Jp Cortez: Pushing back with gold
Jp Cortez of the Sound Money Defense League interviews Jeff Deist on the undeniable nature of inflation and how gold ownership and gold yield is becoming more popular.
Connect with Jp Cortez on X: @JpCortez27
Connect with Jeff and Monetary Metals on X: @JeffDeist @Monetary_Metals
Additional Resources
Start Earning Interest on Gold
The Case for Gold Yield in an Investment Portfolio
Podcast Chapters
00:00 – Introduction
01:39 – Effects of inflation and deficit spending
02:49 – Historical perspective on inflation
04:06 – Fiscal and regulatory factors impacting inflation
06:32 – Impact of low interest rates on investments
10:30 – Growing awareness of sound money globally
11:17 – Adoption of sound money principles worldwide
13:55 – Potential future scenarios for money systems
16:18 – Monetary Metals’ approach to financing with gold
19:26 – Legislative efforts
22:13 – Taxes on gold and silver
24:55 – CBDC’s and privacy
26:59 – The fundamental split in economics
29:43 – Production vs. demand
32:00 – Potential turning points
35:26 – The US dollar
37:46 – The future of sound money
39:31 – Books
40:47 – Subscribe!
Transcript:
Jp Cortez:
This is Jp Cortez, the executive director of the Sound Money Defense League, and I’m here today speaking to an old friend of mine, Jeff Deist. Jeff is the general at Monetary Metals, the former President of the Mises Institute, and formerly the Chief of Staff for Congressman Ron Paul. Jeff, thank you so much for chatting with me today. I’m looking forward to this.
Jeff Deist:
Absolutely, Jp Good to see you.
Jp Cortez:
Let’s start, you, obviously, with your very deep background in Austrian economics and libertarianism, generally ideas of freedom, we are today experiencing inflation at a rate that we haven’t seen in decades. Americans are finding it harder to feed their families or warm their homes or even get an apartment, a car, a medicine, whatever it is. Right now, inflation is a dinnertime conversation, and it can no longer be hidden, the effects that all this deficit spending and printing of money, how the effects of that we’re now seeing them play out. What do you think are Are you expecting inflation to get worse? And how does sound money play into this inflation we’re seeing today?
Jeff Deist:
I don’t know that I expect it to get worse. I expect it to be stubborn. In other words, I think we’re going to have at least a decade where people feel pain of pretty robust annual price inflation. We’re talking at the store. The official CPI seems to be holding right now at 3%, which is not the 2% target. We all know that actual price inflation is much higher than that. Larry Summers, the former Harvard President, just admitted a week or so ago, If we calculated it the same way we did back in the ’70s and ’80s, actually, And there’s a million small ways where people are paying more that isn’t just how much the intimans at the grocery cost, but things like insurance. And you’re paying insurance even as a renter. One way or another, we’re all paying insurance. Auto insurance, I know a lot of more providers have left California, for example. Flood insurance down in places like Florida, I think that’s going to get quite expensive. And so there’s a million other ways in which people are paying. And it’s very hard for politicians to say that this isn’t really happening with a straight faith anymore.
Jeff Deist:
Here’s the thing is we haven’t experienced anything like this, really, since the early 1980s. So the late ’70s, early ’80s, the Paul Volcker era was when inflation, price inflation Inflation really peaked in the American psyche as a a thing in our lives, something that we have to live with, almost like when the Iraq war is going on, that’s a thing in our lives. Inflation feels like that. It feels like something on our back. And so you have a couple of generations of economists, media people, politicians, whatever, basically, really anybody under about 60 or 50 years of age who has simply never experienced an inflationary environment. So from 1982, until about COVID-2022, that 40-year period or thereabouts. Obviously, established interest rates were going down. We can argue about whether the Fed sets them or targets them. I’m increasingly skeptical as to the power of the Fed to do that, but certainly the Fed influences them. So interest rates went down and down and down for about 40 years, and prices didn’t really rise dramatically in a way that hurt people. And so we’re in this new normal. It’s going to take people a while to get used to I would argue that inflation is at least 8%, might be 10 %, really.
Jp Cortez:
Shadow stats, I think, that number is closer to that.
