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Hi, welcome listeners to Pods with Nick and James.
Conversations between two blokes.
The sorts of conversations you'd possibly have down a pub.
I don't know, the kind of conversations you can't have around a water cooler as there's just too much gossip.
But anyway, we're joined today by obviously myself and the host and producer of the show, Nick.
Hi guys. Hello Nick.
There you go.
All right.
Today's topic, we're going to be taking a little bit of a look at the history of money
and a little kind of brief skimp into economics.
The more I look into economics, the more I see that this is, yeah, like an iceberg type of subject.
So I'm afraid we will mostly be dealing with the stuff that's above water.
Like what is money? Where did it come from? How did it evolve?
What are some of the basic and I'm talking basic banking practices in this country, in the US and in the capitalist world as a whole?
Got a couple of interesting facts.
I will freely admit I am taking most of this information from a couple of Google searches,
but then also from history of money, financial history from barter to Bitcoin by Mike Thornton.
What I loved about his book is unlike the history of money by Jack Weatherford or economics, a very short introduction.
The book doesn't immediately start with a gonzo journalism style story of one person in Africa and one person in the New York Stock Exchange.
Just to you other guys who wrote economic books, I'm sure your works are brilliant,
but and I'm sure the stories that you're telling may very well be true.
But the fact that out of three books that I looked at, two of you did it, Ryan come up. No, no, gonna hold my hand.
There's a lot of interesting facts to do with money.
You don't need to maybe maybe your regular audience isn't aware of how bad some sometimes it is in some places in Africa.
And how you don't need to go straight for the sucker punch, do you?
Exactly. Like that. Look, OK, this is the thing.
I don't have a problem with people telling the truth. Yeah.
I went to a an amazing small theater performance.
Didn't know it was about gay conversion therapy, but it was.
And although like it's very easy to get offended when someone saying something against your religion,
the fact that it was honestly done, intelligently written and contained obvious real life emotions from real life experiences that these actors had had meant I had nothing but praise for them by the end of it.
I was deeply troubled, but also deeply moved. And it was just wow.
Whereas this stuff. OK, so me and you have both been raised in a very affluent society.
However, we've also been raised in a society which is constantly bombarded by images of poor Africa.
And although there is some truth in that, there's also lots of parts of Africa which actually doing quite well for themselves.
There's lots of parts of Africa where people are just going about their business, living lives as people.
Yes, there's a lot of honor and I'm not saying we need to cancel financial aid by all means send more financial aid.
But don't just bombard.
The thing that weirded me out is it was like the book seemed too much like television.
Like I was going in, hoping for some historical facts and stuff.
And immediately it's just this. And it's also interesting when you look up on TikTok and stuff,
the number of affluent African people who are genuinely offended by the way that the West portrays Africa generally,
you know, this as this chaotic, heedless mass of need.
That's not what it is. All right.
Bringing it back in. Okay. So, yeah, economics is a very short introduction and both the history of money,
both start with a Gonzo style journalism explanation of how one person in Africa and one person in the US lives.
And I found it too indicative of the way that the media portrays Africa and economic inequality generally.
Yeah, I mean, you didn't need to look at two different. I mean, I think that's just a thought provoker there, isn't it?
It's just Africa and everybody's got that mentality of Africa being really poor.
And so that's an easy thing for people to follow, isn't it? Yeah.
Whereas you could have just gone, here's a person from the rough neck part of Boston who has no money
and has to fight for his own pennies.
And then you've got somebody who lives on who works on the New York Stock Exchange making millions, transferring a million pounds worth of stock every day.
You know, so there's contrast, but they've both gone for extremes, which are stereotypical at best
and not actually necessarily reflective of actual events.
It's hard to know how things are. But anyway, right. OK. So my main shout out goes to Mike Thornton, who wrote The History of Money about finances.
So we're going to take a look at that to begin with. Yeah. OK.
So if we so do you know what the first form of trade was, Nick?
Like, what do you reckon it started with? I should imagine it started with barter, didn't it?
Absolutely. So essentially, I have this. I have a pig that I've hunted today, but you're a builder.
Can you build me a house and I'll give you this pig? Absolutely.
That's exactly how it started. Like, the good thing about it is, is that the barter system meant that you didn't need an intermediary.
But because you didn't have an immediate intermediary, the way that it would often end up working out is you had needed to have intermediary interactions in order to get the thing that you wanted.
So, you know, if you, for example, had a pig and you needed new shoes, but the person who was selling the shoes didn't want a pig, you needed to find out what they wanted.
And then you would need to go trade your pig for that or trade your pig for something else, then for something else, then for something else.
And each time, those who were kind would not rip you off, but those that were not, you'd end up with nothing. You'd end up with like half a shoe by the end of it.
The thing is, society was so much simpler back then as well, because everybody needed food and everybody, as the hunter or the provider, you didn't have time to build yourself a house or make yourself some clothes or sharpen your weaponry, etc.
You were hunting most of the day, every day. So you tend to just, you feed into your own economy just by doing your job and then you come back and you go, right, I will supply food for your family if you then provide your services to me and my family by building me a house or providing some clothing.
So we'll make an agreement on that, that we'll have that kind of scenario going on where I will hunt the food and you guys will keep my house maintained and clothing maintained, etc.
Well that's exactly it. It was a more simple system. And at this time you also started to have debt, as some families would need to borrow food off of their neighbours so that they didn't starve.
