Haha this article doesn’t seem to know much about money: in paragraph 1 it notes that Roman gold coins in India could be melted and reformed into other gold valuables, then in paragraph 2 it asserts that this suggests Rome ran a trade deficit.
It later claims that currency may have caused a plague…hello maybe it was trading that caused the bacteria to move
Thanks for that! It'd be interesting to see a comparison to Spain, the other big, fabulously wealthy empire in history that burned itself out in a similar manner.