Dr. Louis W. Piacentini is, hands down, the nicest man on Martha’s Vineyard. You know this if you’ve ever had a chance to speak to him at Conroy’s Apothecary in Oak Bluffs when he fills your prescription. Unbeknownst to even his co-workers, he harbors a secret passion which he has researched for years, and in whatever spare time he can garner, he has written and published a book about it, titled “Gold Is Real Money.”
He loves gold. Not in a greedy King Midas way. No, Dr. Piacentini believes the United States made a terrible error when it enacted a gold confiscation order in 1933 under F.D.R., with a final coup de grâce under Nixon in 1971 with a law severing gold from our untold tons of paper money. “Societies that move away from solid asset-backed money,” Dr. Piacentini writes, “eventually crumble and fail, usually in dramatic fashion.”
Lou, as he is known to everyone who appreciates his genial nature at Conroy’s, is an admitted Republican, but his message places him outside his own box. The subtitle of his book suggests he shares the Bern with lots of Islanders: “How We the People Are at War Against Big Banks and Big Government.”
Say what? Seems like on both sides of our outrageously polarized electorate, a lot of people would love to lop off the tentacles off the Octopus that Ate the Global Economy, the octopus being Wall Street.
The pleasure in reading Dr. Piacentini’s book is that he’s done the homework you’ve never tackled unless you received a degree in economics from Columbia University. The author explains the use of gold, silver, and other metals going back to the earliest civilizations (although I don’t think we’ll be going on the rhodium system anytime soon). Gold is rare, real, and hard to counterfeit. It wasn’t until the Civil War, when demand for funds was voracious, that the government began to print “greenbacks.” Lots of them. $450,000 worth.
Adherence to the gold standard through the 1920s prevented the Federal Reserve, created in 1913, from expanding the money supply to stimulate the economy. Therefore, in 1933, under the presidency of F.D.R., a nationwide confiscation of people’s gold was enacted. Understandably, many people chose to hold on to their gold coins, some decidedly rare and valuable. Dr. Piacentini argues that President Roosevelt violated the Constitution, which states, “No State shall emit Bills of Credit, make any Thing but Gold and Silver a Tender in Payment.”
In a conversational style that makes reading “Gold Is Real Money” a pure, totally digestible pleasure, Dr. Piacentini takes the reader through the history of the 20th century monetary system, including a pivotal meeting in Bretton Woods, N.H., in 1944, during which 44 Allied powers transformed the U.S. dollar into the world’s de facto reserve currency. The gold standard continues to play a part, but in 1971, President Nixon looked with fear upon President Charles de Gaulle of France, who as Dr. Piacentini wrote, “began redeeming U.S. dollars for gold at such an unsustainable rate” that the U.S. president officially unpegged gold from the dollar. “He abandoned the obligation for the U.S. Federal Reserve to exchange dollars for gold at a set rate,” Dr. Piacentini said.
Frankly, at this point, I was confused. I remembered my third grade teacher back in the 1950s telling us about all the gold “bricks” at Fort Knox that represented all the dollars, and how our economy would be lost without that gold. This just goes to show, once again, that most of what we learned in the third grade was a bold-faced lie, making college — and books like Dr. Piacentini’s — necessary so we could understand how things really work.
Our buddy and pharmacist and, now, autodidact economist, Dr. Piacentini also holds a grudge against the Federal Reserve, and enters into great detail about how the mighty Fed is controlled by all the central banks, the infamous money centers “too big to fail.” We the People, although we’re theoretically represented by a third of the Fed’s directorate, have no electoral bearing on these leaders whatsoever, all of whom are appointed by banks and the executive branch of the government.
Louis W. Piacentini was born and raised in a suburb of Boston. He earned his doctor of pharmacy degree at Massachusetts Pharmacy and Health Sciences in Boston. He is, unsurprisingly, a longtime bullion investor. He’s married and living in Oak Bluffs.
“Gold Is Real Money” will give you a pleasurable and informative tour of economics through all centuries, including this new dynamic and scary one in which we find ourselves. The takeaway from this decidedly libertarian book is that whenever you draw a wad of money from your wallet or bank account, just remember that we’re all playing Monopoly. It’s paper. The government prints out a mess of it at all times, and who knows where it will lead us?
Try not to think of the Weimar Republic in Germany after WWI, when war reparations and hyperinflation caused people to cram all their paper currency in wheelbarrows to go purchase a loaf of bread.
Dr. Piacentini’s hopeful advice: Buy gold.
