The Big Reset

Gold backed almost all major currencies until 1914, when the enormous cost of World War I forced most European countries to abandon the gold standard. The United States followed suit in 1971. Since then, argues Willem Middelkoop, gold has emerged as the financial industry’s greatest enemy. In The Big Reset, he contends that the fight against gold sparked a decades-long process that has poised the world’s financial system for collapse.

Exploring gold’s traditional role as the anchor of financial systems, Middelkoop traces the secret war against it to the 1960s, when central banks across the United States and Europe agreed to pool their gold reserves in the London Gold Pool. He then outlines the history of gold-backed currencies and today’s fiat currencies (state-issued money that has no fixed value in terms of an objective standard). Recently, fiat currencies have allowed many governments to print huge numbers of bonds to finance their budgets. But Middelkoop warns that piling debt onto the balance sheets of central banks is not a sustainable way to revive the economy. Ultimately, he shows, this process will lead to a collapse—and subsequent reset—of our worldwide financial system.