Ben McKenzie

But the problem is that...

When there's a crisis, when there's a collapse, like there was during the Great Depression when the stock market collapsed and countries started raising tariffs against each other and the economies just started folding inward, because you couldn't expand the money supply, because you couldn't do what we did during the pandemic and just print more money.

It is, and there's a great book called Lords of Finance by Liliqua Ahmed that talks about the central bankers of the 1930s, and their adherence to the gold standard really did contribute significantly to how bad it got.

It was going to be bad, but if they had known better at the time, they could have staved off the worst of it.

And that was really one of the takeaways from economists like John Maynard Keynes.

why are we sticking to this thing?

So Keynes and others critiqued this in the sense of like, I know we say we want it to be based on something quote unquote real, but let's think about that for a second.

Why is gold valuable?

Yes.

It's not the most scarce mineral.

You can't eat it.

It's pretty.

And limited.

Exactly.

It is something that has been historically used as value for thousands of years.

So if money is trust, it's a social construct, just like government or religion.

They're only as strong as the social consensus that underlies them.

We have a playful sequence at the beginning of the film, this graphic sequence, just showing you very quickly all of the different things that have been used as money over the years.

You know, feathers and different coins, things like that.

Okay, now we have to go back to where we were before.