Hidden Secrets Of Money - Currency Versus Money

In this video, Mike Maloney tackles about the real wealth of humanity. This is the first episode of Hidden Secrets Of Money series. This video is all about the rivalry of currency and money which was written in history.

TRANSCRIPT

Your true wealth is your time and freedom. Money is just a tool for trading your time. It’s a container to store your economic energy until you’re ready to deploy it. But the whole world has been turned away from real money and has been fooled into using currency, a deceitful imposter that is silently stealing your two most valuable assets, your time and your freedom. Welcome to the Rabbit Hole.

We are entering a period of financial crisis that is the greatest the world has ever known. The wealth transfer that will take place during this decade is the greatest wealth transfer in history. Wealth is never destroyed. It is merely transferred. And that means that on the opposite side of every crisis there is an opportunity. The great news is that all you have to do to turn this crisis into your great opportunity is to educate yourself. I believe that the best investment that you can make in your lifetime is your own education. Education on the history of money. Education on finance. Education on how the global economy works. Education on how all of these guys, the central bankers, the stock market, how they can cheat you, how they can scam you.

If you learn what is going on and how the financial world works, you can put yourself on the correct side of this wealth transfer. Winston Churchill once said that the further you look into the past, the further that you can see into the future. This program is all about creating your own crystal ball, being able to gaze into the future, being able to change this crisis, the greatest crisis in the history of mankind into your great opportunity.

The hidden secrets of money, some of them are hidden in plain sight. They're like right in front of you. The way the monetary system works is something that isn't actually hidden away from all of us. It's out in the open, but it's complex and people just don't --they can't see how it works. It's hard for them to imagine that we're living in such a hoax. Others are meant to be secret, but the truth is slowly coming out. Like the Federal Reserve being a private corporation and not really part of the US Government. But when I started studying this what I found was that there was no place that I could point people to where they could get it all in one spot. And so I basically decided to write my book about it and consolidate monetary history, economics, the markets, fundamentals of gold and silver. There's a lot of smoke and mirrors in economics. And I've sort of made it my job to lift the fog for people.

Welcome to Egypt. This is where it all began. Roughly 5000 years ago, the Egyptians started using gold and silver as their predominant form of currency. But it was not yet money. The pieces of gold and silver that they were using were odd sizes and weights, odd purities. So it still was not interchangeable where each unit is the same as the next. This meant that nothing really had a price yet. You couldn't put a price of so many coins on something because they didn't have coins yet. Trade was still difficult. It was still a guessing game when it came to the exchange of values.

One of the reasons that we are in the financial mess that we are today globally is that people do not understand the difference between currency and money. Currency is a medium of exchange, a unit of account. It is portable, durable, divisible and something called fungible. Fungible means that each unit is the same as the next unit. A dollar in my pocket buys the same amount as a dollar in your pocket. Money is all of those things plus a store of value over a long period of time. Even financial planners, bankers, your accountant, they don't understand the difference between currency and money. The currency in your pocket is a medium of exchange. It's a unit of account because it's got numbers on it. It's somewhat durable, it's portable, it's divisible and you can make change and it's fungible. A dollar in my pocket buys the same amount as a dollar in your pocket. But because governments can print more and more and more of it and dilute the currency supply, it's continually transferring wealth out of your pocket, out of your bank account to the government and to the banking system.

The reason that gold and silver are the optimum form of money is because of their properties. It's an easy medium of exchange because gold and silver store a large amount of value in a very small area. It's a unit of account. Pure gold has the same value all over the planet. So an ounce of gold buys the same amount here in Egypt as it would in China or in the United States. It's durable. The same gold that Egyptians were using in trade 5000 years ago is still here with us today. It does not corrode. It's divisible. You can make change with it. It's very portable. You can use something like oil as money. It's just that you can't carry around a barrel of oil on your back. It's fungible. Pure gold is the same wherever it is on earth. Pure silver is the same wherever it is on earth. It's limited in quantity. That's the reason that it maintains its purchasing power. Governments cannot print it. Over the last 5000 years, only gold and silver have maintained their purchasing power. There have been thousands upon thousands of fiat currencies. Currencies that are unbacked by gold or silver and they have all gone to zero. It's a 100% failure rate.

