Face Value and the Future of Money
The Tragedy of the American Dollar
November 11, 2025
This recent Monetary Metals interview with Chris Whalen provides some of the best insights into the future of money in the immediate and longer term.
Ladies and Gentlemen, Choose Your Currency
November 10, 2025
“So, what will it be today, sir,” asked the server at the Currency Cafe. “Federal Reserve Notes, Loonies, bitcoin, ether, or maybe a goldback or silver maple? We have a special today on over-the-counter t-bills priced in yen.”
Normally, we don’t get to choose the currency in which we transact business or consumer purchases. If we did, the world might be a far different place. We might entertain to buy clothing in Vietnamese dong, French wine in euros or francs, and a poo-poo platter in yuan. Worse yet, we could be forced to pay in currencies chosen by the seller or purveyor of goods or services, given their distrust of anything not of native issue.
Imagine having to carry a wallet of fifteen different paper currencies, along with a pocketful of coins and tokens of various denominations, weights, and compositions. Making matters even more complicated our smartphones would have to be loaded with the current crypto selections: bitcoin, Solana, XRP, and stablecoins of diverse origins.
It might get a bit confusing.
For convenience sake, the general custom these days is to simply whip out the handy credit or debit card or take a swipe with the phone, and viola, done deal. Some old-schoolers still pay in cash. Imagine that.
On the other hand, choice in payment and transaction currency is at the root of financial freedom, a freedom and a responsibility the U.S. congress has consistently, over time, sought to relieve itself from, to the ultimate detriment to society as a whole, but a net benefit to their usurpers in the Federal Reserve System, and to themselves.
Prior to the founding of the American republic, accepted currency was a myriad of foreign, competing monies. Frenchmen, Englishmen, Spaniards, and Nordic explorers and settlers divvying up the great expanse of the new world carried the coin of their realm since there was little to no agreement on who owned what and boundaries were made at the barrel of guns or gentlemen’s agreements. Indians had their own “wampum”, adding to the general malaise of pioneer days.
It was a simpler time, when barter flourished. A harvest of wheat could fetch live chickens. Animal hides were relished in exchange for whiskey, goods, and even the services of women of ill repute. Eventually, the land was became more settled, some colonies established their own paper currencies. In 1652, John Hull was authorized by the Massachusetts legislature to mint coins (willow, oak, and pine tree sailing). The Spanish dollar was widely circulated.
During the American Revolutionary War, colonies issued paper currency to pay for military expenditures and the Continental Congress issued its own paper - continental currency - which, by the end of the conflict, became worthless.
Finally, as the republic took shape, the United States adopted a bimetallic standard of gold and silver under the Coinage Act of 1792. The silver dollar was designated as the standard unit of money, pegged it to the Spanish dollar and all other coinage (gold, copper) flowed from the weights and measures established by the act of congress. The proportional value of silver to gold was set at 15 united of silver for each same weight unit of gold.
One could say after the first 40 years or so of the American experience, issuance and the handling of the nation’s money went straight downhill, and many economists and historians might agree. Silver was largely de-monetized in 1873 (known in financial circles as "The Crime of '73") and taken out of circulation entirely in 1965. President Richard M. Nixon famously rid the world of the Bretton Woods gold standard in August, 1971. Since then, the world has become fully fiat, or decreed, currencies. BRICS are at work seeking to change that.
So, we stand today at the precipice of history, tethered to a currency that is essentially unconstitutional, issued by a private bank, and backed by nothing. Though it plainly purports to be backed by the “full faith and credit” of the United States of America, people have lost faith in the government and the country’s credit continues to devolve into a black, $38 trillion, hole. The original Federal Reserve Note, established in 1913, has lost some 98% of its purchasing power through a series of intentional inflations, government malfeasance, and casual blunders and otherwise ill intentions by politicians of all stripes too numerous to mention.
The latest entry into the dizzying world of high finance, credit, and currency is the crypto experience. Established by somebody named Satoshi (nobody knows for certain), bitcoin came into existence somewhat without fanfare in 2009, and has captured the attention of speculators far and wide, and most recently by Wall Street and its well-trained snake oil salesmen.
Once the Wall Street crowd - the Goldman Sachs, BlackRocks, and JP Morgans - got involved, what was originally promoted as “trustless, anonymous, decentralized money” became just another speculative Ponzi scheme, its original purpose overwhelmed by regulators, derivates, and all manner of propaganda designed to have one believe that it offers some kind of value proposition and salvation from the dredges of fractional reserve fiat banking.
