Dear Mr. Rawles
The Inherent Value of U.S. Paper Currency I have recently decided to obey the law–Gresham’s Law and start converting my paper dollars into “Golden Dollars” including the Sacagawea and Presidential Dollars as well as into the Kennedy Half Dollar. I am mostly doing this for symbolic reasons but I have found that it is a way to get people to talk casually about concepts like inflation, fiat currency and fiscal policy without scaring them off. A US dollar weighs 1 gram, on average. From Earth Works Recycling‘s web page we find that paper is worth between 0 cents per pound for white paper to 1 cent for phone book paper to 2-¼ cents for newspaper. Being generous let’s assume that your US currency is worth the price of newspaper. There are 453.59237 grams in each pound. That means that each dollar is worth .00496 cents or 4.96 X 10-5 dollars. Or looked at another way it would take 20,139 dollars to be worth a dollar. Compared to this, according to Coinflation.com each Golden Dollar is worth 7.3 cents. The inherent worth of a Golden Dollar is 1,472 times more than a paper dollar. Don’t even get me started on silver. In closing, to paraphrase the American Express ad: “Worth of a Dollar… 4.96 X 10-5 dollars… Cost of preparedness… priceless.” – Mr. Bennington
JWR Replies: As I’ve mentioned several times in SurvivalBlog since early 2006, I recommend stockpiling U.S. five cent pieces (“Nickels”) as a hedge on inflation. Unlike the Sacagawea Dollar that has a base metal value of less 1/10th of the coin’s face value, a nickel a base metal value of around 6.7 cents. (135% of face value.) Whenever you can obtain a circulating coin with that much genuine value at face value, then it is worth stocking up.
Mass inflation is coming, folks! Get prepared.