Jeff Deist:
But we have to view this, I think, very, very differently than the past in the sense that there are two forces at work here still. One is just that I think this is much more on the fiscal side than the monetary policy side, because if you look at the amount of just actual money created around this two huge stimulus bills, bills during COVID, one in the Trump administration, one under the Biden administration. I mean, those injected directly more than $6 trillion of cash-cash into people’s bank accounts, businesses, individuals. I mean, that’s not the Fed. The other thing is, of course, is that we are still experiencing a lot of supply issues from COVID shutdowns. The economy is not like your lawnmower. You don’t just pull the cord and turn it back on and resume mowing. That’s not how it works. There’s a temporary a moral element to this that Austrians understand, I think, a lot better than the Paul Krugman’s. And there’s also a malinvestment element to this. If you were invested in certain processes that got shut down during COVID, you might be gun-shy reinvesting in those. And so we still don’t have supply chains the way as robust as we had them before.
Jeff Deist:
We don’t even have employment, really, back up to the levels of pre-COVID. So while obviously people in the Austrian camp tend to blame If they gain 10 pounds, it’s because of the Fed, right? But I think on this time, we have to look at it a lot differently and say that this is also a fiscal and regulatory phenomenon. And I don’t think it’s going away soon. And so all of us, we all have our personal finances to think of, all of us are just going to have to readjust to this new normal. And so I think people are going to be out there saying, what do I got to do to I just tread water with my money? I mean, it’s a lot like it distorts human activity in a different way. But when interest rates are really, really low and nobody could get even 4, 5% on, let’s say, their money market funds. People went out and tried to buy equities. They tried to chase yield because I’m not getting any interest at the bank. Now that interest rates are higher, people are getting more conservative with their money, and they’re just trying to figure out how to Gee, whiz, how can I maintain 5, 6, 7% a year?
Jeff Deist:
Because if not, it really feels like you’re losing. You always have been, but now people feel it.
Jp Cortez:
Of course. And like you were just saying there, in many cases, and I’m thinking maybe about specifically a state’s balance sheets. Most states are heavily invested in commercial paper debt or treasuries or third-world debt, many of which don’t own a single ounce of gold to their name. And if you’re telling me that these assets or these investments are gaining you 4 or 5%, but the real rate of inflation is closer to 8%, what you’re telling me is that you’re losing 3%, you’re making a negative real rate of return there. Yeah, I think it’s because it’s undeniable now and you look all over and people are having a harder time understanding how this can be. There have been a million different misdirections and pivots starting from, originally, there would be no inflation. I’m sure you remember press secretaries going before television cameras and saying things, saying every single economy… We’ve spoken to economists, and every single economist we spoke to assured us that there would be no inflation. And then it became, Oh, wait, there is inflation, but it’s transitory. And then it became, oh, wait, there is inflation. It’s not transitory. It’s Putin’s fault. And then it became, well, it’s the CEO of Kroger, the CEO of your local grocery store.
Jp Cortez:
So all of these, it’s all sleight of hand, right? Because the Fed, because this monetary dysfunction stems comes from the federal policies and the Federal Reserve. But that doesn’t happen in a vacuum. And people down here in Alabama, if I’m in Des Moines, if I’m in Lincoln, I’m seeing there are people living on the streets. America, it’s degrading from the inside. So much of that, I think, has to do with the money, and people are starting to wake up to that. Wait, why? Because is no one uses the dollar because they want to. It wasn’t an explicit choice. No one woke up in the morning and opened their closet and looked through all of the types of potential monies and said, That one, the US dollar. The truth is, many of the alternatives that could potentially make good monies are saddled with regulations, with taxes, with all these disincentives that don’t allow them to be used as money. It’s not that the US dollar is the best monetary instrument that could exist, it’s that we’re trapped. To the extent that the dollar or money is a good, there are varying degrees of quality of that good.
Jp Cortez:
That means money can be done very poorly. It can also be done very well. I would say, insofar as the US government or the Federal Reserve, a independent institution, has a fiduciary responsibility to protecting the value or the savings of Americans, they’ve been extremely poor stewards of that. In America, obviously, we’re seeing people wake up to just basic questions about money. Simply, why do we use money? What problem does money solve? Where does it derive its value? I personally can attest to going state to state and seeing state legislators make it easier for individuals to buy and invest and save in gold and silver. It’s also making it easier for the state itself if they want to protect their own coffers. They’re now in many cases, in some cases, allowing treasurers to protect their wealth, their taxpayer funds with gold and silver. People are waking up, states are waking up. Coal countries are waking up. We were talking before we started to hear about the It feels like a grassroots movement that’s popping up through sections of Latin America between El Salvador, between what we saw in the UFC octagon in Brazil, between Malay and Argentina.