And as debt is a subjective concept, I also imagine this is where the original need for maths in day to day life was derived from.
You know, like, how much, how many cattle did we owe the Jacobsons down the road? How much did we owe to them? Or how much did we give this other family?
I think maybe when it came to, maybe when we started agriculture and animal husbandry and stuff like that maybe, but aside from that it was just hunt, kill, bring back, hunt, kill, bring back.
Yeah. Now, during this time settlement started to grow as cooperation led to prosperity. Unfortunately this led to more complicated debts as rulers would demand more formal tribute in the form of the original taxes.
I know a lot of people out there consider tax simply to be a form of extortion or theft.
Yeah, I've actually written this. What are your thoughts about tax generally?
OK, so I do, I side, I'm a little bit, I've got splinters on me bum I suppose, I'm on the fence. I understand the need for the government to have a kitty to feed from in order to run the country. And our taxes, by being citizenry, should feed into that.
So you're basically paying for the government to do the things that you're not able to outreach and do yourself. Hospital facilities, etc, etc.
However, I can't help but think that their choice of spending has led to the level of tax being increased so high that the cost of living is almost unaffordable for the normal layman.
Absolutely. Which then by raising the cost of living then feeds more into people having a larger need, therefore needing more taxes in order to feed their need.
Which is just, yeah, it's definitely a thing like, I will agree with you, I understand the need for order. And I do like the fact that we don't, I don't know, people in this country don't tend to starve to death.
And that is something at least that I'm moderately proud of, out of all of the bad things about Britain as a whole. Like the fact that we don't have, out of all the evils, we don't have that evil.
No, we don't. There's something that I was made aware of when the kids started going to school and that was that there are three out of ten children that go to school without breakfast in the morning.
Now I know that sounds like quite a first world problem but this is the UK. And these kids are missing meals because their parents can't afford to buy them breakfast.
Or have to go and leave for work too early and therefore don't get that part of their routine. So like money itself is causing such a cycle of parentless children with, like parentless hungry children.
Like the state of society is going to suffer shortly because of that.
Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, you know what, we'll go into, I should have got some more stuff to do with inequality here but that's a very fair point. It was three in ten, did you say?
Yeah.
So literally 30% nearly a third?
Yep. And that's one of the reasons why Rashford was fighting so much for free school meals. Because some kids, that school meal most days of the week might be their only hot meal.
And that's because of the state of, the cost of living. It's because of how high taxes are, it's because of how high utility bills are.
You know?
Okay, well that's not good.
All right, well you know what, maybe we'll do one of these literally about poverty and about its different forms and different places. That's something to consider for the time.
Yeah. All right. Formal tax on a large scale, I'm going to go back to what notes I've got, but formal tax on a large scale required more organized and standardized form of tribute, which led to, which forms to...
Oh, okay, I misspelled that there. All right, but it basically led to things like capital. So like capital, the word for that is actually taken from cattle, as cattle were used in a, were used as a form of tax.
So like if you had a certain herd of a certain size, you were required to give a certain amount of that property over to the government.
Sacks of grain were often traded, feathers and shells, and certain types of stone were also traded.
Other steps towards money, as we know it today, came from trading base metals. This also required the standardized units of weight to be agreed to have an agreed upon value.
The one that I always remember from like the stories in the Old Testament was where you have the term shekel used a lot, which was a weight of, always a weight of metal.
What annoyed me is when I did a bit more research to actually find out how much a shekel was, it turns out it varied massively over where you were and what time scale you were in.
There were some highs and lows and it literally varied between seven and 17 grams. So there were times when it was literally double what it was at other points.
Yeah, I don't know, but talk about unreliable, right? You know, if I pay for a coffee and I get half a coffee, I'm annoyed.
Yeah, if I go to the pub and I ask for a pint of beer and half of my pint is head and the rest of it is beer, I'm going to give it back to them and tell them to fill it up.
Absolutely. Here's another one for you guys. If you buy the cheapest thing at McDonald's, if they get your order wrong, it's a free upgrade.
All right, but moving on.
It's one of those, we're not sponsored by McDonald's, but if you use this code.
No, no, no, no, but I'm sadly I do this when I'm when I'm like, don't necessarily have time to cook myself a proper meal or don't want to go out and like, you know, do the shopping and stuff.
If you go to the drive through, pick yourself up a wrap of the day for two quid and they get your order wrong.
It's literally it's the cheapest thing in the menu. You know, you can't. Yeah, there's no point in. They can't even give out the food that they've got wrong once once they've given it to you and you physically give it back.
They can't give it to anyone.
But anyway, sorry, that'll go in nowhere there. But it kind of sadly talks of the type of man I am.
But yeah, anyway, back to back to this. The records of base metals being used goes back to a thousand years BC.
However, there there are known imitations of the imitate. Sorry, the first coins. I'll tell you what is a weird one. What do you consider to be a coin?
I mean, a coin is not a question. I'm not. It's a small disc of small disc of valuable metal, isn't it? Dependent on your time. It might be copper or or brass.
You might be iron, but then eventually it will end up silver and gold.
Yeah, absolutely. OK, well, it's I'm a little bit annoyed here because all of the websites and the books that I've like listened to.
Like give the give the invention of coins to the city state of Lydia, which is in modern day Turkey.
All right. However, and although the Lydia coins were do look a lot more like what you'd expect a coin to be, the Chinese were were handing out or were using small bits of metal, shaped like a shaped like a crown shell.
