In 1971, the US went off the gold standard, which meant that it no longer had the responsibility to redeem its bank notes for real money—i.e., precious metals. It also meant that, as long as it could get people to accept the essentially worthless bank notes as currency, they could print as much as they liked. They took full advantage of this fact and transformed the US from the world’s greatest creditor nation into the world’s greatest debtor nation in under forty years. The rest of the world followed this extraordinarily bad example and, as a result, no nation is now on … Continue reading Future Currency