Jp Cortez:
There are fundamental questions because sound money doesn’t exist in a vacuum. There are other things. That sound money itself has great implications to what a government can do, what it can’t do, maybe more importantly. Those things are inherently intertwined with freedom, with liberty, with autonomy. We’re seeing these things light up all over the world. I’m your take on this as someone who was obviously in the thick at the Mises Institute. Do you see that Mises’s works and the Austrian school and the sound money ideas, do you see those being adopted around the world more maybe than in previous years?
Jeff Deist:
Well, it’s hard to say. There’s certainly a reason for hope. And oftentimes, things happen very slowly over one’s lifetime, maybe even beyond one’s lifetime. You could say you might I trace the Trump phenomenon, for example, back to Pat Buchan and Ross Perot in the early ’90s, right? Sometimes things have to percolate for a while, and then they find purchase in a particular individual. I would like to think that Ron Paul and his two campaigns had something to do with bringing awareness of the idea of what money is and how it would work. And I do think that this Austrian versus neoclassical or Keynesian thing It is coming to a head.
Jp Cortez:
Is that where you think the battle is right now between Austrians and Neokeynesian? Where do the MMT’ers fit?
Jeff Deist:
It’s beyond that. I’d like to think that what it is, but I think it’s more about objective reality. In other words, there’s an entire academic movement that’s dedicated to making intellectual arguments for unreality. We can just have all these things. We can just have green energy at somehow no cost to us. In fact, we’ll create jobs, and we can just paper over deficits because we owe it to ourselves. And we can fund anything we want to because as MMT tells us, the United States is a sovereign currency issuer and can never run out of it. So we’re only resource constrained. Resource constrained sounds an awful to me like the entire fundamental basis of economics, which is scarcity. And scarcity requires choice, and choice This requires subjective valuation and all kinds of things. But when government comes along in mucks with money, that really has a profound effect on a society far beyond just what we think of as economics. And it puts all of us almost in quicksand because if you’re an American, you probably get paid in dollars, and you probably have your bank account in dollars. Not a lot you can do about that.
Jeff Deist:
If you’re very wealthy, you can diversify across jurisdictions, maybe have other passports, have savings in other countries. Frankly, the US dollar is outperforming all. So why would you want to? But for average people, it’s tough. And I hope that there’s an awareness growing, and maybe the reality of human nature is it just takes some pain to get people to change their thinking.
Jp Cortez:
Sure. And so with the money, I think, I would say being broken. So you’ve got a more abundant currency, and that in and of itself enables a lot of things, right? When you can spend endlessly, you’re less likely to be considerate about how you spend You’re maybe more likely to go through expenditures that you wouldn’t otherwise. In many cases, unfortunately, when we’re talking about governments, that can play itself out in the form of wars. And in many cases, in the American case here, America has been fighting wars of choice, not wars of need for many decades. I would say, and I’ve made the argument, that endless printing of money enables this endless war. It’s not an accident that America keeps fighting wars. It’s not an accident that you have homeless people living on the street outside of state capitals and outside of state legislators all around the country. But scraping together another 60 billion for Ukraine or Israel or whatever the war de jour is, there’s no problem ever in doing that. I think that’s something that has been happening insidiously or sneakily for decades. But now, I think with us being more interconnected with social media and with people, governments no longer being able to hide what is so plain in the face of so many people, we’re seeing that there’s a, and I’m willing to concede that I might be a little too close to it, but I see a sound money movement here, and I’m very bullish, personally, on states’ individuals re-adopting their own gold standards.
Jp Cortez:
This is probably something you’ve seen, the work you’ve been doing at Monetary Metals, very different, I would think, from the academic work done at the Mises Institute. Tell me about what you all have been doing. The idea, I think, and you would better explain it than me, but to to have it be a yield-bearing asset. Gold is the bottom of the pyramid, it’s base layer money. To be able to monetize that would be incredibly useful for the purposes of sound money and for people trying to save and invest for the future. So tell me a little bit about that.
Jeff Deist:
Well, it just seems that it’s a terrible tragedy, really, that there’s, at today’s price, it’s almost $16 trillion worth of gold above the ground in the world. Now, a lot of that is in Central of banks. But nonetheless, that’s a financial asset. We can say it’s not money because governments have decreed that it is not, but it’s nonetheless a financial asset. And as I mentioned in a show last week with Ben Nadelstein, I think the proof of that is that gold trades at a higher per ounce price than its mere jewelry or industrial usage. I don’t think it would be $2,300.
