“I need your clothes, your boots, and your motorcycle.” – Terminator 2
Another? The Spanish Inquisition.
When I was in 8th grade. I decided I wanted a motorcycle, a dirt bike that I could take back up on the Forest Service and BLM roads. This was before the Internet, and there were hundreds of miles of roads and trails . . . right behind my house. The best part was that no driver’s license was required on federal lands.
I announced I was saving up to buy a motorcycle at dinner. I had a few hundred dollars in my savings account that had been on receive-only mode for birthday and Christmas money since I was five. Ma Wilder became enraged, “You’ll do no such thing! Your uncle died in a motorcycle crash! Why buy one when you can use his?”
I kid.
With a goal in mind, I started saving everywhere I could, and within a month I’d managed to get a quarter of the way there to my goal.
To be honest, at least part of that money likely came from the illegal drug trade. I mean, why else would I find $50 in cash secured via a rubber-band to some suspicious oregano-looking substance in a Kodak™ film canister at the school?
I did the right thing, and turned it all in to the school secretary and after 30 days they gave me the cash. Shockingly, no one had showed up to claim that it was there, perhaps since possession with intent to distribute at a school was probably a pretty big deal back then.
No mention was made of the final disposition of the organic products, though the school staff seemed pretty mellow and called me Dr. Feelgood for the rest of the school year.
I won’t say I’m old, but I’m old enough to remember the stoned age.
Back then, money meant cash in a jar under the bed or something rubber-banded to a film cannister containing substances of unknown origin. It was tangible, untraceable, and not some glitchy app with a trendy name promising me riches if I swipe right on a meme coin.
Fartcoin, that makes sense as investment, right? It has to be more stable than Zitcoin.
If I were asked to describe the economy at the end of the third quarter of 2025 in on sentence, I‘d say: “Gold is glittering like it is auditioning for a role in Tarantino’s briefcase, and stocks seem to be high on their own supply.
Never invite a vegan bitcoin owner to dinner. (meme as found)
Let’s take those in order. Gold just hit $3,806. Per ounce. Let’s look closer at what could be causing this:
Part of it is because the dollar is cratering under a mountain of printed funny money. The other part is because central banks are whispering, “Screw the digital dollar, give me something I can bite.” The dollar is wheezing like Jerry Nadler (who is the number one search engine hit when I searched for “short fat democrat”) after a flight of stairs. The dollar is down 5% year-to-date against a basket of currencies. But gold? It is up 42% in the last year, because in 2025, we still haven’t figured out how to print gold.
Think about it: why hoard ones and zeros when you can stack bars?
Central banks from Beijing to Basel are buying gold like it’s Black Friday at Fort Knox. Yes, that same United States Bullion Depository which I’ve been told is still totally full and how dare you ask because why don’t you trust us? And let us be honest, gold is pretty, far prettier than staring at a ledger full of debt that your grandkids will pay off with their kidney sales to overseas oligarchs.
Remember: nothing says “economic stability” like elements that outlast empires. So, gold is up.
Bond quit as a spy and became a handyman – he was used to taking care of an Oddjob.
In other news this week, here’s the real clown show: Nvidia® just announced a $100 billion investment in OpenAI©, who will promptly funnel cash to Oracle™ for data centers, so they can buy . . . more Nvidia™ chips to power the data centers. I have no idea how this isn’t the definition of a Ponzi scheme, because it’s a feedback loop so incestuous it makes European royalty blush. I mean, they’d blush if those genes hadn’t disappeared along with their chins and ability to clot blood.
Nvidia©’s market cap?
$4.47 trillion, equivalent to 13% of the $37 trillion national debt. All so you can have ChatGPT®.
With this one weird trick, you can make your stock go up forever without any pesky customers. (meme as found)
Tell me this is not an asset bubble?
The S&P® 500 is up 22% year-to-date which is a “totally not a bubble ready to blow-off” number. I was pretty happy that my individual retirement account had beaten that. Genius investing? I wish. No. It’s just inflation, with everything from eggs to ETFs doing moonshots as money chases it around.
Nvidia™ is the poster child. I almost bought some in April when it was around $100. Today, it was north of $170. I’m sure that this is totally not a bubble built on recycled cash.
But it’s also not growth: this is a daisy chain of delusion, where pets.com© high-fives Alta-Vista™ and Cisco® into oblivion.
Sign me up.
Speaking of which, I having saved up a big chunk of money I was stuck at home on spring break. On Wilder Mountain, fourteen miles from the nearest town, that meant that after the books were read and the models were made, I had to do something.
On the north side of the house, however, there was a huge block of ice left over from compacted snow during the winter – in places it was two feet thick. I was bored. I poked around in the garage and found a five-foot-long iron rod, pointed at one end, about an inch and a half in diameter.