Well, fiat currency of course is a currency that exists at the dictate or by fiat from a government. They'll say they have their printing presses and the paper money rolls off the printing presses. And then they give it the fiat designation which then makes the currency official. It's just worthless paper. But when Ben Bernanke gives it the special sign and they have the cult meeting at the Federal Open Market Committee meetings it suddenly becomes currency.

If you look at what's really going on it's a con game. And so there's confidence. While the Federal Reserve is very forthright about what they're doing. If you read their website they'll tell you it's a confidence game. They tell that there's no intrinsic value in their money. They'll tell you that they print it backed by absolutely nothing. They actually display all these facts. But if you tell somebody in the public that this stuff is created out of thin air, there's no backing whatsoever, it's absolutely worthless, it's about as valuable as Monopoly money, they'll look at you like you're nuts.

Is there an example throughout history of a fiat currency, a piece of paper, that's unbacked by anything surviving?

Short answer, no. Long answer, no. And here's why. When Addison Wiggin took over at The Daily Reckoning when they got cranked up, Bill Bonner asked him to catalogue all of the fiat currencies throughout history and what happened to each of them. Addison dutifully went to work. Within a short period of time he had gone through the alphabet. All the fiat currencies that started with the letter A were done. They all went to zero. He was halfway through the letter B and all the fiat currencies that started with the letter B and there were 600 of them in just the first letter and a half of the alphabet. And every single one of them went to zero. Everyone, 600 fiat currencies that start with the letter A and half of the ones that start with the letter B are 600 of these things. Not one ever came close. And you think this one, the United States dollar, is going to be the first one after all that. I don't think so. No, no currency, fiat currency has ever survived. None.

The thing about money is there actually is a fairly well accepted definition of what money is. The question is as you apply that definition to particular things that people claim to be money, do they fit the definition? We'll just take the paper dollar for example. How well does it perform those functions? Well, store of value? The dollar has lost 95% of its purchasing power since the creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913. So not very good as a store of value.

One of the things I do is just a way to get the audience's attention is I have a slide and there are three pictures on the slide. One is a pile of Monopoly money. The other one is a pile of Federal Reserve notes, what Americans would call paper money. The other one is a solid gold, American Eagle one ounce coin. And the title of this slide is which of these is not like the other. And if you know the show Sesame Street or if you have children who watch it it's one of the favorite vignettes in Sesame Street. And what it really is there is a kind of IQ test for five-year old's. They're supposed to look at the three things and look at characteristics and find the one that's not like the other.

Well, I've shown this slide to groups of Ivy League university professors and I've also shown it to children, you know, kind of five years old, my nieces and nephews and so forth. And when the professors look at it they say well, clearly the dollars are not like the others because gold has no role as money and Monopoly money is junk and the American dollar is a store of value. So that's not like the other. But the children look at it and they say well, the gold coin is not like the other because the other two are just piles of paper and the gold coin is clearly something different. So my question to the audience is who's smarter, a five-year-old or an Ivy League professor?

Before World War I, each note that a treasury issued would say that there have been deposited with the United States Treasury $20 in gold coin payable to the bearer upon demand. The money was in the vault. The currency was a note they gave you that was a claim check. Only a claim check on the money. The same as if you go to the dry cleaners and you give them your shirt and they give you a claim check for your shirt. The value is that shirt at the dry cleaners. Not the piece of paper that says that you own that shirt. So our currency that's circulated was the paper US dollars and they were claim checks on money.

The next hidden secret is the difference between currency and money. Money must be a store of value and maintain its purchasing power over long periods of time. As we progress through this series, you'll learn that national currencies are really a tool used by the government and the financial sector to leach away your time and your freedom by stealing your purchasing power. So rather than storing your economic energy, currencies leak. Now compare that to the gold and silver the Egyptians were using. Like I started with, it still wasn't money because it wasn't interchangeable yet. But they were on the right track as gold and silver have proven over thousands of years to be the ultimate store of value. Gold is only formed when a star explodes, a supernova, and it stays around forever. This is one of the properties that make it the ultimate money. People are amazed that after 5000 years the pyramids are still here. But what I'm more amazed at is that the currency that the people that built this were using that currency, that gold and silver that they were using in trade on a daily basis is still around today. It may have been melted down and re-refined and it's in a coin or a bar or in some piece of jewelry. But it's still with us today and it still purchases something.

