He accepted and the cycle began again, leading to strong inflation and ultimately loss of trust in paper money, especially in 1755 during the 7 years war against the English. Inflation and fear of repudiation of any form of paper money became chronic. Peasants refused to sell their goods for anything other than metallic coins, shopkeepers raised their prices every week. Metallic coins still disappeared, as people hoarded them to protect them from requisition from the government who needed them to buy grain. The playing card money was over (william-king.www.drexel.edu)
Problems with money
Banking appears as a kind of alchemy, making wealth out of credit, something out of nothing. And the US dollar bill, a virtual crypt-text on the ethereal nature of money, can sum up the whole process. Sheer representation, money could become paper (text) backed by metal, then by imaginary metal, then by sheer imagination. By the eighteenth century all nation-states were in debt, to their own self-created banks. By 1973 the long alchemical process ended with Nixon's "toppling the gold standard," a feat of pure heraldic magic. The "Global Market" manifested as a gnostic sphere in which thought, transmitted at digital speed, coagulates as symbolic wealth. By now trillion dollars clay whirls around the globe in a noosphere (or "numisphere") have its own, devouring all such lesser ideologies as communism or democracy. "Money's gone to Heaven," become absolutely pure, and all-powerful. Money, though always based on trust, demands some material presence. Even electronic means of payments, though speediest for exchange, remain secured by paper records and ledgers, held in safe deposit, to reliably store their value. Humans go back and forth on money's proper ingredients. As times worsen, as in prison camps or during disasters bartering flourishes, trading with cigarettes or jewelry, even children. Today, only eight percent of the planet's money is in paper or coin. The rest is in ledgers.
Trust in barter is face to face. Contemporary trust in money is religious in the sense that its value relies only on rules made by banks and the customs of governance--far removed from most citizens' spheres of influence. And remember money differs from wealth, a matter of richer substance. Wealth is well being, an affluence, a contentment money may nurture but can never buy.