For like hundreds of years before that. Now, although the crown shell isn't round, it's still a small metal toy token, which has clearly been made into a certain shape to represent a certain value.
And because it just seems really similar to me of handing over a small object in order to get something that that in itself to me seems like money.
But yeah, like it's it. I will admit the Chinese ones are made of iron and the Lydia coins were made of a lectrum.
I tell you what points if you know what a lectrum is that is, isn't that silver and gold?
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, that's exactly what it is. Nicely done.
All right. Yeah.
Well, no, no, no, but this is it. I only knew what I didn't know what a lectrum was made out of. But I now understand why in Dungeons and Dragons, fifth edition, it's it's kind of annoying to me that they've they've obviously squeezed it in there, wanting people to learn a little bit of culture to learn a little bit of history.
But all it ends up being is this kind of pointless currency that no one uses, because it's literally halfway between a silver piece and halfway between a gold piece.
Now, the weird thing about the lectrum pieces is that they were worth their weight in gold, yet they're not pure gold, they're lectrum.
So in a way, this was the first instance in my mind of quantitative easing or exaggerated value. Yeah.
It's also interesting that kings would put their faces on these things as a way of being trustworthy.
By watering down the metal by mixing the metal with base metals, you're not only well, you're not only lying, but you're putting your face on a lie.
Like, maybe it was like an entirely a power thing, but like literally by putting your face on a lie and getting everybody else to tell you that it's true. Maybe that was just a massive way of, you know, like just a massive ego trip or getting off on your own power.
I suppose it's the first instance of sorry, go on.
No, no. Well, it just, it seems really weird. In ancient society, your honor was high, was, was your worth was linked to your honor and your honor was linked to your virtue.
If you, if your word was meant means nothing.
It means you couldn't get by because you couldn't trade with people because people would not trust you.
You know, it's interesting that you had these kings.
You have these kings lie, be honest, in a way about their lie, advertise their lie put their face on this lie.
And not only stay at the top, but be, but it be recorded.
I, when I, I've told a lot of lies in my life and I've made a lot of mistakes in my life.
I don't want any of those ones on my tombstone. I don't want any of those ones being the things that I am membered for.
You know, and yet, yet a lot of a lot of people seem to get off, get off on this.
All right. So,
sorry, what you were going to say something.
Yeah, I was just going to say it sounds more like it sounds like it's the first instance of somebody making out.
They've got more or making more, more wealth out of less, if you know what I mean.
So they've got a pot of gold.
So they mix it down with a bit of silver and then they buy the gold's value.
Like the combined weight of silver and gold, the gold's value of that weight in items and therefore make themselves wealthier.
You'll probably come to this point, you'll probably come to this point later on.
But obviously the banking system itself is built on that very premise that they've got X amount and it is an X that they're saying.
And then what they do is they then create two X's and duplicate their value.
I'll explain more, more in detail later when we talk about the monetary system.
No, that's fair enough. The whole cycle of debt and creating more from nothing.
You know, if it was equal, if it was equal to the weight of both silver and gold, then it would be equal.
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But it's not. It's equal to the weight of gold and gold is more valuable.
Therefore, you know, it's like it's like drug dealers when they get an ounce of cocaine and they chop it up and they mix it with half an ounce of baby powder or baby teething powder, you know, and then all of a sudden they sell an ounce and a half worth of cocaine.
They haven't got an ounce and a half worth of cocaine.
They've got an ounce and a half worth of powder of which there is an ounce of cocaine within.
Absolutely. I'm going to spoil one of the interesting facts I learned for our listeners right now.
But most US dollars in circulation have trace amounts of cocaine in them.
That does not surprise me. I watched this video the other day on I think it was a short on YouTube and this kid was so proud of himself because he found a dollar rolled up in the in the found a dollar rolled up in the supermarket.
And his sister is like videoing him going, are you sure you want to be touching that?
He's like, yeah, sure. She's like, how did you find it?
He was like, it was rolled up in the rolled up in the oil.
And she was like, what do you think? Why do you think it was rolled up?
And he went it was like that dawning realization fell across his face and he just dropped this dollar on the floor and freaked out.
It was hilarious. Oh, my God.
That's mean. But like I get I get that is video worthy.
Sadly. Oh, OK.
Well, Lydia is in modern day Turkey, north west of ancient Mesopotamia.
Yeah. So the first coins were Electrum, which is actually absolutely right.
It's a mixture of silver and gold.
The surviving examples have aged amazingly well, which makes sense as gold is imperishable.
But I know silver tarnishes silver tarnishes.
However, it doesn't it doesn't break down in the same way that iron does.
Yeah. OK. So the tarnishing isn't oxidization.
No. OK. It's more like a dirt kind of thing over the top.
Absolutely. Well, that's why when silver goes old, it goes black.
If you got if any of our listeners find themselves in antiques fair, I don't know who listens.
But if you do, if somebody is trying to sell you something is pure silver and yet it's gone poppery, as in as if it has gone green, if it's tarnished green rather than black, it ain't silver.
And they're having you on.
Anyway, sorry, that's something I learned from porn stars.
Right. Where was I?
OK. What I know I've already shared this story, I think, in this podcast.
I'm very sorry to our listeners for repeating ourselves.
