Can't fathom why people ignore the fact that Nixon decoupled all global currencies off gold in 1971. The only US president to resign for shady stuff.
When I say Zambia lets back the Kwacha in copper people look at me strange like the USA and Roman empire didn't back in metals. 🤦♂️
But let's slow it down.
Let's start with Rome. In the early days of the roman republic (500BC) for the first 178 years, there is no evidence of big inflation. They were using Gold and silver coinage whilst small denominations were made out of copper and bronze.
Then some bad guy by the name Hannibal of carthage started to trouble Rome in what was called the second Punic war and to pay for this war, the Romans did "deficit" spending by taking coins from taxes, melting them and adding base metals like copper so they could mint more coins. This caused big inflation and inflation was one of the factors that brought the roman republic into a dictatorship, the Roman Empire.
Despite this the early Romans enjoyed a long period of basically no inflation because they used sound money, gold and silver. It was the debasing money for war spending that led to problems.
Personally i think the Romans are original bad guys because their moves to debase were slick. Firstly they had a cheating method of whenever they walked into govt offices they would clip their coins and take a piece out.After a while they would melt these clippings and make more money. Secondly the Romans had another trick called revaluation here they would take a coin and just give it new stamp e.g take a K1 coin and stamp K100. These guys were specialists in cheating....I applaud such...👏👏
Now lets rock with the United States from the 1700s Up until the world war one US had low inflation, high levels of precious metals in its coinages and treasury notes were backed by Gold at a one to one ratio. From there the US debased its currency more and more to pay for world war two, the korean war and then the vietnam war until finally the link between gold and the US dollar was severed completely in 1971.
After world war two, IMF was formed at the bretton woods summit to push for global financial stability. IMF gave the world an offer it couldn't refuse, IMF said back your national currency reserves in dollar or in metals. The US had just come out of world war two flexing so it was obvious who had the influence. You can guess what the nations of the world chose, they backed in dollars. So IMF said everyone will back in dollars and the US will back in gold and everyone was cool.
Now here comes a real shady bad guy, US president Nixon who was known for criminal activities like wiretapping and spying on the competition (watergate scandal) but his greatest crime came on August 15th 1971 when he severed the last ties between the dollar and gold ending the bretton woods system. These were his words:
"I have directed secretary connolly to suspend all convertibility of the dollar into gold all other convertible assets, except in amounts and conditions determined to be in the best interest of the United States"
Nixon pulled the most shady move ever and the world just watched and agreed as we all moved to a fiat system. This was a bad guy move, to be impartial it must be applauded 👏👏. Nixon later resigned, not for the gold issue but because he was facing certain impeachment for his shady moves in the watergate scandal.
In summary all I am saying is African countries like Zambia, Zimbabwe and DRC Congo need to back our currencies in metals. Yes its cheating on a moral scale but its perfectly within IMF articles.
Some will say but Zambia is christian nation we dont cheat. The same coin that Jesus was given when asked on tax was made of copper at 1/4 probability. Jesus said "Give to ceasar what belongs to ceasar"...he didnt say nothing about how you got what you gave to ceasar.
"History Doesn't Repeat Itself, But it Sure Does Rhyme " - Mark Twain
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