Jp Cortez:
$2,400 as of this, yeah.
Jeff Deist:
If it were simply a commodity for its gold, excuse me, its jewelry and industrial uses. So I do think that there is a monetary moneyness to gold that is reflected in its price. That the market tells us. We don’t have to decree that. So that’s important. And why is a 16 $15 trillion asset not being used as collateral to pledge to backstop insurance, to fund all kinds of production and all kinds of businesses and industries around the world. Well, basically because people have locked up gold and don’t view it in those terms. And so we’re trying to make a tiny chink in that armor and start pulling some of this moneyness out of gold by using it to finance production or use it to finance inventory. And this has been a really interesting experiment because most investments, most things people do, whether they put money in a bank to earn interest or whether they invest it in a stock or a bond to earn whatever return, they’re thinking in terms of dollars. What Monetary Metals does is an ounces business. In other words, we take ounces, we report in ounces, and we return ounces if you want them back.
Jeff Deist:
So we’re trying to grow ounces, not dollars. And so that’s a very different mindset. It’s a very unique offering. And I hope we can grow it into something that really works. And I hope we can do so without the government coming along and doing something terrible to us. I hope we can be Uber. And so by the time they catch on, it’s too popular, something like that. But I’m agnostic on the gold versus Bitcoin fight. I’ve been knee deep in that, waist deep in that. And so I’m not anti-Bitcoin, and I own Bitcoin. I wish it well. I’m pro any system system that rests control of money away from government and central banks. I think that’s key. And when you talk about some of these states you visit, it would be very, very, very helpful to get rid of that 28 % collectibles rate on gold at the federal level, which means every time you use gold, You can’t go to the pawn shop and buy something that would be considered a taxable event, which is a real tragedy. People want to accept it for money. They should be allowed to. But nonetheless, I do agree.
Jeff Deist:
I do think there’s a feeling out there about sound money, and I’m very interested in knowing what states can do to protect themselves in terms of legislation or a gold depository, some favorable Bitcoin treatment. I know Kaitlyn Long, Wyoming, tried to do a lot in that arena. We have to do something. I think that’s clear.
Jp Cortez:
Yeah. And I think one of my favorite things about monetary metals and what you all are doing and how the Sound Money Defense League, how our work dovetails in what you all and others are doing, I think, is to remove the briers and the thicket and all of the things that surround gold and silver or Bitcoin even. And so to clear all this out so that really smart people can innovate within this space. The US dollar has been the US dollar for a long time. Unless you’re calling quantitative easing and financial alchemy, that being innovation outside of those things, there hasn’t really been a ton of innovation in the money space. I guess when things went digital, 25 years ago, there was some of that. But we’re seeing today, I think, innovation like more fractional gold, smaller gold pieces than we’ve ever seen so that they could be used as money. We’re seeing innovation in the space of Bitcoin and some of those second-layer solutions to make it workable as money. And I think that goes back to what I mentioned earlier about how it’s not that anyone chose the dollar. It’s simply that everything else that could potentially be workable as money is saddled with taxes and such.
Jp Cortez:
So like you said, the 28 %, that’s a federal capital gains long term rate on commodities, which gold and silver were deemed by the IRS not by statute. The IRS unilaterally, by rule, decided gold and silver are the same assets or similar assets as baseball cards and beanie babies and works of art. To that front, good news on that front, I actually just confirmed, I believe it was yesterday, congressman Alex Mooney will be reintroducing legislation to eliminate that incorrect treatment of gold and silver as a collectible on the federal level. We’re seeing, hopefully, movement on that front, because like you said, if I’m buying $100 worth of groceries and I’m trying to do that with a couple of Silver Eagles, when I go to pay my groceries, I think to myself, Oh, man, did I buy these Silver Eagles on the same day? What was the price when I bought them? What’s my cost basis? And now I have to report a gain, and now the feds are going to tax me, and then the state is going to tax me as well. As a question of the burden is too high, it’s not workable as money.
