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No Wonder Gold is Flying High!

Things are out of control and won’t get better!  That’s why gold is up more than 34 percent in the last 12 months!

Washington’s fiscal year ends in just a couple of weeks and it’s going to be a doozie!  No wonder gold is flying!

Bloomberg News:

The US federal budget deficit surged in August with one month to go until the end of the fiscal year as higher interest costs continued to weigh on the overall balance.

The $1.9 trillion gap for the 11 months through August was up 24% from the same period last year, Treasury Department data released Thursday (9/12) showed. For the month of August alone, the deficit was $380 billion.   

That story comments on the official deficit news through the end of August.  However now, only weeks later in the middle of September, the annual deficit is already over $2 trillion!  That means the Federal government is spurting red ink at the rate of $5.50 billion per day!

That is a serious deficit disorder!

Economist Stephanie Pomboy commented on X, “QE infinity coming soon. No wonder gold is flying.”

Make no mistake about the seriousness of this situation.  Uncle Sam now has to borrow money to pay the interest on its debts.  Imagine if you had to borrow money on your MasterCard to pay the interest on your Visa.  

The gross national debt is about $35.4 trillion.  That’s 123 percent of the total productivity of the US economy (GDP).  That’s a world indoor record!  It’s higher than the World War II debt to GDP ratio.  And that was the result of a war.  You know, Pearl Harbor, Iwo Jima, the Normandy invasion, the Battle of the Bulge.  

The main battle now is the one with the politicians buying every vote they can so they can get re-elected.  Only in their self-important dreams can that compare with Okinawa, the Battle of Manila, or Anzio. 

In 1980 the debt was less than 35 percent of GDP.  Even in 2000 it was only 56 percent.  Now, to repeat, it’s 123 percent. 

One of the little-known reasons the Fed has to lower rates:  Its rate hikes over the last two years have sent interest costs on the national debt soaring.  Today the interest expense on Washington’s debt is a staggering $3 billion per day. That is not just a meaningless number.  It is money that the American people have to come up with.  They pay it by one means or another:  by taxation, inflation, or shifting as much of the debt burden as they can onto their kids.  Last year interest expense on the US debt amounted to $2,868 for every person living in the US. 

But as the announcers say on the late-night TV commercials, “But wait!  There’s more!”

Despite the mind-bobbling irresponsibility of Washington’s letting things get out of hand, please bear in mind that we’re not even talking today about the hidden US debt, which is now up to about $219 trillion.  That is money Washington has promised to pay to widows and orphans, and disabled veterans and retirees.  Those are unfunded promises Washington has made to people who count on those promises to make ends meet.  

Let there be no doubt about what we are saying.  There is going to be a lot of pain. Suffering that is immeasurable is headed the way of people for relying on the most scandalous governing class this nation has ever seen.

Please get out of the way of this train wreck by keeping your wealth in the real and enduring money of the ages, gold and silver.  You won’t be able to avoid some of the flying debris of a nation undergoing a high-speed collision with monetary reality, but you will have highly desirable monetary assets in the crisis.

Most people won’t.

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Why we get deficits, debts, inflation, and why gold goes up!

“Free stuff!  Step right up!  Get your free stuff now!”

Washington politics has become nothing less than a bunch of carney barkers!  

“Quick grab your Obama phone and hurry!”

The House Budget Committee has gone through the Harris-Walz economic proposals, and it is a grab bag of goodies that would put your typical Washington wastrel to shame.  And that’s pretty hard to do!

The report notes that “since the Biden-Harris Administration assumed office, the average family of four must pay an additional $17,169 per year, or $1,431 per month, to purchase the same goods and services.  But Kamala has more of the same in store for you.

Here’s a link so you can go through their analysis for yourself if you have the stomach for it.

To save some time, here are just a couple of the free stuff bullet points selected by the Committee to Restore Prosperity:

• Free Child care: Kamala cosponsored S. 1806, the Child Care for Working Families Act, which would create new federal entitlement programs for child care. Cost: $600 billion over the next decade.
  
• Free parental leave: Kamala supported a plan to create a government-mandated parental leave, which she would have paid for by imposing new payroll taxes on families.
  
• Free Health Care: In 2019, then-Presidential candidate Harris rolled out her Medicare for All proposal, which included coverage for more than 11 million illegal immigrants. Projected to cost $44 trillion over ten years.
  
• Free College: In 2017 Harris was an original cosponsor of Bernie Sanders’ plan for free college, S.806, College for All Act of 2017. Cost: $600 billion over the next decade.
  
• Free Child Rearing Expenses: Harris proposed Expanding the Child Tax Credit (CTC) and making it fully refundable (a cash grant) of up to $6,000 in first year of life. Cost: $1.2 trillion over 10 years.
  
• Free Down payment on Home Purchase: Kamala would provide a tax credit of up to $25,000 to first-time homebuyers, further boosting demand for home ownership and lead to higher home prices. Cost: $100 billion over the next decade.

And that doesn’t even include free sex-change operations of illegal aliens.

Somehow, we don’t think that when Francis Scott Key wrote that line in our national anthem about the land of the free that this is what he had in mind!

But that is what we have become.  Now do you think the paper dollar can last?  

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If you own silver, wish you owned silver, or are thinking about owning silver some day, the headlines in a recent Jerusalem Post story should grab your attention and not let go:

CHINA’S STRATEGIC SILVER TAKEOVER: A CALCULATED MOVE TO DRAIN THE WEST

China hoarding silver, price 10% higher than West. Secret weapon or economic warfare?

Here’s the lead:

A Hidden War for Economic Dominance

While the world has been focused on the geopolitical tensions between China and the West, a more subtle battle has been unfolding in the global financial markets. China, through a series of calculated moves, has been quietly accumulating vast quantities of gold and silver. This move has signaled a potential shift in the global economic landscape and highlights the developing countries’ need for exorbitant amounts of resources.

Silver: China’s Secret Weapon

In addition to its gold hoarding, China has also been strategically increasing its silver reserves. The Shanghai Metals Exchange has seen a significant surge in silver trading volume, with prices consistently higher than those on Western exchanges. This suggests that China may be deliberately driving up the price of silver to drain the West’s resources.

China has a silver stockpile of 71,000 metric tons.  America is seventh on the list of silver stockpiles with only 23,000 metric tons.  

Peru, because it is “the silver-producing powerhouse,” is in first place with silver reserves of 98,000 tons.  China is next, followed by Poland (65,000 t0ns), Russia (45,000 tons), Australia (27,000 tons), and Chile (26,000 tons).

The Post article points to the possibility of a silver squeeze similar to the one in 1979-80 that sent prices racing to new highs: “If investors begin to panic and rush to buy silver, the price could skyrocket, causing significant disruptions to the global economy.”  

Author and commentator Doug Casey says he’s very bullish on silver based on its technological applications and the relatively small size of the silver market.  “When gold really gets underway,” he says, “silver could easily go to $200 an ounce.

If Samsung’s recent breakthrough in silver solid-state batteries matures, we think that price estimate is woefully low.  One analyst forecasts that the Samsung technology will deliver a battery with a 600-mile range and a nine-minute charge.  It would, he estimates, require as much as one kilogram of silver per vehicle.

If you own silver, you may want to add to your position.  If you wish you owned silver, or are thinking about owning silver someday, we advise you to wait no longer.

Find out more about profit and personal protection opportunities with silver by contacting an RME precious metals specialist today.

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The failures of government currencies are the rule.  They are not the exception.  There are more paper and other government money failures than we could possibly cover, but we’ve taken a close-up look at many of them over the years including the big ones like the German inflation a hundred years ago.  Or the Zimbabwe inflation.  That was one for the record books, too.

But there’s one currency failure that we haven’t written about.  The one in Russia that took place after the collapse of the Soviet Union.  One of our favorite journalists, Matt Taibbi was there, a working reporter on the scene, when it happened.

Here are some of his memories from his Substack newsletter:

In Moscow on the morning of July 24th, 1993 I fixed a cup of tea, rubbed the hangover out of my eyes, and walked out to look for breakfast. I was living then above the Metro station at VDNKh, the ex-Soviet equivalent maybe of New York’s World’s Fair grounds, and saw right away something was wrong. Old women on the street were bawling, a group of men was shouting at a beat cop, and sidewalks were full of people walking in a daze, as if a neutron bomb had gone off.

The government of Boris Yeltsin had decreed it was withdrawing all old rubles from circulation. Russians who’d stuffed rubles in mattresses for decades would be wiped out, unless they could fight through huge bank lines to exchange bills. Worse, the maximum amount was 35,000 rubles, or roughly $30-$35, about 60% of a Russian’s average monthly salary of 58,700 rubles. Those who exchanged the full 35,000 had passports stamped barring all future exchanges. I’ll never forget seeing a burly woman yelling, to no one in particular: “Vori, blyad!” (“F…ing thieves!”).

“Black Saturday” is remembered as a breaking point in the arc of post-Soviet history, the moment when many Russians stopped believing a glorious new democratic future was just around the corner, if it was coming at all. A week or so after the event, on August 6th, 1993, then-Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin burned his name in the nation’s history books. An aphorism-spewing figure whose unique place in Russian lore is like a cross of Yogi Berra and Spiro Agnew, Chernomyrdin said one of the most purely Russian things of all time: “Hoped for better, turned out as always.”

It’s always the same basic scene.  It happens when people seem least to expect it, although the signs of trouble are everywhere.  People in panic.  Crowding into banks and official offices.  Flooding into store to buy goods with currency no one wants because it has no intrinsic value.  Angry mobs with no direction.  Crime lords getting rich on sweetheart deals from their government cronies.  Old people and young alike, crying at the betrayal, wondering how they will make ends meet.

Taibbi:

With inflation above 2500% the previous year of 1992, Russia was beginning a long period of economic suffering that wouldn’t hit climax until 1998, when the country defaulted and plunged into a crisis presaging the rise of Vladimir Putin. It’s hard to describe the disaster of the nineties in terms that will make sense to Americans. Life expectancy for men dropped seven years almost overnight, from 64 in 1990 to 57 in 1994. Deaths from disease doubled. An already heavy-drinking country saw alcoholism rise by 60%. The Lancet estimated Russia that decade saw seven million “excess deaths,” whatever that means. I know what it looked like: mass poverty, spiraling crime, and sharply rising levels of fury toward the West, largely seen as a primary culprit in designing Russia’s crony-capitalist hellscape.

The Western press, like the New York Times, called it a transition to capitalism.  But it was mostly designed by a handful of liberal Harvard academics, most of whom knew little if anything about the functioning of markets and capitalism.  How could they?  Most of them learned economics from clowns like Paul Samuelson, a central planning socialist and author of the establishment’s preferred textbook on the subject.  Samuelson is the bozo that told the students using his textbook, Economics – ubiquitous on America’s college campuses for decades – that the Soviet’s economy was going to bypass the US economy.  

Right!  

And did I mention he was a Nobel prize winner?

As we say, most of them understood nothing about markets and capitalism.

Taibbi writes that he didn’t see any capitalism; what he saw was cronyism, the creation of Russia’s famous oligarchs.  They stole everything that wasn’t nailed down.  And they tried to steal everything that was nailed down, too.

It’s cronyism by another name.  It may have been called privatization by the American lapdog press, but the Russian people had another name for it: prikhvatizatsia, or “grabitization.”

“I saw nothing that resembled capitalism or democracy in my travels,” says Taibbi.  “Competition was managed by politicians who doled out zones of commercial operation like racketeers…. This was a mafia state.”

Taibbi is older and wiser now than he was in 1993.  Today he says, “After witnessing a historic financial collapse in the former Soviet Union, I thought bad advice from Western economists was a root cause. Now I think failure was the plan.”

Yep.  The Deep State wanted Russia as a perpetual enemy even then.  And the Deep State never sleeps.

There are a million stories in the world of currency collapses.  This was just one of them.

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What’s the deal with gold?  What’s going on?

Yahoo! Finance pointed out the other day that “The yellow metal has forged meteoric gains this year.”

Jared Blikre, Yahoo’s finance editor sought to explain it in an article whose headline we borrowed for this piece, “WHY GOLD IS OUTPERFORMING NEARLY EVERYTHING!”

Here is some of what he wrote:

According to BofA Global Research, gold funds just absorbed the largest inflows in four weeks, attracting $1.1 billion. Yet, the broader trend has actually seen $2.5 billion in outflows year to date, suggesting that underlying strength is coming from outside traditional fund flows.

Central banks — especially those of developing countries — have been buying the barbarous relic at a record clip. According to the World Gold Council, central banks have purchased 290 tonnes in the first quarter alone, beating out the prior Q1 record from 2023 and setting CBs on a path to record gold purchases in 2024 that are estimated to easily eclipse 1,000 tonnes.

“Not only is the long-standing trend in central bank gold buying firmly intact, it also continues to be dominated by banks from emerging markets,” wrote

In that regard, Turkey tops the buy list this year with 30 tonnes purchased in the first quarter — lifting its gold reserves to 570 tonnes. China bought 27 tonnes in Q1, making it the 17th consecutive quarter of purchases and also bringing its holdings to 2,262 tonnes. Other notable purchasers include India, Kazakhstan, the Czech Republic, Oman, and Singapore.

The central bank buying spree has solidified gold’s status as a reserve asset. According to BofA, gold has now surpassed the euro to become the world’s largest reserve asset second only to the US dollar, representing 16% of the reserve pool.

The precious metal’s performance can be attributed to its unique position as a real asset with one of the lowest correlations to stocks across asset classes, making it a safe haven from market swings and inflation.

The popular financial press doesn’t like to write about gold, and often when it does it uses disparaging terms like “gold bug.”  There are several reasons for that.  One is that Wall Street and the major banks provide the financial press and bubblevision TV channels with most of their revenue.  And big Wall Street and the banks don’t like you to own assets like gold that you take into your own possession.  The prefer you to keep your assets “on account.”  They can make money hypothecating your stocks to others and they have more opportunities to churn adjust your portfolio when your assets are in house.   

So, we are glad for the attention we get from articles like the one above.  It’s pretty hard to ignore gold as this point anyway.

We have been calling de-dollarization the most important monetary megatrend of our time, so we don’t blame others writing about gold for featuring it.  But that is the effect of our corrupted, unbacked, irredeemable fiat monetary system.  Sure, the central bankers of the world are moving to gold.  But they are doing so not just for a change or to keep busy.  They are moving to gold because they now recognize that the US dollar will go the way of all fiat currencies.  

Or to put it differently, the dollar will return to its commodity value which is paper and ink.  Used paper and ink.

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We’ve already had Third World inflation, endless wars, defund the police, socialist leaders, and a currency that the whole world is backing away from! So why not be prepared? 

Consumer prices are up 39% since 2012.  If you retired in 2012 after carefully planning your household budget, too bad for you!  You could say, as we did, that consumer prices are up 39% since then, but you could also say the dollar isn’t what it used to be.

Both are right.  Bear that in mind if you are trying to plan your future retirement right now.

If you watched the endless parade of no-win American wars – wars that were never declared like the Constitution demands – maybe you wonder about all we could have done in America with all those trillions of dollars.  Or better still, what you could have done with your own money had they not taken it from you in the first place.

Maybe you watched American cities burn under Biden and Harris.  Maybe you didn’t agree with the Vice President and the rest of the Left about defunding the police.  

Maybe you are watching the rise of American socialism and the world moving away from the global dollar, and you are asking yourself:

“What’s next?”

Here’s your answer.  Civil unrest.  Just like the burning cities of a couple of years ago.  Except everywhere.  And regardless of who wins the White House.

Hedgefunder Rayn Dalio, the founder of Bridgewater Associates, wonders what the next economic downturn will be like.  “Disparity in wealth, especially when accompanied by disparity in values, leads to increasing conflict and, in the government, that manifests itself in the form of populism of the left and populism of the right and often in revolutions of one sort or another,” says Dalio.

