Gold, Silver, And The End Of The World

“What do you know about gold, Moneypenny?” – Goldfinger

Why don’t pirates travel on mountain roads?  S’curvy.

A reader writes:  “. . . if you could explain to me the rationale behind buying gold or silver as a hedge against economic collapse, I would appreciate it.”  I answered by sending him bikini graph after bikini graph, but yet he persisted in wanting to know an actual answer.

I don’t think anyone will complain that this one is a repeat . . . .

He had me cornered.  I wrote to him (embellished for this post and clarified for readability):

Thank you for the question.  I promise to answer, just as long as you give my dog bag safely.  He may be old and one-eyed and have diabetes and alopecia . . . we call him, “Lucky.”

It’s good that he’s not a dinosaur – he’d probably be called an eyesaur. 

I thought that I had already answered this question and looked for the post.

As I’ve got over 1,000 up, I couldn’t find it after I looked for about 22 seconds.  Maybe I developed notes on it and never posted?  Maybe I’m just lazy at searching.  In the worst-case scenario, a previous version exists, and everyone just has to deal with this new, superior post.

The question is a subtle one.  The first part of the answer is the degree of collapse.  I’ll start out with this idea: how bad does it get?

  1. Another Boring Wednesday: Would I rather have a ton of gold on a Wednesday morning than not?  Of course.  But I’d probably worry about George Clooney and his wisecracking band of thieves breaking into Stately Wilder Mansion.
  2. Personal Economic Problems: Again, in a sequel, having that ton of gold is still great, but I still have that pesky George Clooney problem.  In reality, gold is somewhat less liquid than cash, but having a bunch of it is still nice.  Also, if you bought gold in 1990, you would have had zero profit on it until 2006.  This was mainly due to sane economic policy and high-interest rates that tamed inflation.

Or is this why they were always after his Lucky Charms®?

  1. Recession: What’s going on in the economy?  If you look closely, silver and gold actually dropped in value at the start of the Great Recession in the 2000s.  As people liquidated their “stuff” so they could still buy the G.I. Joe® with the Kung Fu™ grip for their kid at Christmas, the price actually dropped.  For a while.  Then the price jumped up when it became clear that the Fed® would print as much money as required to choke every person on the planet.  In the fiat world, gold and silver are something I’d look to have.
  2. Depression – 1930s Style: This is a hard analogy – back in the 1930s, the dollar was backed in gold, until FDR (press S to spit) stole the gold from the American people.  Now?  The dollar is nothing more than, to quote Aerosmith, “a lick and a promise.”  (See below)
  3. Weimar-Style Hyperinflation: I don’t think we’ll get here, until there’s a lack of faith in the dollar.  Brandon is doing his best to make Jimmy Carter look like a master of economics, so, if hyperinflation hits?  Gold is awesome, and you might be able to repay your mortgage with five or six pre-1965 silver quarters.  So, yes, gold and silver make sense.  A lot of sense.

In a Leftist world, everyone is a Billionaire.  And also starving.

  1. Country Collapse: What happens if the country ceases to be?  It has happened again and again through history, especially with large “empire-like” countries that don’t have any sort of ethnic commonality.  Japan will always be Japan because there are Japanese and it’s a nation, not a country.  China, likewise.  Without a functioning country, there is no nation to fall back on.  This is where we add another precious metal:    So, yes, gold and silver, but understand that it might be some time before it’s useful again.
  2. International Collapse: Rome provides a powerful example here.  In Great Britain, they’re constantly finding hordes of money – including silver money, and gold.  Why?  Because people stopped using it, and you can’t eat it.  Did that last forever?  Of course not, but 100 years is nearly long enough.  Lead is nice here, too.

Who sang “Can’t Touch This” for Caesar?  1100 Hammer.

  1. Civilizational Collapse: What happens if there’s no oil for the cars – anywhere?  What happens if we don’t have phosphorus for fertilizer?  Bad things.  Gold and silver might be helpful, but lead is much better here.  If the warlord wants your stuff and you can’t keep it from him, welcome to no longer having that stuff.
  2. A Kamala Harris presidency: Looks pretty much like number 8, but with more makeup.
  3. A Neutron Star Eating The Earth: I suggest investing in SpaceX®.

I think that we underestimate the likelihood of things getting really, really bad.  To give an example, I once worked at the headquarters of a big company.  They asked me to look at disaster recovery.  I looked at all of the natural hazards that might hit the company.  The most likely disaster would hit the headquarters once every three hundred years.

