Jeff Kahn graduated Yale University in 1981 with a degree in comparative literature, with a concentration in ancient literature. After working for several years for Paine Webber International in Hong Kong in the early eighties he took an MFA in film at AFI and spent a few years in Los Angeles before returning to New York to set up Solon Numismatics, now Gold-Stater. This venture served as a creative vehicle to take advantage of his love of history and collecting historical artifacts while betting on the perpetual debasement of the US and international currencies.
Each gold coin and medal tells a story about a certain era in world history, when gold was money - as it was for over 5000 years. And though the US severed the gold standard in 1971, the advanced economies have proven over the last fifty years that they are incapable of exercising fiscal and financial restraint without it; and as economies become progressively unfair, imbalanced, overfinancialized and over indebted we trend back towards an ever increasing dependence on the rediscovery of money of intrinsic value.
And the story of each gold coin and medal becomes as much a map for a rapidly approaching future, as it is an explication of the past.
