was measured only in relation to each other, Because countries with relatively weak currencies could make products cheaply, countries devalue their own currencies to make them desirable trading partners. Every paper currency measures itself against the dollar. If the dollar goes down, the other central banks respond to that and they try and intervene in the foreign exchange markets to ensure that the impact doesn't hit their domestic economies. What is a Ponzi scheme? A Ponzi scheme is a fraudulent investment scheme that promises

high returns for investors with little or no risk. Sounds too good to be true, right? That's because it is. In a legitimate investment scheme, the money invested is used to build wealth, typically through low-risk ventures like stock or real estate portfolios. Over time, this generates enough income to pay the investor back their initial investment, plus some profit. A Ponzi scheme, on the other hand, promises massive returns quickly. How does it accomplish this? Instead of using the money invested to build wealth, a Ponzi scheme simply brings in more investors to pay off the previous investors. Because

these new investors have also been promised large returns, the scheme must then find an even bigger group of investors to pay them off. All the while, the creators of the scheme are skimming cash from each group of investors. Because a Ponzi scheme doesn't generate any wealth itself, it must constantly bring in larger groups of investors to keep functioning. Eventually, no more new investors can be found or large numbers of previous investors all cash out at the same time, and the scheme collapses in on itself. By this time, the perpetrators of the scheme have siphoned off

tremendous amounts of money for themselves, while the investors are left out of pocket and out of luck. Without a fixed link to gold, the US Treasury has been able to borrow and spend as much money as it wanted. When the US government needs money, it takes out a loan with the Federal Reserve. The Federal Reserve prints the currency required for the loan and in return receives an IOU from the US Treasury. These IOUs are called government bonds. With the money provided by these loans or bonds, the US government pays its bills and obligations. Meanwhile, the

US Treasury and the Federal Reserve work closely together to sell these bonds at auction, where foreign central banks, pension funds, and even individuals buy these US government loans. Why wouldn't they? Loaning money to the US government is virtually a risk-free investment. However, if the loans are spent on bills and paying off previous loans, where does the government get the money to pay back the current loan and the interest that is charged on it? Is investing in a US government bond simply one small part of a giant Ponzi scheme? The Federal Reserve System is definitely a

Ponzi scheme. There's no question about it. They go through the appearance of lending money to the governments, and the governments agree to pay back the money plus interest. This money comes into being, they create it for that purpose and give it to the government. You understand that it didn't exist before. Central banks just make it out of nothing and click a few keys on a keyboard of a computer and the Treasury of the United States government now has another trillion dollars that it can spend. That's where that money came from. That creates a liability on

the part of the federal government to pay it back, plus interest. Think about that, plus interest. When it comes time to pay it back, plus the interest, they can't pay it back and they certainly can't pay it back, plus interest, too. What they do is they borrow more to cover the original loan, plus the interest. Then by that time, Congress wants more money anyway, so the debt just keeps going up. Under the current monetary system, we borrow all of our currency into existence and we promise to pay it back plus interest. If you borrow the

very first dollar into existence and that's the only dollar that exists on the planet but you promise to pay it back, plus another dollar's worth of interest, where do you get the second dollar? The answer is you have to borrow that. It's a Ponzi scheme because you can never pay it off. It always requires that we go deeper into debt. Since 1971, the United States has been running trade deficits with the rest of the world, meaning we've been buying a lot more products from the rest of the world than they have been buying from us.

The Japanese and Koreans sell us cars and electronics. The Middle East sells us oil, and the Chinese sell us seemingly everything on our Walmart shelves. The US pays for these products with US dollars and everyone is happy. However, if countries were to convert these US dollar profits back into their own currencies, their currencies would rise in value, making their economies less desirable to trade with. Instead, countries invest their dollar profits by buying US government bonds. Countries around the world sell their goods to the US in exchange for US dollars that have been borrowed through the