Look at the evidence in the UK.   Like here, political protests are treated like a crime.  Crimes are treated like political protests.  Riots spread across the UK after ten people were attacked, with three young girls stabbed to death in Southport, attacked by the offspring of immigrants.  Axel Muganwa Rudakubana, the son of Rwandan immigrants, is accused of the murders.  The government is calling protests against migrants “far-right thuggery” with Prime Minister Keir Starmer looking to silence dissent and threatening protestors with “the full force of the law.”

It doesn’t take a Nostradamus to foresee that open borders bring chaos, even here in the US:  from drugs, human trafficking, economic displacement, and increased demand for taxes, to providing immigrant medical care, education, housing, welfare, and policing expenses.  Just last year it cost an estimated $150 billion and that is after taking into account whatever taxes illegals might have paid.  

That is just one among many examples of the dry tinder awaiting a spark in today’s political environment.  Protests everywhere, faltering economies, wars and rumors of wars.  

Here’s some more fuel for the fire.  The consumer has been pounded senseless by inflation.  US credit card debt has risen by more than 48 percent since the first quarter of 2021.

A woman in Dayton, Ohio offered this comment to Fox News:  “I just want the younger generations to have a future… that’s what I’m most worried about… just because I feel like America and the world is kind of all on fire.” 

There was a time that the prosperity of the country provided money to be wildly thrown at problems to keep a lid on things.  There was the Great Society, the War on Poverty, and a host of other boondoggles and wealth transfer programs.  

Some politicians are stuck in time and think this is the same prosperous country that it was back then and the problems can be bought off.  Wrong.  But they keep proposing more spending anyway.  

Nobody ever says how it will be paid for.  But for a government irretrievably in debt like our own, it has to be by inflation.

In the US, Martin Armstrong from Armstrong Economics says, “We are looking at serious civil unrest regardless of who wins in November.”  That stands to reason.  44 percent of respondents in a recent survey said they aren’t making enough take-home pay to cover their daily expenses. 

Hello?  Read that last sentence again!  44 percent!  That’s how many aren’t able to cover their daily expenses.  

And that is now, before the recession hits.

What used to be assumed to be a social contract between the governing classes and the governed has gone the way of the winds.  As far as we can tell, the governing classes are focused on stealing everything that isn’t nailed down.  Government cronies keep asking for and getting more, more, more.

Because there is no one to stop them, much less to even insist on an honest accounting for where all the peoples’ money is going, chaos is growing.  

What should you invest in to protect yourself from civil unrest?  From economic chaos?  From monetary chaos?

If thousands of years of human experience from all around the globe are any indication (and they are for good reason), the answer is gold and silver.

Enough said.

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At Republic Monetary Exchange, we built our business with a policy of putting our clients first.  Our Best Practices Policy is designed to protect you.  

We have warned for years about gold dealers that pop like mushrooms when gold prices are rising.  As we have warned, some pop-up dealers ask customers to pay for their gold and silver now, and then… to wait until who knows when for it to be delivered.

We strongly recommend that you do not do that.  

We recommend Best Practices for your protection when you invest in precious metals.  

At Republic Monetary Exchange we are the industry leader in Best Practices for our clients.  We always make sure to have inventory on hand for your purchases.  Other dealers have made their clients wait for weeks on end to get delivery.  We don’t do that.  We make delivery immediately.   Right then and there.  No delays.  No excuses.

That’s why we are Arizona’s Premiere Gold and Silver Dealer.  For our valued out-of-state clients, we ship immediately, too.  Our signature service includes five-star packaging, fully insured, and expedited shipping.  No delays.  No waiting.

At Republic Monetary Exchange, we’re always surprised to learn that some people buy gold and silver from nameless, faceless voices somewhere.  That must take a lot of guts… to send money off to a boiler room 800 number somewhere.

Right now, there seems to be an explosion of these 800 number boiler rooms with call lists.  They may have even gotten your number.  The pitch changes, but right now the popular approach is for the voice on the other end to pretend you have spoken with them before, and they are calling with a special offer for new clients.  

What we have heard of their “special offers” don’t sound very “special” to us. 

But it seems to happen when gold is showing new strength. Calls from boiler rooms, splashy TV ads, companies that just opened their doors or just got a post office box, emails from people you don’t know, phone calls during dinner.  

We are also hearing complaints about warehouse stores that are trying to sell gold.  People are unhappy that the warehouse stores will not buy back the gold they sell!  

That is not a Best Practice!

At Republic Monetary Exchange, we think everyone should own gold and silver.  But this is real life.  Things happen and some time you may need to sell your gold and silver.  At Republic Monetary Exchange we will buy back your gold and silver even if you did not buy it from us!

And of course, since we follow Best Practices, when you need to sell, we make immediate payment.  Same day.  On the spot.  No risk, no waiting.  Best Practices always.  

One more thing.  Sometime one form of gold or silver will represent a significantly better value than another.  That’s just the way markets work.  Some day Coke is more or less expensive than Pepsi.  Or one cut of beef may be a better value than another.  We like to help our clients get great values when they occur.  But people tell us that the big warehouse store doesn’t give you a choice.  And they can’t even answer your questions about the markets and about buying gold and silver.

At Republic Monetary Exchange you can get all your questions answered by experienced professionals.  

We think our clients have a right to reliable information.  It’s just another part of Best Practices.  And that is how we have built our business.  

If you would like to learn more about investing in precious metals for wealth protection and profit, speak with a Republic Monetary Exchange gold and silver professional today. 

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The pilots flying don’t know how to fly!

We don’t know how to say it nicely.  Besides, your wealth and prosperity matter too much to pussyfoot around about stuff.  So here you go:

Far from the fabled “best and brightest,” of yesteryear, today’s Washington clowns have no idea what they are doing to our economy.  But it’s not good.

All eyes have been on Jackson Hole lately were government economists gather every August.  But it is not a gathering of great minds.  It’s a gathering of pilots who don’t know how to fly the plane.  

We remember Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell at Jackson Hole a few years ago insisting that inflation was transitory.  

Hello, must we remind anyone about inflation hitting double digits in Phoenix?

We remember the Obama economic advisor enjoying the Grand Teton weather not that many summers ago where he went to explain that all we needed was more government spending.  

Hello, let us introduce you to the $35 trillion dollar US debt!

The latest huge – and costly embarrassment – was the employment report.  Just last week (8/21) the Bureau of Labor Statistics discovered that 818,000 fewer jobs were created than it had announced. That’s a pretty big miss by any standard.  From 2.90 million to 2.082 million jobs.   And the BLS was even incompetent in releasing the news of its incompetent miss on the job number, as Zero Hedge pointed out.  As it noted, many on Wall Street began to suspect that with the inflated job numbers the Biden administration was trying to cover up a labor market recession.

In any case, market participants don’t like to trade based on faulty data.  And the Fed is setting policies based on unreliable data.

Well, it wouldn’t be the first coverup of bad economic news.  But here’s the other shoe.

Biden’s commerce secretary Gina Raimondo told ABC News that she was “not familiar” with the BLS.  (She runs the US Bureau of Economic Analysis).  Not familiar?  It was unclear from the conversation if she was unfamiliar with BLS or unfamiliar with the biggest jobs revision in 15 years.  Either way, not great.

Raimondo is another player who described Joe Biden, before his decision to remove himself from the race as “sharp, focused and insightful.”  Now she’s hot off the Democrat convention circuit telling us the Kamala Harris is “pro-business.”

 The people at the Committee Unleash Restore Prosperity beg to differ.   “Harris-Walz is the most anti-business ticket by a major presidential party in our lifetimes and perhaps in American history,” they say.  

Here is their evidence:

 Kamala Proposes $5 Trillion in New Taxes – the Biggest Tax Hike in the History of the World

The Harris tax plan would:

Raise the corporate tax from 21% to 28%

• Quadruple the tax on stock buybacks from 1% to 4%

• Double the global minimum tax from 10% to 20%

• Raise the top Income tax rate from 37% to 39.6%

• Raise the corporate alternative minimum tax from 15% to 21%

• Raise the capital gains tax from 24% to 43.5%

• Impose the first-ever tax on unrealized capital gains at 25%

• Double the number of Americans subject to the death tax

One more thing that we think nails down out case that the Washington pilots do not know how to fly the plane.  We want to show you once again Jared Bernstein, the president’s chief economic advisor, about how monetary policy works.  See the utter confusion for yourself:

America, we have a problem.  We hope we have made the case for you how dangerous this widespread cluelessness is to your wealth and prosperity.  If so, reach out to us without delay to implement a plan to protect yourself and your family with gold and silver.

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WAR!  Better be ready!  Things are getting pretty dicey on the world stage and the Biden administration doesn’t even know how to spell diplomacy!

Amid rising geopolitical tensions on multiple fronts, we’d like to make a single point.  

Iran’s leadership has been virtually assuring the world that it will retaliate for the assassination of Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran.  Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian insists Iran has a right to respond to aggression.  Whether it will do so, we do not know, but this much is clear:  the region is becoming increasing unstable.  Economic warfare with Iran has been US policy for some time, The US has now bolstered its military presence in the region.  Cruisers.  Destroyers.  Fighters.  Escalation is a clear possibility.

What is Iran’s defensive leverage?  The flow of energy.  Oil.  LNG.   The Strait of Hormuz.  Iran has long been clear that it will act militarily to close the Strait of Hormuz in the event of an attack.

The Strait of Hormuz is a sea-lane between Iran and the Arabian Peninsula. It links the otherwise landlocked Persian Gulf with the Gulf of Oman and the Arabian Sea, providing access to the world’s oceans. Twenty-one miles wide at its narrowest, the waterway is a critical choke point.  88 percent of oil from the Persian Gulf moves through Hormuz.

The world economy will come to a standstill if the Persian Gulf erupts and Hormuz is shut down.  70 percent of the oil leaving the Gulf is headed to Asia.  Asia (and Europe) will panic. Energy prices will skyrocket.   

The price of gold will explode.

The US says it can swiftly reopen the Strait if it is shut down.  Maybe.  Maybe blowing up Nord Stream says something about what USGov can do.  But that’s not good enough, because oil tankers will not go there for a long time even if the Strait can be reopened in weeks or months.  Insuring them will become impossible.

We think the market may agree with our assessment.  Gold is a sensitive barometer of geopolitical risks.  Those with long memories will note the role the Iranian Revolution in 1979 and the taking of 52 American hostages played in the skyrocketing price of gold. 

The threat to energy supplies from a war with Iran may already be factoring into new record gold prices.  Never forget that gold is the world’s currency of choice in times of crisis.

Much higher gold prices can be expected if the shooting starts.

Much higher.

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…core consumer prices are up 50 months in a row!

When stock markets are in chaos…

When Warren Buffet sells half his Apple stock…

When the commercial real estate market is a mess…

When phony paper currencies like the Japanese yen get crushed…

When central bank gold buying hits one record high after another…

When the Fed starts panicking…

When the debt explodes…

When people start remembering stagflation…

When socialism is spreading…

When credit card and auto loan delinquencies are climbing…

When Warren Buffet is dumping shares of one of America’s biggest banks…

When foreign wars are growing…

When Washington won’t stop spending…

When the economy is tanking…

When all that’s happening, it’s time to buy gold!

All that is happening now.  

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The Federal Reserve Banking System is a political institution.  It is not a philanthropic institution, nor is it an academic one.  Nor is an honest bank, one that takes in money from willing depositors and makes loans to willing borrowers to make a spread.

The Fed is a political institution.  Its politics are hard left.  Its very existence is a tribute to leftist economics.  And it will tilt the scales of the economy to help the Democrats at the ballot box in November.

We have made this point repeatedly and wonder how anyone can possibly dispute it.

Although still far from its goal – itself made-up, unsubstantiated leftist claptrap – of a 2 percent inflation rate, we warn that the Fed will move heaven and earth (and maybe a few data points) to goose the economy just in time to help the Democrats.  

That means we expect an interest rate cut in September.

Here is Fed chairman Jerome Powell a couple of days ago.  “We think the time (for a rate cut) is approaching. If we get the data that we hope we get, a reduction in the policy rate could be on the table at the September meeting.”

A rate cut will give Kamala Harris, Karine-Jean Pierre, and Joe Biden something to crow about until election day.  And the lapdog press will run their rah-rah machine at full volume.  In fact, they won’t just turn the cheering for Bidenomics up to 10.  They’ll run it up to 11.  

That’s one louder!

The practical effect of forcing rates down is more money-printing to fund America’s $35 trillion national debt.  Usually the biggest debtors (Washington is the biggest debtor in the history of time!) have to pay higher interest rates to offset the risk that they will have trouble meeting their obligations.  But Washington will force rates down instead, and will have to run the printing presses.

It all looks very familiar to us.  We remember the inflation of the 1970s.  It appeared to be coming down, so the authorities did everything wrong and inflation rebounded massively.  

Here’s a chart:

The dashed orange line represents annual changes in the Consumer Price Index from 1966 – 1983.  The inflation rate fell, only to explode back to double-digit territory.

The blue line is the CPI from 2015 until now.  

Look how closely they track one another.  Eerie, isn’t it?

Gold prices skyrocketed, just as we expect them to now when the Fed reignites inflation.  It’s the same old funny money story!

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What happened to the gold in Olympic gold metals?

For hundreds of events, the 2024 Olympics handed out thousands of medals.  The Paris Mint made more than 5,000 medals, 2,600 for the Olympics and 2,400 for the Paralympics. 

When the modern Olympics began in 1896, the official US gold price was $20.67 an ounce.  

As the world’s athletes head home from the summer games (officially the Games of the XXXIII Olympiad from Paris), gold has been trading at over $2,400.  

Gold has increased by 11,666 percent.  Or you could describe it differently, by how much the gold purchasing power of the dollar has fallen.  The answer is that today’s dollar has less than one percent of its 1896 purchasing power.

The Olympic gold medals now contain only 6 grams of gold, less than one-fifth of a troy ounce that serves as the plating for the medal.  Since the Olympic gold medal weighs 529 grams, if it were gold, it would be worth more than $40,800.  But Olympic medals haven’t been pure gold since 1912.

This year’s medals are the design of French jeweler Chaumet.  The design includes an element of radiance, fine lines projected at regular intervals around the center to add a 3D effect and sparkle to a medal.  

At the center of each medal this year – gold, silver, and bronze – is a small insert of iron from the original iron of the Eiffel Tower, meant to remind the athletes of Paris and France.  

The silver medal weighs 525 grams with 507 grams of silver content.   Its value based on recent silver spot prices is approximately $450.

The bronze medal weighs 455 grams and consists of 415.15 grams of copper, 21.85 grams of zinc and 18 grams of iron. Its podium value is approximately $13.

Our congratulations to all the winners and participants.  And remember that the top prize is gold for a reason!  

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Oh, What a Tangled Web!

Let’s see.  The mainstream media has been wrong about almost everything!

So, why should we be surprised they are clueless about the economy? 

We’ll begin with the obvious.  Despite the Biden/Harris administration crowing non-stop about the great unemployment picture (and the lapdog press echoing their every word), In the last year, the economy has hemorrhaged 1.6 million full-time jobs, replacing them with 1.8 million part-time ones.

Is that good news?  

Now, we’re going to get into the weeds just a bit, but you will quickly see what is going on, that the health of the US economy is being misrepresented.  And that is just one more reason to protect yourself with gold and silver before someone points out that the King (Washington) isn’t wearing any clothes (it’s broke!).

Here’s the headline:  U.S. economy grew at a 2.8% pace in the second quarter, much more than expected.  That’s from CNBC.  

This kind of stuff is frustrating for people who know something about the economy.  Former US Budget Director David Stockman saw the same story reported on CNN.  You might want to see his take.  He is virtually at his wit’s end with this stuff.  That’s because the number that is getting all the attention distorts the true picture of US growth.  He writes:

It’s been obvious as hell for a long time that CNN is completely in the tank for the Democratic National Committee (DNC). But this AM they outdid themselves—rolling out some nincompoop economic weather-girl to claim that the Q2 GDP gain of 2.8% was “incredible” and a “high-five” for the Biden-Harris economy.

Stockman is at his wit’s end with this kind of reporting.  That’s because the numbers CNN is so excited about “doesn’t amount to a hill of beans.”