“Huh,” I said to my boss, foreshadowing future writing endeavors, “a new civil war is far more likely than that . . . I mean if the company lasts that long.  Companies go out of business all the time.”

He was not amused.  Corporations tend to not like actual reality to interfere in their projections.  But, I maintain I was right.  How many companies have ceased to exist – big companies – since 2000?  I’ll leave that work to the reader.  Enron®, anyone?

Country music and calculators are both produced by Texas instruments.

Listen, I don’t mean to sound paranoid, but banks are giving mortgages out at 3.3% and inflation is at 6%, which means that banks will lose money every year as long as inflation is a thing.  How can they do this?  Volume!

No, I’m kidding.  The Fed® is giving them tons of money to lend cheaply to keep housing prices up.  When mortgage rates go up?  Then the housing bubble bursts.  So, we could end up in Scenario 3., 5., or 6. very, very quickly.

Gold and silver (in my NON FINANCIAL ADVISOR) opinion are awesome in most scenarios.  If it devolves past the point where order matters at all, then it comes down to weapons, political connections, preps, and sheer dumb luck.  If nothing happens, then my kids will get to enjoy some shiny metals after I pass away.

What’s the best way to tune a bagpipe?  A pitchfork.

I would, however, not want to put all of my eggs in any one basket.  I will personally limit the amount of gold and silver I own to about 10% of my net worth.  Why?  Random number – not bad if things go well in the rest of the world and gold and silver don’t go up in value.  If things go really south, it’s a decent enough hedge to act as a parachute as the plane goes down in flames.

So, that’s my answer:  it depends.  What do you think?  What Scenario above is the most likely?  What’s missing?

Ohhh, Lucky, come here, boy . . . oh, wait, he’s deaf, too . . . .

(Appended Graph)

Author: John

Nobel-Prize Winning, MacArthur Genius Grant Near Recipient writing to you regularly about Fitness, Wealth, and Wisdom - How to be happy and how to be healthy. Oh, and rich.

73 thoughts on “Gold, Silver, And The End Of The World”

  1. Some gold, a lot of pre-’64 silver.
    I think stockpiling minimum 1 year worth of basic necessities makes a lot more sense, along with the gun metal, lead & brass you’ll need to keep them from the savage hordes, just in case they come your way.

  2. I don’t hold precious metals as an “investment”, in the sense of buying low and selling high, but rather as a hedge against most forms of “money” becoming unavailable. I hold different precious metals, lead and brass, to protect the former precious metals.

    1. Absolutely. Your post was wonderful. Buy all of the things you listed first – guns, grub, and ground first. Then shiney things.

  3. Sorry, but if it gets to the point where fiat dollars become worthless, I will only be bartering for things I actually need, like food, hygiene products, pain relievers, bandages, etc. I am not a metallurgist, so I would not be able to tell if the supposed precious metals a stranger wants to trade with is actually what they claim it to be. They could easily pass off a gold-plated piece of jewelry or a fake gold coin or bar, and I wouldn’t know how to tell the difference. There are people out there today who are already scamming people with fake gold and silver products. Think how much easier their job will become when the fiat dollars become worthless, and the unsuspecting masses begin to accept precious metals in place of fiat dollars.

    2. Ahhhh, most of the time, it can be told . . . gold and silver sound different, and can be picked out at a distance in many cases.

    3. It’s sometimes useful not to think of gold as money to be spent when other forms of money don’t work, but as a way to preserve wealth (your stored up life, stored up work) THROUGH the disaster. Ask the Venezuelans if they wish they’d have had their life savings in gold coins, or bolivars in the bank…. or the Jews in Germany, or indians, or any number of other people. Heck, if you have a time machine (we do of sorts, ie books) you can look at the people of the southern US after the unCivil War. Small rectangles of paper before the war, worth something because of what was printed on it, same paper after the war, at least you could use it in the outhouse. Gold before the war, useful to buy things. Gold after the war, still useful.

      There are very few places and times when gold didn’t have value to SOMEONE in exchange for something else. Your home canned mushrooms, guaranteed to be tasty and probably not kill anyone, maybe not so much.

      And barter is fine in theory, but almost every culture everywhere invented money to act as the ‘middleman’ in barter exchanges. Even in recent history, in the US, there were lots of places that had their own ‘scrip’ to facilitate exchanges when “real money” became scarce. See also ‘community currency systems’ and “local scrip” and “token coins” and “trade tokens”.

