Tutankhamun
Cause of death
For a long time the cause of Tutankhamun's death was unknown, and was the root of much speculation. How old was the king when he died? Did he suffer from any physical abnormalities? Had he been murdered? Many of these questions were finally answered in early 2005 when the results of a set of CT scans on the mummy were released.
The body was originally inspected by Howard Carter’s team in the early 1920s, though they were primarily interested in recovering the jewelry and amulets from the body. To remove the objects from the body, which in many cases were stuck fast by the hardened embalming resins used, Carter's team cut up the mummy into various pieces: the arms and legs were detached, the torso cut in half and the head was severed. Hot knives were used to remove it from the golden mask to which it was cemented by resin. Since the body was placed back in its sarcophagus in 1926, the mummy has subsequently been X-rayed three times: first in 1968 by a group from the University of Liverpool, then in 1978 by a group from the University of Michigan and finally in 2005 a team of Egyptian scientists led by Secretary General of the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities Dr. Zahi Hawass conducted a CT scan on the mummy.
X-rays of his mummy, which were taken previously, in 1968, had revealed a dense spot at the lower back of the skull. This had been interpreted as a chronic subdural hematoma, which would have been caused by a blow. Such an injury could have been the result of an accident, but it had also been suggested that the young pharaoh was murdered. If this is the case, there are a number of theories as to who was responsible: one popular candidate was his immediate successor Ay (other candidates included his wife and chariot-driver). Interestingly, there are seemingly signs of calcification within the supposed injury, which if true meant Tutankhamun lived for a fairly extensive period of time (on the order of several months) after the injury was inflicted.
Much confusion had been caused by a small loose sliver of bone within the upper cranial cavity, which was discovered from the same X-ray analysis. Some people have mistaken this visible bone fragment for the supposed head injury. In fact, since Tutankhamun's brain was removed post mortem in the mummification process, and considerable quantities of now-hardened resin introduced into the skull on at least two separate occasions after that, had the fragment resulted from a pre-mortem injury, it almost certainly would not still be loose in the cranial cavity. It therefore almost certainly represented post-mummification damage.
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Bank for International Settlements
Dollar hegemony
Originally the BIS was intended to make sure that no one country could destabilize world currency. However, since the collapse of Bretton Woods in 1971, the US has effectively anchored the world's money with its own fiat currency, resulting in what is sometimes called dollar hegemony , a term coined by Henry C.K. Liu in 2002. In his 1975 book Money: Whence it came, where it went, John Kenneth Galbraith characterized one of the problems of the new arrangement being that the US became obligated to control inflation to a perhaps unreasonable degree, since other countries would suffer inflation whenever the US did. Alan Greenspan, who retired more or less coincident with the loss of the M3 indicator, was often criticized for focusing overmuch on inflation, but this tendency according to Galbraith was and is an inherent problem of the US dollar fiat economy.
Liu is even more critical of the problems it causes, notably distraction of domestic economic and social development efforts by constant unlimited exposure to the global financial markets and the export markets: without effective global capital adequacy and reserve requirements placed on the US, and without any mechanism to compensate for the effects of US inflation or asset bubbles on the rest of the world, a labour-exporting country will necessarily be subject to boom and bust and a permanent subordinate position in the global economy. The International Monetary Fund, more than the BIS, is implicated in this problem, as are of course most national governments which focus on export and GDP to the neglect of domestic demands, well-being and local resilience.
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Gold standard
International Gold Standard and the First Age of Globalization (1871-1901)
Germany was created as a unified country following the Franco-Prussian War; it established the Reichsmark, went on to a strict gold standard, and used gold mined in South Africa to expand the money supply. Rapidly most other nations followed suit, since gold became a transportable, universal and increasingly stable unit of valuation. See Globalization.
Dates of adoption of a gold standard:
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Gold bar
Value
Before 1968 gold traded at a fixed price of $35 U.S. per ounce under the gold standard. However following the decision of the USA to close the "gold window" and abandon the gold standard in 1970, gold rose over the next 20 years peaking at $850 in 1980. Gold then fell and 20 years later, by 2000 it was down to $279 an ounce. In recent years gold has been rising on the back of increased printing of money and large US budget deficits. By September 2006 the price stood at around $600 an ounce.
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