Deep dives on monetary history, real prices, and what things actually cost. Each essay pulls on one thread from the data until something interesting comes loose.
Dollar-denominated home prices are up 124× in 113 years. In gold, a median American home costs barely half what it did before the Federal Reserve existed. Housing got cheaper — the dollar hid it.
Your grocery bill has risen 30× in dollars since 1913. In gold, a week of food actually costs less — the greatest agricultural revolution in history, hidden behind a collapsing currency.
State university tuition is up 110× in dollars since 1913. In gold, public college actually got cheaper — and private tuition tells an important story about what changed.
In 1913, a penny bought a newspaper, a stamp, or a piece of candy. Today it costs more to make a penny than a penny is worth. The story of the smallest coin is the story of the dollar itself.
A Model T cost $825 in 1913 — about 40 ounces of gold. A new F-150 costs around $40,000 — about 9 ounces. Cars got dramatically better and cheaper in gold.
Median household income is up 100× in dollars since 1913. In gold, it peaked in 1970 and has been falling ever since. This essay ties the whole series together.
Six of America’s longest-listed companies plus the Dow Jones, priced in gold and silver. Surviving blue chips outpaced gold from 1980; the broad index has barely beaten gold over a century.
In November 1910, six men representing a quarter of the world’s wealth boarded a private railcar in New Jersey. What they designed in secret over nine days became the Federal Reserve.
On April 5, 1933, Roosevelt ordered every American to surrender their gold — under penalty of $10,000 fine or ten years in prison. Then he raised the price by 69%. The largest wealth transfer in American history happened in two steps.
In July 1944, delegates from 44 countries built a new world monetary order. The dollar would be as good as gold — $35 per ounce, convertible on demand. The system worked until the US printed too many dollars to keep the promise.
On a Sunday evening, Nixon pre-empted Bonanza to announce a “temporary” suspension of the dollar’s convertibility to gold. That temporary measure is now 55 years old. Every financial crisis since traces back to this moment.
After Nixon severed the dollar from gold, Kissinger struck a deal with Saudi Arabia: oil priced exclusively in dollars, military protection in return. Every nation on earth would need dollars to buy energy.
Of the roughly 775 fiat currencies that have existed in recorded history, none have survived. The average lifespan is 27 years. The dollar at 55 years off gold isn’t the exception — it’s overdue.
For 250 years a major commercial economy ran a working silver monetary system with no state-issued silver currency. Hundreds of millions of foreign coins, verified one merchant at a time. Each chop is a verification that actually happened.
An annual Spanish galleon moved roughly 50 metric tons of silver per year from Mexico to China for two and a half centuries — sustained 2x silver-arbitrage, ~1-in-7 wreck rate, and the trade route that closed the Pacific commercial loop.
For most of the 19th century, Chinese merchants in the Yangzi Delta paid up to 30% more for one specific silver coin than its bullion content was worth. The coin had stopped being minted decades earlier.
Hand-cast silver ingots in regional shapes — boats, saddles, drums, snails — quietly ran the Chinese empire's largest transactions for centuries. Outlawed in 1933; their iconography still anchors Chinese New Year today.
Three architectures of premodern distributed verification side by side: Chinese chopmarks, European hallmarks, Italian bills of exchange. What each shared, what each got right, and why the Chinese version is specifically the most decentralized of the three.