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Can there be innovation in physical gold? Absolutely! In our increasingly digital reality, innovation in the material world may seem a bit passé, but not to Dr. Adam Trexler, founder and President of Valaurum. Valaurum produces the Aurum® – the smallest verifiable unit of gold for investment available on the market today. Adam joined Keith and John for an invigorating discussion on what the future of gold is going to look like.

“We’re at the tip of the iceberg in terms of mainstream gold investment in the United States.”

That was how Adam began his thoughts on the state of gold today. Keith and Adam take a deep dive into all things gold – what makes gold money and the obstacles that stand in its way, the different forms and functions of gold, legal tender laws, and how we’re rediscovering the foundational economic truths about gold and money in new and exciting ways. We were delighted to welcome Adam as our first guest on the Gold Exchange Podcast and we hope you enjoy their conversation!

In this episode, Adam and Keith cover the following:

• The origins of Valaurum and their flagship product, the Aurum®
• The universal and timeless allure of physical gold even today
• The effectiveness of gold as an internationally recognized standard of value
• How much gold you would need to carry in your pocket to buy a house
• The importance of redemption or payment in physical gold
• The importance of monitoring spreads in the gold market, not just price

Additional Resources:

Valaurum’s Website

The Aurum®

Monetary Metals Gold Bond Certificate Using the Aurum (Blog Post)

Monetary Metals Issues the First Gold Bond in 87 Years

Valaurum also has the honor of being Monetary Metals’ first Gold Fixed Income Lessee

Episode Transcript:

John Flaherty: Hello, again, and welcome to the Gold Exchange Podcast. I’m John Flaherty and I’m here with Keith Weiner, founder and CEO of Monetary Metals. I’m also pleased to introduce our guest today, Dr. Adam Trexler, Founder and President of Valaurum. If you’ll indulge me, Adam, I’d like to give our audience a brief bio on you.

I would break Adam’s career down into three main epics. He began in venture capital, helping early stage companies raise equity capital. We’ll call epic two the academic leg of the race, where he was a professor and researcher for four years at the University of Exeter and Queen Mary University of London.

Finally, Adam founded Valaurum in 2012 and has provided the visionary leadership from this innovative and rapidly growing firm. Adam, you have the distinction of being our first guest besides Keith on the Goal Exchange podcast. We welcome you.

Dr. Adam Trexler: Good to be here.

John Flaherty: Adam, if you wouldn’t mind, I’d like you to take just a moment and introduce your company to our audience. Please tell a little bit about Valaurum’s mission, your signature product, and where you fit in the gold universe of companies.

Dr. Adam Trexler: Thanks, John. Great to be here. So I founded Valaurum in 2012 with a really radical invention that rather than casting coins or bars, we would deposit gold atom by atom and create a thin film of gold that would look like a conventional bill, but be a usable, spendable, precise denomination of gold in everyday quantities.

So we’re sitting right here on my desk, a one ounce gold coin issued by the US Mint, and it’s unaffordable. And I can’t get anybody to buy it off of me, except for in a standard store. The reason for that is that very few people can authenticate it.

So what our product, the Aurum does, that technology, Aurum technology is we’re able to create bills that have between a dollar and 50 and $150 worth of gold incorporated into them. The gold is recoverable. And more importantly, it’s recognised as a standard of value.

Any person can authenticate it. It’s extremely difficult to counterfeit. We have banknote level security features built into it. We also have unique, patented security features built into it. And all of these things come together to make physical held gold investment something that works in the 21st century.

John Flaherty: So apart from your exponential growth trend, I understand your sales have doubled in each of the last three years. I’d like to know what you’re most excited about, Adam.

Dr. Adam Trexler: Great question, John. And it’s been a little bit more than double, but double’s a good place to start. I’m really excited by what I see as a long term trend where more and more of the public is recognising the need for precious metals investment, not just as something to have in a ticker, but as a physical monetary instrument that they should own.

