Back in the days of the Mongol and Roman empires, the process of stealing wealth from the peasants and savers wasn’t very difficult. A little extra bronze in the treasury’s crucibles meant that you could create a few extra denarii (plural for the Roman denarius), and the emperor could have himself a nice little shopping spree. If any zealots thought about getting out of line, a spear to the side and a soak in the Tiber would silence any would-be threats. With modernity comes complexity, though, and cross-border capital movements suddenly meant that the hard-laboring peasant could save his ...

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