Our American bankers have found that for which the ancient alchemists sought in vain; they have found that which turns everything into gold - in their own pockets; And it is difficult to persuade them that a system which is so very beneficial to themselves, can be very injurious to the rest of the community.

History shows that once an enormous debt has been incurred by a nation, there are only two ways to solve it: one is simply declare bankruptcy, the other is to inflate the currency and thus destroy the wealth of ordinary citizens.

Rising prices of precious metals and other commodities are an indication of a very early stage of an endeavor to move away from paper currencies. We have at this particular stage a fiat money which is essentially money printed by a government and it's usually a central bank which is authorized to do so. Some mechanism has got to be in place that restricts the amount of money which is produced, either a gold standard or a currency board, because unless you do that, all of history suggest that inflation will take hold with very deleterious effects on economic activity… There are numbers of us, myself included, who strongly believe that we did very well in the 1870 to 1914 period with an international gold standard.