Historical Perspective on Gold. http://www.nma.org/pdf/gold/his_gold_prices.pdf The price of gold remained remarkably stable for long periods of time. For example, Sir Isaac Newton, as master of the U.K. Mint, set the gold price at L3.17s. 10d. per troy ounce in 1717, and it remained effectively the same for two hundred years until 1914. The official U.S. Government gold price has changed only four times from 1792 to the present. Starting at $19.75 per troy ounce, raised to $20.67 in 1834, and $35 in 1934. In 1972, the price was raised to $38 and then to $42.22 in 1973. A two-tiered pricing system was created in 1968, and the market price for gold has been free to fluctuate since then. Gold is Gold and largely unchanged as the worlds uniform reserve instrument. Currencies have been devalued to the point where: $1 of gold in 1961 = $42 in 2011: 42X... $271 of gold in 2001 = $1500 in 2011: 5.5X. $603 of gold in 2006 = $1500 in 2011: 2.6x How can this be? It has been stable for 200 years. During the period of stability currency was redeemable for gold. M0 money supply was backed by a reserve of gold. M0 Money, M0 Problems: Expect Massive Inflation in 2009 and Beyond By J.D. Seagraves, on March 18th, 2009 The conventional wisdom is that the year 2009 will be a tough one. Weâll all have to cut back on spending, get our debts under control, skip the annual family vacation, and clip coupons, but by 2010, weâll have a âreturn to normalcy.â Unfortunately, this just isnât in the cards. The era of Permanent Prosperity has turned out to be not-so permanent, and in â09, the bills are finally coming due. Sure, weâd like to hunker down and pay them, but the president, the Congress, and most importantly, the Federal Reserve, arenât going to let us. As bad as 2008 was, weâll one day look back on it as The Last Good Year. The Political-Media-Banking Complex Even though theyâre the ones who will be taking us off the deep end, we canât blame Obama and the Democrats for our sorry state of affairs. Clearly, the Bush administration bears the bulk of the responsibility, and the Reagan and Nixon-Ford administrations played their parts as well. In fact, itâs the hole that Nixon began digging for us with the closing of the gold window in 1971 that will ultimately bury the U.S. dollar. Under the gold standard, every $35 represented an ounce of gold in the Federal Reserveâs coffers. Of course the Fed played tricks with accounting and created far more paper dollars than it had ounces of gold backing them, but there was at least some limit to the extravagance of their monetary machinations. All this changed on August 15, 1971 when President Nixon unilaterally reneged on Americaâs promise to redeem Federal Reserve Notes (a.k.a. U.S. dollars) in gold. Since then, the Fedâs ability to create money out of thin air has been entirely limitless. The Fedâs rampant inflation has become so commonplace that the vast majority of financial journalists donât even take notice of it. The federal government is deeply in debt, so where does it get the money to fund all of these bailouts? Few bother to even consider the question, and those that do assume the bailouts will be paid for with tax revenue. Pundits who are a little more on the ball might understand that the bailouts and âstimulusâ wonât be paid for with taxes, but by issuing new government debt, but even this misses the point. That debt is largely âmonetizedâ by the Fed, which is just a fancy way of saying the Fed creates new money out of thin air to pay the governmentâs bills. So how much money has the Fed created in this manner in the past three months? The answer is quite shocking. How Money is Measured M0 is the measure of the nationâs monetary base. It includes all physical currency such as notes and coins, as well as accounts at the central bank that can be exchanged for physical currency. This is the strictest of monetary measures, and the one least susceptible to rapid increases. M1, by contrast, adds bank reserves and checking accounts to the money supply, while M2 also tags on savings accounts, money market accounts, and CDs under $100,000. M3, which the Fed stopped tracking because the increases were too large to explain, is the most liberal measure of money supply, as it includes all CDs as well as institutional money market accounts, Eurodollars, and repo agreements. The important takeaway from the monetary lesson above is that M0 is the most conservative measure of the money supply available and is completely indisputable: it is the physical currency in circulation or in the coffers of the Fed. It exists in reality, not electronically. And hereâs the scary reality: for the period ending December 3, the Fed had increased the M0 money supply by as much in thirty days as it had in the previous eighty-three years! The amount of money in circulation was 74% higher on December 3, 2008 than it was on September 3, 2008. And hereâs where it gets even scarier: each one of those $268 billion new dollars in print can turn into ten new dollars via the process of fractional-reserve lending. This is not a conspiracy theory, but the cold hard facts. Many ancient civilizations met their doom by holding on to superstitions the likes of which we think our society is somehow above. But the truth of the matter is that all but a tiny fraction of Americans hold fast to the most absurdly false religion imaginable: the notion that prosperity can be created at the printing press. In 2009, this myth will be shattered once and for all. M1 money supply: http://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/h6/hist/h6hist1.txt 2011: 1,853 B 2006: 1,380 B 2001: 1,097 B 1991: 827B 1981: 414B 1971: 215B 1961: 141B 1951: 138B All previous pegged to our gold reserves. The fed/treasury are martingaling our money supply. Between 1971 & 1981 they printed 100% of our currency out of thin air. They did it again from 1981 - 1991 or 4x our 1971 circulation. And again between 1991 - 2011 = 9x our 1971 circulation. Interesting correlation between fractional reserves banking allowing 10x and the fact that we have printed 10x our last gold backed reserves. Somehow we only have $1.85T in currency yet we are 10x the amount in debt. Consider 90% of our currency was printed out from thin air backed by the word and good faith of us politicians. Our debt to gold ratio must be near 100x. Reality is to get out of debt we need to pay our creditors with devalued currency (new printed money). Than we need to collect this newly printed money back in the form of a monetary exchange tax to remove from circulation. An annual income tax will not suffice. All we need is a federal transaction tax of 1% on each monetary exchange. 231 turns of our $1.85T money supply, $431 T in dollar transactions will essentially remove 90% of our printed out of thin air currency from circulation and restore the value of our $ pegging it to gold once again.