But the word money comes from Juno Moneta, which means Juno the Warner or Juno the advisor as Juno, who is the Roman version of the Greek god Hera.
So it's like Jupiter or Zeus. It is the same bloke, different cultures, but Romans ripped off everything from the Greeks.
It's the main god of women and of childbearing had a temple on the north of Rome.
The birds, which would often come to the shrine of Juno when the ghouls were attacking Rome, the birds saw them before anyone else did and buggered off early basically and made a bit of a ruckus to the point where everybody in the city wondered what that was all about.
They looked over the walls and then saw the ghoul army sneaking up on them. So it was seen as a sign at the time.
So everybody. So, yeah, Juno was given a lot more respect and power as they thought the goddess had looked over, looked after the city.
As a result, they then put the royal mint next to. Yeah, sorry. Also to our listeners, the mint is the building where coins are made next to the temple of Juno and many Roman coins had Juno Moneta put on them and a picture of Juno put on one of the faces of the coins as a way of just ascribing value.
To. Yeah, to the goddess. So that's where Juno Moneta is where the word money comes from.
I had no idea about that. That's incredible.
I love a good history lesson.
Well, I liked it. It's also interesting that the.
The the royal mint in Rome was constructed in 269 BC.
The royal mint in England didn't come about until.
Eight hundred and eighty six AD, which I thought was really, really bad until I realized one fact.
And this one fact kind of made me go, all right, then that's fair enough.
England wasn't a country until about that point.
Yeah, fair enough.
Yeah, exactly. Didn't Henry sell the mint as well in sixteen hundreds?
And you know what? That is not something I've that is not something I came across, but I'm definitely going to research into that.
Oh, sadly, I just I also wouldn't put it past him.
Like he was I don't know all of the all of the stories I read about King Henry the eighth are that he was a well, slightly spoiled, but incredibly romantic child.
Who went more from wrong to wrong to massively wrong.
I wouldn't surprise me if he did that. OK, right.
So what's the although the royal mints made coins and the value of those coins for the most part stayed standard.
There's a couple of examples throughout history where.
They weren't standard like at all. These examples are during the sixteen hundreds when the Spanish were mining all of the silver out of a single mountain in Mexico,
which I can't remember the name of, and that's really going to bother me now because I used to know it.
But when and though when those when the Spaniards came back and we also robbed them a fair amount, as is our English way, when they got back to Spain,
rather than the merchants selling more produce or just being sold out or allowing this influx of wealth to create good for the common people,
all the merchants and all the guilds put their prices up, which meant only the people returning from Mexico could afford things.
And all the regular folk were even harder up than before, which is another case of money not always doing good.
Another example, you know what, there's been loads of examples of times when economies have collapsed in a different instance as well.
It's kind of interesting how much of a powerhouse Spain is throughout history.
Like I really need to do a bit more research into this. But in Philip the second of Spain is also what the first and one of the only monarchs in European history to claim bankruptcy,
which he did four times. He had a real problem, did he?
Yeah, he lived an exorbitant lifestyle and he loved war. He loved Aquarium War. And unfortunately war costs money.
Yeah, and I suppose he didn't really do very well in his wars either, given the fact that he had to declare bankruptcy four times.
Absolutely, absolutely. In the last couple of centuries, I will admit in my mind, idealism, theology, politics all contribute to war.
But there are some wars throughout history where it was solely money, like there was the mercenary war in Carthage, it was solely war, or sorry, it was solely money.
And normally the Carthaginians didn't have much of a standing military. They always hired mercenaries.
What they didn't account for is what would happen if they lost and most of the mercenaries survived.
And unfortunately that's exactly what happened a couple of hundred years BC, is the Carthaginians lost were then ransacked by the Romans.
Somehow the mercenaries still felt they were entitled to their pay as they still had fought to a point.
They show up to Carthage expecting to be paid and the Carthaginians had nothing for them, which then caused an uproar.
And then the mercenary band then tried to attack Carthage in order to get their money.
What then really surprises me is that the local people were able to fight them off, which then makes me wonder why...
Why they needed the mercenaries in the first place?
Yes, exactly, exactly.
But anyway... Things like that, it tends to just be exploitation doesn't it?
I can't remember a quote with it, but there's a quote that says,
No man is more dangerous than a man protecting his own home.
You know, no matter...
In that respect, the mercenaries just exploited the fact that those people didn't think themselves very strong and tried to make money off them based on that.
Whereas they had no idea that they could actually be as strong as they were.
Well, that's it.
That's it.
Okay, well, some other things. When do you think the first stock exchange was?
First stock exchange...
I don't know the answer to this question.
I'm going to go with... Wasn't it around the spice trade?
You are massively thinking along the right lines.
I don't know when though.
Okay. So the first stock exchange, as we understand it, was the Dutch East Indian Trading Company.
Oh yeah.
And that was held in Amsterdam in 1611 onwards.
Yeah. Which is interesting that that stock exchange was invented before the Bank of England, which only came into existence in 1694.
Yep.
Which is fairly interesting that that's still going.
I used to like the fact that the bits of paper, like banknotes, were originally just written bits of paper from the bank.
And even though they were standardized in the 1700s, so that there was a template, much like checks,
they still required signatures and stuff and amounts to be written on them all the way up to the mid-19th century, so 1800s.
Interestingly, during the Napoleonic eras, the silver standard came first simply because there wasn't enough gold in the world.
So the gold standard only became available as more gold was mined out the ground.
