The Bearing
Subscribe
Sign in
Home
Notes
The Architecture of Money
Archive
About
Latest
Top
The bank that lends money it doesn't have, and why that's completely legal (#21)
Commercial banks create most of the money in circulation. The Bank of England admitted it in plain English in 2014.
Jul 6
•
Malcolm Hunter
The torch is passed: what gold got right that the next monetary technology had to inherit (#20)
Four engineering principles, one constraint masquerading as a feature. The job description was already written.
Jul 3
•
Malcolm Hunter
June 2026
What your great-grandmother kept under the floorboards, and why she wasn’t wrong (#19)
Folk wisdom about cash under the mattress was never financial illiteracy. It was an accurate read of counterparty risk.
Jun 30
•
Malcolm Hunter
Gold’s fatal flaw, and why it mattered more in the digital age than ever before (#18)
The properties that made gold trustworthy are inseparable from the ones that made it untransmissible. That is the whole problem.
Jun 26
•
Malcolm Hunter
Why every fiat currency in history has ended the same way (without exception) (#17)
Roughly 775 fiat currencies, zero survivors, an average lifespan of 27 years. The pattern is the point.
Jun 23
•
Malcolm Hunter
The Map, Updated
A standalone analysis, written in mid-June 2026.
Jun 21
•
Malcolm Hunter
15th August 1971: the day the world’s money became an experiment with no control group (#16)
On a Sunday evening, the last anchor between money and physical scarcity was removed. The experiment is still running.
Jun 19
•
Malcolm Hunter
The Map No Longer Matches the Ground
A calm, personal reading of how money, finance, and technology actually work, drawn for the years ahead rather than the ones behind.
Jun 18
•
Malcolm Hunter
Bretton Woods: the agreement that made the dollar king and gold its hostage (#15)
Forty-four nations, 730 delegates, one hotel in New Hampshire. The system you live inside started here.
Jun 16
•
Malcolm Hunter
The gold standard wasn’t perfect. Here’s what it actually achieved (#14)
A century of price stability, ended not because something better was found, but because something easier was wanted.
Jun 12
•
Malcolm Hunter
The conquistadors found all the gold, and it destroyed them anyway (#13)
Spain won the geological lottery and lost the monetary one. The mechanism is simpler than the history makes it sound.
Jun 9
•
Malcolm Hunter
What Roman emperors discovered when they started shaving the edges off coins (#12)
The first systematic monetary debasement looked like a clever solution. It was, until it wasn't.
Jun 5
•
Malcolm Hunter
This site requires JavaScript to run correctly. Please
turn on JavaScript
or unblock scripts
