It gets much more complicated than this. First about the dollar. It is the global reserve currency. As such it is the goto currency for global transactions of about everything bought and sold. Other nations' currencies are bought and sold against the dollar. One of the major driving factors concerning how many dollars are allowed to exist is what other nations are doing with their currencies, particularly the Europeans, Japanese, and now especially the Chinese. These other nations have also been printing massive amounts of fiat currency, especially China. If America allows the dollar to rise too high vrs foreign currencies, it hurts export sales, and makes imports cheaper. A policy known as beggar your neighbor. America cannot control how much money China prints, but America can and does print more money to ensure the trade range of the currency remains consistent. It's not just the US dollar that has lost almost all purchasing power, but actually all global fiat currencies in general. Second point, about the suppression of the gold and silver price, via using paper gold, and paper silver to flood the trade exchanges with artificial metal. This is allowed, in part, because several major countries, especially China, happen to be buying and hording real physical metal, in anticipation of the adoption of a new global currency to be put out by the central banks. This plan has been in the works for a very long time. About ten years back they reached a quasi agreement concerning what this final global currency is supposed to look like, and all of the players are to be backing it with a basket of real physical assets, including gold and silver. There's a list of acceptable assets, in various tiers of credibility. Physical gold and silver are now tier one assets for this future system. They are still in the acquisition stage of this plan, so the central parties are all looking the other way on purpose. Meanwhile various parties, banks, and treasuries, private corps, wealthy people, are all acquiring real metal at this time while the price is suppressed. Everyone knows the price is deliberately suppressed. Understand that one way of rebalancing the various national balance sheets is to revalue the price of the basket assets at the time the new currency is rolled out. If gold is revalued at $50,000 per ounce at that time, for example, with "paper gold" phased out, then America's current $300 billion national stockpile is increased in value to roughly $7.5 trillion on the national balance sheet. Suddenly the national debt does not look so unreasonable. Same for the other nations. Third point, about the dollar no longer being gold backed, it is however, now a petro dollar. At the time they took the dollar off of the gold standard, most of the oil in the world came from the Persian gulf, and it was shipped, globally, on primarily American owned tankers. If you wanted to buy oil, you had to buy it with American dollars. Everyone buys oil, even today. It is very hard to buy oil that isn't purchased in US dollars. Only recently have the Russians began to sell their oil in Rubles. Still. almost every major commodity in the world is still bought and sold with US dollars, or with currencies that are exchangeable to US Dollars. Today, lots of people produce oil. Not just the Arabs. The tanker fleets are also no longer dominated by just the big American oil firms. There are foreign owned and operated tankers everywhere. Still, America is very much in the game as far as global currency demand goes. They have the Swift system for currency exchange, and under Trump, America proved they still have plenty of physical assets, when Trump cranked up American domestic oil production, seemingly overnight. American banks are still among the largest in the world. Currently, the price of the US dollar has almost zero ties to the price of gold and silver, other than the fact that a significant amount of the daily trade continues with US dollars. In summation: If the central bankers start their global currency, and revalue the tier assets of the basket commodities, the price of gold and silver will be repriced upwards, whether America directly joins the new currency system or not. There are no dramatic physical shortages of gold or silver at this time. Also, as long as the price suppression remains in place, production of gold and silver will also remain suppressed. As an investment, gold and silver are both long plays. You buy it as insurance against fiat collapse. You also buy it against the day when the banks move away from paper gold trading. When that happens, gold should revalue sharply higher. That day may arrive sooner than people think. It was only recently that physical gold and silver were confirmed as qualified tier 1 capital assets under the new Basil Three international banking regulations. As such, artificial suppression of gold prices with paper gold will probably end soon. The banks need these assets to have value. Direct or indirect revaluation is also likely - don't forget the major banks, globally, are over leveraged to hell. Repricing the assets is one way to fix it. Read about Tier 1 capital here: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/t/tier1capital.asp