The End of the World is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization

by Peter Zeihan

The numbers not only didn’t add up, they couldn’t add up. Throughout human history, humanity has probably produced no more than 6 billion troy ounces of gold (about 420 million pounds). Assuming every scrap of gold ever mined was available to the U.S. government, that would only be enough to “back” a total global currency supply of $210 billion.* From 1950 to 1971, global trade expanded by quintuple that figure, on top of the fact that the U.S. dollar was the currency of the United States itself, which already had a GDP larger than total global trade. The peace and economic growth that the Order encouraged also increased the global population from 2.5 billion to 3.8 billion, suggesting much stronger demand for U.S.-dollar-enabled trade to come.* Even if the politics had been perfect, the gold standard was doomed to fail. The Americans awkwardly and painfully discovered for themselves not only the age-old issue that asset-backed currencies were incompatible with rapid growth, but the very age-new issue that asset-backed currencies were incompatible with global peace—the sort of peace that formed the backbone of America’s anti-Soviet alliance.