And I see that as inexorable process and one that already has two trillion dollars worth of physical bars and physical coins out in the marketplace. And I think it’s only going to grow.

John Flaherty: Great. And before we begin, one more note about the Aurum. As many of our listeners know, Monetary Metals issued the first gold bond in 87 years back in December. And because of the historical significance, we decided to print bondholders certificates not on boring paper, but on physical gold. So we turned to Valaurum to produce this for us, and the results were simply stunning.

So, Adam, thank you for your hand in helping to bring that to pass.

Dr. Adam Trexler: Delighted to it.

John Flaherty: Keith, you’ve been following Valaurum for many years. Is there anything you’d like to add before we get into our discussion today?

Keith Weiner: Yeah, just to touch on something Adam said. What excited me about their product initially was if you want to go to a grocery store, a gold coin is just by far too large of denomination. And so they have Aurum units that are a tenth of a gram. I think here you can do one hundredth of a gram.

Now I’m just remembering the initial one was the tenth of a gram, which is something like, what is it? $6 to $8 today?

Dr. Adam Trexler: Oh, it’s six dollars today. Yeah.

Keith Weiner: Which is a not unreasonable size denomination. And I think about the gold standard. And obviously, our focus is helping drive that using goal to finance things. But in terms of circulating in the economy, people need convenient units and Aurum provides the convenience that going stone.

And then there’s just a very practical consideration. I’ve seen one gram things. We have clients that leased gold from us that are doing one gram things. And it’s called a certi-card. So picture a credit card size piece of plastic. It’s about that thick. And then there’s expanded clear plastic window in the middle of that plastic credit card thing. And then there’s this little chip of gold that flows in there, and there’s your gram.

And then if you want to get into a tenth of a gram, it would be a little speck of gold hardly even a chip. So I think in terms of the pleasure of holding it, which is part of gold appeal for 5,000 years, you lose that when you’re holding this credit card with a window and there’s all that packaging and everything else.

So the Aurum was just cool from that perspective as well.

Dr. Adam Trexler: Well, and I completely agree, Keith. And I think from my point of view, the ability to have even a thousandth of ounce bill, that can have beautiful art on it, that can have all of these effects and complex crystallisations that can have a clear sign of atomically deposited metal, all of those features give people confidence.

But the most fascinating thing is even people who know something about investing and even precious metals, many of them have never held gold. Many of them don’t own it themselves. And it seems relatively foreign. We’re at the tip of the iceberg in terms of mainstream gold investment in the United States.

And so one of my things is I want more and more people to own gold, and maybe they’re not ready to buy a $1,900 coin. And certainly, it’s not within everybody’s means to be tucking away a $1,900 coin on every paycheck. But I give people a thousandth of ounce gold bill all the time. I say, hey, you don’t have gold. Here, now you do.

And that’s really compelling to people. And the idea that they could spend it, the idea that they can trust what it is, that it’s not a copper clad or tungsten clad coin coming out of China. It’s really compelling to people. And when they understand that it has intrinsic value, they get very, very excited.

Keith Weiner: Whenever I’m in a discussion with anybody, I love to ask them, have you ever held an actual piece of solid gold? And a lot of people say, no, they haven’t. And then so I have one. I love to hand them one just to see their reaction.

For those who do, the conversation takes a different tenor, because they get it that there’s a human attraction to gold. And it’s been that way for thousands of years. I mean, it was in Egypt thousands of years BC that was precious and had religious significance and related to the sun and all those things. And you see why gold endures as a universal money.

And if they haven’t held that, there’s certain things they don’t get about it. And it’s like the psychology aspect of it is interesting, too.

Dr. Adam Trexler: It certainly is. And I’m very interested in that universal effect as well. And the amazing thing to me about gold key is that if you’re a factory worker in China, or you’re a farmer in India, or an IT worker in India, for that matter, or if you’re a coffee grower in Kenya, you can buy gold. And its value is basically determined by a couple of international markets that provide a clear pricing indication and a value for that element. In a way, that’s very difficult for people to have access to otherwise.

