Spoiler alert if you haven’t seen the last couple seasons of Money Heist, but basically, after the bank heist, they go to the National Treasury of Spain and steal the gold that backs the Spanish economy, and replaces it with fake gold blocks.
At the very end, as the cops ask the Professor if he has any idea of the magnitude of what he’s done, because if a country has nothing to back its economy then there is no economy – all currency becomes worthless. The Professor in return says that if they don’t tell the general public the truth (that their economy’s backing is fake) no one will notice. The gold backing a country’s economy is simply there to exist in theory. It is never used, so replacing it with fake gold will not change a thing.
How realistic is this? I understand that most currencies in the world are no longer backed by gold, but hypothetically speaking, back when they WERE backed by gold, would this have been possible? If it was possible, why wouldn’t all governments replace their gold with fake gold and sell the real gold (possibly illegally) for some extra profit? I mean, one bar is apparently 80k, and there must have been at least 1k bars in that safe, so they could’ve made 80 million dollars, which would’ve been pretty solid money during when Spain’s economy was struggling, no?
In: Economics
There’s an interesting story here – https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/7qxvd0/alan_watts_a_story_about_gold/. More of a wee exercise.
I would imagine everything would be fine if the secret was kept and the gold never needed physically. Who would know different?
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