Rome, the dollar and debasement

oktober 26, 2025

Currency debasement has a long history.

When the Roman Republic started minting the denarius in the second century B.C.E., each coin was 98% silver.

As the centuries passed, coins were clipped, baser metals were added, and by the third century of the Common Era, each denarius was less than 5% silver.

The internet yields up a quote from Edward Gibbon, who wrote History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire:

The five marks of the Roman decaying culture: Concern with displaying affluence instead of building wealth; Obsession with sex and perversions of sex; Art becomes freakish and sensationalistic instead of creative and original; Widening disparity between very rich and very poor; Increased demand to live off the state.

Gibbon really wrote about these things, although his great and most contentious point was to hold Rome’s adoption of Christianity responsible for its fall.

The best explanation may lie in the emerging field of narrative economics, to borrow a term from the Yale University economist Robert Shiller.

He argues that markets and prices are often driven by stories and narratives that can take on the characteristics of epidemiology, suddenly spreading and “going viral.”

The Treasury bond is the 21st-century equivalent of the Roman denarius, and Washington has made clear that it wants to find ways to keep yields down in maneuvers that have the technical label of “financial repression.”

Bonds with yields held artificially low by the government are, arguably, the modern-day descendants of denarii that have been clipped and turned green.

John Authers Bloomberg 24 October 2025

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2025-10-24/the-decline-and-fall-of-the-debasement-trade

For much more on Rome and inflation, read this great piece by his Opinion colleague Daniel Moss.