Europe's central banks were not built to protect you, they were built to finance wars. The Bank of England launched in 1694 with a single purpose: lend William III 1.2 million pounds to fight Louis XIV, and collect interest in perpetuity. Parliament handed a private cartel a monopoly on note issuance. In exchange, the Crown got its war. Depositors got paper promises. The model spread like an infection. France watched and replicated. John Law established the Banque Générale in 1716, eventually converting it into the Banque Royale, which he used to flood France with paper livres backed by nothing but colonial fantasies about Louisiana. By 1720 the whole scheme collapsed, wiping out French savers across two generations and poisoning French confidence in paper money for over a century. The lesson Europe drew was not "stop doing this." The lesson was "do it more carefully." Germany formed the Reichsbank in 1876, Sweden had its Riksbank from 1668 (the world's oldest, and a blueprint every subsequent government copied). Each institution followed the same logic: centralize control, monopolize issuance, and give the state a captive lender when revenue from taxation proves politically inconvenient. Ludwig von Mises explained that inflation functions as a tax. Every unit of currency created without corresponding production transfers purchasing power from your savings to whoever spends the new money first, which is always the government. That process accelerated dramatically after World War One, when the gold standard's constraints became inconvenient for states that had already promised their citizens more than they could honestly deliver. The Weimar hyperinflation from 1921 to 1923 is the obvious horror story, but the quieter theft across the rest of Europe through the 1920s and 1930s cost savers just as much over time, simply spread across more years. Gradual expropriation carries less drama and less political resistance. Every European central bank operating today, including the European Central Bank created in 1998, runs on this same foundational logic: the sovereign needs money, the bank provides it, and you absorb the cost through prices that never quite return to where they were.