It doesn’t. Simple as that. And neither do the literally thousands of copycat crypto-currencies, alt-coins, and stablecoins. In keeping with the recent American tradition of offering currency of little to no value, the U.S. government has embraced crypto, to the point at which it wholly supports the establishment of stablecoins, pegged to the U.S. dollar, as a solution to the spiraling debt crisis. In their wildest imaginations, these stable coin issuers will purchase U.S. treasuries (they already are), keeping their value at a 1-to-1 basis with the U.S. dollar (which, incidentally, is a floating currency, with rising and falling values and not accepted everywhere) and swap these figments of imagination to the American public, eventually replacing the good old greenback with “money” you cannot see or touch, but that can be programmed by the issuer - ostensibly, the government.
The stablecoin phenomenon, if the U.S. government schemers have their way, will lead directly to the dreaded CBDC (Central Bank Digital Currency), by which the government might enable to do many tricks, including determining what you can buy and when, and where, how much you can spend in a given period and any assortment of other control freakish functions. They can put an expiration date on it, so you have to spend it in a given time period, or have it decrease in value if you don’t use it quickly enough. It is certainly “Frankenstein money” that will be the undoing of us all. Hopefully, they’ll never have the ability to implement it, but, just in case, Americans should become more educated on the subjects of money and currency and keep a close eye on the doings in congress.
They’ve already passed what’s known as the GENIUS (Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins) Act and have other legislation surrounding stablecoin regulations in the pipeline. The European Union is also reportedly hard at work developing their own crypto solution, though banks and finance ministers from member countries are at loggerheads over the “digital euro.”
Opinion varies on whether adoption of crypto and stablecoins are sound financial instruments or well-disguised weapons of mass financial destruction. It is advisable to stay abreast of developments as “money” moves from the solid to the ephemeral and become as well-informed as possible about the future of money.
November 6, 2025
Wall Street & Federal Reserve Wealth Looters
Yes, it’s true. Silver was the basis of all money in the early days of the United States of America and it served the country well for decades, until bankers and congress couldn’t help themselves from tinkering with the system, passing various coinage acts in 1834, 1849, 1853, 1857, 1864, 1873 (the most notorious), and finally, in 1965, the latter date, of course, after the establishment of the Federal Reserve System, authorized by congress and signed into law by president Woodrow Wilson on December 23, 1913, which survives, its currency greatly devalued, to the present day.
Ever since 1999 and the tech bubble implosion, Fed-engineered boom/bust cycles have been the most efficacious means for the Wall Street-Federal Reserve Looting Syndicate to transfer the wealth and assets of the increasingly pauperized middle and working classes, i.e. the retail investor muppets, to the Fed's "private equity" accomplices. 2000 saw the tech bubble bust, then housing bubble bust of 2007 and the 2008 financial crash. Each of these events enabled the already super-wealthy to concentrate even more wealth and power in their own hands.
Now, the Keynesian fraudsters at the Fed have blown the Mother of All Bubbles, prior to the recent rate hikes bilking savers out of trillions in interest income that forced yield-seekers to gamble in Wall Street’s rigged casino. So, here’s the question: are we overdue for yet another Fed-engineered crash, aka another Great Muppet Reaping?
All it would take to burst these bubbles is for interest rates to spike, after being artificially suppressed since 2008 by the Fed and central banks based on their lies of low or “transitory” inflation. Conversely, if/when the Fed implements yield curve control in an attempt to prevent the bond vigilantes from signaling trouble, forewarning the stock market, this risks causing a major loss of investor confidence since these rigged and broken “markets” are totally disconnected from underlying fundamentals.
A broad market meltdown might initially be bearish for precious metals, due to liquidation selling on cascading margin calls (margin debt is currently at all-time highs of $1.3 trillion). Any sharp drop in precious metals prices due to forced selling would potentially enable the Fed’s bullion bank market-rigging accomplices to cover some of their massive short positions in gold & silver and go long before the “flight to quality” stampede into the safe haven of physical precious metals begins in earnest.
These insane bubbles have already gone on far longer than many thought possible. People and institutions vastly underestimated how reckless and irresponsible the criminal central banks would be with their Keynesian monetary lunacy while professing to see no bubbles or inflation.
So how does this end? Too much debt that can never be repaid has been built up in the financial system. Factor in tens of trillions of derivatives and dodgy 2X or 3X leveraged bets, out-of-control government spending, and a dangerously polarized body politic with an enraged right and militant far left, and the level of systemic risk to the financial system is off the charts – especially since no Wall Street investment banks or their Fed accomplices were ever held accountable for causing the 2008 great financial crisis. Our policymakers, regulators, and enforcers remain as captured, corrupt, and clueless as ever. A long-overdue reckoning is coming.
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