      Like any other prep or spending choice, it has to match with your personal goals and desires, but I don’t see any harm in putting some of my stored up work into physical gold, if for no other reason than the coins can be beautiful in and of themselves.

      n

  4. Really, my pitiful holdings in precious metals is the beginning of a hedge against the banks giving me stock in the bank for my deposits. So whatever economic event would trigger that should be on the list. If it were not a good idea you would not read about JP Morgan buying it by the ton. Whatever you want to say about those people, they are smart.

  5. Don’t forget Ferfal’s advice about gold, and why you want some “broken gold”… You can sell a necklace one inch at a time.

    That image, trading gold jewelry for food, really had an impact on me.

    n

    1. That’s excellent advice. Sounds like pawn shops are the place to pick up some gold . . . or maybe form a partnership with a divorce attorney . . .

  6. John – – You said ” In Great Britain, they’re constantly finding hordes of money – including silver money, and gold. Why? ”

    My understanding is that most of these gold hordes that have been found come from the time of the Viking raids of Great Britain. They are believed to have been buried so as to keep them safe from the marauding Vikings. The owner probably was killed in the raid or taken as a slave and the location lost to his family.

    BTW, there is a humorous TV series from BBC called “The Detectorists” which you and the Missus might enjoy.It is about an oddball collection of folks who belong to a metal detecting club. Lead actor is Toby Jones.

    1. I’ve heard of *a lot* of Roman coinage from around the time of the pullout being found as well.

      The Detectorists . . . that sounds familiar. I’ll have to look it up . . . sounds right up my alley.

  7. Well, the form of “broken gold” that appeals to me is old wedding rings. If you pull out gold coins to pay for something, most people will wonder how many more of them you have. If you just slip a worn ring off your finger and pass it over, then a lot of people will assume it is the only one you have. People in general have enough problems without adding polygamy. With the present divorce rates there should be quite a lot available. They are also not huge, so there is less problem of making change for them.

  8. Pingback: Dissident Thoughts: Silver And Gold (And Lead And Brass)

  9. “…they only want to tax billionaires…”

    I still have my stamp collection from the early 60s that has two Weimar stamps. One is 5 Million Marks. The other is a 200 Mark that has been cancelled over to be 20 Million Marks.

    1 x 10(5) inflation. 100,000X. Before TPTB shut down the Internet, I’ll load up on “Forever” 1st Class USPS stamps.

  10. Sir Douglas Adams of Hitchhiker fame wrote of the Golgafrinchans, a large group of clueless souls sent off from their home planet on a fraudulent mission by their overlords who merely wished to unburden themselves of a useless third of their population (consisting of HR types and telephone sanitizers).

    After crash-landing on prehistoric Earth, the hapless boobs set up a society that was the precursor to modern Idiocracy, adopting the leaf as their unit of currency. Although they all became fabulously wealthy overnight as a result, they very quickly fell prey to raging hyperinflation. Their solution was to demolish all the forests so as to rein in the money supply.

    I see eerie parallels between Adams’ fictional imbeciles and the frighteningly real imbeciles running the show in 2022 America. How soon before there will be another FDR-esque gold grab and we are reduced to hauling wheelbarrows-full of banknotes (or leaves) to the market for a crust of bread?

    1. The Left will just shoot the middle class under the theory that will stop the Fed from printing more cash . . . .

  11. I have some mixed thoughts about investing in gold. This is probably due to that I don’t have a lot to invest, it’s hard to convert into sandwiches, and if I have to haul-ass, I don’t want to make more than one trip.

    1. I read over and over about some guy driving with a load of cash and it being confiscated. I wouldn’t think there are dogs trained to sniff out gold. But they do have dogs to sniff out cash. Just sayin’

    2. it’s hard to convert into sandwiches

      –not really, there are gold buyers everywhere, and pawnshops almost always buy gold too. There is a whole industry dedicated to getting more of the shiny for themselves and giving you fiat…

      The ounce in smaller coins I carry in my travel bag would be easy enough to change to local scrip anywhere in the US anyway and it’s a lot smaller than $1500 in cash. (although having the cash with me while traveling is good too.) 15 bills is actually kinda bulky.

      n

  12. A few ounces of gold will buy a lot of tools and materials now. Productive assets to make and repair things people need.
    Skill sets will need to be learned, or hired- but the problem with “money”, whether fiat, PM’s or anything else, is it does not generate income. If society gets to the point where a carpenter or a plumber or a small machine shop cannot earn enough to buy food, we are well and truly sk-rew-ed. AKA warlord land. At that point the critical thing will be finding the best warlord to throw in with- they will need mechanics. Harness makers if it is Full Mad Max. Storing “money” is looking at the problem from the wrong direction, IMO. Better to buy assets.

