History desk · Vienna
Marguerite Adler
Monetary historian, contributing editor
Marguerite Adler writes about what people actually settled their debts with, and under which rules. She spent eleven years working through mint accounts, treaty annexes and central bank minutes before she wrote a word for a general audience, and the habit stuck: every claim in her reporting is tied to a document a reader could, in principle, request themselves.
Her work for TheGoldMagazine covers the long arc from Lydian electrum through the classical gold standard to the 1971 suspension of dollar convertibility. She is unusually sceptical of the two dominant folk histories — that gold was chosen for its beauty, and that the gold standard was a period of stability — and her pieces tend to end where the popular accounts begin.
She reads German, French and enough Latin to be dangerous around a 16th-century assay ledger.
Stories by Marguerite
Archaeology · 9 August 2026
The Hoard Problem: What Buried Gold Actually Tells Us
A field of gold torcs and coins is a spectacular find and a treacherous document. The people who buried it were not writing to us, and the reasons they had for putting it in the ground are exactly what the ground does not record.
16 min read
Monetary History · 14 July 2026
The Gold Standard: How a Soft Yellow Metal Became Money
For roughly five thousand years, humanity kept returning to the same element to settle its debts. The story is less about greed than about the unusually boring chemistry of atomic number 79.
14 min read