Dominic Frisby

Comedian, author, commentator.

How many of us can claim to be an acclaimed comedian? Or a respected libertarian commentator? A vigilante prankster? All three?

Dominic Frisby is one such case. In his time, he has released five albums of comedy music, published seven books, and staged over a dozen shows at the Edinburgh Fringe. His viral hit from last year, “We’re All Far Right Now” (upon being shared by Elon Musk) was viewed by 50 million people worldwide. In August, his latest book, The Secret History Of Gold: Myth, Money, Politics And Power, was published to critical acclaim.

Why did we invite him back?

We’ve been fans and friends of Dominic for years, both for his comedy and his political insight. With his last visit to Trig Towers three years behind us, it seemed high time we had him back.

But this time, we wanted to discuss something specific: inflation.

We all feel it, but do we truly understand it? To most of us, it’s a fact of modern life - an inevitable outgrowth of any capitalist economy. Our politicians claim to be powerless to its force; all they can be expected to do is keep the wolves at bay.

But is that true? We wanted to know, and we knew Dominic would be the man to ask.
What we didn’t know is how fascinating and alarming his answer would be.

What did we learn?

”This is the biggest story in world finance. And nobody’s looking at it.”

Dominic is fascinated by gold.

”It is older than the Earth itself. It is older than the Solar System. You can take a coin-sized piece and pound it into a leaf that is an atom thick or stretch it into a string half-a-mile long. It is incredibly maluable, but it is permanent. It is the closest you’ll ever come to touching eternity. The most immutable asset in the world.”

It’s no wonder that, for centuries, it was the universal currency. The fiat currencies we all take for granted today were, for decades, backed by a corresponding amount of gold. This was ‘the gold standard’, and one by one, the Western powers came off it across the 20th century. This, Dominic reckons, is when things went wrong.

“The final vestiges of it were abandoned in 1971. If you look at the supply of money since then, it’s ballooned and ballooned - and it’s chasing the same amount of goods. Prices have gone up and up and up. That’s why things are so expensive, and there’s very little stopping it.”

To illustrate his point, Dominic has some of the precious metal with him. He hands Francis a piece of the gold, valuing it at £600 - it’s the size of a coin. In fact, “what he’s holding… is the old pound coin.”

”It takes 650 new pound coins to buy the old pound coin. That’s how much we’re debasing our currency.”

But, never fear, the powers that be settled on a solution long ago. If the money is becoming increasingly worthless, the people simply need more of it, so we increase their salaries. The value of money is entirely relative anyway - it doesn’t matter what the numbers are, so long as they line up. But do they?

”If you look at prices in the UK, they’ve gone up twice as much here as they have in Ameica. And the price of almost everything has gone up. The only thing that’s come down is phone calls.”

And, as Dominic explains, the prices haven’t just gone up; they’re swallowing any meagre wage gains we’ve seen. Pulling from his new book, he walks us through a sequence of worrying stats that do much to explain the ever-increasing squeeze the people of Britain are feeling.

”Salaries go up every year, so we should be earning more money. But if you go up by salaries-measured-in-gold, we’re earning less than we’ve ever earned. And that’s the stable form of currency that predates the Earth itself.”

But what’s the larger story? Dominic comes to us with ‘the biggest story in world finance’, but price increases is no surprise or mystery. We’ve all seen it, and even if we don’t like it, it’s hardly a revelation.

Dominic is profoundly concerned. And if what he threatens is true, we all should be.

The perspective shifts when we consider what coming off the gold standard meant for geopolitics. What it did to the public’s buying power is one thing, but if countries are no longer beholden to the gold in their vaults, what then?