Mahathir: You Just Print More Money

“2. It is a great way to make money to replace the money that a nation has lost in a recession caused by abuses of the financial system. You just print more money.”

Quantitative Easing in Dr. Mahathir’s own words, is to solve a country economical problems thru the mean of printing money.

^ Quantitative Easing is an unfair advantage for the rich nations

“3. Actually I don’t think they actually print currency notes amounting to the hundreds of billions of dollars or pounds to replace the money they have lost. The amount of printed currency notes would be huge and be very difficult to transport to the banks which has lost the money. There would be a stream of armoured cars from the mints to the banks.”

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How are Silver Coins Minted?

Blanking, extruding, minting, these may be jargons to many of us, yet they are common terms in metal work industry.  Silver, a precious metal, is soft and easier to work on, compared to the other industrial metal.  When you are holding your American Eagles or Canadian Maples, all of them went through similar processes.  Let us explore what are the steps involves in minting silver coins.

1. Melt

Coins’ life journey began underground, where miners bring them up from the ground and minting factories bring them in as ores.  Another major source of silver today is from recycled sources, such as old picture/x-ray films & electronics.  As you can see from the video, they used the sides of the blanked-pieces and re-melt them, resulting in almost zero-waste production.

Pure silver’s melting point is 962 °C (1763.5 °F) thus to be safe, minters heats them to over 1093°C (2000 °F).  The solid silver will then melts into red hot liquid form. Then it is poured into billets, into a form or size depending on the factory’s machinery capabilities.  Thus the shapes and sizes of the billets varies from one to another.
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