Jp Cortez:
And so that, I think, allowing people the choice, allowing for competition and money to go back to the Hayekian idea of denationalizing currency and letting the market decide what makes the best money. And so I think Because money is such a societal tool, it’s something that when I spend it, it’s because I value the thing that I’m wanting more than I value the dollars. When I spend it, it’s because I want to voice support for a certain good or a cause. The flip side of that is when I choose not to spend it, I’m choosing to withhold my support. So this is a communicative tool. And I think what we’re seeing by that, that’s idea that that is what money is used for, you can see how easily, for example, something like a CBDC could potentially or quickly endanger one’s rights to withhold support in one case or to support certain things in another. The Canadians being an obvious example of a government squishing a movement that it didn’t like. There are stories out of Africa, out of Hong Kong, where liberty groups, fight groups, fighting their government for freedom, are having to use blockchain technologies or having to use Bitcoin because the power that comes with a centralized money is the power to completely quell any resistance, completely squash anyone that the government deems worthy of squishing.
Jp Cortez:
The anti-CVDC thing, I think, is becoming a very popular idea. Over the last couple of years, Christie Noem in South Dakota has signed a couple of these bills into law. Tennessee did recently. As of an hour ago, Nebraska senators voted unanimously to end capital gains on gold and silver and to declare that CVDCs are not money in the state of Nebraska. So you can’t force us to pay taxes in it. You can’t force us to adopt it. And so this is something that’s becoming more popular. I think Ron DeSantis might have been the first one to sign one of these bills into law and likening it to the Chinese social credit score or something like that, where your lifeline can so easily be snipped by a government should you choose to step out, should you choose to say the wrong thing, you’re cut off. And that, I think, is one of the dangers outside of entirely consolidating the entire banking system, outside of the ability to tax or to tax savings, negative interest rates. Outside of those things, there is a massive privacy issue that sound money protects.
Jeff Deist:
Well, it’s true. They hate anonymity. And That’s why drug dealers use cash.
Jp Cortez:
Yeah, right. And that’s the US, they often talk about Bitcoin and these other things, how they’re being used to funnel drugs or weapons or whatever without any irony or understanding of the fact that the US dollar is the single most traded instrument around the world for illegal arms or illegal drugs or human trafficking or all of these things happen in the dollar. That is the criminal’s money of choice.
Jeff Deist:
Absolutely. The CBDC thing is interesting because it has created this populist uprising, which I think is a good thing. We don’t like government overreach, but at least if they overreach, maybe there’s a reaction, and it’s good to hear people like DeSantis are trying to do something about it. And if you Google Neil Cascari on CBDCs, I think you’ll find it on YouTube. He’s one of the Fed governors. He made some very candid statements a couple of years about the real uses of a CBDC, which are all nefarious. There’s no good use tracking, monitoring. And of course, the negative interest rate thing is really scary because we’ve seen that in not just real interest rates, but negative nominal interest rates. It’s on Euro bonds for a good part of the last, let’s say, 10 years. And so it’s a way that you could stimulate spending, right? To say, okay, there’s a minus three % interest interest rate on your B of A, your B of A/Uncle Sam account. And that’s pretty frightening. And it really comes down to this. You mentioned what’s the fundamental split today in economics. And I think it really comes down to Say’s law versus Say’s law deniers, which we might euphemistically say demand-side stimulus people versus production people.
Jeff Deist:
And One thing that changed forever when Keynes came along in the 1930s and became popular was the idea that you create a healthy economy by stimulating demand for goods and services. And how do you do that? Well, generally speaking, that means a monetary or fiscal policy, which is designed to do that. And that is a profound change from what humans understood in economics up until then. And let’s not forget, economics was more holistic prior to the 20th century. It wasn’t really viewed as a stand-alone discipline, arguably until late 1800s, early 1900s. And this idea that we just need to stimulate demand, and production will happen is so fundamentally flawed. And it’s very hard to argue with people who just don’t get that, MOTers being chief amongst them. But more broadly, the Krugmanite types, too. The Austrian school has dedicated the idea that a healthy economy requires capital, for starters. Where do you get capital? Well, you get capital through savings, through foregoing consumption, through profits that are put aside. That capital is then at risk, but put into attempts to increase productivity and profit. And as a result of that, production becomes better, faster, cheaper, whatever it does.