Yes, it is the ultimate money because there is nothing else even in the same league. It's divisible. It's permanent. It's a store of value. It's a unit of account. It's got everything you want out of money but it doesn't go away and it can't be increased. That is what makes gold the most beautiful money of all. What more can you ask out of a money?

It keeps governments under control. You can maintain a solvent system. Governments don't like gold at present because they're getting away with the fiat currencies and they'll do everything they can to discredit it as an asset class. I mean, my goodness, Gold has outperformed the Dow Jones Industrial Average in each of the last seven years. Yet it's not considered a legitimate asset class. Why? Again, it's the fear that maybe gold will be imposed on the system. That it will constrain government ability to spend beyond its means. They can't print it. They can't print it, no.

The proper definition of inflation, I use Milton Friedman's definition. Inflation is an expansion of the currency supply. Deflation is a contraction of the currency supply. If you expand the currency supply eventually prices will rise. And if you contract the currency supply eventually prices will fall. This is a pool. But it's not a pool of water. This is the currency pool. And these are prices. And if you expand the currency supply, prices like a sponge in water have to rise to suck up the excess currency. Governments never stop printing more currency and adding currency to circulation. Therefore, prices keep on going up. Not because they stuff that you're trying to buy is changing. The real estate doesn't change. What has changed is the currency purchases less and less. It's the currency going down. Not prices going up.

The truth is what we have that makes our world work right now is a big story. None of it's real. It's all just promises. And if you think about it that's how currency began to work in the beginning. Before we had currency we had barter. I'll give you three coconuts and you give me four fish. Because that's kind of a fair exchange on coconuts and fish. But that got complicated so we had to invent this thing called money to be divisible, portable medium of exchange. And the challenge is that we've lost that a long time ago. We lost having things of value be our currency. And now we have this thing called numbers and accounts. But trust me it is not real. It's a big made up story. One of the biggest make believe stories ever is called quantitative easing which sounds complex, but it's really just a smoke and mirrors term for currency creation. QE started with the banking bailouts back in 2009. This currency was created out of thin air and then given to the banks who paid themselves record bonuses in reward for crashing the world economy. This is a global phenomenon. But all you have to remember for now is that whether it's QE bailouts or stimulus programs, these are all just voodoo, hocus pocus terms for increased currency creation.

I believe gold and silver will reassert themselves as money. And when they do, there just isn't enough. And their purchasing power is going to go up many, many, many times. Egypt is an amazing place. There's a franticness about it, an utter chaos. Especially like the traffic. When it comes to like all of the merchants that are trying to get every last dime out of you, you get fleeced to the point where you come back with an empty wallet. But you know what? They're amateurs compared to Wall Street.

In the past several years, I've spoken in many countries about the crisis that's coming. And a lot of people think that they're going to be okay in their country. That it's only going to happen in the United States or maybe the United States and Europe. But what they don't realize is that this is a global phenomenon. I got to show you something here. This is base currency in the United States. This is the number of paper dollars that exist basically. It took 200 years to go from no dollars in existence to 825 billion. And then we had the bailouts and then we had QE1, Quantitative Easing One. Then QE2. And then we had QE3 and then QE4 and then soon we're going to have QE57 and QE382. And it isn't just here. This is what the Canadian currency supply looks like. This is Australia, South Africa, Russia. Now this starts out in just the year 2001 and this is like 18 times more currency in existence in a little over a decade. Here is Singapore. Same story. Look at that. Since the crisis, just bam. India, China. Every government on the planet is doing this insane deficit spending and expanding their currency supplies doing bailouts. And history shows that there is no example of this turning out well.

