In August 1963 a group of East German farmers pulled some 17th-century silver taler coins out of a potato field in the village of Glave. By the next harvest, historians had found several hundred more and come up with a fun thesis: the great Albrecht von Wallenstein, a Bohemian general in the Thirty Years’ War, had buried a cache of taler in a jar on his way out of town in the late 1620s. A trader today would say that the general had been long physical silver.
Over the weekend, someone on the Reddit forum /wallstreetbets began encouraging people to buy physical silver. The forum was not unanimous in its support for the trade. Some found it a distraction from other bets, just another day of silver obsessives pushing their favourite trade. But on Monday, the spot price for silver was up as much 12 per cent in London.
Some traders might have been buying to squeeze those betting against the metal, forcing prices higher. But some on /wallstreetbets were making the very long-term case: if you are holding real silver, then no matter what happens, you are still holding real money. Let’s call this the von Wallenstein trade: in a time of uncertainty, you put away a literal jar of silver.
The von Wallenstein silver long assumes that in a catastrophic financial collapse, it’s possible to find shelter at all. And it looks back to a time that never existed: a time of true strong metal money, with none of that inflated, unreliable credit money.
“This is it. This is our Financial Revolution,” wrote Marco de Yolo on wallstreetbets. “We will not need the dollar and we will leave them holding the bag.” The dollar collapse is coming, goes the argument, and anyone with bank deposits or investments in dollars is a sucker, holding a metaphorical bag full of nothing.
In the late 19th century, American farmers wanted to back the country’s money with silver because there was so much of it. They wanted monetary policy to be looser. But that’s not Marco de Yolo’s brand of populism. He wants a return to silver money precisely because there is so little of it. Silver, he wrote, is the “people’s currency”.
Textbooks teach a history of money that progressed neatly from one thing to another: barter to metal to credit. Accept this history and you may find yourself nostalgic for something that never existed: a time of metal, for example, when money was sound and reliable. Or a time before metal, when barter was restrained by social and moral obligations. But money has almost always been messy, mixed, and unfair.
Those coins the farmers found in a jar, for example: the taler system in northern Europe never rested exclusively on financial markets of pure, reliable silver. In the 16th century, investors in the trading town of Leipzig pulled silver taler from the Ore Mountains in Saxony and…
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