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概括：Financial writer Philip Coggan traces the current global financial crisis to the 1970s, when the U.S. broke its last link to gold.
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Well, you write our current predicament - meaning more debt than real wealth - begins in the 1970s, when the U.S. went off the gold standard. Exactly. Up till then, every form of money had some link to precious metal- gold or silver. So the central bank of the U.S. had a certain amount of gold to back the currency and other countries could exchange their dollars for gold. All that ended in 1971 when President Nixon went off the gold standard. And essentially, you had no limit on the amount of money that could be created and no limit on the amount of debt that could be created. But eventually, what it led to was a whole series of asset bubbles. We used that debt to buy assets. The assets went up in price. When the assets faulted, as they did - 1987, Black Monday, late 1990s with the dot com bubble bursting - then central banks cut interest rates to keep the whole thing going. And the result of all that was a, kind of, one-way bet for speculators - keep borrowing money to keep buying assets, central banks will always bail you out. And that's why we ended up in this mess that we are in the moment, with lots of debts and central banks creating money to try and prop the whole system up. Which also leaves us with a situation where everywhere you look these days, countries are trying to get themselves out of this debts. Greece, which you just mentioned, says it can only pay back about half of what it owes. The U.S. is doing something different. You see individual cities go into bankruptcy. The U.S., the government is printing more money. Any of these or other efforts likely to work?