It is sometimes amazing that we haven't experienced more inflation than we have. If they keep expanding the money supply so vastly why aren't our prices growing faster than they really are? And the answer is that a good chunk of the money that the Fed created has been shipped overseas. I remember early in my research I heard this expression that the Americans have exported their inflation. I thought what is that? How can you export your inflation? Put it in a box and send it out, what do you do? But now I understand. You export your inflation by simply sending all these dollars that you created to these other countries and then they send you their refrigerators and their cars and whatever, their TV sets. So you get hardware and they get little pieces of paper. It's a great deal for the American people for a while. For a while. Sooner or later, all of those pigeons come home to roost. When the time comes as it looks like it's now coming. When the rest of the world is saying, Uh-uh! We don't want to play this game anymore. Uncle Sam's dollars are just becoming worthless. There are too many of them. We've got to find something else other than American dollars. Then those dollars start to come back to America. People say we don't want them anymore. What do we do with them? Once this wraps up and we've got this little trickle of money coming back that we'd previously exported, once it becomes a flood and it starts to rush back. Now we are getting our former exported inflation brought back to us. And then we'll see the quantity of money inside the United States grow much more rapidly even than the Federal Reserve can create it. Because we're getting a previous money back. And that's when we will really see the tanking of the US Dollar in terms of what it will buy.

During the second round of Quantitative Easing, global food prices went up 60%. And this created a humanitarian disaster for the two billion people on earth who live on less than $2 a day. These people were hungry to start with. They became hungrier and some of them started overthrowing their governments in North Africa and around the Middle East. So Quantitative Easing was the spark that ignited the Arab Spring. So that's it. When you create money, you get some sort of inflation. It just depends on where the inflation goes.

Given the premise that you have a permanent underclass or poor class and how does inflation affect them disproportionately. It affects them basically in the percentage of their income that goes to food. And we see this as a ratio and we know that there are some danger points. For example. in Egypt recently, once that ratio got to 40% of income going to food and the price of food rising due to inflation. When it got to 40% that's historically a point where people actually stage a revolution. That's exactly what we saw. The French Revolution similarly was all around the price of food getting to a certain critical point where people simply -- the risk-reward for revolution was favorable toward revolution.

Well, exactly right because when you have a runaway inflation it's punishing the very people who are most productive in society. In other words, the people that produce more than they consume and save the difference. The problem is that those productive people, the savers, save in their national currency. And unfortunately, the national currency is just a fiat piece of paper at this point. So when it's destroyed through runaway inflation, $100,000 that you were hoping to retire on doesn't exist. And the things that you were going to buy with it and provide for others don't exist either. Now what are you going to do?

So that all seems pretty scary. However, this is going to happen and you can only play the hand that you're dealt. But the great news is that gold and silver always end up doing an accounting of the expansion of the currency supplies. Basically, the will of the public and the free markets, when governments do this kind of stuff to their currency supply they debase it. Eventually it comes back in inflation. People sense the loss of their purchasing power. They rush back to gold and silver and they bid the value of the gold and silver up in the country until it meets or exceeds the value of all the currency in circulation. This is a process that's been going on over and over again throughout history except this time it's happening on a global scale. It has never before happened in all countries at once. And that means that this is the greatest wealth transfer in history. Therefore, it's the greatest opportunity in history and it's not going to happen again in your lifetime.

So now we've learned that your true wealth is your time and your freedom. Money is a trading tool that stores the economic energy that is your time and freedom whereas currencies leak them away. Gold and silver are the ultimate money simply because of their properties. Fiat currencies are based solely on confidence and always return to their intrinsic value of zero. Governments don't like gold because it imposes restraint. Rising prices are a symptom of an expanding currency supply and gold and silver always account for an expanding currency supply.

So that's it for this episode. Join me next time as we begin to investigate how monetary history just repeats and repeats and how gold and silver always win the battle between currency and money. Until then, my challenge to you is to stop calling currency money. It's a crucial first step towards setting your mind free of all this economic voodoo and changing your context. You can learn more by watching the bonus features on our website and if you have any questions you can post them there and we'll answer some of your questions in future bonus features. So good luck. Thanks for watching. And we'll see you next time.

Good morning. What does fiat mean? It comes from the Latin for crappy car. I'm in the desert in a suit. My camel died. You're not too sure about that, are you? I am ready for a good long nap.

Hi! Welcome to this bonus feature for the very first episode of Hidden Secrets of Money, and this is Currency vs Money. So that's the major topic.