Apart from medieval China, which invented both paper and printing centuries before the West, the world had never seen government paper money until the colonial government of Massachusetts emitted a fiat paper issue in 1690.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I never earned a dollar that was not somehow through writing.
We have to remember there is not a big printing press in Washington that continually prints money over and over.
The spectacle of a great, solvent government paying a fictitious price for gold it did not want and did not need and doing it on purpose to debase the value of its own paper currency was one to astonish the world.
When you print money, the money does not flow evenly into the economic system. It stays essentially in the financial service industry and among people that have access to these funds, mostly well-to-do people. It does not go to the worker.
Paper currency has hitherto been regarded with suspicion, as insecure.
You will never solve the American problems just by printing money.
In occupied Iraq, the introduction of new paper money took almost a year, 20 or so Boeing 747s, the mobilisation of the U.S. military's might, three printing firms, and hundreds of trucks.
Only government can take perfectly good paper, cover it with perfectly good ink and make the combination worthless.
In the '30s, the Keynesian stuff worked at least in the sense that you could print money without inflation because there was all this productivity growth happening. That's not going to work today.
I do know that throughout history, all paper money has eventually come back to its true value, which is zero.