Stockman:

$71 billion or 44% of the allegedly awesome $260 billion increase in Q2 real GDP consisted of a large inventory stocking gain. Real GDP excluding the inventory swing rose by only $89 billion or a pretty limpid 1.6% at an annualized rate.

So it needs be recalled that the Commerce Department’s estimate of inventory gains and losses is one of the flakier components of the GDP in terms of its impact on the annualized headline number during any given quarter, yet its economic significance over any reasonable period of time is diminutive at best. That is to say, the impact of the inventory change figure on the headline number for quarterly GDP can be a big positive, a big negative, a nothing burger or anything in-between. Its impact on the longer-term rate of GDP growth, however, doesn’t amount to a hill of beans.

GDP numbers have plenty of other problems.  We have noted in this space for years that Washington likes to count government spending as part of GDP.  Stockman points to that as well, calling it “double-counting.”

So if you take out the double-counting that inflates GDP and inventory restocking, the economic growth picture is not something to rah-rah-rah about.

As it happened, the real government spending increase in Q2 2024 amounted to $30 billion or another 19% of the aforementioned $160 billion gain in headline real GDP. Again, therefore, if we remove the government double-count and the inventory restocking from the real GDP gain figures, the resulting increase in Q2 2024 is just +$59 billion.

That’s surely nothing to write home about. It represents just a 1.0% annualized gain from Q1 2024.

There’s more, including how the Commerce Department relies on unreliable inflation numbers in its GDP calculation.  We won’t go there because we’re already deep enough into the dismal science called economics.

However, the larger point is that the US economy isn’t what it was or should be.  Stockman points more dependable numbers that reflect the generational decline in America’s economic growth.

• Between 1953 and 1973 the economy grew at 4.0% per annum. 
• Between 1973 and 2001 the economy only grew at 3.1% per annum.  
• Between 2017 and 2024 the economy only grew at 2.28% per annum.  

And today the media is cheering about economic growth that without the rose-colored Washington eyeshades, is probably only 1 percent.  And that is nothing to cheer about.

Because a weak economy cannot sustain a reliable global currency, much less a $35 trillion debt load, you will want to protect yourself and your family with gold and silver.

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As students of monetary history, we have an advantage in the gold price forecasting game.  Based on abundant precedent we can simply say that at some point people will no longer refer to the dollar value of the gold they own; they will instead just refer to the number of ounces they own.

And what does that tell you about what will have happened to the unbacked, fiat, paper or digital, debt-laden Federal Reserve dollar?

In the meantime, here are some observations about gold prices making the rounds in the financial press.

GOLDMAN SACHS SEES $2,700 GOLD PRICE THIS YEAR!

From Investing.com:

Goldman Sachs underscores the significance of central bank gold purchases, which have seen a threefold increase since mid-2022.

While the Chinese market is sensitive to price fluctuations, the brokerage sees structural changes creating an “unshakeable bull market” for gold in China.

“We still see very significant value in long gold positions, and maintain our bullish $2,700 forecast (a 12% increase over current spot prices) for 2025,” they added.

MORGAN STANLEY SEES GOLD PRICE AT $2,650 BY THE FOURTH QUARTER!

From Investing.com:

Gold is approaching its record highs, rising 50% from its 2022 lows and 25% since mid-February.

According to Morgan Stanley commodity strategists, this surge is driven primarily by the physical market, with central bank purchases doubling in 2022/23 compared to previous trends. Retail buying has also increased this year, especially in China, where bar and coin demand is very strong….

While the recent rally has been driven by physical factors, strategists argue that financial flows will drive the next leg higher. They note this shift is “starting to come through,” predicting that gold prices could reach $2,650/oz by Q4 2024.

We note that the fourth quarter is just over two months away.  Our reader will also remember our report this time last year that Bank of America analysts called for silver to reach $35 an ounce this year.  That number is now well within reach.  At the same time they forecast $50 silver in the medium turn.  

J.P. MORGAN SAYS $2,500 NEXT QUARTER; $2,600 IN 2025! MAY OVERSHOOT THOSE TARGETS!

From JP Morgan:

“Amid fraying geopolitics, increased sanctioning and de-dollarization, we observe an increased appetite to buy real assets including gold,” said Gregory Shearer, Head of Base and Precious Metals Strategy at J.P. Morgan.

“Across all metals, we have the highest conviction on a bullish medium-term forecast for both gold and silver over the course of 2024 and into the first half of 2025…. “The direction of travel is still higher over the coming quarters, forecasting an average price of $2,500/oz in the fourth quarter of 2024 and $2,600/oz in 2025, with risk still skewed toward an earlier overshoot,” Shearer said.

We note that J.P. Morgan is an arm of JPMorganChase, the largest bank in the US and the world’s largest bank by market capitalization.  It’s chairman Jaime Dimon is on the shortlist for Treasury Secretary in a Trump administration.  

We also note that it is unusual, and we think a very bullish indicator when analysts warn that their forecasts for higher prices may actually be too low.

GOLD TO $2,700 NEXT YEAR SAYS UBS GLOBAL WEALTH MANAGEMENT!

From BNN Bloomberg:

Mark Haefele, CIO for UBS Global Wealth Management, expects the bull market in gold to continue with gold rising to $2,700 an ounce next year.

We’ve seen a lot of central banks buying in gold, which we think is going to continue because to some degree the dollar and US financial system was kind of weaponized around Ukraine and central banks realized they may want to have some alternatives,” he said.  

We take special note that the Bloomberg story points out the World Gold Council Survey finds about 20 central banks expect to raise their gold holdings.  That is a record high.  

$15,000 or $27,000 GOLD? 

Be sure to check in with Republic Monetary Exchange’s blog often.  Soon we will share the analysis of a noted gold expert who has raised his gold price forecast from $15,000 to $27,000!  You will want to see his reasoning for this stunning forecast!

AND ONE MORE.  THE TRAJECTORY OF AMERICA’S MONEY!

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Is the United States insolvent?  By that I mean is it unable to pay its debts?

The honest answer is yes.  The formal answer is no.

Let us explain.

Better yet, let Ben Bernanke, the former Chairman of the Federal Reserve System explain:

“The US government has a technology, called a printing press, that allows it to produce as many dollars as it wishes at essentially no cost.”

Dr. Bernanke was one of the great money printers of all time.  In other words, he was one of the great inflationists of all time:

“Under a paper-money system, a determined government can always generate higher spending and, hence, positive inflation.”

So, no matter how much debt the government has, it can print money to pay its creditors.  This legalized counterfeiting is a fraud.  You can’t pay off your creditors by doing the same thing without going to jail. But the government can.  Unfortunately, there is no such thing as a free lunch and there is a reason people go to jail for counterfeiting.  That is because it defrauds others.  Even when the government does it and calls it legal.

The new money the government prints takes on value or purchasing power to the extent that the existing money (your savings) loses value or purchasing power.  That loss of purchasing power is commonly called inflation.

The USGoverment ran a $1.3 trillion deficit for the first nine months of this fiscal year. It is about $1.85 trillion as we write this.   

It carries a gross federal debt of $34.9 trillion.  That is what we call the USG’s visible debt.  

(Below the waterline, like an iceberg, is the hidden debt, promises the government has made to its citizens that are not funded.  That is more than $200 trillion. Washington’s response to the hidden debt is “Never mind!”   So, we’ll move on.)

The USG’s debt today is 127 percent of the nations supposed productivity, what the government calls Gross Domestic Product.  Here’s a recent graphic illustration of the gross (visible) debt and its share of GDP.

Former US Budget Director David Stockman recently detailed what has gone on over the last 50 years that is reflected in the above chart:  “The public debt is up 89-fold, from $389 billion to $34.5 trillion. And its share of GDP or burden on the US economy has nearly quadrupled, rising from a post-war low of 36% in 1970 to an all-time high of 122% at present.”

And to circle back to the hidden USG debt, Stockman describes their growth path as well:

“Major entitlements are on a path from 10% of GDP at the turn of the century to more than 23% by 2050. And the overwhelming share of that gain will be due to a retired population that will grow from 50 million at present to 80 million by 2050, putting huge upward pressure on Social Security and Medicare outlays.”

The bottom line is that none of these debts, visible or hidden, can be paid except by the expedient of printing money.  That’s why the people on Capitol Hill seem so unconcerned.  They can spend all they want, and the Fed will make it possible by creating more dollars out of thin air.

That will destroy what is left of the dollar’s purchasing power.  It will destroy the middle class as well.  But as they say in Washington, “Never mind!”

Do you own gold?

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The Crowstrike Outage Shows How Fragile Our Digital Infrastructure Can Be

The headlines captured the story this way:

It’s like Y2K, except it happened this time!

“Largest IT Outage In History” Sparks Disruptions Worldwide!

Unprecedented IT Outage Cripples Businesses Around the Globe!

The IT shutdown impacted major banks, stock exchanges, 911 services, media, and airlines. 

Here’s the lead from the financial site Zero Hedge:  “Early Friday, a global IT outage caused by an issue with cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike disrupted flights, banks, retailers, stock exchanges, 911 call centers, and media outlets. Experts say this could be one of the largest IT outages in modern history.”.

The first question on many people’s minds was whether the outage was a terrorist strike or an act of war.  The only good news was that it wasn’t a security incident or a cyberattack, according to CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz.  

But it could have been.  It makes it a lot easier to ask, “what if,” doesn’t it?

Once again, we see just how vulnerable we are.  So, what happens to your ability to access your money when the internet goes down?  Or the power grid is attacked?  You are stuck unless you have money like gold and silver that is off the grid.

Oh, and do we need to drive the point home by mentioning that we also just learned last week about a massive hack of AT&T records in 2022?  

From NBC:  “A 2022 security breach compromised the data of ‘nearly all’ AT&T cellular network customers, with hackers stealing six months’ worth of call and text message records, the company said Friday.”

Here is what we wrote in 2019 (when gold was just over $1,300!:

Some people buy gold for privacy.  They would like to keep their financial affairs better protected.  Since the banks have become snoops for the government, reporting what you do, and since big corporations try to follow you in everything you do and anything you buy, just the peace of mind of having a little privacy is a very good reason to own gold.  

You may remember how a lot of things were shut down after 9/11.  Have you even wondered what would happen if the increasingly stressed national electricity grid went down, or if solar flares screwed up satellite functions and digital communications?

What would you do if ATM machines stopped spitting out cash?

I can tell you this.  In any of those circumstances you would be very happy to own gold and silver, the world’s most liquid commodities.

Visit with an experienced precious metal professional at Republic Monetary Exchange and learn about the importance of getting your wealth off the grid and into the world’s most enduring forms of liquidity, gold and silver.

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Is the Inflation Rate only the 3% that the Government says it is?

Here’s a wake-up call!  Yes, another one!  

The government tells us the inflation rate is currently 3.0 percent.  That’s the Consumer Price Index increase for the 12 months ending in June.  

Between January 2020 and last May, consumer prices rose 21.75 percent.  According to government numbers, that is.  

Sure.  Biden is at the peak of his game.  He’s never been better.  And consumer prices have only risen 21.75 percent over roughly the last 4 ½ years.

Why do we find this number so incredible?  

Simple.  It doesn’t square with our experience or the experience of anyone we know!

One fellow posted a TikTok video showing a Wal-Mart receipt for a grocery purchase he made in 2022.  The 45 items he purchased – he described it as a full month’s groceries – cost a total back then of $126.76.  Because the app has a “reorder all” feature, he found that the same purchase today would cost $414.39!

Hello?  Or as the fellow said himself, “Like, what?”

That’s an increase of 226 percent!  In two years!  For the same items!

Maybe Janet Yellen can deny experiencing sticker shock at the grocery store.   She has a car and driver, and a private Fed dining room.  

As off-kilter as the CPI is, the Fed prefers to use something called the Personal Consumption Expenditure Index to measure inflation.  Jeffrey Tucker of the Brownstone Institute thought to ask an AI how that index is computed:

The BEA uses the same data that creates the quarterly GDP [gross domestic product] report, which measures U.S. economic output, but the PCE price index measures consumer purchases through different calculations. It converts the prices, which are still the producers’ prices, to the end price paid by the consumer. The PCE price index includes the broadest set of goods and services compared to other measures of consumer price changes. It measures changes in a basket of goods and services, but the PCE is based on data from businesses and trade organizations while the CPI is based on survey data from tens of thousands of consumers. The BEA normalizes the data via a price deflator—a ratio of the value of all goods and services produced in a particular year at current prices to that of prices that prevailed during a base year—to get the monthly PCE index: the average monthly rate of inflation (or deflation) for the U.S. economy as a whole.

Well, that’s one way to cook the books!  There are others.  Things like “core inflation.”  Core inflation doesn’t include energy or food costs, although I’d like to see the cost of buying anything – anything at all – that doesn’t depend in some way on energy and food.

It’s all “lies, damn lies, and statistics” as Mark Twain may or may not have said.  For us, the answer is to buy gold and silver to protect yourself from all the number fudging and money printing.  And if you want to know what’s really happening to your cost of groceries, save your receipts.  

Or get the Wal-Mart reorder app!

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Your Essential Financial Survival Briefing!  The American Gold Story!

Reviewers praise Real Money for Free People!  Rich Dad Poor Dad’s Robert Kiyosaki says Jim Clark’s book is “essential reading for anyone who values their financial freedom.”

New York Times bestselling author Charles Goyette says Jim Clark’s book “explains in easy-to-understand terms what the Founders knew, that honest money- gold and silver- means prosperity and freedom for both nations and individuals.” 

Skyrocketing prices, massive new spending programs, debt ceiling puppet shows, money printing, debt up the wazoo!

How did we get here?  Where is all this headed?  Here’s an excerpt:

Our governing classes and monetary authorities] have created the conditions for an explosion of impoverishment. They are the big spenders and reckless borrowers of both parties. They are the grand councilors and academic advisors of the almighty State. They and their statist epigone and media servitors are the inevitable offspring of connivers like Franklin Roosevelt and Richard Nixon, who stole the people’s gold and betrayed the nation’s good-as-gold dollar…

There is no turning back. They must now continue to print money until the system crashes. It is the endgame of their folly.

REAL MONEY FOR FREE PEOPLE is a fast-paced review of why the Founding Fathers, to assure a free and prosperous America, built the new republic on a solid monetary foundation of gold and silver.  Learn how later politicians, those of lesser character, have abandoned that foresight by handing America’s future and prosperity over to self-serving bankers and money manipulators.

In this book, Jim Clark pulls back the curtain to reveal what the mainstream media conceals:  how the unsustainable and reckless policies of the Federal Reserve are destroying the dollar and your savings.

More importantly, it tells you exactly why gold and silver – the world’s most treasured and time-tested forms of money – are your key to protecting your wealth and profiting in the years ahead!

NOW AVAILABLE FOR THE FIRST TIME ON AMAZON.COM!  Click Here!

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They’re even wrong about being wrong about inflation!

What a bunch we have running fiscal policy in our country.  Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has distinguished herself for being wrong about inflation and virtually everything else.  And President Biden, well there’s no need to describe his abject confusion anymore.  Since everyone except a few shameless toadies in the media can see it, that would be beating a dead horse.

But their public positions are both utterly incoherent and incompatible.  When fiscal policy is this contradictory, it is time to seek refuge in gold and silver!

Yellen’s cluelessness and apologies for not understanding inflation are the stuff of legend.  But there is more, so much more…

Her support for a wealth tax, a tax not on income but on property people own, a tax on unrealized capital gains that would even require people to sell family businesses to pay, would have Karl Marx dance a commie jig!   

Equally destructive was her support for the administration’s crazy desire to have banks report people’s every transaction of $600 or more.  Imagine how utterly mentally vacant she must be to not have envisaged how much strangling bureaucracy that would have created.  Inconceivable!

Her failure to have the Treasury issue long-dated bonds before the Fed began raising rates is just one more component of our debt disaster.  Stanley Druckenmiller calls this “the worst mistake in the history of the Treasury.”