So that international standard that you can take that gold anywhere, but also you can hold it in your hand and you have something of value across the world is very unusual. And to me, that’s one of the qualities that makes it a unique monetary instrument.

Keith Weiner: That’s right. If there’s a local surplus in one place and a local deficit, and is one plane trip away, and the market can even out until the gold price is consistent everywhere. That’s not true for sand, or bricks, or even steel, wheat, oil. All these things are very significant to transportation challenges and costs.

And so you have a very different market for Brent crude versus West Texas crude, where the gold market is basically one price. Unless some country, like India says, 10 percent import duty or something. Certain countries have messed with it a bit by having friction to it.

But other than that, it’s the price everywhere and universally recognised everywhere. If you’re dealing with a coffee grow in Kenya, does he understand your currency? They understand dollars, of course, but other currencies, they may not.Gold, everybody smiles. I get it.

Dr. Adam Trexler: They do. And one of the components of gold that makes it so compelling as that instrument is, is the density of value. I mean, if you can imagine trying to stockpile Brent crude in your garage to, it’s rather unattractive. But on a couple of occasions, I’ve been in this strange situation of needing to do a run to a vault and carrying enough gold in my jacket pocket to buy a house.

And that density of value, while it’s still a physical commodity, is just extraordinary and almost unique.

Keith Weiner: Let’s make into perspective for the listeners. So crude oil is, what, $70 a barrel, roughly?

Dr. Adam Trexler: Right, today.

Keith Weiner: So if you wanted to pay somebody a thousand dollars worth of oil, you’re into one of the 15 barrels, and a barrel of oil is 50 gallons. So you’re looking at something like 1,500 gallons, like swimming pool size amount of crude oil, which, by the way, is toxic, degrades when exposed to oxygen or sunlight. And that’s worth $1,000. That’s not even that big of transaction. And you need a swimming pool that was sealed off from oxygen and sunlight, too.

As I always joke with people, and I say, okay, imagine the truck is going to be at your house in five minutes. And the guy’s going to hop out with a truck and say, sir, where would you like your oil? And you realise the impracticality of anybody trying to deal in oil other than the specialty industry that has the tanks and the safety equipment and the anti-exclusion devices, all the rest of that, whereas a thousand dollars worth of gold is half an ounce.

Dr. Adam Trexler: Yeah, so the beauty of Aurum is that you could count out five or 10 Aurum bills, depending on the specific weight and pay precisely. Of course, you could do that with a liquid oi, but I’d hate to be there with my measuring cups addition, you the precise amount of oil. So that divisibility and that density of value, frankly, that safety is really attractive.

And the other thing I think about is a lot of people are doing innovative things, both with gold and with other commodities, in terms of putting those on to a distributed ledger and then having custodial storage somewhere else. I think those are really interesting memes of making trade have less friction.

However, the really interesting thing to me about gold is that you can take that physical delivery. You can hold it in your hand. And that provides the final certainty in terms of proof and ability to receive exactly what you need and exactly what you’re entitled to.

Keith Weiner: There’s a really important economic point about that. And unfortunately, economists have really either been dismissive and a little pejorative or just done some hand waving, and they call it hoarding. And then it seems to say that word, everyone rolls their eyes and shake their head and the conversation moves on.

But it’s really important, economically, that there be a means of final payment. And since we’re physical beings that live in a physical world, the final payment means you’re taking delivery or something physical. And not everybody needs that and not every transaction and not every day.

In fact, most of the people most of the time don’t demand that and don’t need it. And, of course, observers of monetary systems have observed that when the currency is redeemable, then that tends to keep, the banker is honest. And then when you declare to be irredeemable, as Roosevelt did in the United States in 1933, and then worldwide, Nixon was the last nail in the coffin, then that gives them license to be perhaps less forthright in how they deal, because there’s a redemption mechanism.

Every banker every day is faced with, okay, so I think I can get away with something. And everybody finds out, they’re just going to withdraw all their gold. They’re now going to be be bankrupt. And gold versus any other commodity just serves that so well.