Federal Reserve, creating IOUs. Countries then loan their US dollar profits back to the US by buying more IOUs. The money from these loans is spent on paying government expenses as well as paying back previous IOUs. However, in order to do this, larger loans must be made in order to pay back the principal and the interest. By paying back old loans with new and larger loans, it would appear as if the entire world has been investing their hard-earned money into a Ponzi scheme of epic proportions. In this business of creating money for federal governments and national

governments around the world, if they didn't keep creating new money in larger amounts, the whole thing would crash because that's where the money comes from to pay off the previous loans. It's the new loans. That's why it's a Ponzi scheme. It's a classic Ponzi scheme. In order for the US economy to function, we have to borrow more and more money from the rest of the world. The more money they loan us today, the more money they have to loan us in the future. If they ever stop loaning, the whole thing collapses and we can't pay

them back. Every Friday night, Julius Job is to compare the grocery prices of our neighborhood stores for Saturday morning shopping. There are five big neighborhood markets within a couple of blocks of our house, and Julius spreads her shopping around, going where the prices are lowest and the quality best. Remember when a chocolate bar cost a quarter? When you could fill your car up for $5, and feed a family of six for $35 a week? Whatever happened to those days, without anything tangible backing currencies, governments could borrow and print as much currency as they wanted. This

has gradually led to the value of our currency being eroded. With the creation of all this money that dilutes the value of all of the dollars that were out there before, so that the purchasing power of the dollar gets crowded down. We used to be able to buy a gallon of gas for 0.31 cents. Now it's hitting around $5. The average guy in the street is affected by inflation because of the loss of purchasing power. As a consequence, his standard of living is declining if he can't keep up with the inflation rate. In many measures

of a standard of living, Americans today are actually worse off. You can take my grandparents. My grandmother never worked, despite the fact that my grandfather was a carpenter, and they had eight children. Could a carpenter, somebody without even a high school diploma, just working in a blue-collar job, support a wife and eight kids today? Not a chance. With inflation rising faster than income, people were forced into more and more drastic measures to maintain their standard of living. With each new day, the work of a family begins again. When we went off gold backing on the

dollar, what used to happen prior to that is, the husband went to work and the wife stayed at home and raised the family. Because of inflation in the 70s, the wife went to work. Now you had two incomes that was necessary to produce and buy the same goods and services. In the 90s, we stopped saving. The savings rate basically got down to zero because people were spending and they couldn't save in order to buy the same goods and services. Then we got to the last decade. The wife was already working, the savings were down to

zero, and they borrowed money. We've gone from two earners, getting rid of our savings rate, to borrowing money to keep pace with inflation. The average person is now forced to borrow well beyond their means. Getting themselves deeply into debt. At first, this was to maintain a nice standard of living. However, slowly it has become necessary just to survive. By printing so much currency and devaluing it so heavily, it would seem that governments are essentially levying a hidden tax on their people. Central banks tried to say that two percent or three percent inflation is a good

thing and they make that a target. Well, it's still a tax. Why is two percent inflation or three percent inflation better for the country than no inflation? You will be told, of course, that it's better than deflation and you'll be told that people like to feel that their money, jobs, or their wages are going up by two percent and this is something. With effect, that two percent is robbery and what they get is going down by that amount. We are experiencing inflation these days. They say the CPI is up, whatever it is, two or three

percent. Anybody who's alive knows that inflation is well beyond that, probably running double digits. The purchasing power of the average person has been deteriorating drastically. However, in order to disguise this, governments have been skewing the figures in their reports to make it seem as if inflation is much lower than it really is. There is this curious distinction made that most people don't understand between core inflation and headline inflation. The core inflation is this basic two percent target, which doesn't matter. The headline inflation is once you include all sorts of things like energy prices and sudden

tax rises and the rest. Well, the inflation rate is skewed. They use all kinds of contrivances to make the inflation rate look lower than it really is. If the US government was using the same CPI model that it did when President Carter was in the White House in the late 1970s, inflation rate today in the United States would be nine or ten percent. That's how badly the currency is being debased. The reason why they do that is there are a lot of inflation-adjusted responsibilities that the US government has to pay out money to. For example,

people on the Social Security system earn on an inflation-adjusted basis. If they keep the inflation rate low according to their own statistic, that means they're paying out less and government budget deficit is less. A thriving metropolis. Toledo is one of the world's greatest glass processing center. In Akron, the state's fifth-largest city, that story deals primarily with rubber. Akron is the rubber manufacturing capital of the nation and the world. Her very name is synonymous with rubber. In a global economy where currencies are measured only against each other. Countries are able to artificially lower the value of

