J.B. Shurk – Mark Jeftovic wrote a wonderful essay arguing that WWIII has been in the works ever since industrialized nations jettisoned the classical gold standard at the outbreak of WWI. Drawing from Ferdinand Lips’s insightful book, Gold Wars, Jeftovik recounts how everything changed once governments abandoned sound money in order to finance long wars.
From the mid-1600s all the way to 1914, the gold-linked British pound remained remarkably stable — even increasing its value relative to gold over those two and a half centuries (no doubt because of its proven resilience through myriad crises). Continue reading