A Nobody

A short history of currency debasement: Debasement is the oldest con in government. Rome ran it better than anyone until the twentieth century came along and said, "hold my beer." Under Augustus, the denarius started at 4.5 grams of nearly pure silver. By Nero's reign in 64 AD, the emperor had shaved it down to about 90 percent silver. Nero had fire damage to repair and games to fund. His successors kept clipping. By the time Gallienus ruled around 260 AD, the denarius and its descendant, the antoninianus, carried around 5 percent silver, a copper slug dipped in a thin silver wash that rubbed off in your palm. Prices in the empire rose more than a thousandfold across the third century. Diocletian then responded with the Edict on Maximum Prices in 301 AD, threatening death to any merchant who charged what the debased coins were actually worth. Merchants did the sensible thing and stopped selling. Shelves emptied. This method never changed, only the technology. Henry VIII of England ran the Great Debasement from 1544 to 1551, dropping the silver content of his coinage from 92.5 percent to 25 percent and pocketing the difference. Londoners noticed the king's copper nose showing through the silver on his own portrait and nicknamed him Old Coppernose. Clipping coins requires effort. Running a printing press requires almost none, which is why the modern state loves paper and loves screens even more. John Law gave France a preview in 1720 with his Banque Royale and a flood of paper livres backed by Mississippi fantasies. The scheme collapsed within a year. The French liked the lesson so little they repeated it with the assignats of the 1790s, printing until the notes were worth essentially nothing and executing speculators in between runs of the press. Then came central banking, which industrialized the whole operation and gave it a respectable name. The Federal Reserve opened in 1914. A dollar from that year buys you about three cents of goods today, a 97 percent loss of value, achieved without clipping a single coin. Nixon closed the gold window on August 15, 1971, and after that nothing anchored the dollar except the promises of the people printing it. The Fed expanded its balance sheet from roughly 870 billion dollars in 2007 to nearly 9 trillion by 2022. Your savings account paid less interest than the currency lost. Debasement transfers wealth from whoever holds the money to whoever prints it first. That is the entire mechanism, from Nero's mint to the Fed's open market desk. The man who spends the new money early buys at old prices. By the time the fresh units reach your wages, the prices already moved. You hold the bag. Gold held its weight for five thousand years because no committee could vote it into existence, and governments abandoned it for exactly this reason.