Jeff Deist:
And so by being more productive, whether as a firm or as, let’s say, an individual, any of us in our personal lives, when we’re more productive in producing whatever it is we do, whatever good or service we produce for a living, that gives us the ability then to go consume. That production in our own lives or in our own firms is what generates that trade in cash that gives us the ability to go out and have demand. So a focus Focus on demand as opposed to production has been absolutely disastrous for the West, conceptually, economically and otherwise. And if you want to say, well, Jeff, come on, wait a minute. Look how rich the West did pretty darn good in the 20th century. And we’re rich and we have this and that. But That’s not the only question. The question for economics is, what’s the unseen? What would have been? And we see this all the time. The question is not, what What is CPI? What is the cost of a gallon of milk? The question I’m interested in is, what would be the cost of a gallon of milk absent all the fiscal monetary and regulatory interventions we’ve had?
Jeff Deist:
Now, that’s hard to say. That’s a difficult thing for social scientists to attempt to display or make clear to us. But nonetheless, that is especially the job of economists. And so if the Fed or anybody else comes along and says, oh, well, inflation is very low and it’s in check. Okay, but maybe the natural order of a healthy and growing economy is deflationary on the price side, right? How will we ever know? And it seems economics or mainstream economics has just dismissed this.
Jp Cortez:
Yeah. And I think you hit on something there that I’ve been thinking about recently that the whole system is geared to chase velocity of money. The idea that, Oh, we’re going to chase aggregate demand, and this is the engine that makes an economy run. When that becomes the target, you see what we have today. And so sound money then, I think, becomes ever more important because we just spent the last couple of minutes talking about the dangers of abandoning it. So the big three, the 1913, 1933, and 1971, the three major dates in American history, where ’13 was the establishment of the Federal Reserve, ’33 being the expropriation or confiscation of gold by executive order, by federal by FDR, and then ’71 being the closing of the gold window. And that was Nixon. So what is the next date in the United States? This next major date that completely changes the paradigm and changes what we know and how money functions? Is it the potential or imminent adoption of a CBDC? Is it countries starting to stockpile gold even more openly than they’re already doing? Is it a just full-throated adoption of MMT? What do you think the next big happening is?
Jeff Deist:
Yeah, that’s interesting. You almost alluded to the BRICS there, whether that- That’s another yet. I don’t think that can be a thing because it’s actually very, very hard for countries to have the discipline of a gold standard. Sure. There’s nothing in what the Chinese, the Brazilians, or the Russians have done internally, domestically, fiscally over the past, let’s say, 50 years. It gives me any confidence that they would be able to have the discipline to do that. So the BRICS thing, I think, is overblown. But I’ve really wondered I heard about this. What’s the next big turning in money? Is it Breton Wood’s next version? And I used to think, well, it’s going to be another crisis like 2008 because we’ve papered over all that debt. Over 300 trillion now is the next turning in money. It was 40 trillion in ’08. So we haven’t solved the problem. Debt at all levels, corporate, sovereign, household individual. So I used to think, well, there’s going to be another crisis. And this time, let’s say under the auspices of the IMF, they’ll say, you know what? We can’t really have all these crises, and we can’t have all these governments issuing their own currencies with their own central banks.
Jeff Deist:
So just like the Eurozone got rid of the Euro and had the ECB, we need an ECB for the world now. And that’s going to be the IMF. And it’s going to start out with what they call SDR, Special Drawing Rights, which is going to be a basket of currencies, maybe commodities. So at the outset, people feel warm and fuzzy about it. They understand these things, but then over time, they get rid of those currencies, and it just develops into a pure international or global fiat. And James Rickerts wrote about this stuff, and he wrote a book called Currency Wars. And so that was always an interesting thing to me. But then now that almost seems quaint. I mean, fast forward to COVID and all that, and those things almost seem quaint to me because the acceleration of the debt and everything. And so my near term prediction is that the dollar will limp along as king, and that’s informed by people like Brent Johnson at Santiago Capital.
Jp Cortez:
Milkshake Theory, right?
Jeff Deist:
Milkshake Theory guy, which I think, which I largely agree with And increasingly, my own views on this are informed by there’s a whole new breed that the digital era has given us. I mean, you have academic economists, and they’re increasingly being overshadowed by. You’ve got people like Peter Saint Ange, people like who are bringing a lot of insights using social media. You have people like Lynn Alden and George Gammon. You have people like Jeff Snyder who has that whole Euro-dollar theory. So a lot of this has forced me out of my more doctrineer Austrian thinking. It doesn’t mean I’ve rejected it. It means that I’ve been forced to rethink some of my assumptions. John Tamie at Forbes, he has a whole genre of the Fed doesn’t matter. I can’t do anything. And you Austrians are silly. I don’t agree, but it’s It’s important. Food for thought. So this one, I just… Other than the dollar limping along and the debt just going up and Congress finding a way to service it, to me, those are the immediate stories. And I just don’t know. I wish I knew. I used to really subscribe to that collapse IMF scenario, but now it’s so much bigger and the geopolitics are so complex and there’s energy.
