Alan Ereira
speaker
97 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Alan Ereira’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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The fact that this influx of gold is not what Nebuchadnezzar intended. It's exactly the same thing. We see it happening later on with the Spanish in America. The Spanish think when they take all the gold out of America, they'll be rich. No, what will happen is they'll take all the gold out of America and the gold will fall in value because there's too much of it.
And that's what happened to Babylon. The gold falls in value. It's a slower process than we're used to in the modern world because the Distances are greater, communications are slower. But from the time that the temper is seized, the value of gold falls steadily. This is because prices are in silver and gold and silver are in a ratio to each other.
So the increase in the quantity of gold reduces the value of gold, so the gold-silver ratio changes. And so gold, then you have to regard it as a commodity, like barley, like anything else, and its value falls in relation to silver. And you see that in the price changes in these tables, which don't measure gold price, but they do give you silver prices for the commodities.
And you can see this huge shift in commodities. And it's interesting, the person who published this incredible scholarly work, publishing all the information from these tables at the late 1990s, says there's this fall in prices and we don't know why.
Yes.
Yes. Well, it must be the first because it's the first time there'd been currency anyway to crash. And a friend of mine called Paul Craddock who is the metallurgist who was working as an archaeologist with the British Museum, excavated in Sardis. And he thought he'd found a mint that was producing the coins. And then he realized as the excavation went on, this wasn't a mint.
What they were doing in this place was taking the coins to pieces. They were destroying the currency. And he found the whole of the methodology by which they did this, by which they take electron coins, turn them to foil, and then disintegrate them in order to separate the gold from the silver.
Because it had got to a point where the face value of the coin was less than the value of the silver in it.
That is where the traders, of course. The trade routes are 3,000 kilometers long. This is what binds this world together. There is a direct trade route that goes from Babylon to... to the Greeks in the Mediterranean. That's why I was stressing how long distances things had traveled even to Varna thousands of years before. People move enormous distances. Objects move enormous distances.
If they're wanted, they'll get them. And so that's what was happening. The impact of value, I mean, it travels slowly. It's a ripple. But it happens. And you can see it happening. And you can see the value of gold commodities halving. It's overproduction of gold creating inflation. And so how does this affect what happens next?
Well, what happens, obviously, if they're destroying the currency, the whole trade route is, there's a word that starts with F. I can't remember what it is. Yeah. It's in a poor way. So by the time Agniates dies, his whole currency has perished. His successor is a chap called Croesus, who most people will have heard of. Rich as? Rich as Croesus. Rich as Croesus.
Now, one of the reasons that Croesus is rich as Croesus is Agniates was also very rich. The river that goes through Sardis, unlike any other, The gold that's found in that river is 100% pure gold. It's 24 carat. Wow. It is not alloyed with anything. So you've actually got a source of real good gold there. And so Croesus comes up with this marvelous idea.
He will produce a new coinage made of 100% pure gold. And alongside it, a parallel coin of silver. And these two coins will replace the old one that was the two metals joined together. And that will mean that shifts between the value of one and the other can be coped with.
And it's coped with very simply, actually, because when the relative value changes, he actually changes the relative sizes of the coins. And he's now introduced currency stability. And you now have... really very significantly, the introduction of the gold standard and a gold coin which we still use.
The one-third stator that Croesus introduced is the same size and weight, not quite exactly, but almost exactly, as the sovereigns, the gold sovereigns they're minting in London now. But instead, the symbols that he put on that coin were the lion facing down a bull, and the two of them are glaring at each other head on.
Now, the one change that we've made is that we now have the lion and the unicorn, one horn instead of two. But it's actually, you know, it's the gold currency. And this has been the basis of the world's economy ever since, with catastrophic consequences.
Oh, it does. It does. The amount of gold in the coin now is the value of the coin. Okay. That's why this is a disaster. Because what's happened is that what he's done is to convert money into absolutely a commodity. If you buy Croesus' gold coin, you're not actually depending on the stamp to validate it.
What you're depending on is the certainty that it's pure gold, easily checked, and it's weight. That is the value of the coin. And that is why it leads to catastrophe. Because once your money is itself, the pieces of money are themselves worth something. That's one big problem.
And the second big problem is it's not just that they're worth something, but they have a connection to a religious connection, which has a drastic effect on what happens to them. After all, if you think about it, the price of gold is going up all the time. It seems to be steadily on the increase. Now, the amount of gold in the world can never go down.
One of the features of gold is it's absolutely indestructible, except by very peculiar activity. So the amount of gold will constantly increase. The gold that was in the Roman Empire, the gold that was in the Babylonian Empire is all still with us and probably is in bits of gold that we buy in jewelry shops now. There's no way of knowing.
Showing 61–80 of 97 · page 4 of 5
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