Then there is her assertion that the US can afford two wars at once.  “Absolutely!” she says.  That was eight months ago when the national debt was $33.56 trillion.  Today it is $34.68 trillion.  Up well over a trillion dollars in eight months!  

As for Biden, just as he wanders, squats, and mutters aimlessly at photo shoots, shadowed by handlers trying to cover for him, he bats about for something to say about inflation until he comes up with something his handlers prepared for him.  Bill Bonner describes him similarly: “Biden, the man, is just a cut-out… a place-holder. We’ve never heard an original thought pass his lips, nor an insight worth remembering. Instead, his pensée is just much-rehearsed blah-blah, sticking with whatever talking points his handlers suggest.”

So, what has his people had him saying about inflation?  Greed, of course.  

But greed has always been with us.  If greedy corporations are responsible for inflation, if they have the power to unilaterally raise prices, why wasn’t inflation out of control before Biden?  (Note that Washington never blames inflation on government greed!  It never points to all the money it shovels to its cronies and its favored interest groups.  It is never, ever about their greed).  

But in any case, Biden and Yellen are not even able to keep their stories straight!  The other day on CNBC Yellen contradicted Biden’s attribution of inflation to corporate greed.  “I think that inflation is about supply and demand,” she said.

Well, of course, all prices are about supply and demand.  When the government prints trillions of dollars out of thin air and distributes them to its friends, they increases demand.  Same amount of goods and services in the economy, but suddenly some people have a lot more printed money with which they buy things.  It’s like an auction:  they are bidding prices higher and higher. 

The cluelessness is not limited to just Biden and Yellen.  It is systemic in the administration and, frankly, in both parties and throughout Washington and the governing classes.  Take for example the cluelessness of Jared Bernstein, the president’s chief economic advisor, about how monetary policy works.  See for yourself:

The ship of state is being run by the intellectually deficient.  It is a ship of fools.  They are incapable of steering us out of a currency storm.  They will destroy the dollar and leave your prosperity wrecked upon the reefs.

The need to own gold is growing more critical by the day. Because something will happen!

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What are the major forces driving gold prices up?

We spotlight four of them:

WAR

It is our view that the mainstream media ignores or underplays the significance of all of the forces destroying our currency and prosperity.  But it seems most clueless about the way war destroys both.  However, our hands-on experience goes back a long way.  We remember the Vietnam War and the role it played in ending the gold-backed dollar, just as we remember the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the revolution in Iran, and the fire they lit under gold prices.

So, we are not willing to turn a blind eye to war drums beating today.  We note that the situation in Ukraine is escalating with the attack on Sevastopol, Crimea.  Russia blames the US and promises to retaliate.  The widening of the Mideast war to include Lebanon is another fuse that appears about to be lit.

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DE-DOLLARIZATION

 The move away from the dollar and to gold is very real and a key driver of higher gold prices.  It can only accelerate.  Note for example that a Russian court has approved the seizure of hundreds of billions of dollars of assets from Western banks, a response in kind to the theft of Russian assets by the sanction regimes.  It goes without saying that this makes dollar-holders around the world very nervous indeed and heightens gold’s allure as an asset whose value is not subject to the whims of some issuing government.

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INFLATION

Inflation teaches everyone that eventually made-up government money loses value.  The highest US inflation in more than 4o years is beginning to drive that lesson home.  Average weekly earnings have risen over the last 3 ½ years, but rising prices have undone any advantage, as the average real (constant dollar) income of working families has fallen $2,300.  

Some get it already, but eventually, almost everyone will realize that this is not because of cosmic rays or the greed of corporations, but because the money itself is being managed specifically to lose purchasing power.  Then what can today be called a slow diversification by some Americans into gold and silver will become a stampede.

DEBT

All inflations are the result of dishonest governments spending money they do not have and running up debts that they cannot repay.

Even the Congressional Budget Office, which tries its best to downplay the real debt debacle, expects the budget deficit to skyrocket, from $1.9trillion this year to $2.8 trillion by 2034.  

As for the national debt itself, it will hit $35 trillion in a few weeks, and $37 trillion by the end of this year.  In fact, on our current path, the debt will reach a stratospheric $60 trillion at the end of the ten-year budget window, according to David Stockman.  And that, he adds, is with the happy face the CBO is putting on its projections:

Even that depends upon the latest CBO iteration of Rosy Scenario, which envisions no recession ever again, just 2% inflation as far as the eye can see and real interest rates of barely 1%. And that’s to say nothing of the trillions in phony spending cuts and out-year tax increases that are built into the CBO baseline but which Congress will never actually allow to materialize.

David Stockman

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So, there you have the four biggest drivers of higher gold prices now and in the foreseeable future:  war, de-dollarization, inflation, and debt.  All four are hopelessly intertwined, each powering the others.

Other less visible developments will add to the fuel-propelling gold higher, little-noticed financial annoyances like the war on cash and major destructive forces like the unstoppable spread of state socialism.

Don’t wait any long to protect yourself, your family, and your wealth with gold and silver.

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If it is so strong, why does it buy less and less?

Headline, the Wall Street Journal, June 4, 2024:   The Dollar Is at Its Strongest Since the 1980s. Can It Last?

Sorry, but it’s flapdoodle.  Gobbledygook.  Gibberish.  Bafflegab.

Or to put it in more serious terms, it’s Newspeak.

George Orwell coined that term in his uncannily prescient novel 1984.  Newspeak is a language of simplified grammar and limited vocabulary designed to narrow the range of critical thinking.

The WSJ provides a caption to a photo in its “strong dollar” story: “The U.S. dollar has defied analysts’ expectations and appreciated again this year relative to a basket of other currencies.”

It should have said “The U.S. dollar depreciated again this year relative to a basket of groceries.”  

The WSJ can get away with calling it a strong dollar because they are a financial newspaper.  And it is true that if you are importing Mercedes, the exchange value of the dollar matters.  Chances are if you are importing foreign goods, or exporting US goods, you are very much aware of currency differentials and that you are hedging them when you need.  

But for the sake of clear communication, the term “strong dollar” should go in the deleted file.  Especially since most of us at any given time aren’t importing Mercedes.  

The financial press gets away with it as a sort of faux sophistication: “Our readers know what we mean!”

Some do.  But the real damage is done when the rest of the financially clueless media pick up on it.  So, the rest of then repeat ad nauseum on talk shows and general newscasts that the dollar is strong.  The people who hear that pass it on in conversation at work or to their neighbors.  

But even the financial press should be careful not to sound like toadies of the government.  After all, they don’t say Tesla was “strong” today or Ford was “weak.”  They say those stock prices are up or down, higher or lower.

To call the dollar strong is wildly misleading.  The dollar can only be said to be strong when compared to other currencies that are constantly losing real value.  The WSJ story came hard on the heels of Mexico electing some hard leftist president.  Her father was a communist and it is not clear where she differs from Karl Marx.  Because people like her destroy wealth and ruin currencies, the Mexican peso immediately fell, down as we write about 9 percent.  A peso down would mean the dollar, comparatively speaking, is marginally higher. But because Mexico elects a socialist (more trouble on our southern border!) the dollar is strong? Don’t kid yourself!

If currencies were ships, and Mexico’s ship was sinking at a nine percent rate and the US ship was sinking at a 3 or 4 or 5 percent rate, would you say the US ship is seaworthy?

The dollar isn’t strong at all.   It is weak.  Extraordinarily weak. 

That is because the function of a currency is to allow people to purchase things.  With that in mind, here is a 10-year chart of the US dollar’s purchasing power:

It doesn’t look particularly “strong,” does it?

Nevertheless, they say, “the dollar is at its strongest since the 1980s.”  When it bought a heck of a lot more than it does today.

So, when you hear the media tell you the dollar is strong, you’d better compare it to something real like the price of gold.

Those who do that are thinking for themselves despite the media’s Newspeak.  And they are buying gold.

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Here is just a short list of the major – some might say existential – threats we Americans are facing.  

They all have the same cause.  It’s not hard to figure out.  It‘s not because of the alignment of Jupiter and Mars.  It’s not because of subversion by space aliens.  

They are all caused by Washington and our growing left-wing national ethos.

All of them.

Here’s a rundown.

Our lifespans appear to be growing shorter.  “The numbers are shocking.”

Harvard School of Public Health, April 13, 2023 – U.S. life expectancy has declined to 76.4 years, the shortest it’s been in nearly two decades, according to December data from the CDC….

[Dean Michelle Williams] noted that younger people in America are dying at higher rates than their counterparts in other high-income countries and that the U.S. also has among the highest maternal and infant mortality rates among upper-income countries.

American IQs are falling.  “The first time ever.”

The New York Post, May 3, 2024 – A report from 2023 revealed the depressing reality — that the average intelligence test score fell from 100 to 98, a dismal, two-point decline after a previously uninterrupted 30-point rise that began in 1905.

American public schools are a national disgrace.  “In public education, we reward mediocrity and discourage excellence.”

The Discovery Institute, July 11. 2023 – Detroit Public Schools [are ranked] the worst performing of all 26 large city districts, with just 5 percent of their eighth-grade students rated proficient in reading and only 3 percent in math. What is surprising is the Detroit Public Schools Community District rated 99 percent of Detroit’s teachers as “highly effective” or “effective,”

Teacher[s] cannot be fired for poor performance. Consequently, evaluations have little or no meaning. Not only can teachers not be fired, but incompetent teachers will make more money next year as they gain another year of seniority and an automatic raise.

The American Dollar Is Worth Less Each Year – “Inflation hits 20 percent under Biden.”  

The Hill, May 15, 2024 – Inflation under President Biden hit a cumulative 20 percent. The dollar’s value has plummeted under his watch. The Bureau of Labor Statistics also confirmed that the consumer price index is resurgent and growing faster than average wages. Combined with weak GDP growth, this data shows the U.S. economy is reentering stagflation.

You can’t personally do much about most of these problems.  Crowded hospital waiting rooms and strained facilities can be your problem in an emergency.   You can be victimized by falling IQs and failing schools if underqualified candidates are made airline mechanics, air traffic controllers, or are given a host of other jobs.

And you can’t possibly do much about America’s economic destruction.  Millennials are expected to be the first generation to earn less than their parents.  Two of three middle-class respondents say their income is falling behind the cost of living.

But you can do something – and do it at once! – about the collapse of the US dollar’s purchasing power.

It’s like emergency medical workers performing triage:  They sort out and prioritize the injured.  What must they immediately treat?  What comes first?

In the case of these existential crises, the first and more urgent problem that can be addressed immediately is to protect yourself from ongoing currency failure.  You can insulate yourselves from the criminal mismanagement of the dollar, its quantity and quality, by investing in gold and silver.  Both have records of superior performance as money that goes back thousands of years.

Speak with a Republic Monetary Exchange precious metals professional.  He can help you achieve the protection you need in the days ahead.  

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It’s a purchasing power calamity!

Brace yourself!  Another huge wave of inflation is approaching!  The purchasing power of your savings is about to get swamped once again.  

So far the purchasing power of the US dollar has lost about 20 percent of its value during the Biden presidency.  But the Biden presidency is not over yet!  Brace yourself for more Biden inflation and brace your savings with gold and silver.

The gold and silver markets are saying another wave of inflation is about to hit!

Here’s what is going on:

Wholesale prices are running hot.  The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported recently that the Producer Price Index accelerated to its highest level in a year.  Producer prices are a leading indicator of coming consumer prices because producers pass along their higher costs.  Stated differently, today’s wholesale prices are tomorrow’s consumer prices.  

Rising commodity prices mean higher consumer prices, too.  

Copper is one of the leaders in rising commodity prices, but others include coffee and chocolate, coal, natural gas, soybeans, wheat, coal, milk, orange juice, and butter.

Reporting that the Commodity Research Bureau index just hit its highest level in 13 years, the Committee to Unleash Prosperity remarks that “anyone who thinks we have turned the corner on Bidenflation – and we know that includes at least half the economist in Washington – should have their head examined.”

Get ready for another wave of Biden inflation and for the purchasing power of your savings to fall even more.  

Don’t get caught.  Make sure to protect yourself with gold and silver.  See us now!

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Suppose a hundred years ago some far-sighted benefactor, someone a few generations back, wanted to leave some wealth for their descendants – including you.  Would you be better off if they left you $10,000 cash in bills or $10,000 in gold?

A hundred years ago American money was gold. Americans commonly carried and conducted commerce in $20 gold pieces.  They were the coins of the realm.  But if you thought carrying them around – especially in great quantities – was inconvenient, you could use paper money.  A US $20 note issued by the Treasury was just a claim check or a warehouse receipt for gold.  If you wanted to, you could walk into any bank or go to the Treasury and exchange that paper $20 note for real gold.  No questions asked.

So your benefactor would have had a choice.  Which would you have wanted then to leave, paper or gold?

You probably don’t have to think about it too hard.  The US paper dollar has lost about 95 percent of its purchasing power since 1924.  

Someone naïve argued about that with us once.  “That’s impossible,” he said.  But figure it out for yourself.  Inflation officially reduced the dollar’s purchasing power by 3.4 percent last year.  It reduced it by 6.5 percent in 2022. And so on, year in and year out.

Here’s a shortcut.  Consumer prices are up about 20 percent since Biden was sworn in.  That means today’s dollar only retains 80 percent of the purchasing power it had in January 2021.

Add in more than a few years of year-after-year inflation along the way, and soon you will find that the loss of purchasing power really adds up!

If a thief broke into your bank account and stole 3.4 percent of it last year and 6.5 percent of it the year before and has been stealing from it every year of your lifetime, you might be upset.  You might call the authorities.  But there is no point in calling the authorities on what is happening to the dollar because it is the authorities who are doing it!

The $20 gold piece contained just a little less than an ounce of gold, at exactly .9675 ounces. Based on a recent gold price of $2,350, just the gold content of a $20 gold piece would be $2,274 ($2,350 x .9675 = $2,274).

So the price of gold has increased close to 113 times ($20 x 89 = 2260)!  Think about that in percentage terms.  Your gold has increased by 11,300 percent!  That’s an average of 113 percent a year!

(The story is even better than that because, thanks to their rarity, desirability, and for other reasons, investors and collectors prize those beautiful U.S. gold coins beyond just their gold content.  Ask your Republic Monetary Exchange gold and silver professional about this.)

As for the paper money?  Well, it lost most of its purchasing power.  That is the common fate of unbacked paper money throughout time.

So by now, even if you had never thought about our question before, you will have doubtlessly concluded that you would have wanted your would-be benefactor a hundred years ago to leave you real gold instead of paper money.  

Our story says something about real money and wealth preservation in this day and age. 

That’s only part of the story, that honest precious metal currencies hold their value.  So with the clear interest that the people have in a reliable form of money that holds its value, why do governments hate gold and silver money?  Why is it that the more dishonest and corrupt they are, the quicker they turn to printed or digitally printed money?

That, as they say, is the rest of the story.  We’ll write more about that one of these days, but if you’d like to cut to the chase and get the answer to that and your other questions about wealth preservation, speak with a Republic Monetary Exchange precious metals advisor today!

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The headline on Yahoo! Finance reads, “Living on Edge: Nearly 90% of Retirees Worried Inflation Will Eat Away Savings.”

The story reports that a third of retired Americans are worried that they haven’t saved enough.  No surprise there.  89 percent describe themselves as deeply concerned about the erosion of their purchasing power by inflation.  As well they should be. You can not reply on a dollar-dependent retirement.

Add to that a crisis of confidence over the future of Social Security.  44 percent of non-retired Americans are afraid that Social Security will run out.  

Will it run out?  It already has run out!  The money you and millions of Americans paid into Social Security over your lifetime has been spent.  In its place, the politicians left an IOU.  

Great.  A government that can’t even pay its on-the-books visible debt of almost $35 trillion is whistling past the graveyard if it is pretending that it can pay its off-the-book hidden debts like Social Security.  Those hidden liabilities, conservatively estimated, come in at about $215 trillion – more than 6 times more than the already unpayable visible debt.

That is why we say don’t even think about a dollar-denominated retirement!