their own currency, making their industries more competitive. A country with a weak currency can make products cheaper, causing entire industrial centers to move overseas. This effect has been seen countless times in cities around the world, some of which still haven't recovered from the loss of their industrial base. I think the guy on the street is frustrated. They go, gosh, I went to college, I don't have a job, I can't get a job, I spend all this money and I've got student loans. It's costing me more to live. The Fed is telling me there's no inflation

yet I go to the store and I see the price of milk, eggs, and meat have up. I pull into a gas station and it's costing me more for gas. They don't really understand how all this affects them on a personal level, and that's why I think they're frustrated because there isn't an educational system that explains that look, when you print money, when you have nothing backing it, and when you debase it, you have all the side effects that you see. Higher inflation costs, corruption, cronyism, all the things that would have been in the headlines

that we've seen over the last four or five years. The protest movements are an interesting phenomenon. A lot of people are terribly upset with Wall Street. They're upset about what's happening to their purchasing power. They're upset with the news that they hear of the fact that the executives of these giant banks are getting million dollar bonuses at the same time, they're dipping into the pockets of the taxpayers to get all this bailout money, so they're angry. Unfortunately, people are demonstrating against the economic crisis, and yet at the same time, they're demanding more welfare and demanding

more medical benefits. They're demanding more state control and regulation of their lives. They're demanding more money be created and pumped into society. They don't realize that those are the very things that have brought them onto the street in the first place in their anger. While the person on the street is struggling to get by, we're told that what we're experiencing is a typical recession. Why then does this current crisis feel different from previous economic recessions? This is far from typical. I think this is the end game. I think what we're experiencing now are the pains

of the 40-year experiment in fiat currency coming to an end. It is an absolute failure not only for America but for the entire world. Up until 2008, we've been borrowing more and more money to maintain our standard of living. Are we now at the point where we're maxed out and cannot take on any more new debt? What we're seeing today is deleveraging at all levels of society. Consumers are maxed out. Each succession that we had in the economy when we went through this boom and bust period, we'd go through a bust they would reinflate again,

and the economy would start up again but we kept piling on levels of debt. Finally, we reached the point where you can't pile up any more debt. Banks are no longer willing to give out credit so freely, and many people are more concerned with paying off existing debt as opposed to taking on new debt. While this is prudent, sensible behavior, it's also a serious threat to the global economy. Having set itself up as a giant Ponzi scheme, the global economy is reliant on more and larger debt being issued to keep itself functioning. If you try

to just live within your means and get by with just the amount of dollars that we have today, paying the interest on them collapses the currency supply. We continually have to borrow more units of currency into existence every month than we extinguish by paying off debt. The system, as it's been presently structured is that, they have to continue expanding the money supply, otherwise, the system is going to die. Politicians and pundits talk about living within our means and paying down the debt. You can't do that without collapsing the entire economy. We would just vanish into

this black hole. All the politicians are in a situation where if they don't come to the rescue, we could just have an overnight shutdown, which they can't ever imagine happening while they're in power. There's always this wish to move on and the expression kicks the can down the road, which is really what we're doing. The problem is we've run out of road. There is no place to kick the can anymore. We've got to deal with the can and it's not simply a can, because every time we kick it down the road, unfortunately, it got bigger.

Now it's an enormous can and it's going to crush us. While the financial crisis of 2008 may have been the first death throes of the Ponzi scheme, governments around the world weren't about to sit back and let it fail, so they delayed the inevitable collapse, pushing it down the road by bailing out struggling financial institutions, buying toxic mortgages, and taking on debt on behalf of its citizens. In 2009 and 2010, what happened was the crisis was papered over through bailouts, guarantees, money printing, expansion of the money supply, et cetera. Governments can do that. Don't underestimate

the ability of governments to dictate results in the short run, but in the long run, none of the problems were solved, the bad debts are still there. The banks are still insolvent. The banks are not lending. The economy is not growing. We haven't really solved anything. By buying their way out of these crises, by creating money out of nothing and flooding it into the economy, and diluting the purchasing power, they're not solving the problem. What they're doing is pushing it off a little bit into the future and making it worse. Now, do we keep going

