You can’t fix a problem until you can define it. So, let’s define the global problem today: the strength of the U.S. dollar.

Outside of the Japanese yen’s self-imposed march toward extinction and the euro’s peripheral debt troubles, the buck is behind most of the financial struggles the world grapples with today.

Fix the dollar and you fix the world … and with it the U.S.

And the solution to the dollar is simple: Scrap it. Toss it onto the dung heap of dead currencies and begin anew. A fresh start with new scrip. Prettier this time, too. No more of the drab green paper with portraits of dead white men and blah federal buildings and monuments.

Bring back the currency art of yesteryear like this $5 silver certificate from 1896:

Or this $1 silver certificate from the same year, arguably the most beautiful banknote in American history:

So much this would accomplish (aside from making American currency aesthetically competitive with the world again).

Finally Free of the Fed

First, we’d lose reserve-currency status. No country would ever want to hold as its primary store of reserves a currency that a government purposefully destroyed. A reserve currency is both a blessing and curse, and it’s the curse side of the equation that, after all these decades, has created so much global angst.

Kill the buck and with it reserve-currency status and … no longer would global trade care about the dollar except to the degree that some country is trading directly with America. Commodities would no longer carry a dollar-denominated price tag, which would mean a strong dollar would no longer drive down the price of every commodity on the planet at the same moment, as it has done.

Commodity prices would reflect local and regional demands more accurately and not be influenced by the words, deliberations and actions of a small clique of bureaucrats in the Eccles Building in Washington, D.C., who set interest-rate policy, ostensibly, for America, but who, in reality, impact the entire world with those words, deliberations and actions.