Franklin Sanders grew up in and around Memphis, Tennessee. He graduated with a BA from Southwestern at Memphis (now Rhodes College) in 1969. After two years in the U.S. Army, he attended graduate school at Tulane University and the Free University in Berlin.

Since 1980 Mr. Sanders has published and edited a monthly newsletter, The Moneychanger, “to help Christian people prosper in an age of monetary and moral chaos.” He has written or co-authored four books: Heiland, a novel of the future; The Greening (with Larry Abraham), an expose of the environmentalist hoax, and Paul Schneider, Witness of Buchenwald, a translation from German of the life of a pastor martyred by the Nazis. In 1993 Mr. Sanders wrote (with Jim Blanchard) Silver Bonanza: How to Profit From the Coming Bull Market in Silver. In 2001 he wrote The Next Great Depression Survival Manual and in 2004 Why Silver Will Outperform Gold by 400%, all available from The-MoneyChanger.Com

In 1980 Mr. Sanders opened his own company brokering physical gold and silver. Working for grassroots monetary reform, in 1984 he opened a gold and silver bank (warehouse exchange). This angered the federal government and IRS, which investigated and harassed him for 4-1/2 years, ruining his business. In 1990 Mr. Sanders and his wife, Susan, were indicted along with 24 others for allegedly operating a “secret bank” and conspiring to evade taxes. Each faced 19 years in prison. After the second longest criminal tax trial in American history, on July 9, 1991 the jury delivered “not guilty” verdicts on all counts for all defendants.

Mr. Sanders was also indicted in a related Tennessee case. Under a law which had never been invoked in the 19 years it had been on the books, agents accused him of not collecting sales tax on exchanges of gold and silver money for paper money, although the US constitution forbids any state to make anything but gold and silver coin a legal tender. He was convicted and rather than serve 73 months of “probation, went back to jail and serve out his sentence. The Tennessee court of criminal appeals overturned one count of his conviction, and he appealed conviction on the other count to the United States supreme court, which refused to hear the appeal in November 2000.