Consumer prices are up 20 percent – at least – since Biden became president.  We say at least because except for ever-changing statistical modeling price gimmickry, the inflation rate would be much, much higher.  John Williams at ShadowStats.com continues to track the inflation rate on the same statistical basis that prevailed before sketchy “hedonic” adjustments were figured in.  On that basis, the real inflation rate is 8 percent, which certainly tracks much closer to the real-world experience of families today.   An 8 percent inflation rate doubles the cost of consumer goods in just 9 years.   Try to maintain a retirement budget with that going on.

Let us illustrate the point one more way.  Between December 2019 and March 2024, the Bureau of Labor Statistics says the CPI increased by 21.5 percent.  How much has the price of a Big Mac gone up in the same period?

87.7 percent.

If we have made the point clear that one should not even thing about trying to survive a dollar-dependent retirement, we recommend you make an appointment with a Republic Monetary Exchange gold and silver professional to discuss a plan to prepare for the monetary crisis ahead with the world’s most enduring, most prized, and most desirable forms of money: gold and silver.

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It’s not something that people generally want to talk about – widespread civil chaos, lawlessness, and social collapse.  

But it goes hand in hand with the failure of the monetary system.  And it doesn’t take a Nostradamus to see the sign of something like that on the horizon.

Just the other day we noticed that hedge-funder Ray Dalio, the founder of Bridgewater Associates, is noticing the same things.  Dalio told the Financial Times that he sees a 35 to 40 percent chance we incur a civil war. 

“We are now on the brink,” he said.  

The publishers’ description of the book The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future reveals that the battle plans for the next civil war have already been drawn up. “Not by novelists, but by colonels.”

In times of chaos, the governing authorities will do anything to keep themselves in power and to expand their power. Under cover of calamity, governments do all kinds of unthinkable things and invoke unimaginable tyrannical powers.  They will target your wealth, bank and retirement accounts, and your property.  

But this discussion provides a good opportunity to reiterate that your core position in both gold and silver should consist of real metals in your possession.

Ron Paul believes that the developing economic crisis, the ending of the dollar’s global reserve status, unpayable debt, and the Fed printing money to cover the Washington scoundrel’s spending will be the triggering event for what many expect is coming.

“This will result in massive public unrest potentially resulting in violence, the rise of authoritarian movements on the left and right, and increasing authoritarianism,” says Dr. Paul.

Providing for yourself and your family with gold and silver in a period of lawlessness and economic chaos is essential.  A Republic Monetary Exchange precious metal expert can help you review and structure your portfolio for the fraying of social order.

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Sorry, too late.

You just can’t turn a $24 trillion economy over to someone a clueless as Joe Biden and expect things to go well.

How many examples do you need?  It was just last week the President claimed that inflation was 9 percent when he took office, but he got it on the run.

Not even close!

The big Biden lie was too much even for in-the-bag media outlets like CNN and the Washington Post which had to set the record straight.  To wit:

Inflation was 1.4 percent when Biden took office.  It raced to a 43-year high of 9.1 percent in a year and a half.

You just can’t entrust a $27 trillion economy to someone like Biden and expect a financial crisis to be averted.

A couple more examples?

Okay:

Biden wants to drive people out of internal combustion engines and into electric vehicles.  But at the same time, as analyst Michael Shedlock puts it, “Biden wants EVs so badly that he will quadruple tariffs on them.”  That makes a lot of sense.   The same kind of sense that in a housing affordability crisis, Biden slapped tariffs on Canadian lumber.  So, are we surprised that lumber prices have risen 32 percent? 

You just can’t turn a $27 trillion economy to someone like Biden and expect a financial crisis to be averted.

You’ve probably seen this video of Jared Bernstein, the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors.  If you haven’t, please watch it and share it with everyone you know.  Bernstein is utterly confused about how US monetary policy works.   He is Biden’s chief economic advisor.

If the blind lead the blind both shall fall in a ditch.

You just can’t turn a $27 trillion economy to someone like Biden and his advisors and expect a financial crisis to be averted.

You cannot trust a monetary system run by these clueless people.  Gold doesn’t need a Chairman of Economic Advisors.  Its value is intrinsic and enduring.

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Ron Paul says, “Massive public unrest… violence… authoritarianism!”

Make sure you have plenty of gold and silver, because it’s not going to be pretty!

No one has a better track record than former Congressman and presidential candidate Ron Paul when it comes to foreseeing the results of government interventions.  Whether it is foreign policy like the Iraq war and the other regime change calamities, or economic like the housing bubble and inflation.

Now Dr. Paul is warning about the next economic crisis.  

“Disappointingly, but not surprisingly, Congress was too preoccupied spending billions more on military aid for foreign countries and banning TikTok to pay attention to the looming bankruptcy of the two largest federal entitlement programs,” says Dr. Paul.  “Many in Congress no doubt believe they can ignore the impending bankruptcy of Social Security and Medicare because they can count on the Federal Reserve to do the ‘dirty work’ of cutting real benefits and raising taxes. This result can be produced via the hidden, and regressive, ‘inflation tax.’”

Both the Social Security and Medicare funds covering hospital expenses will begin running red ink in 2035 and 2036, according to fund trustees.

Dr. Paul says that even though interest on the debt is now the third largest item in the federal budget, behind Social Security and Medicare and ahead of military spending, few in Congress are serious about cutting welfare or warfare. They believe the Fed will cover things over by printing money.  

The Federal Reserve’s purchase of federal debt will result in price inflation, says Paul.

It will also encourage more government spending by reinforcing the uniparty delusion that, as former Vice President Dick Cheney said, “deficits don’t matter.” The Federal Reserve’s inflationary policies artificially lower the interest rates, which are the price of money. The artificially low interest rates distort the signals sent to investors and entrepreneurs, leading to malinvestment. This creates bubbles resulting in illusionary prosperity. Eventually, economic reality will catch up with the Fed-created illusions and the bubbles will burst, causing an economic downturn.

The next economic crisis will likely either be caused by or result in a rejection of the dollar’s world reserve currency status. Congress will be forced to make drastic cuts in spending while the Fed will be enabled to monetize the debt. This will result in massive public unrest potentially resulting in violence, the rise of authoritarian movements on the left and right, and increasing authoritarianism.

-Ron Paul

During his long tenure in office, Ron Paul was the foremost monetary and gold authority on Capitol Hill.  “Those who truly want a monetary system free from political interference should join the movement to restore government’s constitutional limits and separate money and state.”

Until the Constitution is back on top, own gold and silver!

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Something is beginning to bubble in the silver market!

The year isn’t even half over and silver is already up more than 15 percent.  And yet it is still unbelievably inexpensive!  

But first, there is more going on in the silver market than just the insanity of Bidenomics.  More than Washington’s unpayable $34.6 trillion national debt.  There’s more than just the global dollar standard beginning to fray.

There’s all of that.  It’s all rocket fuel for the next big silver move.  But there are also the supply/demand fundamentals for silver.  They are equally explosive!

The totals from 2023 are in. Industrial demand for silver is setting records.  Here are a couple of numbers that grabbed our attention.  

Industrial demand for silver rose 11 percent in 2023 to a new record high.  At the same time, overall silver supplies are down, including the biggest supply component, mine production.  

You might easily have predicted that silver for photovoltaic applications (solar cells) would be higher.  But would you have guessed that photovoltaic demand would jump an incredible 64 percent?  In just one year?

China figures heavily in the PV sector, and indeed total industrial silver demand from China climber 44 percent in 2023.

Earlier this year we cited one analyst who described silver as “stupidly cheap!”  The rising silver price confirms that he’s right.       

Silver is still way below its all-time highs.  Silver was $50 an ounce in 1980. That was 44 years ago.  Are there any other major industrial commodities that are 40 percent below their price of 44 years ago?  Don’t kid yourself! 

Silver reached highs of about $50 in both 2011 and 2012.

Our point is that silver today is more than 40 percent below its old highs last set a dozen years ago.  And there is one thing you need to know about the silver market.  When it takes off, it really takes off and even outperforms gold itself! 

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So now the Federal Reserve has had to backpedal on its presumed interest rate cut this year.  That’s due to “a lack of further progress” on inflation says the new policy announcement.

The Deep State Money Manipulators are in one hell of a fix!  Again.

If they cut rates and loosen money, prices will keep climbing.  If they don’t cut rates, the economy could begin to stall as the decline in GDP suggests.

Wall Street knows that the stock market is driven by the creation of money and credit by the Fed, so the players are obsessed with the game of tea-leaf reading and “dot plots” that are supposed to be indications of what the Fed will do with rates at its next meeting and the one after that and the one after that…  They are so good for nothing, they make us laugh!

As recently as March the conventional wisdom was that the Fed would treat Wall Street to three interest rate cuts this year.  But what can it do when inflation is in rebound mode and the rest of the world, especially China, wants gold?

So here’s how the Fed hopes to walk the knife edge without falling off.  On the one hand, it intends to forego the rate cuts it has been dangling in front of the markets.  But on the other hand, beginning in June the Fed is actually going to ease back on “Quantitative Tightening,” its attempt to roll back some of the most frenzied money printing in US history.  From the Fed statement:

Beginning in June, the Committee will slow the pace of decline of its securities holdings by reducing the monthly redemption cap on Treasury securities from $60 billion to $25 billion.

For perspective, from 2008 to this time in 2022, the Fed’s assets – basically the money it “printed” digitally, the money it made up to buy things – ballooned by $8 trillion.  Realizing that all that money printing would create new world indoor record inflation, the Fed has been trying to undo some of it while it still can.  They set out a long-term schedule for tightening, but now have announced they intend to back off.  This means they want to loosen money and credit, but they are afraid that doing so with interest rates will be all too transparent, spurring faster price increases.  So, they’re going for the sleight-of-hand rate cut.

At the same time, Chairman Powell sent a clear signal the Fed intends to keep a close watch on the employment numbers.  “The employment goal now comes back into focus. So we are focusing on it,” said Powell.  That’s Fedspeak for “don’t forget this is an election year!”  A weak labor market would be very bad for President Biden and you know our assumption:  the Fed will heavily tilt policy to help Biden win reelection.

Monetary policy resembles an old-fashioned pinball machine as it bounces from bumper to bumper.  The Fed bounces from inflation to employment, from easing to tightening.  All along the way it essentially admits that it doesn’t know what it is doing.

There is no way out.  High rates are taking their toll.  The cost of funding US debt is soaring.  US manufacturing is in contraction, as is employment.  But prices keep climbing.  Crude oil is up by double-digits since the first of the year.  Gas is up more than 20 percent.  

“There is a lack of further progress” on inflation.  That’s not us.  That’s the Fed’s official statement.

Now, doesn’t owning gold make all the sense in the world?

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A Former Treasury Official Says You Already Don’t!

In YOU WILL OWN NOTHING, Part I, we shared a video of a Canadian man trying to withdraw a few thousand dollars from his bank account.  The bank wanted a document of some sort to show what he was going to do with his money.

There is more of this sort of thing going around than most people suspect.  It is not just happening at the level of local banks.  A former US Treasury official suggests that you may have already lost ownership of your retirement and investment accounts on a national level.  You will own nothing!

Meanwhile, the US government is making clear to the rest of the world that their dollar holdings are only theirs when Washington says they can have them.

Locally.  Nationally.  Internationally.  Title to assets and control of monetary resources is under assault.  You don’t have to be Carnac the Magnificent to see where this is headed.

On the international front, Congress didn’t just pass a bill to give away $95 billion in foreign aid money we don’t have, it also included a provision that will allow Washington to steal billions of dollars owned by Russia.  Bill Bonner says that the measure is the equivalent of if France, in response to the US invasion of Iraq (remember the Weapons of Mass Destruction that didn’t exist?) had seized the bank accounts of Americans in Paris.

This is what is meant by the weaponization of the US dollar.  It is why US dollar owners around the world are growing wary of the dollar.  They fear correctly that they will own nothing!  

That fear is driving a move to more trustworthy alternatives.  It explains the move by foreign central banks to own more gold. Gold is the most trustworthy money in the world. It depends on no one’s promise.  Gold is its promise!

The US is undermining its own currency.  Washington is shooting itself and you in the foot.  That is because the value of the dollar has long been buttressed by its international reserve status.  Pull out the support system, and everything will cost you even more.

What about your ownership of your investment and retirement accounts?  Paul Craig Roberts says, “you may have already lost ownership of your banking, pension, and investment accounts.”  

Roberts was an assistant secretary of the US Treasury in the Reagan administration and an associate editor of the Wall Street Journal.  He explains:

Your “ownership” has been reduced to permission to use your assets until the financial intermediary holding them gets into financial trouble. At that moment, they cease to be your property and become the property of the creditors of the intermediary that holds your accounts, whether it be Merrill Lynch, Schwab, Wells Fargo, TIAA, or whoever. Your dispossession was done quietly over many years by regulatory agencies. This is what Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forum means when he tells you that “you will own nothing.” You already don’t.

So, there you have it.  Faith is collapsing in the property rights the people must have in their financial assets.  Internationally.  Nationally.  Locally.  You’ll own nothing… unless you own gold.

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The only money you own is gold and silver in your personal possession!

You better watch this video.  Especially if you think you own what is in your bank account.

Ownership is the ability to call upon and dispose of assets as you desire or as agreed upon.  When you deposit your money into your bank account do you think you still own it?

Better watch this video from Canada…

Apparently you can’t even withdraw your own money from a bank in Canada without being thoroughly interrogated. How is it any of their business what you do with your money? pic.twitter.com/qU0Ktubq9k

— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) April 15, 2024

During the collapse of major banks last year – Silicon Valley Bank, Signature Bank, First Republic Bank, and others – clients reported personally intrusive inquiries and difficulties in making bank withdrawals.  It is a problem that we expect will only grow worse.

Gold is the most liquid financial asset in the world.  It is not dependent on counterparties, fund managers, bank managers, or Fed officials.  It is not susceptible to being frozen by bank holidays or by institutional bankruptcies.  

But this only applies to physical gold and silver you have in your possession.  It does not apply to “paper gold” or gold substitutes.  To learn more about the safety of gold, speak with a Republic Monetary Exchange precious metals professional today!

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Gold is going through the roof because the already unpayable US debt is, too!

After all, if there is no hope for US debt at $34 trillion today, how about when it reaches $141 trillion in 2054?  And that is where the Congressional Budget Office says we are headed!

$141 trillion is a lot of money!  How does a national government even begin to pay the interest on a debt that big?  You know the answer:  money printing!

Former Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke was both candid and shameless about it just a few years ago:  “The US government has a technology, called a printing press, that allows it to produce as many dollars as it wishes at essentially no cost.”  

Look, from 2024 to 2054 the annual deficits will average 6.7 percent of GDP.  That is almost double their average over the last half-century!

By 2054 the deficit will hit 8.5 percent of GDP.

Says the CBO, apparent master of understatement, “Such large and growing debt would have significant economic and financial consequences.”

Among its other effects, it would slow economic growth, drive up interest payments to foreign holders of U.S. debt, heighten the risk of a fiscal crisis, increase the likelihood of other adverse outcomes, and make the nation’s fiscal position more vulnerable to an increase in interest rates.

When we want to print something, we have to buy inkjets, make sure there is plenty of paper in the printer and hit Control P.  Today the Fed’s legalized money printing is mostly digital.  It’s so easy now!  They don’t even have to cut down all those trees for paper like they used to do!  They must be environmentally friendly!

Make sure you have plenty of US gold coins, Maple Leafs, Krugerrands, other favorite coins, and gold bars!  And don’t forget the silver – bars and coins!  You’ll need it!

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Here’s a story we have told before, but with gold hitting so many all-time highs lately, it is one that deserves to be told again.

It begins with a serious economic crisis that is fast approaching.  Here’s a snippet from Fred Hickey (The High Tech Strategist) on April 2 that highlights just how fast things are spinning out of control.  In just the last 20 days, he writes, US government debt increased by $168 billion.  That is equal to the entire US deficit in 2002!  

This unrelenting gusher of red ink ensures that something like a “Crack-Up Boom” is fast approaching today.  

