The common theme in the quotes below is that fiat currency, such as the USD, always reverts to zero value. This is surprisingly supported by central bankers themselves, as you will see below. Further, the continued issue of money, as has been the case for the last 10 years, tends to enrich the elite but defraud the people.

 

But look at the number of dollars in existence ($3.635 trillion in the M-1 money). Divide that by the 260 million ounces of gold the U.S. Government is supposed to own, and you get a gold price of $13,982/ounce.

Doug Casey

[M1 is now 4.005 trillion, USD15,345/oz]

 

Regardless of the dollar price involved, one ounce of gold would purchase a good-quality man’s suit at the conclusion of the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt, and today.

Peter A. Burshre

 

It is a sobering fact that the prominence of central banks in this century has coincided with a general tendency towards more inflation, not less. [I]f the overriding objective is price stability, we did better with the nineteenth-century gold standard and passive central banks, with currency boards, or even with ‘free banking.’ The truly unique power of a central bank, after all, is the power to create money, and ultimately the power to create is the power to destroy.

Paul Volcker, ex Federal Reserve Chairman

 

Gold, unlike all other commodities, is a currency…and the major thrust in the demand for gold is not for jewellery. It’s not for anything other than an escape from what is perceived to be a fiat money system, paper money, that seems to be deteriorating.

Alan Greenspan, ex-US Federal Reserve Chairman, in August 23, 2011

 

Everything has its limit – iron ore cannot be educated into gold.

Mark Twain

 

The gold standard did not collapse. Governments abolished it in order to pave the way for inflation. The whole grim apparatus of oppression and coercion, policemen, customs guards, penal courts, prisons, in some countries even executioners, had to be put into action in order to destroy the gold standard.

Ludwig Von Mises

 

With the exception only of the period of the gold standard, practically all governments of history have used their exclusive power to issue money to defraud and plunder the people.

Friedrich von Hayek

 

The problem with fiat money is that it rewards the minority that can handle money but fools the generation that has worked and saved money.

Adam Smith

 

At the end fiat money returns to its inner value—zero.

Voltaire

 

If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issuance of their currency, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all their property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.

Thomas Jefferson

 

The money power preys upon the nation in times of peace and conspires against it in times of adversity. It is more despotic than monarchy, more insolent than autocracy, more selfish than bureaucracy.

Abraham Lincoln

 

Give me control of a nation’s money and I care not who makes the laws.

Amschel Rothschild

 

I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country. A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is concentrated. The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men. No longer a government by free opinion, no longer a government by conviction and vote of majority, but a government by the opinion and duress of a small group of dominant men.

President Woodrow Wilson (regretting signing into law the Federal Reserve Act)

 

It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before morning.

Henry Ford

 

By this means (fractional reserve banking) government may secretly and unobserved, confiscate the wealth of the people, and not one man in a million will detect the theft.

John Maynard Keynes

 

The modern banking process manufactures currency out of nothing. The process is perhaps the most astounding piece of slight hand that was ever invented…If you want to be slaves of the bankers, and pay the cost of your own slavery, then let the banks create currency.

Lord Josiah Stemp, Former Director of the Bank of England (1937)

 

If the governments devalue the currency in order to betray all creditors, you politely call this procedure “inflation.

George Bernard Shaw

 

In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation […] Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the “hidden” confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights.

Alan Greenspan

18 February 2020 Macro, Uncategorized