Gold as the universal money
Every major civilisation on record chose gold as money. Civilisations separated by oceans, centuries and religions reached the same conclusion.
The periodic table contains 118 elements. Humanity tested many of them.
Gold was selected for four physical properties. It does not corrode.
It is divisible: a bar can be melted, cut and reshaped without losing purity. It is malleable.
And it is scarce: no one can synthesise it or print it. It must be dug out of the ground.
All the gold ever mined in human history would fit inside 3 and a half Olympic swimming pools.
8 billion people share that total supply. Scarcity of that order is why no government, no emperor and no central committee could inflate gold away.
The purchasing power proof
A Roman centurion 2,000 years ago earned about 1 ounce of gold per month.
He was a middling professional soldier, well paid for his time. The ounce bought a quality toga, a leather belt and a pair of sandals.
At the time of recording, 1 ounce of gold was priced at about 4,700 dollars. The same sum buys a comparable quality suit, shoes, belt, shirt and tie. The same weight of gold buys the same category of goods 2,000 years later, while gold's purchasing power stayed flat and the dollar lost value against it.
Bretton Woods and the anchor
In 1944 at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, 44 countries agreed to peg the US dollar to gold at 35 dollars per ounce.
Every other currency was pegged to the dollar. The United States had most of the world's gold. The US was the major beneficiary of the war, and its vaults were full.
Gold backing limited the amount of dollars that could be printed, which kept prices stable. A paycheck bought roughly the same goods year after year.
Then the Vietnam War cost far more than budgets allowed.
The Great Society programmes added another layer of spending. Government outlays exceeded tax revenue by a wide margin.
Under a gold standard, more dollars require more bullion. No additional supply existed.
The French president said, in effect, that France did not trust the US had enough gold to back all the dollars being printed. France demanded its gold back.
As Felix puts it, France sent a warship to New York to collect gold bars from the Federal Reserve vault. Other countries, including Britain, lined up behind France to demand their bullion, beginning a run on the US reserve.
August 1971 and the severing
On August 15th, 1971, Richard Nixon announced the temporary suspension of the dollar's convertibility into gold. The dollar has remained unconvertible since.
The dollar has not been backed by gold since. The dollar system is described as eroding, yet it remains the dominant global reserve currency.
From that point forward, the dollar was backed by a promise.
No physical asset stood behind it. The term for such money is fiat currency, from the Latin "let it be."
Fiat money has value because the government says it does. A 1971 dollar is now worth about 7 cents, a loss amounting to 93 per cent of its purchasing power.
Someone who saved diligently after 1971 and kept those savings in cash saw 93 per cent of the value disappear.
The printing press without constraint
After 1971, no physical constraint limited how many dollars the government could create.
In 1981 the US money supply was about 860 billion dollars. The figure had risen to about 22 trillion dollars in 2021.
The increase is roughly 30 times in 40 years.
Felix argues that during an 18 month period around the COVID response, the US government printed 40 per cent of all dollars in existence.
New money works the same way as a company issuing a billion new shares of stock. The old shares do not disappear, but each one is worth less because there are more of them.
The currency loses value, and prices reflect the loss.
Inflation moves wealth from savers to borrowers and from cash holders to asset owners. In practice, wealth moves from wage earners to asset owners.
When wealth is held in a house, in gold or in stocks, inflation lifts the nominal value.
When wealth is held in cash or depends on a wage, inflation erodes it year after year.
After 1971, the printing press had no anchor. The national debt and the cost of living followed from that single change.
Central banks return to gold
Central banks in 2025 bought over 1,000 tons of gold. Record purchases accelerated from 2022 to 2023 to 2024 to 2025. Poland, China, Brazil, Turkey, India and Kazakhstan are among the buyers.
Three reasons explain the buying, each stated plainly.
The first is de-dollarisation.
Poland, China, Brazil, Turkey, India and Kazakhstan are reducing their dependence on the US dollar. Gold does not have a foreign policy.
And no foreign government can print more of it. BRICS nations have discussed the use of local currencies for trade, though the process remains contested and incomplete.
The second is sanctions risk.
After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, the US and Western allies froze about 300 billion dollars of Russia's foreign reserves. Most of that sum was held in US currency. The precedent was visible to every other government holding reserves in dollars.
The precedent suggested that any state acting against Western interests could face similar measures. Gold stored in a domestic vault cannot be frozen by a foreign government.
No outside authority can sanction it remotely. The debate over what to do with the frozen Russian assets continues in Europe.
The third is debt.
The US national debt is close to 40 trillion dollars. Felix argues that about 1,000 billion dollars is being added every 100 days.
In Felix's view, they are hedging. They are buying more of a metal that has functioned as money for 5,000 years.
Price targets, ratios, and allocation
Investment banks have been raising gold price targets to 5,000 and 6,000 dollars.
Gold year on year at the time of recording was up about 65 per cent.
The silver-to-gold ratio (the number of silver ounces needed to buy one ounce of the yellow metal) was at 62 at the time of recording. A ratio of 62 is about average historically.
Silver has very little supply, and industrial demand from electronics, solar panels and medical devices compresses available inventory further.
Many sovereign wealth funds and family offices have 5 to 15 per cent of their portfolio in gold. When gold rises, it signals that trust in the monetary system is slipping.
The post-1971 fiat currency system has coincided with a 93 per cent loss in the dollar's purchasing power and a thirty-fold expansion of the money supply in four decades. Central banks in Poland, China and India have responded by accelerating gold purchases. Combined buying exceeded 1,000 tons in 2025. Gold has been money for 5,000 years. The dollar's link to gold was severed 55 years ago, and the currency has lost 93 per cent of its value since.