If you have never been in 8th grade and so bored you decided to take a harpoon and smash ice for an afternoon, well, you’ve never lived. It was, actually, fun, especially kicking it out of the shadow of the house into the bright spring sunshine where it glittered and glistened as it melted away.
Okay, right, wailing, not whaling.
However, it had a weird impact on Ma Wilder.
She thought I was trying to help, not realizing I was just bored and being destructive in a socially acceptable way. She talked with Pa, and, proud of my industriousness, they offered to stake the rest of my motorcycle purchase.
So, don’t give up. If the Trump economic policy is thrashing around aimlessly breaking stuff hoping that something good will happen, then, heck, maybe we’ll all get motorcycles?
I mean, there are a lot of uncles, right?
Note: None of this is investment advice. Even though I’m having a good year, absolutely everyone is having a good year. I’m expecting the kid at the drive through at McDonald’s® to be giving stock advice soon. If you stake any of your financial future on advice from an Internet humorist, you deserve what happens to your portfolio.
1) we are on the most critical path the world has ever seen…it gets more Biblical daily
2) if you were not already buying Silver, imho you are a dumbass
What people don’t realize is that with the latest price pop, gold is finally priced the same as its inflation-adjusted 1980 peak of $850 per ounce. A stacked ounce of gold that gave you $850 of purchasing power in 1980 gives you $3800 of purchasing power today – and so will buy you roughly the same pile of “stuff” in both eras.
But back in 1980 the federal debt was “only” $0.9 trillion (instead of $37 trillion today) at “only” 33% of annual GDP (instead of 120% of annual GDP today). The economy is so much worse today than in 1980…
The “true” price of gold is gonna have to go a LOT higher to compensate for the much higher risk level in today’s economy full of “Bitcoin treasury” stocks like Strategy, “circular Ponzi schemes” like Nvidia/Cisco/OpenAI and “Fed monetized” Treasury bond sales. Central banks and stackers (not to mention average portfolio investors) are increasingly realizing this and are driving the gold price up.
I say let ‘er rip. I’m stacked and good to go. 🙂
It did. And the momentum for silver, especially, is up.
S&P is up a little less than 14% YTD as of 9/22 – 6693.75/5881.63
Those who ignore Scott McNealy’s take on history…
https://thefelderreport.com/2017/10/26/what-were-you-thinking/
…are condemned to repeat it…
https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/66619e8203c4ee479e13658a/672a3dd350cf9bf911689cd8_672a3cf14b13c5060352eaa9_Screenshot%25202024-11-05%2520at%252010.42.07%25E2%2580%25AFAM.png
The Mag 7 stocks currently make up over a third of our entire equities market, which is basically ignoring Scott’s 10X redline analysis.
Winter Is Coming.
Noted. And, thank you.
Another big difference today vs. 1980 is demographics. Boomers were laying 2-4 babies/household. Today it’s <2. In 1973-74 the DJIA tanked from 1,000 to around 500. The market was extremely undervalued, to say the least.
The gold price/tech stock mania of today reminds me of the broader stock mania that erupted when % rates dropped from 17% to 6-7% by 1983. And the NASDAQ boom/bust in the early '00s.
Everything will return to being undervalued. Including gold, when it gets liquidated when the economy goes south.
I do see a sharp, short devaluation of gold followed by an uptick, because unravelling will likely cause a bit of deflation. We’ll see. There will be bargains.
I’ve got a bunch of trade items to include oil lamps and pain-relief tinctures I’ve made. Surrounded by ranchers and swamps filled with beaver is a good thing.
Gold can’t soothe muscles or help you see in the dark, and there’s also the precious metals of copper, lead and brass for when you aren’t being attacked by Super Mario.
It can’t. And if we get to that level, I bet we lose half of the US population in a year.
I can see the attraction of gold, but I can’t quite see through the process of safely converting it into food, clothing, fuel, and taxes. Let’s suppose that you have a stockpile of, oh, $100,000 worth, just so it’s worth talking about. Let’s suppose that we spend $5000 a year on property taxes, $5000 on food, and $10,000 on other stuff. So, that stack of gold needs to last five years. What are the chances that when I take one of my gold bars down to Ye Olde Cash 4 Gold shop, that _somebody_ notices the casual, confident way that I plunk it on the counter. “I’ll bet there’s more where that came from…” goes through his head. Two months later, I cash in another, and somebody tries to follow me home (assuming that I didn’t leave my address on any paper work at the YOC4G, and they can just look it up for later use). Maybe I lose them, that time, but they’ll try again. Maybe they’ll break in while I’m away, and terrorize my family, or maybe I’ll be home when something goes bump in the night.