down this road? Do we print more money? The Fed's balance sheet went from 800 billion to 3 trillion. Should it now go to 6 trillion? We had an $800 billion stimulus. Should we now have a $2 trillion stimulus? In theory, you could, but this is where people could lose faith entirely in the currency and the currency could collapse. The Federal Reserve's money printing exercises may help prop up the economy in the short term. However, what are the consequences of money printing on such a large scale? I think you're going to see a very rapid decline

in the value of the dollar in a matter of days, whether it's 20 percent, 30 percent, or 40 percent. A lot of people have been buying the dollar as a safe haven. When they find out that there's no safety there, in fact, they need a safe haven from the dollar. Right now, the dollar is benefiting from the fear trade. What if the fear trade is afraid of the dollar? Aside from causing an enormous amount of inflation, the Federal Reserve's reckless money printing exercises also run the very real risk of creating a worldwide loss of confidence

in the US dollar. I think a currency crisis is highly likely, but it'll be very difficult to know exactly what will cause it and when. I think it will be something unforeseen, could be a natural disaster, could be a political shock. It could be just a general loss of confidence. It could be something as simple as a treasury auction that goes bad. There are no buyers and all of a sudden the interest rate starts to go up. Then the financial players, the big hedge funds start to react to it, dumping dollars. Then all of a

sudden you have foreign central banks that begin dumping dollars, get me out, and when that happens, just like that. At some point, just like all Ponzi schemes, the participants wake up to the con, they don't want to participate anymore, and the whole thing implodes. Now, when private factors, when people are voluntarily participating, foreigners, foreign central banks, when they stop buying, the one difference is the Federal Reserve can come and supply the demand for the people who are waking up to the Ponzi nature of what we're doing. However, when the Fed becomes the only buyer, that's

the end game or the beginning of hyperinflation. Hyperinflation is a rapid increase in the inflation rate, so much so that people lose faith in the currency, and you see what is in fact a flight from the currency. Defeated Germany has runaway inflation. In Germany, the mark becomes so worthless, it is used to paper walls or to light stoves. What happens is the government spends so much money forcing it to borrow. It gets to the stage where it's borrowing more money than the market is willing to lend to it. The central bank then steps in and

turns that government debt into currency. The great question is, and I don't know the answer, is what level of inflation? Five percent, ten percent, 15 percent, or 20 percent? Do you start to panic? All I know is when that level comes, everybody panics together. The consequence of hyperinflation is the price of goods and services rises very rapidly, and that feeds upon itself causing people to get rid of the currency even more quickly. You then have a situation where people go out and they buy things just to get the hell out of paper money. Paradoxically, that

then starts driving and accelerating demand for paper money because they want more paper money to go and buy things. You have this situation where the value of paper money starts collapsing in advance of its issue. In everyday life, you'll be scrambling from day to day to get tangible things. If you're thinking of buying one can of tuna, you're going to buy two because you know that tomorrow or even later on that day or the next hour, that can of tuna is going to be costing you more. You're going to be scrambling to get anything that's

tangible. This period is going to involve a lot of economic pain. A lot of people who are currently retired in America are going to have to get jobs. Their retirement is gone. It's been bankrupted because they put their faith in a Bernie Madoff-type national Ponzi scheme. Of course, a lot of the property is going to decay if people are spending money on the necessities. They don't have money to make the repairs necessary to maintain their properties. If the landlords can't collect rent from their tenants, how are they going to maintain their properties? How are they

going to pay the taxes? I think the whole economy is going to crumble beneath the weight of this runaway inflation. Of course, the initial reaction by the Fed will be to create even more inflation, to try to stimulate the economy by printing even more money, which, of course, is the source of the problem. On the surface, it would appear that this is a problem facing the United States alone. However, with so many countries holding their savings in US government bonds, a loss of confidence in the US dollar could trigger a global crisis that would affect

every nation on Earth. If the US dollar hyper-inflates, the implications are really profound because you can go to a country like Zimbabwe and see the impact of hyperinflation. What happens when the world's reserve currency hyperinflates? We've never been in this situation before. It's impossible to predict what the outcome is going to be. However, logic suggests that if the US dollar hyper-inflates, most, if not all, of the currencies of the world will also have severe economic problems, because at the end of the day, the reserves of all of these currencies are basically dollars. There have been