That is the name the great free-market economist Ludwig von Mises coined to describe the last stage of a currency breakdown:  The Crack-Up Boom.  In German, it is “Katastrophenhausse,” a catastrophe boom.

Because we think our friends and clients will need to know very soon, from his work Human Action, here is Mises’ description of the breakdown of a currency:

The characteristic mark of this phenomenon is that the increase in the quantity of money causes a fall in the demand for money…. The monetary system breaks down; all transactions in the money concerned cease; a panic makes its purchasing power vanish altogether. People return either to barter or to the use of another kind of money.

The course of a progressing inflation is this: At the beginning the inflow of additional money makes the prices of some commodities and services rise; other prices rise later. The price rise affects the various commodities and services, as has been shown, at different dates and to a different extent.

This first stage of the inflationary process may last for many years. While it lasts, the prices of many goods and services are not yet adjusted to the altered money relation. There are still people in the country who have not yet become aware of the fact that they are confronted with a price revolution which will finally result in a considerable rise of all prices, although the extent of this rise will not be the same in the various commodities and services. These people still believe that prices one day will drop. Waiting for this day, they restrict their purchases and concomitantly increase their cash holdings. As long as such ideas are still held by public opinion, it is not yet too late for the government to abandon its inflationary policy.

But then finally the masses wake up. They become suddenly aware of the fact that inflation is a deliberate policy and will go on endlessly. A breakdown occurs. The crack-up boom appears. Everybody is anxious to swap his money against “real” goods, no matter whether he needs them or not, no matter how much money he has to pay for them. Within a very short time, within a few weeks or even days, the things which were used as money are no longer used as media of exchange. They become scrap paper. Nobody wants to give away anything against them.

It was this that happened with the Continental currency in America in 1781, with the French mandats territoriaux in 1796, and with the German Mark in 1923. It will happen again whenever the same conditions appear. If a thing has to be used as a medium of exchange, public opinion must not believe that the quantity of this thing will increase beyond all bounds. Inflation is a policy that cannot last.

“Inflation is a policy that cannot last.”  

That is why gold has broken out for new higher ground at the same time Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell has admitted once again that the Fed doesn’t really know what it is doing.

China, once America’s leading creditor, is fleeing US government bonds like they have the plague.  It is doing so at the same time that the governments need to borrow more money than ever.  

The Crack-Up Boom is nearing.   Do you have all the gold and silver you need?

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Washington is squirting red ink out from every pore.  The budget year is half over, finishing with a deficit of more than a trillion dollars.  

This will end badly.

We have been sounding an alarm in these posts about US debt and the fear that it would get away from us.  A few recent examples:

Another Ominous U.S. Financial Update

Time to Take a Look at the U.S. Fiscal Situation!

Uncle Sam’s Credit Score Keeps Falling

We believe the price of gold is confirming that Washington’s debt is every bit as bad as we have said.

Our opinions don’t have the force of law, but to us the US national debt is a matter of criminal negligence.  Washington has been indifferent to the debt as it grew, and now it is too late:  the national debt has gotten away from us!

From the Wall Street Journal: 

The Congressional Budget Office reported Monday that the federal budget deficit for the first six months of fiscal 2024, ending in March, was $1.064 trillion. Enjoy it, because you’ll eventually pay for it in higher taxes.

The problem isn’t a shortage of tax revenue, which rose 7% from a year earlier to $2.19 trillion. Individual income-tax and payroll-tax revenue both rose 6%, while corporate income taxes rose 35%. Is a 7% increase what President Biden would call a “fair share” increase? Probably not, because he wants to raise taxes even higher if he’s re-elected.

Interest on the national debt is now a trillion dollars a year.  That will go up as older debt, money borrowed at lower rates, matures and is refinanced at today’s and tomorrow’s higher rates.  

If Washington has to borrow more and more and more to keep itself afloat, it will have to attract borrowers at much higher interest rates, especially now with the world already beginning to express skepticism about the US dollar.  Jaime Dimon at JPMorgan Chase is talking about rates rising to 8 percent.  That’s nothing, but financing today’s US debt at 8 percent would cost $2.75 trillion a year,

There is no solution to the debt overhang.  Except legal counterfeiting.  The debt can only be paid by printing money.

It is a critical situation, one best met by owning gold and silver.  A US debt crisis and the soaring interest rates that will accompany it will crash banks, financial markets, real estate, small businesses, and consumers around the world.

As we wrote about the worsening debt situation last year, “Gold and silver are the only monetary assets that are not someone else’s liability. They are not dependent on someone else’s solvency, promises to perform, or honesty. Their value does not depend on the endorsement, propriety, or honesty of any State or institution. They are not like empty government promises.  They have no counterparty risk, no risk of rule changes, nonpayment, default, or bankruptcy by individuals, companies, financial exchanges, institutions, and banks—quite apart from being insulated from the risks of the Fed’s fiat dollar as well.”

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Lew Rockwell Explains it All!

“The power to create money is the most ominous power ever bestowed on any human being. This power is rightly criminalized when it is exercised by private individuals, and even today, everyone knows why counterfeiting is wrong and knavish. Far fewer are aware of the role of the federal government, the Fed, and the fiat dollar in making possible the largest counterfeiting operation in human history, which is called the world dollar standard. Fewer still understand the connection between this officially sanctioned criminality and the business cycle, the rise and collapse of the stock market, and the continued erosion of the value of the dollar.”

Those are the words of one of the most important champions of sound money in this age.  

Lew Rockwell has been extraordinarily effective in the fight, on the front lines of the battle, and always in key positions.  Lew was a former editorial assistant to the great free-market economist Ludwig von Mises, and later chief of staff for Congressman Ron Paul who was for many years the most knowledgeable monetary expert and gold standard supporter on Capitol Hill.  In addition, Lew is the founder and chairman of the Mises Institute, executor for the estate of Murray N. Rothbard, and editor of www.LewRockwell.com.  He is the author of Against the State and Against the Left.

Quite a resume. 

We want to share a few words from Lew’s recent piece on LewRockwell.com called Bring Back Gold!:

I would venture to guess that a sizeable percentage of even educated adults would be astounded to discover that the Federal Reserve does more than manage the nation’s money accounts, that, in fact, its main activity consists in actually creating money that distorts production and creates inflation and the business cycle. In fact, I would go further to suggest that many educated adults believe that gold continues to serve as the ultimate backing of our monetary system, and would be astonished to discover that our money is backed by nothing but more of itself.

We have our work cut out for us, to be sure, mainly at the educational level. We must continue to state the obvious at every opportunity, that the fiat system is exactly what it is, a system of paper money backed by nothing of real value. We must continue to point out that because of this, our economic system is not depression proof, but rather highly vulnerable to complete meltdown. We must continue to draw attention to the only long-term solution: a complete separation of money and state based on the commodity that the market has always chosen as money, namely, gold…

What has been true for hundreds of years remains true today. The clearest path to the restoration of economic health is the free market undergirded by a sound monetary system…. 

We want to tip our hat to Lew Rockwell, a great spokesman for both real money and free people.  As Lew says, “Let’s do everything we can to end the Fed and restore the real gold standard!”

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As Zimbabwe’s latest attempt at a currency collapses – this would be the sixth one since 2008 – the country’s leaders are watching it fall and hinting that the next Zimbabwe dollar will be gold-backed.

Riiiight!  Of course it will!!!!

Bloomberg News:

The country’s local dollar has weakened against the US dollar every day in 2024, sending the price of a single loaf of bread from Z$6,105 to Z$19,357 in a mere 11 weeks. Such a loss of purchasing power has historically pushed the central to intervene bank and arrest the slide, but this time, there has been no action….

President Emmerson Mnangagwa announced this February his government will introduce a “structured currency.” Then, Finance Minister Mthuli Ncube said it may be backed by gold and the central bank postponed its monetary-policy statement to give final touches to the plan.

There are no gold-backed government currencies anywhere in the world.  None.  It is a symptom of the dishonesty of our age.  While it is inevitable that people – given enough government currency debauchment – will start to trade in gold among themselves around government’s monetary systems – there is zero chance that Zimbabwe will introduce a gold-backed currency.  

Of course, Zimbabwe is a stunning case history for the brazenness of its monetary crimes, its policies are only different in degree and not in kind from those of the US.  And for the same reasons that economist Peter Earle with the American Institute for Economic Research identified in the above epigram:  inflation is a tool for giving favors to cronies and buying votes, and because the people don’t understand it, governments and politicians can blame it on outside forces.

Bloomberg:

Even when people want to use it, the Zimbabwe dollar can hardly buy anything. The highest denomination, the Z$100 note, must be carried in large wads to carry out the smallest of transactions….

Zimbabwe suspended publishing inflation figures after July 2008, when the measure reached an annual 231,162,000%.

If you want to read the story of the currency inflation that made Zimbabwe the world’s laughingstock, read my book REAL MONEY FOR FREE PEOPLE!  The American Gold Story.   It’s an important guide to wealth protection and profit in these troubled days.  Stop by our office, we’ll give you a complimentary copy.

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It’s time again to update our friends and clients on the financial situation of the US government.  

We are neither surprised nor pleased with what we have to report.  While no one likes to be the bearer of bad news, despite what the lapdog press tells you the situation is growing grim.

We have already shared the headline story with you, that US debt is growing by a trillion dollars every one hundred days.  

The deficit, just for February alone, was $298 billion, up $36 billion, or 14 percent over February 2023.

Meanwhile, as we write, a $1.2 trillion 1,012-page omnibus spending bill covering an estimated 70% of discretionary government spending, is before the House of Representatives.

Michael Shedlock, MishTalk, calls it a Republican humiliation:

• Republicans said no more omnibus massive bills: Failure
• Republicans demanded budget cutbacks: Failure
• Republicans said they would restore order: Failure
• Republicans said they would pass bills without Democrats: Failure
• Republicans said no more continuing resolutions: 3 Failures

It is a legislative horror story, loaded with leftist pork, woke spending, and transfers overseas of wealth from the American people.  It is simply impossible to describe in a short space what an outrage it is.  Here are a few details reported by Jesse Waters:

• $850k for a gay senior home
• $15 million to pay college tuition for Egyptians.
• $400k for a gay activist group to teach elementary kids about being trans
• $500k for a DEI zoo
• $400k for a group to give clothes to teens to help them hide their gender.  That includes giving 13-year-old children chest binders, tuck equipment, and “counseling” without parental consent.

Go here to see some additional details.

As if that is not enough, the new fiscal year, FY2025, is only about six months away, with a White House budget proposal that increases federal spending to $7.3 trillion, a jump for 4.7 percent over the current year.

Q.  Does Washington think money grows on trees?

A.  Yes.

The Congressional Budget Office projections that the debt will reach $50 trillion by 2033 and $60 trillion in 2034.  Former Reagan budget Director David Stockman is more realistic.  He expects the Washington UniParty to drive the debt to $100 trillion in the early 2040s. 

Other indicators:

The cost of auto insurance is skyrocketing, up 21 percent last year.  The Wall Street Journal reports that credit card interest rates are near record highs.  Delinquencies are rising.

At the same time, home affordability has collapsed to the lowest level on record.

One other dirty little secret is the situation at the Federal Reserve.  After the private chefs and limousines, the palatial offices and private jet travel, an incredibly bloated staff of bureaucrats, and the money it throws at the economics profession to keep them all endorsing its fiat monetary fraud, the Fed is supposed to send to the Treasury the money it makes in its monetary operations.  How is it doing on that front?  Not well.  As economist Judy Shelton wrote recently, it is actually helping to widen the deficit:

The Fed’s main tool for raising its target interest range is to increase the “administered rates” it pays to commercial banks and money-market mutual funds on the roughly $4 trillion they hold in cash accounts at the Fed. Last year the Fed’s interest expense amounted to an unprecedented $281 billion—exceeding its $164 billion in interest income—with the difference paid out of funds that would otherwise be remitted to the U.S. Treasury.

To appreciate the fiscal effect of the Fed’s operating losses: The Biden administration’s budget for fiscal 2023 projected $516 billion in Federal Reserve “earnings” to be included as receipts for the 2023-32 period.

How America’s financial situation has been allowed to deteriorate so fast is a story for future historians.  But the story for today is how can so few people see how fast it is falling apart.  

For now, buy gold and silver.  And hold your breath.  Things are moving very fast.

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Some are leaving the dollar.  You might want to think about it, too!

Charles de Gaulle, the former Premier of France, called the global dollar system America’s “exorbitant privilege.”  Or maybe he didn’t.  Maybe with was a French finance minister.

But if de Gaulle hadn’t said it himself, he could have because he understood that it would end up fleecing the rest of the world.  In fact, de Gaulle sent his navy to pick up the French gold that was being stored by the United States.

The dollar’s exorbitant privilege of being the reserve currency of the world made Americans a little better off in some ways than they might have been.  It created an artificial demand for dollars, allowing the US treasury to borrow more cheaply than it otherwise could have done.

But such privileges don’t last more than a couple of centuries.   And now our privilege is expiring in half the usual lifespan.  Why?  Because the Deep State has weaponized the dollar.  Instead of being a neutral unit of accounting and trade, like gold, the US freezes, appropriates, and confiscates dollars belonging to other countries.  It prohibits them from using, spending, or disposing of dollars they own.  

To the extent foreign nations hold dollars, they are vulnerable to the whims of Uncle Sam and its often senseless foreign policy.  And they know it.  A “substantial percentage” of foreign central banks surveyed by Invesco reported concerns about the way the US and its minions froze almost half of Russia’s $650 billion gold and foreign exchange reserves.   

No country wants to keep wealth in a currency that can deprive it of its use unilaterally.  Like the dollar.  Imagine agreeing to keep money in a bank or brokerage account that can suddenly just shut you out.

Now Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell is being cagey with one congressman, Alex Mooney, R-W.Va., who is asking specific questions about foreign nations’ repatriating their gold and how much gold the Fed is holding.

We’ll let HeadlineUSA tell the story:

The Fed chairman told Mooney that the Federal Reserve does not own gold but holds it as a custodian for other entities—a fact the congressman presumably already knew. Powell also said that the Fed serves as a custodian for a “small portion” of the U.S. government’s gold, telling Mooney that “any questions you may have about such gold are best directed to the Treasury Department.” Rep. Mooney’s questions were not about the Treasury’s gold [emphasis added].

To Chris Powell, secretary-treasurer of the Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee, the Fed chairman’s responses to a sitting member of Congress are not only unacceptable but also telling.

“The refusal of the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board even to acknowledge, much less reply to, the questions of a member of Congress about the repatriation of gold from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York confirms that something really big is going on with gold internationally,” Powell said in an email to Headline USA.

President Biden recently announced the imposition of an additional 500 financial sanctions on Russia.  Altogether the US has some 4,000 sanctions in place against Russia.  Russia has developed workarounds for most of them.  It is clear that sanctions have hastened the development of alternatives to the US-controlled, dollar-based SWIFT account settlement system.  The effect of the American sanctions being wielded so promiscuously makes it appear that the global dollar standard is not so much failing as it is committing suicide.  

Washington is killing American prosperity.  It long ago killed the good-as-gold US dollar.  It is doing untold harm on many other fronts in addition to now destroying the dollar reserve standard.  It has declared foolish wars on the internal combustion engine, free trade, individual meritocracy, financial privacy and much more.  

Our political classes have the Midas touch in reverse.  They are turning everything they touch into toxic waste.  They will bring the dollar down and impoverish the American people.

We are in the business of helping people like you protect your wealth and yourself from their madness. Let us help.

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“You know the Founders wrote the Constitution “to bind down the government from mischief,” said Jefferson.  Then they added the Bill of Rights, and you know what those ten amendments say:  The government shall not… shall not… shall not… shall not… all the way up to the marvelous Tenth Amendment that said if we forgot anything, you can’t do that either!”

– John F. McManus, speaking at the Ron Paul Presidential Campaign 
“Rally for the Republic,” 2008.

It is with great personal sadness that we note the passing of John F. “Jack” McManus on March 4.

Jack was a friend of more than 50 years.  He was also a great patriot, a mentor, a client, and a personal inspiration. 

