Keith Interviewed by Silver Doctors to Discuss Permanent Gold Backwardation
Keith Weiner sat down for an interview on the SilverDoctors.com podcast for a robust discussion on a variety of topics related to gold and monetary economics.
Topics included:
- What is Keith’s current assessment of the gold & silver markets?
- What is a gold bond, and is it better than a government bond?
- The government needs lower interest rates, and what does it mean to say the dollar is “irredeemable”?
- Why is Keith keeping an eye on gold “backwardation”?
- What would happen if the gold held by the US Treasury was re-priced from the current $42.22/oz to a market price per ounce or a fixed price of say, $10,000/oz?
- What does Keith think about silver and the gold-to-silver ratio?
- What’s on Keith’s radar as we move into the end of 2019?
For the full interview, see below:
Here’re a few thoughts on an excellent interview I wrote down as it progressed.
My dad was a smart guy but he wasn’t an economist. He was a mechanical engineer who helped design the Apollo lunar lander. Anyway I was an extremely serious teen at the time when the Federal budget deficit hit $60 billion for the first time. Very concerned, I asked my dad what in the world were they doing. Didn’t the people running the show realize that they would crash the system, spending money they didn’t have? He told me that it was all a confidence game and the game would end when the confidence ran out. Basically the same thing that Keith said here.
The dollar is not money. It is a fiat currency with nothing backing it other than confidence right now.
JP Morgan said “Gold is money, and nothing else.” Not exactly true. Silver can be used as money too. The advantage of gold is that it is very valuable. The disadvantage of gold is that it is very valuable.
Paraphrasing, the interviewer asked if people somehow instinctually know that gold is money and will they eventually come that realization again? The answer is no. Most people have little to no experience with gold. When the crisis hits though, they will see their dollars lose value very quickly and they will try to convert their fiat currency to something that will maintain its value. As a result, people almost overnight will get attracted back to gold. Gold is an excellent battery to store the value of their labor and capital.
Once again, thanks for sharing. I can’t wait for the next one.
One more thing. I agree with Keith’s sentiments about the ‘joke’ told by Richard Fisher. Pretty loathsome. The under, lower, working, and middle classes really resent that kind of attitude. We’re not happy that we are getting rolled.
Keith,
Your claim that door to door gold confiscation was a Maoist abuse but isn’t really effective sounds uninformed.
In fact, Korea, Manchuria, coastal China and many parts of SE Asia were very effectively and systematically looted during the Japanese occupation. Their effectiveness was enhanced by decades of accumulated intelligence by pre-occupation Japanese merchant and crime networks. Then with a rapacious military at hand to terrorize large urban areas and “Golden Lily” operatives leveraging seized bank records and older black market intelligence, the “take” became so immense that it burdened Japanese shipping lanes stressed by Allied naval pressures. The hoard should technically be called “incredible” because it falls into the realm of modern conspiracy mythology where it lives in a mist of plausible deniability and self-delusion about post-war, covert, superpower tactics. The idea that modern tools of surveillance and military terror would not be just as effective is so patently wrong that it should give pause to anyone contemplating a substantial personal hoard of physical metal.
The only protection stored values have is civilization itself. Counterparty risk premiums rising to the point of gold backwardation do not play out well at all; I have always viewed your gold basis dataset as a proxy for the “civilized-ness” quality of life.