A Thousand Pictures Is Worth One Word: Worthless

"Jeff Clark of Casey Research has created a wonderful historical "art" album which addresses the number one question which most people living in the US right now are unable to fathom: how can one's currency go from X to 0. It is impossible. It certainly can not happen to the dollar. Right? Well, as Jeff says: "History has a message for us: No fiat currency has lasted forever. Eventually, they all fail. You might suspect this happened only to third world countries. You’d be wrong. There was no discrimination as to the size or perceived stability of a nation’s economy; if the leaders abused their currency, the country paid the price." We may add one other thing: no country in the history of the world has imploded from hyperdeflation. Not one. At the point where the debt load was insurmountable and not enough cash flow was being generated to sustain it, the authorities would always find a way to step in and be the terminal source of dilutive fiat demand: from ancient Rome, to Weimar, to the collapse of the Soviet Block, to, inevitably, the unwind of the failed (neo) Keynesian model, where we are right about now. Sure, we can all come up with goalseeked theories that validate our perspective but they are all meaningless at the end. Past a given threshold debt money ceases to function as backed by the full "faith and credit" of the backstopper and is nothing but paper. Yes. Even the abstract concept of so-called "reserve" currencies. Quote Clark: "As you scroll through the currencies below, you’ll see some long-ago casualties. What’s shocking, though, is how many have occurred in our lifetime. You might count how many currencies have failed since you’ve been born." There are many more where these came from. Thousands in fact. Which brings us to the title of this post. What are all these images, which is really all they are now - fancy paperweights (no pun intended) from near and far history, worth now? Precisely..."

at http://www.zerohedge.com/news/thousand-pictures-worth-one-word-worthless