And I just want to underscore for everybody listening to this. When Adam said, he can carry in his jacket pocket enough value to pay for a house, or maybe not, with the current boom in housing prices have gone up so much, that’s not true anymore.

Dr. Adam Trexler: Two jacket pockets.

Keith Weiner: A modern, large form factor iPhone would be something like two kilos if that was made out of solid gold. Two kilos is what’s that, about five pounds?

Dr. Adam Trexler: 4.4 pounds, and that would be $120,000 melt today.

Keith Weiner: Right, $120,000 is four pounds. I mean, really, no joke, you really could put that in your jacket pocket. And then if you’re in jeans, you could put several more kilos each on you two front pockets. And if you had a backpack, you can have a million dollars worth of value easily.

There’s no other commodity that comes close to that, with exception of a few other rare metals, but they don’t have the recognisability. I ran an experiment for myself personally. This is years and years ago. I was traveling to London relatively frequently.

I was just fascinated with the currency exchange in the airports and also on the high streets there. And seeing the bid ask spread, if you wanted to trade your dollars to pounds, pounds for dollars, what was that spread? And could you walk into a coin shop here in Main Street and buy Gold Eagle and then go over there and sell it for pounds at a tighter spread?

And the answer is yes, if you’re comparing to the guys in the airport. No, if you’re comparing to the best price you can get on a high street. So the Eagle just had slightly wider spread.

But now if this was Kenya and you’re talking about the… What do they have there? I want to say they have a showing the currency there. The spreads would obviously be much wider against the dollar versus the pound. The pound is one of the big currencies in the dollar index, very liquid currency.

The other currencies, I think you probably have a tighter spread by bringing gold coin over versus by bringing stack with dollar bills. So they’re very practical considerations, friction and trade, not just thinking, OK I’m going to buy this because I think it’s going to be $60,000 by tomorrow morning.

Dr. Adam Trexler: I’m delighted you bring up the notion of spread, Keith. And I think that many people who consider themselves seasoned gold investors have gotten too fixated on melt and pay too little attention to spread. And here’s what I mean by that is, a lot of times gold bullion today is priced in terms of the melt value or the underlying value of the gold and some premium on top of that.

And there’s fascinating pricing things that have happened with this. But one of them is that everybody said, well, I want to get the cheapest gold possible, which tends to be commodity bar. The problem is that bar doesn’t necessarily command the same premium on the other end, and in general, people will tend to melt it down. So what you have then is a close value to melt, but not necessarily a good spread.

And from Valaurum’s point of view, and I think this is common sense, what we should be looking for in the gold market is something that is easily recognised, is easily authenticated. There will be other associated costs to that utility. We think that Aurum is one of the best of those products.

But we look for tight spread between the buy and the sell. And I think we’re at its infancy, but we’re very interested in creating a tight buy and sell spread rather than just being focused on this race to the bottom melt price. We want to get the best products out there that command a premium and maintain a premium, because we think that that will create the most efficient gold market where people will easily authenticate and pay an arrow spread.

And so that’s I think the direction that the gold market will go in. But it does require a mental shift from buying the cheapest bar you can possibly buy to buying recognised gold forms like, you’re probably looking at a Liberty gold coin from the US Mint to Maple Leaf for those ounce denominations and then we think as you get into the 20th of an ounce size Aurum.

And I think that that will become the standard for gold ownership and investment because it naturally has less friction.

Keith Weiner: Yeah, I was going to say it’s a institutional level. And for high networks, investors that are keeping depository accounts, the kilo bar or the hundred ounce bar has the tighter spreads, provided you don’t take it out. As soon as you take it home, it loses the integrity of this chain of custody, and there’s a good chance if we try to bring it back, they’re not going to take it back. So I’ll just say, well, we’ll melt it and we’ll let you know what it’s worth after it’s melted.

