Carroll Quigley Quotes
When goods are exchanged between countries, they must be paid for by commodities or gold. They cannot be paid for by the notes, certificates, and checks of the purchaser's country, since these are of value only in the country of issue.
Quigley, Carroll. Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time. Macmillan, 1966, p. 57.
“Laid up” means “saved”. “Commutable”means fungible—gold and silver can buy anything else.
This objective finally reached its peak in the Nixon administration when the U. S. went off the gold standard. 75 Years after FDR tried to make the U. S. dollar more resilient, America had been so successful that many foreign governments having the same problem of little or no control over their currency, have pegged their currency to the U. S. dollar, thus gaining our stability.
Economists they world over have differed as to how critical it was to have a money supply that is based on a gold standard or other precious metal. United States history has had a dispute over whether the money should be backed by gold or silver. Finally, under the Richard M. Nixon administration, the United States went off the gold standard and American money ever since is only backed by the ‘full faith and credit’ of the United States. Some politicians like Paul believe this is a poor policy since it allows governments to control their own money supply irrespective of their gold or silver holdings. Paul goes further than most and sees freedom itself dependent on a precious metal standard. Most politicians disagree.
This was a very astute prediction. At the time, the United States gold mining production was second only to South Africa and American currency was based on the gold standard which seemed to all to be permanent. Half a century later, the U. S went off the gold standard.
Carroll Quigley was an American historian and theorist of the evolution of civilizations. He is remembered for his teaching work as a professor at Georgetown University, and for his writing about global conspiracies, in which he argued that an Anglo-American banking elite have worked together for centuries to spread certain values globally.