Well yeah, if you ever play games like Terraria, so you start off the game, obviously you only get little bits of silver and copper here and there,
but obviously the amount of copper you have eventually leads to you having one silver, then two silver, then ten silver, then twenty silver,
and eventually you've got enough to have one gold. So it's the same in that respect, I suppose.
The amount of silver was a lot more abundant, and the likelihood of people having the amount of money to add up to one gold was going to be less
until money had time to run its rounds and more people ended up accumulating what other people didn't have.
Well absolutely. What really surprises me is the short-livedness of the gold standard.
Yeah, it went out in the 1930s, didn't it?
Absolutely right, well done. Good background knowledge, mate.
The gold standard went out for us in England. The pound was put to the gold standard in the 1800s, I don't have the exact date here,
but it literally was gone by 1931. So already by 1931...
You could no longer take your notes and exchange it for gold bullion.
Absolutely. But here's another weird thing about the gold standard. So even before we had the fiat system,
which is... I'm really worried that that's just the way... Although I loved this book, the bloke's voice was very American.
Like I'm not talking slightly, I'm talking... You know what, I won't even go into it as I'll come across xenophobe.
I love America and at least the principles on which it was founded.
But yeah, it was just... The way he pronounces it is fiat, which sounds like a maker car.
But it's where the money's simply worth one of itself. It is an entirely free-formed system of value.
But even before then, places like America, America didn't actually get rid of the gold standard until 1971.
So 40 years after we had. And even during that time, the National Reserve was only required to have 40% of the money in circulation.
In gold reserves. So they've already increased the amount of value of that gold by 60%.
Yeah. And just to be clear, what James is trying to get to there is that the Federal Reserve is the main bank of the US.
It's the main central bank of the US. And if it has say a billion dollars in its accounts, then it legally only needed to keep, you say 40% or 60%?
40%.
40%. So it only needed to keep 400 million of that 1 billion dollars in its accounts to cover any kind of withdrawals.
The other 600 million, it could then loan out. Make up. In order to make more money.
So do you know, I don't know if you're ready to get on to this point, but do you know how money, how debt is created?
Yes, I'm going to. Well, I'm not ready to go on to that just yet, but we know. No, no, no, we'll flow it. We'll come back to the other stuff.
Yes, I know how national debt is created, although I will admit I didn't know before reading the book, but you've clearly well versed in this.
So let's hear your explanation of it.
So if you think about it like every bank is only required to keep a percentage of its accounted money in its vaults and the other in this case 60% of it is then loaned back out.
So the incredible thing about the monetary system is they don't go, OK, that person no longer has this amount of money because I've just lent it out to this person.
What they do is they go, OK, well, I'm just going to create this money out of nothing and put these numbers in their account.
So if you think about it like if you think about it like digital transactions as things are today, it's a lot easier to understand.
So somebody comes into the bank with £10,000, they go, the bank goes, thank you very much. I'm going to keep 40% of that in my vaults.
That is £4,000. This other £6,000, I'm going to loan out to this person who wants £6,000.
So then they give that £6,000 to this other person. But the person who put in £10,000 into their bank account, their value doesn't change.
Their bank account doesn't change. They've just created £6,000 out of nothing and given it to somebody else under the proviso that they'll pay it back with interest.
They then go to their bank and do exactly the same thing. They put in their £6,000.
The bank goes, right, well, I only need to keep 40% of that and off the top of my head, I don't know what 40% of £6,000 is.
But you get the idea. They then lend out that other 60% to the next person.
But that original person's bank account doesn't change by £6,000. It doesn't change at all.
It's just money created from nothing and then that goes to the next person and they go do the same thing.
I think it's estimated to be offered £10,000. They can create £100,000 worth of debt.
This is why there is some auditing, but it's far, far less than what I think is acceptable and what I think most people would find acceptable.
What annoys me about the Federal Reserve and the Bank of England, I don't know how much.
Unfortunately, the book I read was written by an American, so it does talk a little bit about the Bank of England, but it talks a lot more about the Federal Reserve.
What really weirds me out is that the Federal Reserve is a government, it's not a public company, it's not a corporation, it's almost a branch of the government which is not answerable to the government.
That's what I don't get. The people, the chair of governors for the Federal Reserve are seen as government members,
but they are not audited by the government and not held to account by Congress at large, which makes far less sense than I would like it to.
It's just incredibly corrupt. I think it was J.D. Rockefeller who said, give me control of a country's money supply and I care not for its laws.
Wow, he literally said that.
Oh my god.
Money corrupts.
Absolutely. It's frustrating though, because some people say we should go back to the gold standard, when the banks at least used to have some kind of physical backup to the value of money.
Do you know why they removed the gold standard?
I do, I do. That's exactly where I was going.
Annoyingly, ladies and gentlemen, we all, despite the three out of ten children going to school and not having breakfast, which is still shockingly bad and a bit depressing,
we all have far more than what we should have or what we would have by the gold standard.
There physically isn't enough gold to maintain the lifestyles that we live or the value of money in the world.
Additionally, even when spreading out the reserves so that you've only got like, say even if you only had 10% of the actual gold as a gold standard,
that means you're leaving 90% of your population at risk of losing everything if they don't get their wiggle on and get the gold from the bank quick enough.
But it also puts huge pressure to mine more gold, control more gold, buy more gold and get it.
