BALTIMORE – We are searching for an insight. Each time we think we see it… like the shadow of a ghost in an old photo… it gets away from us. It concerns the real nature of our money system… and what’s wrong with it. Here… we bring new readers more fully into the picture… and try to spot the flaw that has doomed our economy.
Let’s begin with a question. After the invention of the internal combustion engine, people in Europe… and then the Americas… got richer, almost every year. Earnings rose. Wealth increased. Then in the 1970s, after two centuries, American men ceased making progress.
1859: Frenchman Etienne Lenoir builds a double-acting, spark-ignition engine that can be operated continuously. The internal combustion engine is born.
Despite more PhDs than ever… more scientists… more engineers… more capital… more knowledge… more Nobel Prizes… more college graduates… more machines… more factories… more patents… and the invention of the Internet… after adjusting for inflation, the typical American man earned no more in 2015 than he had 40 years before.
Why? What went wrong? No one knows. But we have a hypothesis. Not one person in 1,000 realizes it, but America’s money changed on August 15, 1971. After that, not even foreign governments could exchange their dollars for gold at a fixed rate.
The dollar still looked the same. It still acted the same. It still could be used to buy booze and cigarettes. But it was flawed money. And it changed the whole world economy in a fundamental way… a way that is just now coming into focus.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