Of course, professional depositories do have X-ray guns, and they have electrical and acoustic instruments to try to figure out if it’s a hunks in core and just wraps in gold or whatever. But if you’re trying to pass that bar to anybody on the street or even a relatively sophisticated retailer, probably never have the equipment to figure out if that bar is fake or not.

I think most people probably wouldn’t really know if the bar was lead painted in gold. A more sophisticated person would, because lead is a lot lighter than gold for the same bulk. So for taking things out of the system and having it in your hands and interacting with other people who aren’t industry specialist, then you need something that’s recognisable and not easy to counterfeit. And that should be rewarded with the tighter spread.

One of the things that excites me about where we’re at marketwise is we’re in a place where Monetary Metals is doing this in our area and you mentioned spreads on your product. We’re conducting experiments in monetary science using the world as our laboratory. That is so cool.

I don’t know how many listeners think that’s cool or not. Maybe everyone’s going to say case, Keith, you’re just a geek. Shut up.

Dr. Adam Trexler: I think it’s a cool, Keith.

Keith Weiner: It’s like there’s certain knowledge that it’s been lost and then other things that are just being developed new for the first time. And we have a chance to test and then proves the hypothesis that this works this way or this doesn’t work this way or whatever.

And you can run experiments as just they’re super cool.

Dr. Adam Trexler: Well, and I think one of the interesting things here is when you see this with a hundred dollar bill, so it was pretty easy to spend a hundred dollar bill for quite a while. And then other governments, I think North Korea began counterfeiting American US hundred dollar bills, and suddenly they became harder to spend than other US bills. And they had to update the security. And it seems to me that’s roughly on a seven to 10 year cycle.

But the form of gold, that good delivery bar that only works in custody, that’s been around for hundreds of years, essentially. And the coin is a monetary form is obviously thousands of years old. I have Greek coins.

Keith Weiner: Goes back to the Kingdom of Lydia, which I think around 600 BC was the first old coin.

Dr. Adam Trexler: So what do we do? Firms have been trying to make coins more difficult to counterfeit. But to me, there’s this wonderful proliferation of paper-like polymer-based anticounterfeiting features. And we are bringing that together with gold to make something that’s truly authenticatable in the 21st century in physical delivery.

And to me, that just makes more sense than the coin form for any of those small denominations.

John Flaherty: Adam, I believe you mentioned earlier, but there are at least three countries that you’ve been involved with in helping them to issue your Aurum product has legal tender. Is that right?

Dr. Adam Trexler: That’s right, and announcements of more coming.

John Flaherty: Awesome. So we also see a trend here in the States of several states taking steps to eliminate taxes on gold to free it up for more circulation. But perhaps I’m sure you gentlemen have a few thoughts on these trends and what role they might play in a path back to the gold standard.

Keith Weiner: Yeah, let me jump in on this first, because I’ve been involved at the state level and testifying and helping pass these things successfully in Arizona, not so successfully in Texas. Surprisingly, the state that created the Texas State Depository for gold, they’re to fit to pass a bill that recognise gold and silver as legal tender. Although the tax issue is smooth in Texas because they don’t have a tax, better than income tax anyway. And there’s no sales tax on gold there.

I think there’s the state-by-state movement. It’s maybe not as rapidly developing, say, the marijuana movement, but I think there’s now a dozen states that have done something recently to recognise gold in a more formal way, or at least repeal the taxes. But imagine if that continues. That could go to Washington.

And politicians in Washington are, if nothing else, sensitive to the mood of the people and eager to get on the right side of every trend and get the photo op. So enough states do it, then Washington may pass something to repeal the capital gains tax on it.

One of the bizarre things, too, and I researched this in my testimony, there’s not really a lot of revenue raised by tax in gold, like capital gains on gold. This is going back some years. No tax, what state was it? It was like three million dollars for the whole year was the states tax revenue on the capital gains on gold.

I mean, it was nothing and I extrapolated that to Arizona based on the population of Arizona. I don’t remember what state it was now. Like in Arizona, I would have been a few hundred thousand dollars of revenue to the state for the whole year.

