We have a postscript to last week’s article. We said that rising prices today are not due to the dollar going down. It’s not that the dollar buys less. It’s that producers are forced to include more and more ingredients, which are not only useless to the consumer. But even invisible to the consumer. For example, dairy producers must provide ADA-compliant bathrooms to their employees. The producer may give you less milk...
Read More »Washington State Politicians Drop Cynical Attempt to Impose Taxes on Gold & Silver
Well, here’s some encouraging news… Efforts in Washington State to impose sales taxes on gold and silver were SHUT DOWN today thanks to intense efforts by the Sound Money Defense League, a group of in-state coin dealers led by Dan Duncan, the Association of Washington Businesses, and a large number of vocal grassroots supporters. Here’s the backstory… Since last month, a few misguided Washington State senators and...
Read More »New Inflation Indicator, Report 14 Apr
Last week, we wrote that regulations, taxes, environmental compliance, and fear of lawsuits forces companies to put useless ingredients into their products. We said: “For example, milk comes from the ingredients of: land, cows, ranch labor, dairy labor, dairy capital equipment, distribution labor, distribution capital, and consumable containers.” There are eight necessary ingredients, without which milk cannot be...
Read More »Debt and Profit in Russell 2000 Firms
This week, the Supply and Demand Report featured a graph of debt vs profitability in the Russell 2000. Here’s the graph again: This graph shows a theme that we, and practically no one else(!) have been discussing for years. It is the diminishing marginal utility of debt. In this case, more and more debt is required to add what looks like less and less profit (we don’t have the raw data, only the graphic). We do not view...
Read More »Gold & Basel 3: A Revolution That Once Again No One Noticed
Via The Saker blog, By Aleksandr Khaldey Translated by Ollie Richardson and Angelina Siard cross posted with https://www.stalkerzone.org/basel-3-a-revolution-that-once-again-no-one-noticed/ source: http://www.iarex.ru/articles/65626.html Real revolutions are taking place not on squares, but in the quiet of offices, and that’s why nobody noticed the world revolution that took place on March 29th 2019. Only a small wave...
Read More »West Virginia Joins Growing Sound Money Movement – Six Other States Now Weighing Their Own Bills to End Taxes on Gold & Silver
Before the ink could even dry on West Virginia Governor Jim Justice’s signature on a repeal of sales taxation on gold, silver, platinum, and palladium bullion and coins, legislators in Wisconsin and Maine introduced similar measures in their own states. All told, 39 states have now reduced or eliminated sales taxes on the monetary metals, and Wisconsin, Maine, Kansas, Arkansas, Minnesota, and Tennessee are all actively...
Read More »What Causes Loss of Purchasing Power, Report 7 Apr
We have written much about the notion of inflation. We don’t want to rehash our many previous points, but to look at the idea of purchasing power from a new angle. Purchasing power is assumed to be intrinsic to the currency. We have said that the problem with the word inflation is that it treats two different phenomena as if they are the same. One is the presumed effect of rising quantity of dollars. The other is the...
Read More »SOUND MONEY: A BIBLICAL PERSPECTIVE – PART II
«Because gold is honest money, it is disliked by dishonest men.“ – Ron Paul The value of silver and gold is given by their own nature Neither gold nor silver has value expressed in other units of account. Their value is expressed directly in their own weights. Everything else that is valuable (other assets, commodities, goods, services, or performed labor) is measured against a certain weight of these metals. In...
Read More »Sound money: A Biblical perspective – Part I
«It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain an idea without accepting it.»Aristotle In today’s world, it is obvious that the competition of ideas is under serious threat and with it, the much-needed discussions on how to deal with certain topics or try to understand the world we live in. That is particularly worrying, especially when one considers that the western world went through the process of...
Read More »Will Basel III Send Gold to the Moon, Report 2 Apr
A number of commentators have predicted that the rules of the Basel III bank regulations will cause gold to skyrocket (no, this article is not about our view that gold does not go up, that it’s the dollar going down, that the lighthouse does not go up, it’s the sinking ship going down in the storm). Will it? It would be easy to say—as with all of their other predictions of gold to infinity and beyond—“wait and see.” But...
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