The Gold Exchange Report is Keith Weiner’s monthly commentary incorporating Keith’s unique insights into monetary science and economic theory. He riffs on markets, metals, macro and money.
The Zombie Ship of Theseus To listen to the audio version of this article click here. The Ship of Theseus is an old philosophical thought experiment. It asks a question about identity. Suppose you replace all of the boards of a ship with new ones—is it still the same ship? We are not going to […]
To listen to the audio version of this article click here Opposing Monetary Directions “Real estate is the future of the monetary system,” declares a real estate bug. Does this make any sense? We would ask him this. “OK how will houses be borrowed and lent?” “Look at this housing bond,” he says, pointing to […]
Listen to the audio version of this article here Breaking Down the Dollar Monetary System If you ask most people, “what is money?” they will answer that money is the generally accepted medium of exchange. If you ask Google Images, it will show you many pictures of green pieces of paper. Virtually everyone agrees that […]
To listen to the audio version of this article click here Picture, if you can, a world in which gold circulates as the medium of exchange. People pay for everything, from groceries to rent, in gold. Employers pay wages in gold. Productive enterprises borrow gold to finance everything from food production to constructing apartment buildings. […]
To listen to the audio version of this article click here Can you remember back to when you were two or three years old? Toddlers often think that there are little people inside the TV (or maybe this was only true when the TV was about as deep as it was wide—and maybe kids today […]
To listen to the audio version of this article click here Coinbase, a publicly traded cryptocurrency company, recently announced that it will sell 1.5 billion worth of bonds (then revised it to 2 billion). Dollars. A leader of the crypto revolution is borrowing dollars. Without any awareness of the irony, crypto promoters say that this […]
Picture, if you will, a government that deliberately inflicts bad policy on the people. I know this sounds crazy, and could never happen, but please bear with me. Suppose the government criminalizes hiring someone who produces less than an arbitrary threshold. Or it forces the closure of all businesses deemed to be non “essential”. Or […]
To listen to the audio version of this article click here A few recent articles bring to the public’s awareness that wealthy investors are preferring not to sell their assets, and thereby pay capital gains taxes. Instead, they borrow against them, on margin. This reminds me of an experience I had some years back. I […]
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 […]
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 […]