    Along that line- when the power is gone, the ubiquitous Li lion battery tools may prove to worth their weight in gold. Especially if they can be solar charged. Anyone know something about that?

      1. Sheee-iiiitt…

        Bet my life-long habit of buying oil lamps every time a rummage sale has one under $5 might just pay off…

        That and buying two-man bucks, braces-n-bits, cans/boxes/bags of random fasteners/specialized tools/belly lint will be worth almost as much as the knowledge to use them all, almost as much as proper distillation.

        Lithium batteries only last so long…

  13. I wouldn’t say “save 10% in precious metals”. I would say, precious metals are the last thing you buy, and then it doesn’t matter what percentage that is. The exception is to already have at least one years property tax ( more is better ) in silver, assuming silver is $100 an ounce ( it will get much higher, JUST adjusting for supply, not including inflation ) when you cash it in to pay the tax. This is just hyperinflation insurance, prior to collapse. However, most of my wealth is in assets I can use. Oil Age assets, to include insulation, lumber, not so many guns but lots of ammunition, wheat by the ton, because Food First, and even solar panels ( which will be set up to be able to bring in nightly, to prevent theft ). Any other asset is digital, dependent on the dollar and hence worthless already ( we just haven’t admitted it yet ). PM’s are nice to have, but don’t kid yourself. The end of oil is the end of most of the population. And the beginning of a Dark Age, with no trade. No trade, no need for PM’s. As stated in this excellent article. Yes, please, Sir, may we have another? More Doom, more Gloom. All hail Malthus.

    1. The 10% was just my personal number, not a general suggestion. I’ll clarify that.

      And, as you and Arthur have pointed out – PMs come last in the preps.

  14. I generally don’t comment on economic posts. Doing so puts too strong a spotlight on my own personal ignorance of such matters.

    All I will say is that bagpipes were played at our wedding, at my request. And, yes, knowing this, The Missus agreed to go through with it.

  15. Gold is fine, if you have an army to protect it.

    Silver, you can protect with just a bank vault.

    I have neither of those, so I invest in tools, some of which might come in handy for gunsmithing. More relevant to our immediate present, a couple of pop rivets fastened the blade of my bent snow shovel back into position, which I was then able to use to help dig a new neighbor out of her snowy driveway, and to dig another neighbor’s Uber driver out of his stuck position. So, now I have three new civil relationships (counting the Uber driver, though maybe I’ll never see him again), for the cost of two pop rivets and the rivet-setting tool. I feel much wealthier.

    I also have a jar of pure-copper pennies, and copper/nickel nickels. If the deal goes down and we need to re-start a new local economy, they’ll be tokens of exchange. The main problem with that is, what would I want to buy from my complacent neighbors? Maybe I can teach them to grow vegetables instead of grass, and we can specialize and trade. (To maintain genetic vigor, it’s not sufficient to grow just a few plants and save the seeds, and it’s important not to allow crossing between related crops, such as carrots and Queen Anne’s lace (wild carrots).)

    1. I heard of one millionare that has been doing exactly the same thing – hoarding nickels. They’re already underwater on the melt value….

      1. “…melting down nickels…”

        That was Kyle Bass. Bought $1MM from the Dallas Fed, sold them to a Mexican for $1.25MM, who melted them down. At that time the melt down of a nickel was almost 9¢.

  16. I have a book recommendation, though I haven’t read the whole thing yet. “The Anatomy of Revolution”, by Crane Brinton, “Revised and Expanded Edition” (1965). Scholarly yet entertaining, he finds parallels between the English, American, French, and Russian revolutions. What factors make a government susceptible to revolutionary change? What kind of people lead and support revolutions? Why do revolutionary governments “eat their children” (e.g., why Trotsky had to go into exile, and still be murdered.) There’s a lot to think about here.

      1. John – So far, the big “take-away” is that governments are overthrown, when they cannot meet the economic challenges of their times, by a diverse crew of idealists, the “moderate” revolutionaries are overthrown by the radical revolutionaries when the moderates are no more successful than the old regime, and then the radicals survive on ruthless suppression of alternatives. The US example doesn’t quite fit (according to the American History that I was taught, but perhaps it was sanitized for your protection). The English Revolution was a long time ago, so facts are scarce, but the French Reign of Terror and the Russian Lenin/Stalin terrors follow this progression.