It's all of the messed up stuff like the wars in the Middle East to do with oil or black gold would start happening everywhere that there's known to be gold underground.
One of the first rushes, gold rushes, was in England when the Romans invaded us and found out that we had a number of precious metals under our shores and started mining that.
There are a number of locations which are sacred to indigenous people, but we know there's gold underneath them.
If we went back to the gold standard, the chances of us protesting in the street that we shouldn't be stealing land and ruining places of natural beauty
and places of sacred significance to local tribes is going to go out the window if none of us can afford a bowl of porridge in the morning.
Like, it's unfortunate that the thing I hate about what I've learnt about quantitative easing where the bank does literally what Nick has just described,
where it creates money out of nowhere or creates stocks out of nowhere or creates national debt out of nothing and nowhere, is that it at least keeps the wheels turning.
And it is at this point where we are living in a society which is just turning wheels, supported and run by air, that's not great.
I'd love to go back to the gold standard, but chances are if we did that, I'd need to buy a flat cap and start digging for gold in my back garden immediately.
Which is why I kind of lean towards a different form of economy moving forwards, but maybe that's a topic for slightly later on in the podcast.
Well I think we should definitely go into that at some point. Right, although we've spent a lot of our time so we're just going to go with some random, well it's not random, all of my,
I call it random but I found all of these things interesting at least.
Alright, can you, I'll tell you what, can you guess a couple of the facts that I'm going to just hit you with a couple of facts and we're going to see it.
What do you think was the last, what do you think was the last country to abandon the gold standard?
I'm going to go with probably somewhere like Syria.
Okay, no it's a similar sound but geographically you're kind of off. If I said Second World War, I think that kind of gives some of it away.
If I was to give you that clue.
So was it Germany?
It was, hmm.
Or was it one of the countries that they invaded?
It was the country they didn't invade, it was Switzerland.
Switzerland, Switzerland of course.
Yeah, because they, the lords of sitting on the fence.
Yes, I hate to admit it but yeah, the people who, no I'm not going to.
They absolutely made their survival by sitting on the fence.
Well they did and you can argue a large amount of money rolled in and out of Switzerland during that time and a large amount of gold went in and out by that time.
I mean a lot of Nazi gold is said to still be in Switzerland.
Well because of that they were able to keep on the gold standard until the year 2000.
So over 70 years, well sorry, 69 years after we had had to abandon it they were able to stay on it until that time.
Yep, but they also got heavily immersed, shall we say, by the wealthy, by being essentially a tax haven. They were quite happy to be a tax haven for the wealthy weren't they, in order to maintain that gold standard.
Well absolutely, there's a lot of countries which have done incredibly well throughout history and there is, you know what I'm not going to touch more upon the Second World War.
I've got a lot to say about that but all of that I wasn't alive during that time. I've just got a lot of second hand opinions which have been handed to me.
Okay, but yes Switzerland had the gold standard until the year 2000.
I guess I'll just ask you this, where do you think, out of strongest currencies, where do you think the British pound, the euro and the US dollar are in when it comes to strongest currencies?
Okay, so I think because of the abundance of the currency their value is actually mediocre. I think the pound is currently lowest with the US dollar slightly above that and then the euro slightly above that.
But I would say it's probably about middle of the park.
Okay, so you were right about where the euro is compared to the dollar. Although all three currencies are still somewhat strong, surprisingly strong if I'm honest with you because I tend to believe the news when it's telling me how terrible things are.
But the British pound is actually the fifth strongest currency in the world.
Okay, okay, I know it wasn't, I know it did sink lower than the euro but it must have clawed its way back up because Brexit had a massive hit on the strength of the pound.
Absolutely. Well the euro is above and the US dollar is number 10.
But that's down to the abundance of the dollar. Its strength is diminished by the fact they've got so much of it.
Yeah, that's true. It's almost like if you give me a bucket of diamonds, then I'm going to attach them to everything and it's going to have no value to me anymore.
You know, whereas if you give me one diamond, I will put it in a special case and put it on a shelf so I can admire it and it can sit there and I'll be really happy with it and it's never going to go to anybody else because it's my diamond.
You know, abundance creates lack of value.
No, that's entirely true. I'll tell you what. What do you think is the currency which is the strongest in the world at the moment?
Oh God.
I'll tell you what, I would not have got this and additionally, I still don't know. I had never heard of this currency before.
Okay. Is it a rupee? I don't even know that a rupee still exists.
There are several forms of rupee. Okay. Although weirdly enough, the Indonesian rupee is the fifth lowest currency in the world.
Okay. Slightly better than the Sierra Leone.
Anyway, it's the Kiwati Dinar is the strongest currency in the world and it's worth about £2.50.
Well, where's that from?
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, so it's called the Dinar and you've also got the Bwani Dinar which is the second but I don't even know where that country is.
I know a lot of oil countries have done really well for themselves which is weird because can you guess the lowest, I was really surprised by this, can you guess the weakest currency in the world?
No. I would probably go along the lines of somewhere African.
Yeah, again, because of the perspective. Yep.
And again, that stereotype has led you wrong. It's the Iranian Rial.
I'm really sorry to anyone from Iran if I'm horribly pronouncing that.
Why? Why is the Iranian currency so low?
Exactly. Has it got anything to do with the war?
Well, you know what, it wouldn't surprise me. I'll tell you what, based on...