dozens of currency collapses since the end of the Second World War, and they all result from the same thing. Bad policies and bad management. The US right now is pursuing bad policies. Central Bank is doing a bad job managing the currency and as a consequence, it's inevitable that the dollar is going to collapse. It's on this road that I call the fiat currency graveyard. The markets, the private sector, however you like to decide it, people, they suddenly move in a herd instinct. They suddenly understand things and this can happen overnight. It really can. The timing

of this is, I think, very difficult, it is impossible for us to say. However, I would point out that there is a danger that I use a metaphor. One morning we will wake up and find that we are in a very different world. It may not be one morning, it may be a week, a month, I don't know. When it happens, it will happen quite quickly and we won't be able to predict when. Hyperinflation may be one of several scenarios facing the world today, but history has shown us that whenever a nation tried to run

its economy using an artificial fiat system, the end result is always the same, disaster. There is a proven 100 percent failure rate. There is no exception to this. Fiat currencies always fail. Then 40 years ago, we tried this grand experiment where all the world's currencies became fiat at the same time, when we ended the Bretton Woods system. The world is going to have to extricate itself from this monetary system based on the dollar because if you want to back your currency, you have to back it with something. You can't back it with nothing. You always

think of that old Superman movie where the first one was Lois Lane, she falls off the top of the building and Superman catches her and he says, I got you. Don't worry, I got you, and she says, well, you got me. Who's got you? That's the dollar. Who's got the dollar? It's not Superman. The dollar can't fly on its own. The dollar used to be backed by gold. It was gold that had the dollar. It's like everybody has tethered their ships to the Titanic of currencies and so we're all going to go down. If there

is a loss of confidence in the US dollar and I think there will be in this decade, it happened before so it'll just be history repeating. Then we'll probably have to go back to something that will instill confidence and what instills confidence is gold. The only real solution is to go back to a real sound currency, real money, with something behind it. It doesn't have to be gold or silver. Historically that's been what societies have chosen through trial and error. They've tried this, they've tried that and they always wind up with gold or silver. I

think that probably is a clue that it's not a bad way to go. With all the uncertainty facing the world today, a return to a gold-backed economy would seem logical. How come there isn't so much as a discussion about such a return? The answer is as simple as it is alarming. The people at the top, the ones who have been benefiting from the current Ponzi system, don't want the ride to end. Many now believe that the price of gold and silver have been artificially suppressed to make it seem less desirable as a unit of global

exchange. What governments try to do is to maintain a low gold price because by doing that it makes the dollar look worthy of being the world's reserve currency, when in fact we know the dollar is not worthy of that esteemed position because it's being so badly mismanaged by the United States. Groups like the Gold Antitrust Action Committee or GATA, have been tracking what they believe is the deliberate suppression of gold and silver prices through a variety of dubious means. In 12 years, we've amassed nothing but evidence of the supports the manipulation of the gold price.

It'd be like talking about a murder trial when the jury would say guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. However, you're going to have to present each point of evidence and how it all fits together. There are numerous methods that they use to suppress the price of gold. Some are harder to prove than others. However, some of them are fully reported, and that's central bank sales. Between 1999 and 2002, the Bank of England foolishly sold a massive amount of Britain's gold reserves at an average price of $275 an ounce. The proceeds were spent buying euros and US

dollars. The governments of Canada, France, and Switzerland, among others, were also sellers of their gold around this time. We know that the central banks used to sell 400 tonnes every year. Why were they selling 400 tonnes? Obviously, it was the dumbest decision anyone could have made in the decade. By far the dumbest, but they did it every year. Sell 400, now gold goes from 300 to 1,600, almost 1,700. Why were you selling the gold? Because they were trying to keep the price down. It was a coordinated thing to keep everyone focused on believing in currencies.

