The Ultimate Enigma: The Price of Gold: Who Owns Whom?

• Author: Oliver Houck
• Pages: 207-210

207

The Ultimate Enigma:

The Price of Gold:

Who Owns Whom?

By Oliver Houck

The Power of Gold: The H istory of an Obse ssion, by Peter L.

Bernstein. John Wiley & Son s, Inc. 201 pages.

From the November/ December 2013 issue of The Environmental Forum.

If I were to write Peter L. Bernstein’s e

Power of Gold: e History of an Obses-

sion, I might begin w ith his description

of Egypt’s King Ptolemy II, who had “a polar

bear (!) from his zoo lead festive processions

in which the bear was preceded by a group of

men carrying a gilded phallus 180 feet tall.”

No other symbol could have said what Ptol-

emy wanted to say. e story of gold would

thus make a hig hly entertaining fairy tale—

the ultimate unicorn—if it were not plagued

by an untrammeled line of conquest, war,

slavery, fratricide, genocide, bruta l inhuman-

ity, and the despoliation of e very medium on

earth where it has been found. Few things in

human history have been more constant, and

appalling. And adored.

Bernstein is a historian with a penchant for facts and narration, and an

economist skillful enough to untangle the morass of gold-as-money that

dominated t he western mind for centuries. He has in eect two books in

one, the rst treating t he almost insane hold that gold ha s exercised on civi-

lization from the earliest records, and the second demystifying the rivalries

over the gold sta ndard that, dry stu today, were the central theme of the

U.S. presidential elections in 1896, the pride of the British banking system,