Upon graduating from Holy Cross with a degree in physics, Jack served his country proudly as an officer in the US Marine Corps.  In 1966 Jack took a position with the John Birch Society as a teacher, a writer, and a speaker.  He rose to become the organization’s President from 1991 – 2015 and President Emeritus thereafter.

The John Birch Society is one of the most misunderstood political advocacy groups in modern American history.  It is sufficient here to say that when you see American sovereignty subordinated to multinational organizations, and promiscuous and unconstitutional American regime change wars around the world that cost the American people their future well-being, you are seeing something the JBS fought valiantly against for many years.  When you note the ascendency of a few powerful corporate entities exercising undue influence over Washington and seeking always to suppress the free speech rights of Americans, you are noting the very crony capitalism that the JBS warned of.  When you watch the Federal Reserve’s long-term destruction of the US dollar and the bailout again and again of the influential money center banks at the people’s expense, you should remember that the JBS stood firmly against all of this corruption and abuse long before others began to awaken.

Jack McManus was at the forefront of all of these battles.  He was the right man for the job.  He was a tireless champion of American freedom and prosperity, and he was – as they say in the area around  Boston where he lived – “wicked smart.”

I last talked with Jack some months back when his wife of 65 years, Mary, passed away. It is a reminder to me and perhaps to others not to allow the busy activities of daily life to prevent us from being in more regular contact with those we love.  

In addition to our long friendship, I will always be grateful to Jack for his supporting me in devotion to the traditional Roman Catholic faith we shared.  At the same time, Jack often said, when a fellow patriot preceded him in death… “America has lost one of its sons”.  I echo his sentiments of him.

Please pray for the repose of the soul of John F. McManus, who entered into eternity this week.  

St. Ambrose once wrote:

“We have loved him in this life; let us not abandon him in death but rather by our prayers, let us conduct him to the bliss of eternal glory.” 

O Gentlest Heart of Jesus, ever present in the Most Blessed Sacrament, ever consumed with burning love for the poor captive souls in Purgatory, have mercy upon the soul of Thy servant. 

Be not severe in Thy judgment but let some drops of Thy precious Blood fall upon our beloved departed and do Thou O merciful Saviour send Thy angels to conduct the soul of Thy servant to a place of refreshment, light, and peace.

May the angels lead you into Paradise.

May the martyrs receive thee at your coming and take you to the holy city.

May the choirs of angels receive you and may you have rest everlasting. 

V. Eternal rest grant unto him, O Lord.

R. And let perpetual light shine upon him.

V. May he rest in peace.

R. Amen.

V. May his soul and the souls of all the faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace.

R. Amen.

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Global debt is soaring!  Up $15 trillion last year!

Uh oh!  Unpayable debt leads to money printing.  That’s just the government playbook.

 The Institute of International Finance, a global association of financial institutions, tracks and analyzes global capital flows and debt trends.  It reports that “over $15 trillion of additional debt was added to the global debt mountain just last year.  That brings total global debt to a new record high of $313 trillion.”

Let us remember J.P. Morgan’s words, that gold is money. Everything else is credit. 

All of this debt, not to mention other undisclosed leverage like derivatives that can come topping down in a crisis, represents a lot of precarious credit resting on a tiny amount of real liquidity, gold.

Economist Daniel Lacalle calls this a “ticking time bomb for the global economy.”  He writes:

Bloated public debt is a burden on the economy, making productivity stall, raising taxes, and crowding out financing for the private sector. With each passing year, the global debt figure climbs higher, the burdens grow heavier, and the risks loom larger…

Citizens are led to believe that lower growth, declining real wages, and persistent inflation are external factors that have nothing to do with governments, but this is incorrect. Deficit spending is printing money, and it erodes the purchasing power of the currency while destroying the opportunities for the private sector to invest. The entire burden of higher taxes and inflation falls on the middle class and small businesses.

Lacalle concludes, “The end of the United States dollar will not come from external threats but from the irresponsible actions of its own government. Cheap debt is always exceedingly expensive.”

At the risk of repeating ourselves, they can’t print gold.  

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The following graphic is from Visual Capitalist.  It displays the top 11 countries by gold reserves as of September 2023, based on data from Central Banks, the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Gold Council.  It says, “In 2023, amid uncertainty about US interest rates and continued geopolitical risks, the metal once again demonstrated its importance by hitting a new record in December.”

These are the conventionally accepted numbers.  We want to note our reservations.  First of all, the Federal Reserve strenuously resists auditing.  Similarly, the US government’s gold holdings, such as those at Fort Knox, go unaudited.  We find that especially peculiar since by law every public company in the US must submit financial statements each year audited by certified auditors.

Shouldn’t the same be required of the government?  If it is sauce for the goose, it should be sauce for the gander.

Secondly, the is a widespread belief among knowledgeable people that China goes to a great deal of trouble to conceal its gold holdings.  For more on that see our post from the past year CHINA KEEPS BUYING GOLD!

We think the reason China and other nations are turning to gold in the waning dollar economy are also good enough reasons for individuals to do the same!

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And then stake out a long-term gold and silver position!

“Any way you look at it, interest costs on the national debt will soon be at an all-time high!” 

So says the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, a nonpartisan organization dedicated to addressing America’s long-term fiscal challenges.  They provide the following illustrations of the problem Washington has created.

Other major items in the 2023 national budget were easily bypassed by rising interest expenditures which totaled $659 billion.

As outsized as that interest expense is, the Congressional Budget Office says that this year, 2024, it will rocket 32 percent higher, to $870 billion. 

Interest expense will soon be the single largest US budget item – even bigger than Social Security, Medicare, or the war budget.

The Peterson report on rising federal interest expenses concludes with this warning: “By any measure, interest costs as part of the federal budget are at an all-time high, and trending even higher in the years ahead.  Securing our nation’s fiscal and economic future will mean getting these interest costs under control.

We simply do not believe that the federal budget will be reined in.  Period.  We have no way of knowing exactly what Washington will do other than by looking at the propensities of the governing classes today.  We are sorry to report that we see little but fiscal and monetary irresponsibility at every turn.  There simply is no meaningful coalition for fiscal rectitude in Washington at all.

Under the circumstances, informed people will want to protect themselves now with a substantial position in physical gold and silver.  It is the prudent thing to do at the end of an empire. 

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PICK ONE:  Central bank purchases, stagflation, or a deep global recession!

You could see gold surge by 50 percent according to Aakash Doshi, Citi’s North America head of commodities research.  He and other Citi analysts wrote in a recent note to clients that among the pathways to $3,000, gold would be a ramp-up in de-dollarization by central banks.

That could lead to a US dollar crisis.

And that is not the only avenue to much higher gold prices in the next 12 – 18 months, he said.  

Reporting on an interview with Doshi, CNBC says another trigger that could drive gold to $3,000 would be a “deep global recession” that could spur the U.S. Federal Reserves to cut rates rapidly.

“That means the brakes have been cut, not to 3 percent, but to 1 percent or lower – that will take us to $3,000,” Doshi said.  

More from CNBC’s report:

Stagflation — an increasing inflation rate, a slowing economic growth and rising unemployment — could be another trigger, though Doshi said there’s a “very low probability” of such a scenario….

These three potential triggers aside, Citi maintains that their base case for bullion is $2,150 in the second half of 2024, and the price of gold to average a little over Doshi added.

A widely followed J.P. Morgan analyst, Marko Kolanovic, and his team have also raised the prospect of a return to 1970s-style stagflation.  “There are many similarities to the current times,” they write.  “We already had one wave of inflation, and questions started to appear whether a second wave can be avoided if policies and geopolitical developments stay on this course.” 

We think Citi’s calls are fine as far as they go, but that they don’t go nearly far enough.  Other forces on the immediate horizon include a move by Washington to create a central bank digital social credit surveillance currency, a widening of America’s many wars, serious civic strife over the election and its manipulation, an implosion of China’s economy, and banks tipping over the brink here in the US.

The ducks are lining up for much higher gold prices.  If you are not sufficiently prepared, come see us at Republic Monetary Exchange.

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It was not quite a year ago that banks started tumbling down.  You remember the names:  Silicon Valley Bank, Signature Bank, and First Republic, all American banks.  But it wasn’t just an American problem as the presence of Swiss banking giant Credit Suisse and Deutsche Bank on the troubled list attested.

Rising interest rates were tanking the banks’ holdings of US Treasury debt instruments and mortgage-backed securities.  Many Americans – although not most – made withdrawals from their banks.  It was only prudent.  Why keep your money parked in troubled institutions?  It’s your money.  Protect it!

Even though the Fed’s balance sheet is upside down (that’s another story!), the central bank rode to the rescue with another Big Bank Bailout Bonanza.  Don’t be surprised.  The Fed was created by the Big Banks in the first place to do Bailout Bonanza whenever Big Banks needed them.

The Fed said, “Even though as a matter of law, accounts at Big Banks are only insured to $250,000, we will create a new program known by the acronym BTFP to create the impression that the Fed will bail out all the banks – or at least the Big Banks that are in on the Bailout Bonanza!”

So, bank depositors started moving money to Big Banks that would be the beneficiaries of the Bonanza Bailout.  That was not good for small banks, but they didn’t create the Fed, so tough!

None of this fixed anything.  It was just designed to forestall the en masse withdrawals of deposits from banks (and into gold, by the way).

Now the other shoe is dropping, one we have been warning about:  Commercial Real Estate.  The delinquency rate on office building mortgages is climbing at a fast clip, putting the screws to private leaders and banks alike. 

New York Community Bancorp is in such bad shape that its picture belongs on the back of milk cartons.  

WolfStreet.com:

A lot of these CRE loans are coming due this year and next year, and need to be refinanced, or extended, but interest rates have jumped, and many of these office properties are dealing with the structural collapse of demand for office space, so refinancing is going to be tough, and extending-and-pretending is going to be tough, and banks are going to have to deal with losses.

The problem is structural and won’t just vanish when the mood changes or rates drop.

Appearing on CBS 60 Minutes recently, Fed Chairman Powell said there will be losses, but he thinks they are manageable (of course he does!):

You know, we’re working with them. This is something we’ve been aware of for, you know, a long time, and we’re working with them to make sure that they have the resources and a plan to work their way through the expected losses.

Right.  Where do the resources come from to manage their losses?

They come from you.  It’s not magic.  They devalue the people’s money.  It is what they have always done.  That’s how the Big Bank Bailout Bonanza works!

Last year, people wanting to move assets out of banks and into gold and silver were waiting for us when we opened the doors in the mornings.   Our lobby was crowded from early to late.  

This year we think you would be wise to beat the rush!  Speak with a Republic Monetary Exchange specialist today.

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Their financial situation is worse than alarming!

“Twitching like a finger
On the trigger of a gun.”

-Paul Simon

Uh oh!  China is making things feel twitchy!

We are always on the alert for the most likely trigger of the coming economic calamity.  The thing that ends the made-up, manipulated money system and remonetizes honest money.  There are many candidates today.  War.  US banks.  Bidenomics.  A debt crisis.  A Fed screwup.  

But if we had to guess, it looks like China.

We are very concerned that this could be the one.  The block in the Jenga tower that makes the whole thing tumble.  The straw…

There is generally a trigger, a single event that sets the whole house of cards collapsing.  It was the failure of Creditanstalt 1931, Austria’s largest bank, that was the first major bank collapse of the Great Depression.

Today it looks like China.  

For some background, please review our recent article China’s Coming Collapse.

Kyle Bass notes that Chinese real estate developers Evergrande and Country Garden together have $500 billion in debt.  

Think about that.  Two real estate companies, both in default, a half trillion dollars in debt!  “Every single property developer in China, listed property developer, is in default today,” says Bass.  “This is just like the US financial crisis on steroids.  They have three and a half times more banking leverage than we did going into the [2008] crisis.”

“China has 20 plates spinning and all the plates are crashing right now!” 

This looks like the trigger event.  It looks far too big to contain.  It has the prospect of bringing the global economy to its knees!

The seriousness of the situation has China scrambling for gold.  The people in China seem to know it and are trying to prepare themselves.  Here’s one Japanese newspaper’s headline and lead:  

China gold purchases soar 30% on economic anxiety

Chinese gold purchases rose 30% in 2023, as the country’s central bank bought the commodity to replace its dollar holdings amid tensions with the U.S. and individual investors sought a haven for their assets as the economy stumbled….

As China acquired more gold, the country cut its holdings of U.S. Treasurys to around $782 billion as of November, about 10% less than the previous year, the U.S. Treasury Department reports. The figure is roughly $230 billion less than China’s holdings immediately after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

China is a hot mess.  There’s not much they can do about the popping of their real estate bubble.  But they want to land on their feet.  They want to have some real enduring assets on the other side of the mess.  That’s a good idea for individual American investors right now, too.  Especially since this looks very much like the trigger!

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First the NY Times!  Now Chase Bank?

If you aren’t panicking about the US debt picture, you may not be paying attention!

Now even the most establishment of establishment figures are starting to show signs of panic.  Including the most establishment banker of America’s most establishment bank.

Jamie Dimon is the chairman and chief executive officer of JPMorgan Chase, the largest bank in the US.  They like him a lot.  He’s been in that role since 2005, a job that has made him a billionaire.  

Maybe Dimon isn’t panicked, but he sure as heck is worried that we are at the brink. “It is a cliff. We see the cliff. It’s about 10 years out.”

The US national debt is currently more than $34 trillion.  Throughout its history, US debt has averaged 30 percent of total US economic output. Today, it is 123 percent, more than four times the average. It is more than the entire annual productivity of China, Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom, France, and Italy combined. 

Dimon says the US is going to face “a rebellion” around the world when our debt trajectory turns straight up. 

Dimon underestimates the debt-to-GDP ratio at 100 percent.  It is 123% of GDP which means the cliff is much closer than he says.  And while everyone is trying to act like there is no panic, the panic is beginning to spread even at central banks around the world. 

Dimon is not the only establishment voice to express concern about uncontrollable US debt.  As we reported recently, even some at the reliably big government, big spending New York Times are getting religion.  And that tells us that the crisis is about to boil over.

From the lead of a recent Times piece: “For years, many economists believed the country’s debt was not a problem. Interest rates were low, which held down debt payments. Inflation was also low, which suggested the debt wasn’t hampering the economy.

“But times have changed, and federal deficits now look scarier.”

We prefer “unpayable,” but “scary” is a good word for the debt as well.  After all, the national debt amounts to $102,400 per person.  How can retirees, fast-food workers, and the American middle class manage that kind of debt burden?  They can’t.

Here’s the “Debt out the Wazoo” chart from WolfStreet.com:

Call our debt spiral a death spiral.  That’s what Nassim Taleb calls it.  We don’t accuse Taleb, the author of The Black Swan, of being an establishment today.  Far from it.  

Here’s his take: 

So long as you have Congress keep extending the debt limit and doing deals because they’re afraid of the consequences of doing the right thing, that’s the political structure of the political system, eventually you’re going to have a debt spiral.

A debt spiral is like a death spiral.

Nassim Taleb

What do you do when the issuer of your currency is in a death spiral?  You protect yourself with gold and silver as people around the world have learned to do for thousands of years.

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Forget what the Fed chairman says.  Forget the Consumer Price Index and the Producer Price Index.

Pay no attention to core inflation and the Personal Consumption Expenditures (PCE) price index.  Pay no attention to any of Washington’s price indices.  

Instead, trust your own living experience.  Is your cost of living going up or down?  Does feeding your family cost more or less?

Here’s just one example among millions of what is actually happening.  Take a look!

Skrinkflation strikes again, this time at the Raceway. Being this case of shrinkflation occurred at a sporting event, does this border on Funflation? Funflation is a recent economic trend that is hitting concert and sporting eventgoers hard. Have you noticed the face value of a concert ticket recently? The cost to attend a ballgame? Remember when taking the family to a baseball game was somewhat affordable?

Forget the Super Bowl, as it gets closer and closer to only being affordable by either the super-wealthy or the super fiscally irresponsible. A single ticket for next week’s Super Bowl is averaging close to $10,000. This is up almost 70% from last year’s big game! The crazy part? It will still be sold out!