Alan Greenspan, in testimony to Congress, admitted that they were manipulating the price of gold when he said, the world's central banks stand ready to lease gold in increasing quantities, meaning they were already doing it. Should the price of gold rise, meaning the target was to suppress the price of gold. They were already doing it and their target was to suppress the price of gold. He admitted it in testimony to Congress. Although central banks are able to sell off their country's gold holdings legally, they may have also been suppressing the price of gold using some other

rather questionable means. Some investigators believe that Western central banks have been loaning their countries' gold to bullion banks. A bullion bank is an institution that sells gold with the intention of buying it back sometime in the future at a cheaper price. With the proceeds of this sale, these banks have been known to buy US government bonds. While this isn't a problem in itself, central banks report the gold they have and the gold they've loaned to these bullion banks as one item. While a central bank may claim it has a certain amount of gold in reserves,

much of that gold may be on loan to a bullion bank which may have sold the gold in exchange for government bonds. One means of intervention in the gold market is the lending of gold to so-called bullion banks, and they sell it in the market. This suppresses the price as if the central banks would sell it directly. However, this lending does not appear in the book of the central banks. The US Treasury a few years ago changed the way they account for gold and they are accounting for some of their receivables and their inventory as

one line item. They're accounting for what they actually have and what people owe them as the same thing. That is basically illegal accounting. It's fraudulent. Why work so hard to keep the price of gold and silver low? Why do healthy gold and silver prices threaten to collapse the Ponzi scheme? There's this competitive relationship between gold and national currencies because gold is the only competitor to a national currency. Gold is money and these national currencies are money substitutes that circulate in place of gold. Fiat money gives the power to government. Real money keeps the power with

the people. When you have real money, the government is limited. It can only spend what it taxes and the public will resist taxation. However, if the government can simply print and borrow, there's a lot less resistance. It's a lot easier for the government to grow when it can promise something for nothing. That's what they do. Gold is what protects the people from the reckless policies of the government. Gold is the government chaperone. The government wants to be able to do whatever it wants, gold stands in its way. Yes, gold is an enemy of big government,

but it's a friend of freedom. It's a protector of individuals from the government. Gold is a competitor to the dollar. When it's going way up, it's a threat to inflation. It's a barometer of the well-being of the United States. Look at gold screaming now and the world's falling apart. It calls attention to how bad things are. The US government has an interest in Wall Street and the politicians, to keep the price suppressed. Wall Street doesn't want you going down to a coin dealer buying gold and silver coins. They want to sell you paper. The government

wants to sell you paper. I would say it's the government and Wall Street. Golden hands of people are the way you control government. Governments cannot create money out of thin air. If it's gold, they can only create paper out of thin air. If they can create paper out of thin air, they can use that paper to wage wars, or they can use that paper as a political contrivance to enrich their friends. As a consequence, governments have been fighting gold all century long. Despite this desire to keep gold and silver down, the recent instability in the

markets has seen the demand for gold and silver skyrocket. This, in turn, has exposed a deeper problem within the central banks. The problem of central banks in the West now face is that they have sold an awful lot of gold to try and suppress the price of gold. They are now embarrassed by the fact that central banks not in that original cartel, are now really very keen buyers of gold. We're talking about the Chinese, the Russians, the Indians, and Mexico. All these non-mainstream central banks, not part of, if you like, the top club members of

the Bank of International Settlements. The little guys in that context, they're picking up hundreds of tons of this stuff. To suppress the price of gold, Western central banks have had to sell or loan out their country's gold holdings. However, because the gold they sell rarely leaves their vaults, no one can be certain they aren't selling or loaning out more gold than they physically own. If this is true, then this could be one of the biggest scams ever perpetrated in history. A massive con perpetrated not by individuals but by entire governments. The central bank gold, most

of it sits at the New York Federal Reserve and the Bank of England. It's in the basement of these two places and it doesn't actually move. When a country is doing international settlement, they basically take a bar off of this pile and put it on that pile, or they'll just change the labels or it's a book entry, it's accounting, except there's been some creative accounting on all this gold. I don't think all of it is there. The question remains if everybody, especially the big players, wanted all of their gold delivered at the same time, it

is physically impossible to do it. Most gold that exists on the planet, there's more than one claim on each ounce of gold. There's several people that think that they have a title to that same ounce of gold. I have said many times over and over again, if you can't hold it, you don't own it. The game can't go on forever because sooner or later people are going to demand their physical gold or silver and that already is happening. The lack of accountability in gold sales by Western central banks hasn't been a concern so far. However,

as more and more buyers of gold have started to demand physical delivery, central banks that have oversold or loaned out their country's gold will find themselves caught in a major scandal. The result of such fraudulent activity means buyers of gold, be they individuals, pensions, hedge funds, or even entire nations, could be ripped off for billions of dollars. It's a little similar to the Murdoch scandal here at Fox News in London, the Madoff scandal. It's a very incestuous relationship between the press, big money, and the politicians. Unfortunately, these things don't get corrected until they blow up.

