Sometimes, bad luck can strike. But other times, a catastrophe comes from a series of bad decisions, each the reaction to the consequences of the previous one. On August 15, 1971, President Nixon decreed that the US dollar would no longer be redeemable for the gold owed, even to foreign governments. This bad decision is the latter, a desperate attempt to avoid the consequences of previous bad decisions. Tricky Dicky’s Catastrophe Richard “Tricky Dicky” Nixon...
Read More »Is the Gold Standard the Economists’ Punching Bag?
The following article was written by Keith Weiner, CEO of Monetary Metals, as a counterpoint to this article, POINT: Should the US Return to the Gold Standard? No It was originally published at InsideSources, here: COUNTERPOINT: Is the Gold Standard the Economists’ Punching Bag? In many gyms, there is a punching bag in the corner. When someone feels frustrated or wants to show off, he can hit it. The gold standard is the punching bag in the economists’ gym. In an...
Read More »Gold Price Smashdown vs Gold on Fire
No sooner did we write Silver Rorschach Test, than the price of gold flash-crashed, or was smashed down. On Sunday afternoon in Arizona—i.e. Monday morning in Australia and Asia—the gold price dropped sharply. Gold bug sources claim that the drop was $100, but as we can see from the price graph included in this report, the actual crash itself was about $70. Some of these sources were very quick to assert that the drop was caused by naked selling of gold futures...
Read More »Gold, Stocks & Commodities- A Complicated Correlation
In our July 29 post titled How Gold Stacks Up Against Stocks, Property, Commodities and Big Macs! we showed readers charts of gold as a ratio to other assets and products. We discussed that gold competes with crypto and stocks for the investment dollars. It was clear that gold as a ratio of the S&P 500 Index and of the broader MCSI World Equity Index show that gold is ‘relatively cheap’ compared to these measures. But then we showed that this wasn’t the...
Read More »Moving from Gold-Redeemable to Irredeemable Currency
When we saw the following comment from a prominent otherwise-free-marketer, we knew it was time to write this article. “…the value of the Fed’s “liabilities”(which are so in name only) [scare quotes and parenthetic comment in original] bears only a very loose connection to the value of its assets.” This statement seems so simple. The Fed is the issuer of America’s and the world’s reserve currency (mainstream pronunciation “muhn-ee”). Observing that this paper has...
Read More »Motivated Reasoning About Silver
[unable to retrieve full-text content]We’re seeing the argument, again, that silver stocks are being consumed in solar panels, medical applications, and of course, electronics. This argument has a certain temptation. After all, the standard assumption is that value is inversely proportional to quantity. Purchasing power is widely believed to be 1 / N (N is number of units of currency issued).
Read More »Biden’s Dangerous Inflation Denials
[unable to retrieve full-text content]President Joe Biden is in denial about inflation. This week he superficially addressed the problem by admitting the obvious – that prices have been rising rapidly this year – while denying that the inflation surge represents anything out of the ordinary.
Read More »Quantitative Easing: A Boon or Curse?
Central banks’ massive Quantitative Easing (QE) programs have come under scrutiny many times since the central banks fired up the printing press and began quantitative easing programs en masse after the 2008-09 Great Financial Crisis. However, the increase in central bank assets due to quantitative easing programs during the crisis pale in comparison to the QE programs during the Covid pandemic. As economies recovered after the Great Financial Crisis many worried...
Read More »Celebrating Five Years of Interest on Gold
[unable to retrieve full-text content]This month marks the five-year anniversary of Monetary Metals paying interest on gold. It was July 2016 when we offered our first Gold Fixed Income True Gold Lease. The gold lease was to Valaurum for manufacturing their flagship product, the Aurum®. It paid 3.0% interest on gold to investors (you can read the original press release here).
Read More »Episode 22: Reimagining Physical Gold with Adam Trexler of Valaurum
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...
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