Ah, good ol’ money. It’ll always be there, right? So long as we have enough of it, we can purchase goods, services, security…well, you get the idea.Unfortunately, too many governments treat money like coffee—assuming they can always just make more. As we’ll see, this process of chasing increasingly bad money with even worse money can eventually lead to no money at all.Here are ten times legal tender became legally dead.
10 The Roman Denarius
An act of patriotic defiance during Rome’s battle against Hannibal in the Second Punic War, the denarius was introduced in the late third century BC. The coin consisted of almost pure silver and weighed 4.2 grams.Its heyday came in the century following Rome’s mid-second century BC conquest of Macedonia, whose rich silver deposits allowed the money supply to increase tenfold. The denarius became so universal that, by the middle of the first century BC, the inscription “Roma” was removed for lack of necessity. Roman minters produced millions of denarii each year, which flowed freely—not only within the Empire but anywhere Romans traded.