I’m like, guys, there’s no there, there. All you’re doing is preventing transactions. You’re just stopping people from doing business. You’re not even arguably the benefit to the state of getting taxes. You’re not even getting that. Just let go.

And it took five years. It was vetoed by a Democrat governor once and two Republican governors, one of them twice. And then finally, the will of the people was heard. So that’s my observation on this movement.

Dr. Adam Trexler: Yeah, I think from a conceptual level, gold is obviously not money in the same way that it is not declared something that must be compelled to be accepted that then United States government doesn’t see fit to demand that I can pay Keith for my coffee and gold.

Keith Weiner: Let me just interject if I may.

Dr. Adam Trexler: Sure.

Keith Weiner: In thousands of years of history, nobody has ever had to be forced to accept gold. It’s the debtor who might want to choose to pay something lesser quality and then has to go to court and be told, no, no, no, you got to settle here. Your debt has a green and gold. It’s a very lopsided asymmetrical situation.

Dr. Adam Trexler: Agreed. But I think a complementary point is that, most, if not all central banks, hold gold for its historical longterm value because it has no default or political risk, because of its liquidity, because of its divisibility for their purposes. This is a monetary instrument. And to treat it as just a commodity is really quite strange.

I mean, the US Mint is issuing gold bullion based on its gold value and its legal tender. It’s legal tender with a small face value. This is clearly a monetary instrument. You can argue it’s not the money of the land, it’s not the USD, it’s not the greenback. But why there should be capital gains on it? I see is illogical, and to call it anything but a monetary tool also seems strange to me.

Keith Weiner: I may be alone in the world and taking this position, but I’ll happily die on this hill. And I make a distinction between money versus medium of exchange. And I would say that gold is money. It’s still behaving as money. But it’s not the medium of exchange.

If you try to walk into a grocery store today or a car dealership where the transaction sise is suited, you can’t buy a car and count down 20 Gold Eagles. It’s not a medium of exchange. But it is universally recognised, universally accepted. And if I just put a spread of any commodity, in so many ways it doesn’t behave like any other commodity.

The most interesting of which is we continue to accumulate it after thousands and thousands of years of accumulating it. There is no such thing as a glut in gold. The minimum of commodity if you accumulate a certain amount, there’s a glut. And then the price crashes and nobody produces anymore because they can’t make money in producing it. And then all the consumers are incentivised to consume it more. And the glut is worked off and eventually the market gets back to normal.

In the case of gold, there is no such things a glut. And that’s exactly what you’d expect money to be. There’s not a particular limit on how much money people want to hold. And if more gold is pulled out of the ground and therefore more money comes into the market. There’s always a bid for money. And the bid for money is greater than the cost of mining most of the time. It’s an interesting arbitrage there, but most of the time that’s true.

And so it absolutely behaves as money, but not as medium of exchange. And I make that distinction. Most people define money as the medium of exchange. And clearly by that definition, gold isn’t money. But yet there’s a need for understanding the concept that trades and works in some way different from all of the commodities. And what is that way? And that’s obviously what we’ve been talking about on this session.

Dr. Adam Trexler: Two points about that, Keith. And this is really some of the centre of the things that fascinated me about money in general. I would say the overall investment market has been obsessed with media of exchange. And I think there’s been amazing technological innovation in media of exchange. I would say a lot of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency-

Keith Weiner: No, let’s not go in there. No, no, no, no, no, sorry.

Dr. Adam Trexler: Or at least it hopes to be. But I would put Visa and Mastercard, these are all Venmo. These are all media to make exchange have less friction. What typically has been neglected in the last 30 or 40 years is store of value, particularly in the United States, because the greenback has been such a standard for value storage.

However, internationally, gold has done nothing but appreciate as a store of value. And Americans are rather late to the party with this. But how do you store value with density, with security, with certainty? And the dollar has had something to say about that, the Euro has been that, and also gold.

