In today's dollars, 1975 gold at $196 is .

1980 gold, the peak year at the historical price

of $850, would now clock

in closer to $2,176. And remember, this is only what

you get using the most conservative

market calculation of gold's worth. There are other,

1. Try this on for size... $38,349 per Ounce

Remember, for a good part of America's history,

So it's not so crazy to ask yourself... if America has 8,180 tons -

When dollars became unhinged from gold,

the printing presses at the Fed cranked up.

By 1980, for every ounce of gold in America, the

financial system carried $6,966 in cash.

That's $1.8 trillion total. But get this, by the end of 2005,

Of course, it's even higher now. The printing presses are still cranking,

well into 2007.

Only now, it's much harder for you

to know how fat the actual money supply

has gotten. See, by March 23, 2006...

The number had gotten so embarrassing... the Fed

actually "retired" a number called "M3,"

which was the most broad-reaching

measure of how much

Because this is the starkest vision you see

the absolute carnage that's piling

up in a "secret war" Washington's fighting right now...

and has fought, unsuccessfully,

for the last 20 plus years. No, not the war in Iraq. Or Afghanistan.

The enemy is the dark nemesis of a dead and stagnant economy.

And the Fed secretly fights to hold it off

desperately every single day.

This is a worse enemy than recession.

It's the enemy called deflation, an economy

The weapon of choice in this ongoing secret war

is to flood the market with cash and

easy credit. Because regular cash

and credit injections

make everyone feel rich.

The theory goes, when you've got cash and

low-priced credit, companies borrow and

expand. Consumers borrow and spend.

Which is why, since 1950, the total amount of money in

See, the trouble is, even money can't escape

the natural law of supply and demand.

When there's too much of it floating around,

each dollar is worth that much

And in the USA's case, it's helped plummet the purchasing power

The US dollar's worth today is just pennies compared with what it

In fact, its worth is just a fraction now --

compared to the last time

Only now, unlike then, the "wiggle room"

we have left now between us

and a complete dollar

implosion is so thin it's practically

transparent. Could total implosion

Take what relatively new Fed Chairman professor

Ben Bernake famously said in

a speech at the National Economists Club in Washington,

Like gold, U.S. dollars have value only to the extent that they

are strictly limited in supply. But the U.S.

government has a technology,

called a printing press (or, today,

its electronic equivalent), that allows

it to produce as many U.S. dollars as

it wishes at essentially no cost...

You can conclude that, under a paper-money system,

a determined government

In other words, if you want to juice an economy...

turn on the printing presses

and make it as easy as all get-out to borrow money at a low,

low rate of interest.

Bernanke and others in the Fed think that's no problem.

They think they can handle it,

just so long as short-term interest rates don't go to zero.

Flooding the market

with easy money is more

like burning your furniture to keep warm. It cannot last as a

There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought

about by credit expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis

should come sooner as a result of the voluntary abandonment

of further credit expansion, or later as a final and total

See, thanks to all that Fed-driven loose credit,

consumer debt has soared.

It's never been higher. In 1987, when Alan Greenspan

first took his job in

Washington, consumers where in the hole by about $10 trillion.

Where are they now?

As a whole, Americans owe three and a half times more than

the entire U.S. economy --

the largest in history -- produces in a year.

If you or Antoninus owed that much

Meanwhile, the government doesn't seem to worry.

They spend money even faster.

They borrow even deeper. Even this administration now, with full

knowledge of the implications

of a credit disaster, has already borrowed more money

since 2000 than every

By 2017 - says the Heritage Foundation - USA federal deficits

should be soaring by

at least $1 trillion per year. After that, it will jump to $2 trillion.

That's not how much

they'll owe. It's how much you add to what they owe...

every 12 months,

Slashing the rates means an even bigger dollar collapse.

And even higher credit debt,

at a time when few Americans can afford it.

It would also mean less

overseas confidence

in the U.S. economy. And that alone

See, when all those overseas bondholders

out there see the United States

disintegrating its economic base, that's all she wrote!

They'll start dumping the dollar

and they're debt investments with abandon.

You're reading this correctly and, as

BUCKSHOT would say.