Mike Maloney and the Case for Sound Money

5 min read

Few people have done more to explain sound money to ordinary savers than Mike Maloney. He founded the precious metals company GoldSilver in 2005, wrote a best-selling guide to gold and silver and created the video series Hidden Secrets of Money. His YouTube channel had passed 100 million views by 2022. His message is simple. Paper currency loses value over time. Gold does not. This article sets out the main ideas behind that message and why they matter to British savers today.

From a spare bedroom to a global audience

Maloney's story began modestly. He started GoldSilver in a spare bedroom of his home, running the business alone and handling everything from phone calls to bookkeeping himself. His own reading on monetary history and economics led him to write his first book while the company was still small.

His wider fame came from Hidden Secrets of Money, which launched in 2012. The series was filmed in 18 countries and set out, in plain language, how money has been created and debased through history. Its appeal lies in its approach. It does not ask viewers to follow the gold price day by day. It asks them to understand what money is.

Currency is not money

Maloney's central idea is a distinction most people never stop to make. The pounds in your bank account are currency. They are a medium of exchange and a unit of account. Real money must do one more thing. It must store value across years and decades.

Think of it this way. A pound coin works perfectly well for buying groceries this week. It is accepted everywhere and prices are quoted in it. The problem appears only when you hold it for a long time. Put a pound in a drawer for twenty years and it will buy noticeably less when you take it out. Gold, over long periods, has kept its buying power. That difference is what Maloney means by sound money.

By that test, paper currency keeps failing. Governments and central banks can create it at will, so its supply has no natural limit. Gold has passed the test for more than 5,000 years. It cannot be printed, it does not corrode and almost all the gold ever mined still exists. The World Gold Council estimates that more than 200,000 tonnes have been mined in all of history, around two thirds of it since 1950. That is why central banks still hold it as a reserve asset today.

The record of the last fifty years

In August 1971 the United States closed the gold window. Under the system agreed at Bretton Woods in 1944, foreign governments had been able to exchange their dollars for gold at 35 dollars an ounce. On the evening of 15 August 1971 President Nixon ended that promise. From that day no major currency has been tied to gold. Every pound, dollar and euro has been backed only by the word of the government that issues it.

The result shows up in the price of everything. In 1971 an ounce of gold cost less than £20. Fifty years later, in 2021, it averaged around £1,300. Gold had not become sixty times more useful. The pound has lost the great majority of its buying power. Gold simply measures the damage.

Debt tells the same story. The US national debt passed 39 trillion dollars in March 2026. Debts of that size are rarely repaid in full. They are usually eroded by inflation, quietly and over many years, at the expense of anyone holding cash. Britain is on a similar path, with public debt now close to the size of the whole economy. We looked at the British side of this in New Year, Old Problem.

Wealth is transferred, not destroyed

Maloney's second big idea is that a financial crisis rarely destroys wealth outright. It moves it. When a currency is debased, value flows away from those holding paper and towards those holding real assets. Savers who keep everything in cash fund the transfer without ever being asked.

History offers plenty of examples. Germany in the 1920s, Argentina in the early 2000s and Zimbabwe in the 2000s all saw paper savings collapse while gold held its value in real terms. Britain has never suffered anything so extreme. Yet the slow version has run here for decades, one percentage point of inflation at a time.

Germany in 1923

The German case shows how far the process can run. In 1914 the mark traded at about 4.2 to the US dollar. By November 1923 one dollar bought roughly 4.2 trillion marks. A loaf of bread in Berlin cost about 160 marks at the end of 1922. By late 1923 the same loaf cost around 200 billion marks.

Families who had saved carefully for decades saw their savings wiped out within months. Those who held land, goods or gold came through with far more of their wealth intact. On 16 November 1923 a new currency, the Rentenmark, replaced the worthless paper. The savings lost along the way were never returned.

Examples like this are not a forecast that Britain will follow. They show the direction of travel when money can be created without limit. The extreme cases simply make visible what slower inflation does quietly.

Central banks are acting on it

The strongest support for Maloney's framework comes from the institutions that issue currency. According to the World Gold Council, central banks have bought around 1,000 tonnes of gold a year since 2022, roughly double the pace of the previous decade. These are the very bodies that manage paper money. They are choosing to hold more gold. We covered this trend in Central Banks Are Buying Gold at Historic Levels.

Gold's recent path has not been a straight line. It set a new record high in late January 2026, then pulled back sharply in the months that followed. Short-term swings are part of owning any real asset. The long-term direction, measured against paper currency, is what matters.

Sound money for British savers

You do not need to share every one of Maloney's forecasts to accept his framework. Unbacked currency loses value over time while gold endures. That is not a theory. It is the record. The question is simply how much of your wealth sits outside the paper system.

Many of our customers come to gold for exactly this reason. Some want to protect savings from inflation. Others want to pass something real to their children and grandchildren. Everyone's situation is different.

British savers can act on that record with a particular advantage. Britannias and Sovereigns are UK legal tender, so gains on them are exempt from Capital Gains Tax for UK residents. Gold bars do not share this advantage. A Britannia is struck in 999.9 fine gold. For those who want extra certainty, a certified coin is graded by NGC or PCGS and arrives sealed with its own certification number that can be checked online in seconds. When you decide to sell, our established buyback service pays a fair market rate on the day.

Speak to a specialist

If you would like to talk it through, call a specialist on 0208 064 0076, Monday to Friday, 9am to 5pm, or book a call at a time that suits you.

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Sources

This article is for information only. The value of gold can go down as well as up.

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Gold Insights are independent articles, researched and written by our own team at Gold Tier Advisory.