The Dollar Meltdown – Review

By Michael Nystrom, GoldSeek

I started collecting coins back in 1976, when I was just 8 years old. My interest was piqued when a kid brought an old Franklin half-dollar to school one day. I’d always liked the Kennedy halves since there were relatively rare, and getting one in change was a special event. But that Franklin half was something else entirely – like something from another planet! Even as a second-grader, I could tell there was something qualitatively different about it. It just felt different. It was heavier, and had a certain elegant dullness to its finish. It was dirty and worn around the edges in a way that made you think it was no stranger to work.

But in that glorious year of our nation’s 200th birthday, America was far enough down its current slide into poverty that it no longer minted coins from silver. The government couldn’t afford it any more. That practice had ended a dozen years earlier, and the silver that had circulated in America for hundreds of years had quietly disappeared. A silver coin was something entirely new – and exciting – to my eight-year-old eyes.

In retrospect, seeing that Franklin half was a life altering event. It got me interested in coins and money, got me started collecting, and provided me with an education that I otherwise would have missed completely in my public schooling. The old coins were elegant and beautiful. Through them I learned of art, economics, history and culture. At the same time, the new copper clad bicentennial coins were making their way into circulation. I wondered why the new coins were made of silver-colored copper sandwiches instead of real silver, and was told that “there wasn’t enough” silver to go around. It was only much later that I learned the real reason – not that there isn’t enough silver, but that the value of our money is being steadily eroded through inflation. The result is that even pennies today are no longer made of copper.

My education naturally allowed me to understand the language of Ron Paul, back when most others still thought he was a kook. It was through Dr. Paul that I began to understand the link between sound money and Liberty – another subject that was somehow missed in public school.

But something I’ve only recently been coming to grips with was hammered home this weekend as I read Charles Goyette’s excellent new book The Dollar Meltdown. My entire life has been lived during a period of declining American living standards. The collective cultural mythology of ‘the richest country in the world’ has been so blinding that until recently, I had failed to acknowledge this simple fact.

The Dollar Meltdown puts America’s decline it into a sweeping context that makes our collective outcome impossible to ignore: Plunging living standards, a steadily eroding currency and massive inflation in a nation that has lost its industrial base. If you think things are bad now, they’re only going to get worse. To quote Goyette: (p.9)

Gold’s recent advances signal that we are in a period of major transition now. The American dollar’s role as the world’s reserve currency is inherently unstable and the signs of a breakdown are all around. Just as the monetary authorities have been unable to reinflate the high-tech bubble or the real estate bubble, when the dollar bubble is finally burst, no other paper currency will be able to take its place.

Read more….