        Revolutionaries united in their hatred of the ineffective old regime turn on each other when they discover the Governing Is Hard. One factor supporting the stability of our current regime is the lack of a vision for “a better future if only the old folks would get out of the way”. The French looked to America, but couldn’t get here from there, and the Russians had (mis-placed) Faith in Marxism. It’s never sufficient to criticize the old; one must offer a plausible alternative.

  17. Pingback: More on money from John Wilder. – Dark Brightness

  18. RE: ,,, giving mortgages out at 3.3% and inflation is at 6%, which means that banks will lose money every year as long as inflation is a thing. How can they do this? Volume!
    NOPE! They make the origination fees and sell the loans to pension funds. Someone is getting it with no love but it is not the banks. Got a pension. Go look in the mirror.

  19. Why do bagpipers always walk while they play? To get away from the sound.

    The globalists have been talking for a century (a couple millennia if you believe the Old Testament) about how they plan to intentionally wreck the economy so that people are begging for them to take control, and they’ve done it in a few countries. Nothing that is happening is by accident, and it is unlikely to go off the rails in a satisfying Mad Max way that so many are counting on. Things are going to be terrible, and discussions of gold/ silver/ lead are merely discussions about how to be the last person enslaved. Ditto for fleeing the cities; they’ll be coming for all of us eventually.

    The best way out of the trap is to work towards local and state power in flyover country, then use that power to fend off federal overreach by any means.

    1. I see that happening more and more (state vs. fed) – that might even be the trigger that topples the Jenga tower . . .

  20. Planning for the future, I still say we base the next currency (newbucks? quatloos?) on the egg. Eggs cannot be hoarded. Eggs cannot be faked. Eggs are inherently valuable, but only temporarily. If the demand for eggs goes up, the price of chicken also rises. If the demand for eggs drops, the price of chicken also drops.
    And the retail price of a gross of eggs normally correlates well to the price of an ounce of silver.

    Plus, I think a coin with an egg-shaped hole in the middle would be cool. But I’m totally serious about using eggs as the base of the future currency after the collapse. Think about it, and the implications. Imagine stock brokers and bankers waiting breathlessly for the quarterly farm report.

      2. Funny, but please notice that I said the currency should be based on something. Something other than gold, silver, or hollow promises.

    2. Some people would figure out ‘coin-clipping’, like putting a tiny hole in an egg and draining out a bit of the insides.

      Bank vaults would have to be refrigerated.

      1. Maybe it was just bad timing, but when I was at the big grocery store yesterday morning, the entire refrigerated poultry case was empty. I didn’t need any, so I didn’t hang around to see whether they were, maybe, just waiting for the next truck to unload, but … it was eerie.

        Also, got a plan to meet a farmer at a deserted baseball field parking lot tomorrow to score some local bacon and eggs.
        (BTW: ever try mixing a teaspoon of bacon drippings into a pint of oatmeal? It’s way better, and better for you, than brown sugar. And that reminds me: the price of bulk organic rolled oats is up 40% within the last year.)

        1. I’ve seen that here, too – empty shelves. Weird times.

          Oatmeal – hmmm, it’s been approximately 20 years since I’ve had any . . . but I’ll give it a try next opportunity!

  21. John, I have a little bit of each as my understanding is that they can serve as a store of wealth and for a short period of time can be used as wealth, but they do bear the issue of being unable to be eaten (well, you can “eat” small flakes of gold, but it has limited nutritional value).

    A difficulty I think we have now which we have never had before is that once upon a time everyone understood gold and silver as currency as that was how they were used universally. We now live in an age where many people (I bet) have never seen gold or silver except as jewelry. The concept will be quite foreign to them.

  22. Chickens used to be so valuable that no one ate them. The promise “a chicken in every pot” was a promise of so much wealth and prosperity that you could eat your breakfast factory, and still thrive.

    Now chickens, in the US anyway, are one of the cheapest proteins. Markets will distort when there are incentives. No one in 1920s rural America could envision the scale of factory farming of chickens that would be necessary for them to be CHEAP. They were always something you had a few of ‘out back’ and if you were doing well, you had more than you needed and could occasionally eat one.

    We might well end up back in that situation.

    n

    (ok, the Perdue family could and did envision it.)

    2. Well said. Lots of “small scale” egg production around here. You can eat as farm fresh on that as you wish . . . .

  23. “Also, if you bought gold in 1990, you would have had zero profit on it until 2006.”

