Secret plots constantly making headlines

You will have to tell me if I am just easily amused.

Last week Numismatic News ran a story about a privately designed prototype money that was dubbed the “eurodollar.”

What made it interesting was that examples made of gold were given to the leaders of all countries at the July 8-10 G8 summit, which is an annual event started in the 1970s to try to keep the economies of the major industrial nations on an even keel.

Russian President Medvedev used the gift as a prop to illustrate his point that the world needs an alternative to the U.S. dollar as a reserve currency. He was quoted on the Bloomberg business Web site.

Now Russians have been rocking the boat internationally more or less continuously since our World War II alliance turned into Cold War confrontation.

But the past provides an interesting echo. The term “eurodollar” originated in the Cold War because the Soviet government did not trust the United States to honor its currency. A eurodollar was a U.S. dollar kept on deposit at a bank outside the borders of the United States. Since these first deposits started in Europe, the “euro” part of the term makes that connection. This Russian invention helped to propagate the dollar’s role as a truly international reserve currency.

The promoter of the new prototype coin given to Medvedev, Sandro Sassoli and the Museo del Tiempo, whom I never heard of before, states flatly that his aim is the unification of the European Union with the United States and the merger of their respective currencies, the euro and the dollar, but he wants schoolchildren to come up with a new name and design for the merged currency by the year 2015.
As noted in the story, I don’t think the Russian president knew the background, or as Paul Harvey used to say, the rest of the story. I don’t think he would want to see a combined nation of 800 million people on his borders.

Well the story doesn’t end there.

In my e-mail this week I have a message that says, “The new ‘World Coin,’ revealed at the recent G8 Economic Summit, contains coded images that portend a dark future for the entire world. The images mock the Bible, and are based upon the Satanic Pentagram. The same day that the coin was revealed, Barack Obama met with Pope Benedict XVI.”

It is certainly clever of these plotters to use someone none of us has ever heard of who is advocating a new currency designed by schoolchildren.

But then this conflicts with the secret plot to merge the dollar with the Canadian dollar and the Mexican peso into a unit called the “amero,” which conveniently was designed by a Colorado artist who likes to be in the limelight.

These secret plots make my head spin. There is the secret plot to suppress the price of gold. The lack of evidence, of course, is the primary evidence that the plotters, at least in this case, know how to keep a secret – except that many hard money advocates are citing the story as a reason to buy gold.

Perhaps it is a secret plot by gold owners to unload their holdings at the current high prices. How much is an ounce of gold in eurodollars, or is that in ameros?