Some of the other low ones really surprised me as well. Like, although again it shouldn't. Okay, so name another country that America's invaded and messed up.
I mean, Vietnam?
Yeah, their currency is the second lowest. The Vietnamese Dong is literally the second lowest.
I mean, they kept them at war for 20 years. 20 years. And that war costs an extortion of money.
We said about this last time, like, the war, people make money off of that. And the whole point of the Vietnamese war was about making an economy out of war.
And the Americans picked Vietnam for some reason. They said it was because a passenger boat got sunk by the Vietnamese.
However, there was no evidence of that. The people that they said were victims of that passenger boat being sunk had no family. Nobody even knew who they were.
So a war was started on what they now call White Flag Operation. Or Falslag. Falslag Operation, which is essentially a lie, which led to a 20 year long war.
Much like our war was on Saddam Hussein and his non-existent weapons of mass destruction.
Yeah. All right. So I tell you what, we'll wrap up fairly quickly. But one currency which was in the bottom 10 that really surprised me was the Ugandan shilling.
Now this really surprised me because, do you know what Uganda is also famous for?
Is it diamonds?
Well, it's partly, they've got a few bits and pieces, but they've also got the highest number of new startup businesses per year.
So it's not like they don't have an economy or that they don't have trade. They've got loads of trade and they've got loads of new ideas.
Is it all telemarketing?
Oh, sorry.
No, but like the biggest number of new startup businesses. So like I realize that means you're going to have a lot of people that just painting signs and painting over signs as like different businesses are set up, fold and then come and go.
But like for a country which is producing that many new businesses, I just kind of assumed the economy would be a little bit stronger there.
Yeah, it obviously has potential to grow. I mean, you look at, but it's about those companies, those new startup businesses being successful and drawing in economy, isn't it?
So it's not necessarily about the number of businesses, it's quality over quantity.
Oh, absolutely. That's true. That's true.
Okay, well, there is a way through my note before you round up. What I'm going to do is I'm going to cut in with the so it like so money itself has been around for a long time and a form of currency has been around for a very, very long time.
And I'm going back to Jack Fresco, who, as I said in the first podcast, like he's one of my favorite human beings to have ever existed. The blokes are genius.
He was born and was raised around about the same time as the Great American Depression. And the thing that confused him massively was the fact that overnight everything stopped.
And yet nothing seemed to change. The factories still existed. The materials were still in the factories. And yet there was all of a sudden no money to pay the workers.
And so the workers stopped. And he was massively confused by this. The fact that this one thing, which was manmade, could have such a detrimental effect to lifestyle, to humanity in general.
Like it had a massive impact on the American nation and each depression in their own countries in their own rights had the same effect. It was massively detrimental to the economy and to its people.
And so he set about thinking up a means to transcend the need for money. And I use the word transcend because I think if you look at the path of economy and the path of money throughout history, like you said, we started with bartering and then that evolved into a form of abundance.
And then they started using specific tokens and then that led to the monetary system. And then you had banking start through the Templars. I don't know if we covered that, but essentially the Templars used to take their patrons money, give them a payoff slip.
And then at the next city that person could go and take that slip to any of the Templars and take their money back out from that person. They didn't necessarily get it from the same person.
It was one of the perks of being a Templar was that you used to securely travel people's wealth around. So that was the first form of essentially banking that existed.
However, eventually it evolved into the monetary system that we see today and privatized banks and central banks, etc, etc. But the problem with it is that the debt is now so crippling and so out of balance that we're no longer in control of this system.
And it controls us. The need for more money outweighs the need for the projects, the need for the goods that we're providing. And that in itself is creating wastage.
And when you're when you're producing exponentially, it's truly a unsustainable system. So he decided that he would revise the entire thing and he came up with a system which I thought was which I thought was really interesting.
A lot of people would do better to look into it. It's a resource based economy and essentially it does away with money entirely and bases the economy off of its resources.
It would need essentially a global unity. It would need an independent possibly like I spoke to you before about AI, but almost a govern almost a distribution system that was governed by
that was governed by a computer that could decide where resources needed to be more and how the distribution of those resources would be.
But it would in turn do away with this overbearing need to work every single day to earn money to buy your food. Essentially everybody has a right to survival.
Everybody has a right to food, electricity and if you do away with money and technology immediately like leapfrogs.
You you take away the restrictions your children get get taught by the best that money can the best that they can get as opposed to the best that money can buy at that time.
If they are learning through technology they would still be learning through the best technology because they don't the schools don't have to buy the stuff anymore.
You look at technology that goes into cars.
Every vehicle that exists would be would be built to the highest possible level.
And that's what's read that because that's what's better for resources rather than exactly the money exactly you get phones nowadays that have like an inbuilt expiry date.
They're designed to go off at a certain time because the company wants to sell its next model because otherwise the company goes out of business.
Why would it sell something that would work for the next 4550 years or longer?
Because they don't need they don't need a supply as many as people exist and then they'd be out of business.
They need that continual resale.
And the same is true of light bulbs.
There are patents out there for light bulbs which you know like I don't believe anything lasts forever.
You know like I don't believe anything is well you know obviously gold lasts for a very long time but I believe all things downgrade all things break apart and decompose like just the rules of.
What's the right way of putting it.
The law like just the laws of entropy and stuff. But what I will admit is is that you can make stuff last for a very long time.
Like TV.
This did for 100 years.
Why is it that they only seem to last.
