In Gold We Trust? The Future of Money in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Single)

spending by America's Federal Government (adding in state and local governments significantly increased the total) was around 24% of national income whilst tax revenues were 15% of national income. That left a near-record peacetime budget deficit to be financed by borrowing of 9% of GDP.

"coin clipping"

A combination of President George W. Bush's tax cuts and Obama's post-financial-crash stimulus had, in a decade, taken federal debt from 33% of US national income to 62% in 2010. Unreformed, it was projected to keep rising, to 90% in 2020

Maybe innovators in the private sector will produce some entirely new form of money that is not dependent on government at all.

Whether the gold price will continue to rise will depend not just on whether faith in fiat money continues to decline, but on whether the search for an improved form of money will produce, as we should all hope, something not just as good as gold, but better than it.

The value of this early money, whether gold, silver, cowry shells or barley, was essentially the same as the value of the quantity of the stuff from which it was made. Economists call this "commodity money". Paper money, by contrast, tends to be worth far more than the paper it is printed on. One of the key technological challenges was to

when there is a mixture of 'good' coins with high silver content and 'bad' coins that have been clipped or debased circulating, the public will hoard the valuable good ones and pass on the bad ones to others.

It was a fear of the economic and social upheaval that might be caused by money losing its value that drove Britain to adopt "sound money" policies nearly 300 years ago. This move coincided with an unplanned switch to using gold instead of silver as the basis of money and, ultimately, to the accidental birth of the gold standard. Its &quo

In December 2010,