Madoff blew up. Murdoch blew up. The gold market is going to blow up and I think it will be a bigger scandal than either of them because it's a worldwide financial situation. It's only a trick that the politicians in power today know and the central bankers, the only trick they know is to create more money out of nothing, to inflate the currency. They have no other trick. As long as we keep looking to them to be our leaders and solve the problem, how can we expect anything else? That's the only trick they know. The other

trick there is, is to stop inflating and to go back to a sound currency. They'd say, oh, no, we can't do that. The reason they can't do that is because, it would put them all out of business. They wouldn't be able to continue the Ponzi scheme. Even with cracks forming in the current financial system, the only solutions offered by governments are in fact more steps down the road to disaster. However, while a single person may not be able to save the world, there is still something you can do to protect your family and yourself. You

cannot turn to a Ponzi scheme and ask him to run a real business, because he doesn't know how. You can't turn to all of these Ponzi schemers in government who are inflating the currency and say, well, let's solve the crisis in some other way because they don't know how. The solution is to quit depending on the same people with the same mentality to solve our problems. If governments won't go back to a gold standard, individuals can go back to the gold standard all by themselves. Politicians can create fiat money at will. That's why it's fiat.

Why would you want to put your faith in that? Put your trust in politicians and bureaucrats and central bankers when you can just have something real that has intrinsic value, that is scarce, and that is going to remain scarce. Would you rather have gold or a fiat currency? We see what's happening in the world and obviously, people are starting to figure out that gold is likely to sustain its value way more than a piece of paper is. It's not that the price of gold is going up, it's that the value of the dollar is going

down. The price remains constant in terms of human effort and purchasing power. An ounce of gold today will buy the same thing it bought 2,000 years ago. An ounce of gold today is approximate, it takes so much human effort to get out and refine the same human effort that it took to do certain things 2,000 years ago. It's the human effort equation that maintains stability. How much effort does it take? Gold is financial insurance. The thing about it is you own it because you want to be protected. You just have to have it if you

want to have a sleepless night because there's nothing else. If some catastrophic event happens and we've seen them, how are you going to be protected? The current financial system may be dying, but where there is chaos, there is also opportunity. As the old model falls apart, the door may be opened for great prosperity. It's clearly not the end of the world, it's probably not even the end of America. For many countries, this is going to be the beginning of an economic boom, a giant burden being lifted off their shoulders where the world no longer has

to loan trillions of dollars to Americans so that we can continue to consume what we don't produce. When this comes to an end, the world will benefit. It is not something that we should fear. We should embrace it as a world. This is the greatest wealth transfer in history. If we have a global currency crisis, then you're going to see a greater wealth transfer than has ever happened in all of history. It's all going to happen at once. Therefore, it's the greatest opportunity. We have millions of people now taking an interest in, what is money.

The question of what is money? What should it be? They're learning, especially a lot of young people. The sun will rise tomorrow as it has a million times before. Commuters will wake up and travel to their offices to begin the day's work. Farmers will tend to their crops and construction workers will build new infrastructure. However, will the world they live in still be the same? In 2008, the world was given a wake-up call. The biggest financial crash in human history was delayed by the same poor decisions that brought it about in the first place. What

that massive bailout bought us was not a solution, but merely time. Time for the people responsible to wring the last few dollars out of a dying system. However, for those able to see the cliff edge approaching, time to protect themselves, and their families, from the imminent plunge. In the end, that time may prove to be the most valuable commodity of all. There are these brief moments in history where the safe haven asset for the last 5,000 years simultaneously becomes the asset class that has the greatest single potential gains in purchasing power. We're in one of

these cycles right now where money is the best investment. Get out of currency, buy money, and you're probably going to be able to buy a whole lot more stuff later. However, the best thing that people can do of all is really to take on their own responsibility for getting financially educated. This is the most important thing. Don't let the banks and brokerage houses and other people guide all of your decisions. Find out what's going on for yourself, and empower yourself.