Five and maybe 20 if you if you bought a really really good one.
I remember my first TV when it blew my granddad replaced the tube light in the back of it and it was fine.
You know.
Love it.
Whereas if I took apart my TV now I'm more likely to kill myself because of the like the capacitors that are inside the TV on highly dangerous.
You wouldn't want to take apart TV because of how dangerous it is you know or a computer screen or all these things that you should be able to just fix.
But you can't because they're proprietary.
Yeah.
They're designed to be fixed by one and only person that is the company that designed them and therefore use they still have a service like my screen breaks on my phone.
Because I've got a super fan dangled top of the range phone that needs to be fixed in a vacuum environment so it's free from dust etc.
I have to give it back to Samsung.
For them to fix it and then they can give it back to me.
Absolutely.
Or like.
I've heard there's a light bulb.
You know what I'm going to need to do my research on that one.
But like and I will unfortunately somehow squeeze this into the next episode.
But I know that there are light bulbs out there which can last decades literal decades of daily use.
And yet I went around my mum's house the other day and all of the ones on the landing are broken.
And I can remember and it's I think it's only maybe a year a year and a half since since we replace those though.
Yeah the electrics in the house are dodgy.
Not going to pretend that they're not.
But at this day and age we can make things incredibly fancy.
Yeah.
How can't we make them well.
Yeah.
The point is we can but there are there are legal acts.
There are actual acts that force companies to create expendable products because of the economy.
They must in order to keep money coming into the economy they must create products that do not last forever.
That is part of governmental acts on economy.
If I can't remember the exact acts but I will find out.
And I know that for a fact that like they have to be able to put more money in to the economy.
It's a lot of the same reason why pharmaceuticals don't necessarily keep like cure your illness.
They sustain your illness because by sustaining your illness they keep the economy going.
They keep money coming in.
They don't want to cure you with one tablet when they can sell you 50 tablets and all of their money is increased exponentially and the economy continues.
So I don't I'm not I'm not this guy's massive fan in the world.
But Chris Rock's skit on on this kind of sums it up perfectly.
When he start he says he says exactly what you've said that there isn't any money in a cure.
There's money in treatment.
So you know what he goes I won't repeat the stuff he says because I don't want us to get banned or for you to get fined or anything.
But he names some a number of horrible illnesses and just says yeah they're not going to get cured.
But they will get they will become treatable like eventually you're going to get somebody show up to work and just go.
Oh my insert horrible name of disease here was acting up.
Sadly if the joke doesn't work unless I actually name the horrible disease but it's an offensive joke so I won't go too far into it.
But yeah you're right.
Because it's why you can't everything nowadays isn't you don't buy or own anything.
It's always let and subscribe.
And the same is true of the housing rental.
Sorry you know what we're going off on one here.
The housing rental market every single entertainment service you no longer buy a video cassette even if it did break after 50 times of watching it.
You don't buy DVDs anymore you don't buy games you buy streaming services you buy certain platforms which you access the games.
Yeah yeah yeah.
It's all like if it wasn't for the fact that food doesn't work like that you need the physical object and you use the physical object.
I'm sure you know there might become a time when you start getting subscription services to test goes.
You can there is there's one off the top of my head is.
Are you thinking about the protein shakes and stuff like you're not the pro to know because there's a meat subscription service I was looking at it the other day actually kind of going like.
I was actually looking at their hand part because essentially my idea for shopping is I'm very ritualistic I tend to eat the same meals.
But on a rotation like this there's variation there but I know what I like to eat and therefore I tend to eat a week's worth of ritualistic meals.
No that's fine what's your favorite there the week.
To be fair my lunch every day is macaroni cheese because I am a monster for macaroni cheese.
Absolutely anyway so this subscription service at what the main point as I said was like a hamper so meat hamper where there was like chicken breasts and steaks and mints and.
Everything else and you pay like 30 pounds for a box of a variety of different variations of these meats because I can't eat pork so I was looking specifically for something that I could cater myself.
And then when I went to the checkout they went OK fine do you want to buy this once or would you like to subscribe to this every week or every month or every year.
You know what what's your what's your every month we will send you this and you will give us 30 pounds.
But hold on.
But when I go shopping I go I don't need that this month I don't need that this month I don't need that this month.
I'll go shopping for this you know.
Surely buying food on a subscription ends up with you having more than you can possibly use.
But that's that's the point that this is the point I was making with this resource based economy like.
It never it doesn't come down to you having more than you actually need.
You have exactly what you need and yes like there are still jobs for you to do.
But if you know that you're only required to put your physical into the economy for lack of a better term.
For three months of a year in order to keep humanities wheel turning.
There's your incentive you don't need money as an incentive to work you need freedom as an incentive to work.
You want to be free for nine months of the year then apply yourself for three months.
Yeah.
Like money is it's I hate to say but it's kind of reaching its end of relevance especially with the the way that human beings are developing.
I can't help but think that the monetary system and the economy that we have as we know it is going to change drastically.
Because of the way that debt is at the moment the state that debt is in it it it limits the ability of so many while empowering so few.
Absolutely. OK.
Well we'll we'll call it a day there.
Listeners thank you very much for listening.
Nick thank you very much for producing hope.
Yeah hope everybody's learnt something I know through the research for this I definitely have.
Have a good night everybody and we'll we'll see you again in another couple of weeks.
Cheers.
Take care guys.
Bye bye.
Thank you.