And that’s why there’s two trillion dollars I mentioned earlier of physical gold in investment forms, and it’s largely as that store of value that will last, frankly, forever. There’s gold that has been melted down from ancient Lydia that’s circulating now in the form of bars or coins. It doesn’t go anywhere. It’s been here for thousands of years, and we continue to increase the pool of it. A third of the gold that is circulating today is probably ancient.

Keith Weiner: Yeah, it would just recirculate.

Dr. Adam Trexler: Certainly from 19th century back. So that pool of gold isn’t going anywhere, and we continue to need more.

Keith Weiner: I was this going to make an ironic observation about the dollar store value. One of the Federal Reserve’s legal mandates enacted in law is to maintain the purchasing power of the dollar. And so the Fed states that it’s trying to price stability is how they talk about it on their website. And price stability is defined as two percent debasement in perpetuity.

And I always click to say, George Orwell, I don’t know if he’d be smiling or rolling over in his grave, but, man, that’s a perfect example of Orwellian double thing right there. But they’re trying to debate it on purpose because all the living economists, all the King’s horses and all the King’s men and all the King’s horses’ wife, agree that you create jobs and prosperity and exports and GDP by debasing the store value on purpose. And it’s like burning down a little bit of your house every year, but only a little bit.

It’s only two percent. We call that help stability.

And I would like to just touch on that point and remind people that this goal doesn’t have that problem, obviously.

Dr. Adam Trexler: Well, and that ability to hold value as it is, and I think people have gotten oversold on the speculative potential of gold, which always could be there but at the cost of a real disaster for the national currency, you’re thinking that speculative capacity is there. But the real value of gold to me is to buy something that I know that my children, when they’re adults, will be able to use, to buy something that 20 years from now, when I hope to retire, will be similarly valued, to be able to take the very long view and prepare for our fundamental time passing.

This is a basic problem of humanity. And gold has been playing that role. And say it’s anything but at her to deny that need is almost perverse to me. So we just have this deep need for planning across decades, if not centuries. And that’s what let’s humans build great things and not to speak of individual careers, individual life paths.

And when we have monetary instruments that respect that process, it’s intimately linked to not chasing the next quarter, but how do we build things of value and store value over a long period? And I think that’s where gold really shines.

Keith Weiner: If you’re saying if someone’s trying to build a multi-generational family trust, they wouldn’t put a stack of hundred dollar bills in that trust and just assume for their grandkids, that will be fine, that there might be issues with that?

Dr. Adam Trexler: I might worry for them. At two percent a year, that’s pretty scary to me.

Keith Weiner: That’s right.

John Flaherty: Well, gentlemen, I think that’s all the time we have today. I think we’ve been consistent with our podcast promise to discuss timeless principles. And we’ve done that today. Thanks, again, to Adam for being our special guest, and for both of you taking the time to share your thoughtful insights on these important topics. And to our audience, thank you for joining us on the Gold Exchange.

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2021-03-05

Our previous episode on “money printing” veered into fractional reserve banking at a few points, so this week John Flaherty and Monetary Metals CEO Keith Weiner dive into that topic.

Episode 13: The Pressing Problem With “Money Printing”

2021-02-26

The phrase “money printing” conjures images of a giant printing press spitting out sheets of hundred dollar bills somewhere in the basement of the Fed. But is that what’s actually happening lately? Absolutely not. Join John Flaherty and Monetary Metals CEO Keith Weiner for a conversation that will likely make you say “WOW!” or “Whaaat?” or maybe even “Oh, NOW I get it…”

Episode 12: The Yield Purchasing Power Paradigm

2021-02-20

Most people think in terms of purchasing power: how much can one’s cash buy? In this week’s episode, CEO Keith Weiner & John Flaherty discuss an alternate perspective. Instead of spending your capital, what if you invested it to earn a return? What can that return buy?

Episode 11: The Common Ground Between Bitcoin & Gold

2021-02-07

Is there common ground the among proponents of gold and bitcoin? John Flaherty and CEO Keith Weiner take on that question in this episode.