    Um, not so much.
    Gold avwrage prices and highest prices, US market, 1990-2006:

    Year Average Highest
    2006 $604.34 $725.75
    2005 $444.99 $537.50
    2004 $409.53 $455.75
    2003 $363.83 $417.25
    2002 $310.08 $348.50
    2001 $271.19 $292.85
    2000 $279.29 $316.60
    1999 $278.86 $326.25
    1998 $294.12 $314.60
    1997 $331.00 $367.80
    1996 $387.73 $416.25
    1995 $384.07 $396.95
    1994 $384.16 $397.50
    1993 $360.05 $406.70
    1992 $343.87 $359.30
    1991 $362.34 $403.70
    1990 $383.73 $421.40

    So, firstly, unless you bought gold at the highest price of the year, you could have made a profit in every year from 1990 to 2006, because the average price is always lower than the high price. Math is funny like that.

    Secondly, if you’d bought gold and simply sat on it, you would have made a slight profit as early as 1994.
    But “making a profit” on gold is speculation, which is retarded.
    And trading intrinsic value for inflated temporal value, which is beyond retarded.

    Because like your wife’s driving directions, you only know the high after you’ve gone past it, so you always lose out on profits, sometimes greatly.

    You buy gold because it never loses value.
    An ounce of it is always an ounce of it.
    And, mirabile dictu!, buys nearly exactly the same amount of goods and services now as the equivalent value of it did 100, or even 1000 years ago. You could look it up.

    Dollars, like all currencies (which are NOT money, just currently used as money, hence the term “currency”), were stable from 1790 to 1933, and a losing proposition every year since then.

    An ounce of gold in 1933 was worth $20.67.
    Just like it was non-stop since 1837.
    As far back as 1786, it was going for $19.49. Not a lot of change.
    Now it’s worth $1770, with highs beyond that.

    A dollar from 1933, OTOH, is now worth about 1.2¢.
    Precisely because it now takes 85.6x as many dollars to buy the ounce of gold (which is still an ounce of gold) than it took in 1933.
    The Fed inflating your currency has thus stolen 98.8% of the value of your money in the last 90 years.

    The average hourly wage in 1933 was 49.1¢/hr, for an annual average salary of $982/yr. (Assuming a 2000 hr work year).
    So if you aren’t making at least $84,000 year right this minute, the difference between that amount and your actual salary is how much of your money the Fed has stolen from you, and has been stealing, every year you’ve been alive.
    (And that’s before we even add in the depredations under theIncome Tax authorized by the 16th Amendment, the first of Progressivism’s shameless acts to destroy the republic, and reduce the entire population to peasantry and eventual utter slavery.)
    FTR, the average annual US salary is now about $56.5K. Fedbux inflation has stolen, IS STEALING, $27,500 from you every year, and the theft increases the more currency they print.

    But if you take those fiatbux and turn them into gold, over time, the theft becomes almost negligible, because gold is always worth what gold is worth. It’s finite, can’t be inflated, nor created out of thin air. The only way to cheat with it is to debase the coinage, by mixing formerly near pure gold with baser metals, and calling the resulting crap-and-steak mixture a hamburger. Over time, countries that do that invariably increase the crap content, until the hamburger is all crap, and the money is all lead.

    And then, inevitably, those nations, and empires, collapse.

    Also, Britons didn’t “stop using gold and silver”, ever. They buried it because it couldn’t be stolen, and it couldn’t be taxed, neither by lord nor king, if it couldn’t be laid hands on. They were peasants, but they weren’t stupid.

    By no strange coincidence, the same is true of gold in this country from 1933 to 1975.
    A buried pound of gold worth $330.72 in 1933 was magically worth $2,583.84 in 1975, when private gold ownership again became legal in the US, and it’s worth $28,320 now. And that’s purely for melt value.

    BTW, a fractional-ounce 1/10th oz. gold coin is simply a smaller substitute for a $177 bill. A pre-65 90% silver “junk” quarter is (at the moment) the equivalent of a $4 bill. Think about that.

    And for those people concerned because “You can’t eat gold or silver”?
    Okay.

    Go try to buy clothes or gasoline with tunafish sandwiches.
    Keep one or two in your wallet for emergencies.
    Let us know how it works out.

    1. I meant anywhere from 1988 to 1990, but it was late. I appended a graph above with a horrible drawing from my mousepad.

      Gold is for stack, not for sale. (Same with silver, though The Boy bought at $12 and sold at $40)

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