Jeff Deist:
You got to throw energy into that mix. You got to throw war into of that mix, instability. We’ve seen some of these minor uprisings. I think Malay represents that. But it’s just… It Well, I’ll tell you what, if I did have an answer to your question, I would be on my eTrade account right now, figuring out what I’m going to short and what I’m going to buy. Sure.
Jp Cortez:
I guess I find myself hopeful. Maybe this is youthful hope. But I’m seeing the malaise of the world. And to be sure, there are a few. This isn’t a movement that’s taking the world by storm necessarily. But I think the old saying, it happens slowly and then all at once. I think ultimately, that’s probably what we’ll see here. We’re seeing, in some cases, a really strong rejection of leftist ideas in many cases. Latin America is a stronghold for leftist ideas for the last several decades, and now we’re seeing Argentina and El Salvador push back on inflating the currency away, on harming the people in the country. So between what’s happening internationally, between what’s happening, this is personal on the state legislature level, I guess I’m more hopeful than ever that because of part of what you said, the interconnectedness of we’ve got Peter St. Ange, we’ve got Per, we’ve got these giant accounts that are not just online, they’re also going on TV. E. J. Anthony is another one of Peter’s colleagues at Heritage, and they’ve been doing incredible work there. I think that The government will continue to pivot. The government will continue to blame the next thing, whatever that is, be it supply chain disruptions or whatever the next war is, which Janet Yellen has already assured us that we have enough money to fight another war if we like.
Jp Cortez:
I think ultimately, that is going to… I’m hoping that that creates or a movement percolates through the average American who has never really given any thought to what money is, who has just been saving in dollars, has dollars in their bank account, and suddenly is finding themselves unable to afford to feed their family. So, yeah, I think I’m bullish, I guess, hopeful on the future of sound money. I think you’re probably right in that there’s There had to have been some pain for people to wake up, to have scales fall from the eyes of people. I don’t think we’re necessarily done yet with either the pain or with people coming to the realization that money as it exists today in the United States is not a neutral good that is happening independent of everything else. All these are policies, and this is all a choice. To the extent that you believe that inflation is stealing from people, stealing from savers or wage earners, then it must be stopped. There’s a moral and an ethical obligation to stop what is just an intentional policy of currency debacement.
Jeff Deist:
I agree, 100 %.
Jp Cortez:
Well, Jeff, I think we’re close to wrapping up here. Do you have any final thoughts on sound money, what you see in your everyday work with monetary metals? Any parting thoughts?
Jeff Deist:
No. I know people have too much on their plate. If I can only recommend one book, it’s Mies’s Theory of Money and Credit. I mean, that’s over 100 years old now, and it holds up phenomenally well. And there’s portions that you can skip, where he’s talking about some of the historical stuff and stuff that’s relevant at the time. But the core lessons of that book, I think, are you got to give the guy credit. Un unbelievably impression. He’s writing that in a time really before central banks. I mean, the Bank of England, but before the US FAD, at any rate. And so it’s a great book that I highly recommend.
Jp Cortez:
Great. Well, listeners should check that one out. Jeff, thank you very much for joining me today. Thank you for all the work you’ve done to promote Sound Money to advance the liberties, excuse me, the ideas of liberty. As I was in my early 20s, late teens, when I was roaming the halls of the Mises Institute, and it was an incredible environment to learn from some of the best academics in the world, some of the thought leaders in this space. I appreciate what you’ve done for me and this movement. So thank you. Thank you for joining me, and hope to talk to you again soon.
Jeff Deist:
Soon, definitely. This episode was brought to you by Monetary Metals. Monetary Metals is a different gold company.
Jp Cortez:
Others buy and sell gold.
Jeff Deist:
Monetary Metals operates the Gold Yield Marketplace, a platform of products that offer a yield on gold paid in gold to investors and institutions.
Jp Cortez:
Our gold financing, Simplified. Reliable financing denominated in gold with a built-in hedge for gold-using and gold-producing businesses. To learn more, visit www. Monetary-metals. Com.
Jeff Deist:
See you next time.
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