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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But its religious significance means that there are other cultures which are much less interested in its monetary value than in its religious value. And so they will keep taking it out of circulation to offer it to the gods. For example, the mercenaries who are being paid with gold coins are not going to use that to go and buy a loaf of bread with.
For a start, the gold coin is much too valuable, but also it has a totally different significance for them. So what used to be regarded as gold hoards buried in the ground for safekeeping in times of trouble, now most of them turn out to be not that at all. What they are is offerings placed in the ground for security, safety, protection.
So you have towns in Britain which have gold coins placed in the ground at the entrance to the town as a protection. guarantee of divine protection. You have enormous quantities of gold being used to celebrate divinity in India, in China. Look at those huge Buddhas, tons and tons of gold. Temples in India with billions of pounds worth of gold in their vaults belonging to Krishna.
Gold is being taken out of circulation all the time. Now, the thing about currency is that it has a function. Its function is to make trade possible. The Chinese worked out a long time ago, about the time that all this was happening, that currency was best regarded as not having value in itself. And it's better to use tokens that don't have significant value.
If you give them significant value, you run into trouble because you have to have enough of these tokens to make gold flow in a fluid way. If you produce too many, then you have inflation. If you produce too few, you have deflation. You've got to get the balance right.
Now, the problem with the fact that gold is constantly being taken out, taken out, taken out, disappearing, always to the east, by the way, always to China and India, is that you run out of gold. You keep running out of gold. And this causes one continual crisis after another, right through into modern times.
Persia doesn't have a market. So when Persia destroys Babylon, it changes the whole significance of currency. Circulation of gold currency diminishes greatly, and it becomes much more of a medal, a prize, a gift. But then it comes back again, as other cultures see it as a way of paying mercenaries, particularly. So it's not a continual story.
It's one which is constantly being repeated and rediscovered. And from time to time, it looks as though gold is disappearing as a currency system. This happens not only in the ancient world when you have a period when the Greeks think that gold currency is an evil and it's the currency of tyrants. And the currency you want is silver.
So you go through a period like that, which is changed by Macedonia, which is very keen on gold currency, right up to when Rome falls. It falls because it runs out of gold, can't pay its armies anymore. The gold is all gone. And you go into a Europe which develops a new kind of methodology of how you pay people and how you pay your soldiers, which we call feudalism. And they don't have any gold.
And there's probably one bathtub of gold available to the whole of Europe in the 11th, 12th centuries. But then it comes back again through the Arab world. And you get these crises coming back and back and back. I mean, in the 19th century, where after the California gold rush, It was widely believed among Europeans that the California source of gold was endless.
So when Germany decided to switch from having a silver currency to a gold one, the Germans were quite untroubled by the fact there might not be any gold for them to use for money. But they were wrong about California, and there wasn't any gold for them to use as money. And the result was an enormous financial crisis, devastating in the 1870s. So this is a problem that keeps on coming back.
It is, absolutely. And you see the extraordinariness of it in America. When the Spanish arrive in America, they arrive in a highly sophisticated world of large cities which don't have money. They don't use money at all. And a large part of the colonial enterprise of the Spanish
is to drive the indigenous people of South America, particularly, into having to use money, because this is the only way that Spain can get a taxation system that allows them to withdraw money. They're after the gold. The only way they're going to get it, if they can force people to trade using gold and take some of it as tax.
But Spain has entered a world where the idea of currency is unknown, where large cities survive without having markets of the kind that Eurasia had, but still survive perfectly well with a different system of exchange completely. and gold having an enormous sacred purpose, very important, very much related to life, energy, rebirth, and safety, but not money.
And it's come out at the very moment when a large number of countries are accelerating their possession of gold to an extraordinary and unprecedented extent. And it's not reported that But Russia has massively increased its acquisition of gold. So have countries in Eastern Europe like Poland, as well as India and China.
And this is because of something that they think it's making them safer in the face of something coming down the road that they're expecting.
Why wouldn't I? Thank you. It's lovely to have the opportunity. It really is.
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