Is the Current Money System Due to Expire?

"We're due for a new money system," he says. "It could be a basket of currencies, or three currencies—the euro, the dollar and an Asian currency—or something through the IMF."

A crisis—indeed, the current crisis—will precipitate the change in money systems, Greenberg suggests. "We have kicked the proverbial economic can down the road. At this moment in time the feeling is that the executive branch doesn't have that much control over the finances of our economy," he says.

The gold dealer fingers the government's loose monetary policy specifically as the source of the dollar's debasement.

"We're inflating the currency supply, and as a result prices rise. People are losing confidence in the currency and they want something with intrinsic value.

"Look, the dollar worked yesterday, and today, and for our entire lives," Greenberg adds. "But in our grandparents' lives it didn't work and in other parts of the world and at other times [currencies have failed]. At some point, we'll wake up and it won't work."

He cites Nixon's severing the dollar's gold convertibility as the most recent example, when the government was "printing more money to pay for the Vietnam War in August of 1971. France was making noise about wanting gold, not our dollars," so a new monetary system suited to a debased currency was instituted, Greenberg says.

Now, citing a litany of current troubles—the fiscal cliff, falling earnings, rising prices and a declining dollar among them—Greenberg thinks the system will buckle in some dramatic way.

"The stock market will drop 30 or 40 or 50%, paper [money] will be worthless, but gold and silver will [spike] in value."

Greenberg expects the secular upswing in gold to last another three to eight years. The bullion dealer says these days he even has investors purchasing physical gold and silver for their IRA accounts.

"At some point it will peak, then you exit," he says. "When everyone's going in, then get out and buy cash-flow real estate."