Paper Money Collapse: The Folly of Elastic Money and the Coming Monetary Breakdown [Hardcover]

Schlicter's analysis is certainly controversial, and I must admit that I started reading Paper Money Collapse with a degree of scepticism. However, the logic of his argument is compelling and, upon concluding the read and reflecting, the reason behind many recent world economic events becomes evident. A good example is the inability of western economies such as Japan and the US to stimulate growth, despite repeated attempts at monetary expansion.

He begins with a clear explanation of what money is and how it works; how it began as a pure commodity currency, morphed into a paper currency backed by gold, changed again through the process of Fractional-Reserve Banking and has today (as it has in past times before collapsing) become a fiat currency where Central Banks can create money at will and at no cost. Currency created through Fractional-Reserve Banking is somewhat elastic and that created by Central Banks is infinitely so.

It is this elasticity that allows monetary expansion to distort and unbalance the economy, and to induce short term stimulus in certain sectors but zero real growth overall in the long term. It also has the important side effect of generating inflation. As the process continues monetary stimulus is destined to have less and less effect whilst the inflationary consequence is intensified, with the inevitable result of hyperinflation and currency collapse.

Schlicter underpins his analysis with descriptions of historic paper money systems, all of which failed. Our present system of paper money, particularly after 1971 when the US abandoned The International Gold Standard, displays numerous symptoms analogous to the historic examples cited.

What is the solution? Schlicter is uncompromising; only after the effect of previous credit expansions have been unwound and we have returned to a system of inelastic money (albeit possibly including an element of Fractional-Reserve Banking) can the economy begin to grow naturally and spontaneously. We should look to the period of The Classical Gold Standard between 1890 and 1914 which enjoyed economic prosperity notwithstanding a modest rate of deflation throughout.

I confess that one reason for my reading this book was to see what I could do to adapt my personal circumstances to what is, by any measure, potential financial disaster. Schlicter claims that this is not the purpose of his book yet he goes on to suggest that gold acquisition is preferred strategy. However, he also points out that in 1933 Roosevelt confiscated all privately held gold!

I'm not sure what I'm going to do, but I certainly would not want to be dependent upon government bonds or pension obligations for my retirement.

When I first met the Austrian School of Economics and the monetary theory of the trade cycle in 2000, in the course of looking for an explanation of the dot-com bust, I believed politicians and economists would surely not let such a theory pass if it contained any truth. By 2007, I realised the mainstream of economics contained a key intellectual error - an inadequate treatment of time.

Given that understanding of time, elastic and inflationary money is a distinct poison. That poison is now destroying our society.

Schlichter's book sets out the arguments in convincing detail. I should love to believe he is completely wrong. That no longer seems likely.

Anyone who cares about prosperity and progress should read this book.

I agree with the bit on the cover of this book where it says that this is not an easy read. For me, it has not been, and not just because the truths Schlichter spells out and explains are so not-easy to take. I am a huge fan of his, and have been ever since I first heard him talk about the analysis in this book in London about a year ago, but he makes me work hard. This book is heavy on logical exposition, much lighter on diverting anecdote. For the latter sort of Schlichter stuff, you must read his blog.

One way to describe Paper Money Collapse might be to say that it is the sort of book that the great Austrian School economist and economic historian Murray Rothbard might have written, had he lived a bit longer. Last year I read Rothbard's Man, Economy and State. While doing this, I kept hoping that I would read a theoretical analysis of our current financial woes, as opposed merely to Rothbard's general take on Austrian Economics as a whole. I realise that this was a lot to ask of a book published several decades ago, and not surprisingly I was, although in general much educated, largely disappointed on that particular count. Well, what I was only hoping to read in that Rothbard book was what I did read in Detlev Schlichter's much shorter book, which I heartily recommend to anyone willing to really get stuck into it. Here is a conceptual analysis, in very much the painstaking Rothbard manner, of how non-commodity-backed currencies behave when they collapse, and why they do collapse, always, inevitably. In other words it is about the times we now live in.

I learned a lot from reading Paper Money Collapse. In particular, Schlichter has convinced me of the wrongness of the argument that since we want economic activity in the world to increase indefinitely, but gold is, barring a few trivial further discoveries, fixed in quantity, gold won't work as the basis of currency. But non-elasticity is exactly why gold is such a good basis for currency. Totally elastic money, on the other hand, inevitably collapses, always and everywhere. Why should our elastic money be any different?

Schlichter is not pointing the finger at individuals. This is not a detective story, where in the final chapter all the suspects are rounded up and Herr Schlichter points the finger at the guilty man. President Nixon's decision to break the final link between the dollar and gold is deplored, and Ben Bernanke's recent pronouncements are likewise disapproved of, but many of the decisions that lead to our current mess were made many, many decades ago, and by their nature they are the kind of decisions which are far easier to make than they are to reverse and clean up after.

Nor does Schlichter believe that hyper-inflation now threatens us all because central bankers are unaware of the badness of hyper-inflation. They know that hyper-inflation is bad. Unfortunately, they also know that if the collapse that Schlichter describes occurs while they are in office, then that, for them, will be even worse than a bit more inflation or even quite a lot more inflation. So, they carry on printing money and postponing the resolution of the problem, which means that when nemesis does finally arrive, it will be all the worse. But, says Schlichter, they know what they are doing; they just don't know how to stop. Schlichter telling them to stop will accomplish nothing.

I suspect that Schlichter may be being rather kind about just how plain stupid some even quite high ranking central bankers now are, but clever or stupid, these people are now thoroughly boxed in by their previous decisions and by the decisions of their predecessors of earlier years and decades.

I have been using the phrase "paper money", as Schlichter himself does in his title. But as we all know, when central bankers now create yet more money, they are mostly putting numbers in electronically managed bank accounts. It is not the printing of bank notes that is the problem; it is the lack of a commodity base to control the process. By the same token, paper bank notes that refer to a currency that is solidly based on something like gold would be fine. But I am sure that Schlichter has thought long and hard about this phrase, and I gladly defer to his decision to call it "paper currency" in his title. I certainly don't know a better way of putting it. "Fiat" money? "Elastic" money? (That's the phrase that Schlichter switches to in the subtitle, also prominently displayed on the front cover.) Both are a bit more accurate than "paper" money, but are also a bit less attention-grabbing for the kind of intelligent and educated everyman whom Schlichter is trying to reach. "Paper" gets over the gist of the problem pretty well, I think. And you start learning what that means as soon as you read the sub-title.

When it comes to Schlichter's pessimism about him personally having any influence on the conduct of public policy, I agree with him, in the short run. But I think he may be proved wrong, in the longer run. I agree with him that there is nothing much he can say to the people now in charge of financial policy that will persuade them to do the right thing now, which basically means getting the collapse over and done with as soon as possible. But when this collapse starts seriously happening anyway, in just the manner and for precisely the reasons that Schlichter says, he could then become a very Big Cheese, as we say in my native England. In fact, if this book does half as well as I suspect it may, Schlichter will probably be accused, by various paper (fiat, elastic) money idiots who know only the title of this book but nothing of what it says, of having precipitated the catastrophe he describes. But other people, including politicians and central bankers, could also then be asking him: So, Schlichter, what the hell do we do now? I urge Schlichter to be ready for this moment. Suggested title for his next book: Now What? (Presumed answer: Let non-state controlled and non-state backed bankers supply currency, which they will back with gold. Get out of their way and let them get on with it.)

Meanwhile, I urge anyone who thinks that he might find this book enlightening, and helpful for personally navigating through the mess, to go ahead and be enlightened. I think this book may become very big. It certainly deserves to.