You don’t own it if you don’t hold it, and you can’t hold it if someone else really wants it and you need to sleep. If you’re lucky, all they take is your gold. What do you do then?
Gold is the money of governments with armies to guard it. Silver is the money of bankers with a vault. Copper is the money of craftsmen, and debt is the money of slaves.
Lathechuck
You could have voted for Ron Paul for President, but how can you extort others if you did that? Much more instinctually satisfying to have a civil war, than to admit no “government” of any flavor is going to act in your interests,
Consider holding your gold in the form of unadorned wedding rings, and sell them one at a time. No one observing will think you have more than one.
Use USPS to ship your gold to JM Bullion and let them wire the cash proceeds to your bank account. Works just fine for me. I highly recommend JM.
https://www.jmbullion.com/sell-to-us/
https://www.jmbullion.com/investing-guide/james/ship-gold-silver-safely/
I’m sure it works fine _now_, when the paper gold is just as fungible as the physical. But I don’t think that’s the kind of arrangement that most gold holders are preparing for. E.O. 1602 may return to haunt us.
Lathechuck
I did some research today on this.
In 1933, E.O. 1602 required mandatory exchange (under threat of imprisonment for non compliance) of both gold coins and also paper currency specifically labeled as “gold certificates” that could supposedly be exchanged for gold coins upon demand. Citizens who surrendered an “ounce of gold” in these forms received in return $20.65 of paper fiat currency. Technically this EXCHANGE made E.O. 1602 a “nationalization” of gold and not a “confiscation”, which would have been FDR taking the gold without any recompense to citizens.
Via 1602 the US government acquired $300 million worth of actual gold coins and $470 million worth of paper gold certificates (ie, IOU claims on physical gold coins that the US Government could then ignore). At the exchange rate of $20.65 per coin, the government thus stockpiled about 14.5 million ounces of physical gold. Now, in 1933 the M1 money supply was estimated at $32 billion and the corresponding M2 was around $39 billion. So the government paid out (300+470)/say 32,000 = around 2.5% of the 1933 money supply to take gold out circulation and private hands.
After fifteen years of Depression and World War, the US government claimed then and now that Ft. Knox holds 147 million ounces of gold at a book value set by law of $42.22 per ounce in 1973 as part of the Nixon gold shock shenanigans. If that gold is really there, the US Government could raise over $500 billion overnight by saying that Knox gold will henceforth be valued at current market value. I personally expect this eventually to be part of Trump’s gold shock shenanigans before his second term is over.
From another angle, only 10% of the gold in Ft. Knox can be said to be gold “confiscated” by E.O. 1602.
Fast forward to today. Using data from Wikipedia, it looks like the US Mint has issued about 35 million ounces of gold coins since production started in 1986 for Eagles and in 2006 for Buffalos. Of this, around 85% are one-ounce coins and 15% are tenth, quarter and half-ounce coins. So there’s only a little more than twice the number of gold coin ounces in circulation than there was in 1933 – ignoring foreign gold coins, of course.
So, conclusions. “Confiscating” gold coins today would bump up Ft. Knox holdings by (147+35)/147 = 24% compared to the 10% boost provided by the 1933 “nationalization”, but would cost “only” around $35M * $3700 per oz = $130 billion to US Treasury fiat currency. With today’s M1 and M2 money supply figures on the order of $19 trillion and $22 trillion, “compensating” current gold holders for their coins would only take around 0.13/20 = around 0.5% payout of the money supply, only a fifth of what was required in 1933.
So bottom line, a modern equivalent to what happened in 1933 would be cheaper to do for the Government (a $130 billion program is not a big deal these days) and cause a significantly bigger boost to Ft. Knox gold supply than what resulted from E.O 1602 – 25% vs. 10%. And they would be motivated to do this because they knew their subsequent actions would cause the gold price to explode once it was in THEIR hands.
SO why hold gold? Because it’s a very good deal and sound investment in our current economic environment, period. That’s enough of a reason for me. If the game changes and the government confiscates the gold held in your home vault, or Russia vaporizes the gold held in your NYC IRA custodian vault, then it’s a whole new ballgame – one where “holding gold” is gonna be the least of your worries. At that point, you morph into whatever you need to be to keep going. Until then, say the Serenity Prayer a lot – and try to enjoy the “serenity” part every single day.
YMMV.
Anon-
You can ship Au & Ag back to most large brokers you bought it from with no commission & shipping charges. EFT back to you.
Dr Copper is in a panic, Indonesia troubles. Big time bad. Richard Adkinson of Freeport McMoran might come out of retirement to salvage things. Sharp Starksvegas CEO Emeritus. Aced the CPA Exam, first try. But is almost 80.
Love the last quote, especially the last six words. Again, depends on the depth of collapse.