Randy Tovar

I was studying other times in history when gold prices more than doubled in the reserve currency of the time, as they did in the past year: it's rare and almost always a sign of a profound loss of confidence in the existing monetary and political order, going all the way back to the Roman empire (the so-called "Crisis of the Third Century"). And it often marked the transition from one era of power to the next: the fall of Rome, Spain's decline from world power, the French Revolution and Terror, the end of Bretton Woods, etc. Interestingly, it's often actually as much a cause as a sign of these episodes, as this is effectively a transfer of real wealth from the poor to the rich elites who protect themselves with gold - this being what ignites the political upheaval. The weird aspect of the current episode is the relative silence around it: we're witnessing what may be one of the great pivotal moments in financial history yet it's being barely discussed.