Money & Economic Foundations
Backed by nothing. Still buys your groceries.
The euro, the dollar, the franc, the yen — none of them can be handed in for gold. So what exactly is holding them up?
The problem
Take the note apart.
Remove what's holding it up, one at a time, and see what's left underneath.
💶 What this note can do for you
INTACTTap a support to take it away.
Notice what you never removed: gold. There wasn't any. Everything holding that note up was a social and legal arrangement — people accepting it, the state building its framework around it, and an institution defending what it buys. As paper it's worth almost nothing. That was always true.
The definition
Three things give it value.
None of them is a material you can weigh.
Hands on
You can't turn up one without turning up the other.
Drag toward more discretion and watch both ends of the beam move.
A middle setting: some room to respond, some exposure to losing purchasing power.
Where the limit went
No gold means no automatic brake.
Something still limits it — just nothing you can dig out of the ground.
Check yourself
Five questions.
Answers come straight from this lesson. Submitting completes it.