The Story of Gold

(NOTE: This is a new edition of the classic work. It is not a scanned reproduction of an old library book, full of errors and weird characters. It contains every word of the original, plus all the original photographs and illustrations, which have been reproduced as well as possible under the circumstances. The US dollar is going to h*ll. The euro is on the verge of cracking up. Japan has been in a recession for over twenty years, and now faces the task of cleaning up three nuclear reactors. Not even the Swiss franc is backed by gold anymore. While the price of gold has skyrocketed in the past decade, especially in the past few years. Every day, headlines remind us we're tottering on the brink of economic chaos. America and many other countries are suffering their highest unemployment rates since the Great Depression. Food and fuel costs are rising high. The ShadowStats site estimates that if the US government still calculated inflation as it did during the 1970s, the rate would be about 12%. Yet Social Security recipients and everyone receiving Cost Of Living Allowance-calculated checks has not had a raise since January 2009. Interest rates are the lowest they've been in anybody's memory. Some experts predict we're headed for the kind of hyperinflation Germany suffered in the 1920s and Zimbabwe a few years ago. Fiat Money Around the World is Failing But if the US dollar and other fiat currencies go down the tubes, what will replace them? What IS money, anyway, if it's not a national unit of currency backed up by that government's treasury? Over a hundred years ago, one of the first finance professors in the United States, wrote a book to explain and celebrate gold. Gold is money, he declares. The world was on the gold standard at the time, yet he tells us that gold has been money since the dawn of civilization. When empires accumulate more of it, they prosper. When their supply goes down, so does their wealth and power. This is what caused the end of the Roman Empire, for example. Is the United States headed in the same direction? We certainly don't have as much gold in Fort Knox as we did at the end of World War II, the peak of our national power. Mead makes a simple explanation. As any businessman -- and Fed Chair Ben Bernanke knows, an economy is prosperous as prices rise. That's why Ben is so keen to increase liquidity when facing a financial crisis. An economy is in recession when the supply of money goes down, choking off credit -- and business suffers. That's called deflation, and the fear of it drives Mr. Bernanke a lot harder than the fear of inflation. This book is a voice from the past, when the world -- especially the United States -- increased its wealth at an unprecedented rate. The only parallel is China in the last twenty years. And when we were on the gold standard. This is information the disciples of fiat money -- Fed Chair Ben Bernanke, Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner, their equivalents around the world, and the heads of the IMF and the World Bank, and modern professors of finance -- don't want you to know. They deny the power of gold. They want to kill gold.