Gold: The Once and Future Money

Above is the title of book by Nathan Lewis, an senior economist in an Asset Management firm in New York. He actively writes for popular financial media, Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal.

His book has three chapters, first chapter give us details about money in every forms, second about history of money in US, and the third, explaining currency crisis across the world, including Asian crisis on last decade of 1990s. The interesting part of this book is his conclusion that there, even if it will need a period of years of even tens of years, will be an end of era of paper money. The world has no other choice other than return to hard currency. The future hard currency will based on gold, just like in past.

John Naisbitt – the one regarded as ‘god’ of modern economics – in his book, Mind Set, has predicted the future of paper money. According to him, the last monopoly abandoned by mankind is monopoly of paper money issued by a country. Society who do not believe paper money will purchase private currency, the one has intrinsic value by nature.

There many reasons to disagree with those two economist above, but please just think like this. If someone will give of buy from us, and he offers payment in money or barter in gold with same value, what is our wise choices? What our teacher teach us in economics class sure will tell us the right one.