I predict that we will experience a currency crisis sometime in our lives. One day people who have spent their entire lives working will wake up and realize that the dollars they hold are simply worth the paper they are printed on. With the recent events that have occurred on Wall Street, this seems all that more imminent. This is not a new phenomenon and has been budding since the Bretton Woods Agreements (Link), and especially in the past 30-years, as the US began providing the rest of the world with its largest (and for a while most profitable) export, debt. We now find ourselves in a place where debt is all we can produce. We’re no longer a manufacture. All we give the world is debt, and now it is bad debt. After we went off the gold standard for good and with the passing of a 1996 that stated that the Federal Government no longer needed to disclose the amount money printed, and injected into circulation, we have essentially just been printing an obscene and unknown amount of worthless currency.

Print more War, print more Katrina relief? Print more. Wall street collapses? Print a lot more. Thus, with each new emerging crisis, these solutions have served as a quick-fix, but at what point do we find ourselves drowning in a worthless currency? The true long-term investment may be the selfish hoarding of gold; but if you can’t get your hands on the precious bullion, then you might consider GLD, it is an ETF that trades in sync with gold futures.

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