Shrinkflation and Funflation are merely tactics by greedy corporations to fight the pressure inflation is putting on their profits. Instead of raising the price and risking consumer backlash, companies are hiding this behind inferior products, smaller sizes, and lower quantities.

It’s everywhere.

Remember how when you were a teenager you could easily attend a concert with a little money saved up? It sure is unfortunate, but today’s teenager has to (have their parents) pay hundreds or even thousands of dollars to go and see their favorite act.

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See for yourself, it’s US against them!

Having ignored the Constitution and subverted our once good-as-gold dollar, the American elites hope to complete their betrayal with Soviet-style policies (for you, not for themselves, of course).  

That includes eliminating freedoms (yours that is), gas stoves (yours that is), air travel (yours that is), parental rights (yours that is), and more.

They have benefitted from the era of debt-driven government growth, unprecedented money printing, and government power grab.  They are better off because of it.  And they know it.  

The rest of us have not similarly benefited.  And we know it.  

None of this is just made-up argumentation.  These are not mere assertions.  Thanks to survey research by the Committee to Unleash Prosperity, we can show you the real numbers, what the American elite believe, and what they support.

You won’t like it.  They don’t care.

First, who are the elite whose views we are about to share?

The American Elite is defined as people having at least one post-graduate degree, earning at least $150,000 annually, and living in high-population-density areas (more than 10,000 people per square mile in their zip code).  They represent one percent of the population.  

To zoom in a little closer, the survey also includes a sub-sample of elites it calls “Ivy League Graduates.”  About half of the “elites” attended these schools. 

Their views are then compared to those of all voters.

Now if you have a qualifying income and went to an Ivy League school, it doesn’t mean that you are a leftist, socialist, woke, or delusional.  But many of your peers certainly are.

But they are doing well, and they know it.

We recommend you view the entire eye-opening report  Them vs. U.S.  But here are just more charts of their findings, about your freedom and rationing.

Those described in this survey as elites cluster in places that have an outsized impact on public policy:  in government, media, and academia.  They run the show.  They run monetary policy.  As we pointed out recently, for every Republican economist at the Fed there are 10 Democrat economists.  

That is why you have to protect yourself from them.  

Speak with a Republic Monetary Exchange gold and silver specialist and make sure you are prepared for more government control and more monetary shenanigans run by the elite.

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Once again Republic Monetary Exchange’s Jim Clark joins Robert Kiyosaki’s panel of experts to complete the four-part series that Robert calls “the most important show ever!”

The Rich Dad Poor Dad radio show panelists – all veteran gold professionals – have been called together to explore the significance of gold as a timeless form of currency and a safeguard against economic turbulence. 

They discuss gold’s unique properties, its historical role as a reliable medium of exchange, and the dangers of relying on fiat currency. The conversation also addresses central banks’ gold acquisitions, the possibility of government gold confiscation reminiscent of the 1933 U.S. event, and the diverse views on its probability and consequences. 

The episodes offer a comprehensive analysis of gold’s value in the face of contemporary financial challenges and its importance in investment portfolios for wealth preservation.

Here are all 4 episodes that make up the series…

Part 1 of 4:

Part 2 of 4:

Part 3 of 4:

Part 4 of 4:

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In our effort to make sure our friends and clients are always well-informed, we work our way through mountains of information.  We were surprised and happy a few days ago to see that The Market Oracle was quoting our friend and colleague Charles Goyette from his New York Times bestseller The Dollar Meltdown:

The Market Oracle:  Consider that fifteen years ago Charles Goyette author of “The Dollar Meltdown” (2009, Penguin Group) came to a conclusion with respect to the repayment of our national debt when, by comparison, it was only $11.9 trillion.  He states then: “The gross federal debt is 80 per cent of GDP.  That’s the highest it’s been since the 1950s.  But that percentage of debt was much more manageable then because fifty years ago America was a creditor nation, now America is a debtor nation. Fifty years ago, it maintained a trade surplus, now our trade deficit, having grown for a generation, is immense.  Fifty years ago, America was the world’s manufacturing hegemon, now America’s manufacturing base is being lost to the world.  Fifty years ago, Americans were savers. Now the Chinese have shown us what it means to defer consumption and save.”

He continues: “America’s debt at any level – $12 trillion, $59 trillion, or $99.3 trillion – won’t be paid.  They will simply be rolled over again and again until America’s creditors are unwilling to loan any longer. To recapitulate, inflation in the United States is a result of the Federal Reserve turning government debt into money. The Federal Reserve is central to America’s most devastating bubbles and is responsible for almost a hundred years of criminal-scale dollar destruction.  By debt monetization, government acquires money to spend without debate, legislation, or vote, by commensurately devaluing the currency held by the people.  No wonder critics say, this amounts to nothing less than taxation without representation.  In truth, the nature of the U.S. debt is so enormously understated that it amounts to accounting fraud.

Today, the US debt remains an accounting fraud.  The only difference is that today the numbers are so much bigger, and that time is running out on the US government’s fiat money Ponzi scheme.

The following chart for the fourth quarter of the last fiscal year makes our point, illustrating that the federal took in more money from borrowing than from any other revenue source.

If you believe Washington can borrow America’s way to prosperity, then there is nothing to worry about.  If you are not that naïve, you will want to own gold and silver.  Speak with a Republic Monetary Exchange precious metals specialist today to create a sensible plan to protect yourself from Washington’s mounting and unpayable debt.  

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Rich Dad Poor Dad author Robert Kiyosaki presents a four-part program that he calls “the most important” show ever.

Today we present Part 1, The Good News and Bad News about Money.  It features Jim Clark on a panel with other veteran precious metals experts including RME associate Charles Goyette.

The discussion addresses the historical context of the US dollar and explores how global economic shifts could influence personal wealth.  Robert’s guests share their knowledge and personal experiences, emphasizing the role of precious metals in safeguarding assets.

Enjoy Part 1 of this very important 4-part series.  We will post Parts 2, 3, and 4 as they are released. 

Harry Dent Warns about the Stock Market:

Since 2009, this has been 100 percent artificial, unprecedented money printing and deficits: $27 trillion over 15 years, to be exact.  This is off the charts, 100 percent artificial, which means we’re in a dangerous state.

I think 2024 is going to be the biggest single crash year we’ll see in our lifetime…. If I’m right, it is going to be the biggest crash of our lifetime, most of it happening in 2024. You’re going to see it start and be more obvious by May.

“Gold is “Practically a Steal” at these Prices!” – Jim Rickards:

When this panic hits and the dollar is deemed no longer reliable, the world will turn to gold…. Investors should consider today’s gold prices a gift to acquire gold at bargain prices before markets, and the mainstream media, wake up.

Even at $2,052, gold is so cheap right now, it’s practically a steal.

Ernest Hemingway – First Inflation, then War:

The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists.

Back in August, Ron Paul Foresaw Presidential Politics at Work in Fed Policy.  Right as Usual:

The Fed will likely pause its rate increase next year in the hope of boosting economic activity to help President Biden’s reelection campaign. Former President Trump gave Powell an additional incentive to keep rates low next year by promising not to re-appoint him if he returns to the Oval Office. 

Jim Clark from Real Money for Free People – The American Gold Story:

The founders created the conditions for an explosion of human prosperity. Our governing classes and monetary authorities are their opposites. They have created the conditions for an explosion of impoverishment. They are the big spenders and reckless borrowers of both parties. They are the grand councilors and academic advisors of the almighty State. They and their statist epigone and media servitors are the inevitable offspring of connivers like Franklin Roosevelt and Richard Nixon, who stole the people’s gold and betrayed the nation’s good-as-gold dollar. They are a generation of trousered apes who do not know the difference between ditchwater and champagne, and of like-minded Fed officials who conflate empty paper promises with the real, enduring monetary wealth of the ages, who trade the real money of free people for a mess of monetary pottage.

By their own logic, there is no turning back. They must now continue to print money until the system crashes. It is the endgame of their folly.

Up, Up, and Away!  From David Stockman, a Chart that Shows US Debt from 1966 to Now:

First They Destroy the Money!  Ayn Rand Calls Out the Destroyers:  

Whenever destroyers appear among men, they start by destroying money, for money is men’s protection and the basis of a moral existence. Destroyers seize gold and leave to its owners a counterfeit pile of paper. This kills all objective standards and delivers men into the arbitrary power of an arbitrary setter of values. Gold was an objective value, an equivalent of wealth produced. Paper is a mortgage on wealth that does not exist, backed by a gun aimed at those who are expected to produce it. Paper is a check drawn by legal looters upon an account that is not theirs: upon the virtue of the victims. Watch for the day when it bounces, marked: “Account Overdrawn.”

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One really easy lesson… here’s what’s going to happen to your money!

The current inflation rate (CPI) is 3.1 percent.  What does that mean for your money?  Jim Rickards at the Daily Reckoning sums it all up in just a few words:

How damaging is 3.1% inflation? That rate will cut the value of the dollar in half in 22 years. It’ll cut the value of the dollar in half again in another 22 years.

Put differently, if you start your career at the age of 21 and retire at 65, the dollar you earned at age 21 will only be worth 25 cents by the time you retire. That’s 75% wealth confiscation by government-caused inflation.

There’s nothing benign or comfortable about 75% wealth confiscation. But that’s where we are today.

And that is the story in a nutshell.

“There’s nothing benign or comfortable about 75% wealth confiscation.  But that’s where we are today.”

We grow very wary when it appears almost everyone is thinking the same thing.  It often means there is not a lot of real thinking going on.   The view that Chairman Powell and the Fed are going to be able to drive interest rates lower in the New Year is nearing unanimity.  

But no one is bigger than the markets.  Even the Fed.  And the markets may produce quite a different outcome.

Consider:  The Fed can diddle with short-term rates, but its rate manipulations cannot control long-term rates.  And even its artificial distortions of short-term rates are ephemeral.  We are living today through the reckoning for years of the Fed’s interventions.  Stated otherwise, there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.  Milton Friedman used that phrase repeatedly to make clear that a price would be exacted for the government’s manipulations, cronyism, and giveaways.

That is why we have inflation.  The Fed makes up money to give to some entity or to pretend it can control interest rates.  But the money it prints takes on value to the degree that the rest of the money in the economy – your money – loses value.  Having inflated the supply of money and credit to buy down interest rates, bail out banks, or “stimulate” the economy, prices everywhere else go up. 

It is also why we have recessions.  Washington and the Fed create malinvestment with made-up money, booming some recipients or sectors with liquidity only to have financial reality and monetary reality eventually assert themselves.  Remember the housing boom and bust?

Having created 8 trillion dollars in the years after the housing bubble, the Fed has fraudulently distorted the economy with years of this legalized counterfeiting.  The most massive monetary distortion in US history has yet to be assimilated.  It is bound to cheapen the dollar’s value much more than the bothersome inflation we have already experienced over the last two years.

And don’t even ask us about the money printing that is needed now to manage the otherwise unpayable US debt.

Oh well, go ahead and ask.  We happen to have a chart that tells the story.  

Interest on the national debt has climbed to a trillion dollars a year.  It was less than half that just a couple of years ago.  As older government bonds bearing lower rates come due, the Treasury will have to roll that debt over into higher interest rate issues.  And in the face of furious money printing to pay for that interest, rates will climb to offset the accompanying inflation.  At least market rates will climb.  

As Rep. Thomas Massie told Tucker Carlson recently, the Fed was sold to us on the basis that it would be the economy’s firefighter; instead, it is the arsonist!

So, whatever plans that Powell and the Board have for interest rates, all the money printing that has gone before will have its say.  And people tend to abandon made-up currencies in times of crisis, preferring gold.  

Wouldn’t it be wise to expect much higher gold prices with all that money printing headed our way?

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Now is the time to buy gold according to Marc Faber, a leading French bank, and others!

When is the right time to buy gold?

If you don’t have enough for what’s coming, right now is the best time to buy gold… whenever right now happens to be.

Who has enough gold?  We’ve never met anyone who has enough.  Certainly not Marc Faber, a Swiss investor based in Thailand.

Faber is the editor of the Gloom, Boom, and Doom report.  At a recent precious metals summit in Zurich, Faber said he believes that the long-term trend for the next 20 years or more is for inflation to move up.  “I have been advising investors to own gold and other precious metals, silver, platinum, for the last 40 years.  I buy continuously every month some gold.”

“Central banks’ function in the long run is to print money.  Never forget that.   A central bank exists to print money.  In view of that I think that gold and other precious metals are still a good investment from a long-term perspective and also from a safety aspect.”  

Analysts at Société Générale, the French-based multinational financial services company, share a bullish view. They expect gold to climb to new all-time highs in the new year, based on lower Fed interest rates.  

“Unlike oil, gold prices have increased since the start of the Israel/Hamas conflict,” they write in their latest report.  “Gold has continued to ignore the rising real yields headwind, as demand has remained robust.”

A good deal of that demand continues to come from dollar-wary foreign central banks.  “The heterogeneous coalition of countries in the Global South should continue to de-dollarize and give a further boost to gold,” the analysts note.  They expect gold to hold around $2,200 throughout 2024.

Do you have enough gold to weather the storm ahead?  It is a gathering storm consisting of the following:

The wild growth of US government spending and debt that we have recounted many times. 
See The Money Madmen Keep Printing for a quick refresher.

A wildly inflated stock market. 
Thanks to the Fed’s stove-piping of made-up money to Wall Street, between 1991 and 2022 the Nasdaq Composite Index has outpaced American’s real wages by 40 times!

A wildly wobbly wealth gap. 
David Stockman reports that over the last 22 years, “annual wealth gains for the top 1% were 4,250X larger than the median real wage gain and 17,000X larger for the top o.1%.”  It is in the nest of such disparities that revolutions are hatched.   And gold always shows up on top in revolutions.

If you don’t have enough for what’s coming, right now is the best time to buy gold… Make an appointment with a Republic Monetary Exchange precious metals consultant today.

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Who are you going to believe?  The Swamp media or your lying eyes?

With less than a year before the presidential election, a Swamp public relations agent named Taylor Lorenz, who poses as a reporter at the Washington Post, is hard at work on the newspaper’s relentless mission to explain that prices, inflation, and the nation’s “economic woes” aren’t really that bad under Biden.

Is that so?  

No.  In fact, the claims of the Bidenista’s about the great economy can be refuted with a few simple charts.

Someone triggered things by posting a TikTok of a dressed-up novelty Big Mac that cost $16.  That was enough to bring a swift response from the people at the WaPo, the Washington establishment’s house organ.  A regular Big Mac is up only 10 percent, they protested.  As though a 10 percent increase in prices is no big deal.   It’s just not fair, was the tone of the piece.  “Voters still don’t like the economy, and they blame the president.”

The folks at ZeroHedge were quick to cut through the nonsense with graphs that illustrate what the American people are actually experiencing under Bidenomics.

First, consumer prices under four years of Trump and 35 months under Sleepy Joe:

When Swamp economists try to convince you that inflation isn’t really all that bad, they generally pivot to something called “core inflation,” the CPI figures calculated without including food and energy.  So here is the way that looks:

And finally, this chart of disposable incomes over the Trump and Biden years.  A majority of Americans have seen their disposable income fall – and fall hard – under Bidenomics.  

That last chart finally showed up in the article, “buried towards the bottom of the WaPo report,” writes ZeroHedge. 

That’s the way with the Swamp media.  When they do finally add the salient information that reveals the rest of the story, it is usually not until the 16^th or the 31^st paragraph since they know full well that most of their readers don’t go that far into the story.

For us, the story isn’t complete until it explains that an honest, reliable monetary system based on gold would have prevented most of the problems of rising prices and falling incomes that we are experiencing today.  But since the monetary system is in the hands of the banking cartel, you must protect your wealth with the enduring and reliable money our founders recommended:  Gold and silver.

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All Eyes are on Argentina!

It’s an upset!  Javier Milei’s landslide win in Argentina has toppled – at least for now – the country’s inflationary Peronista left-wing rule.  

“Freedom goes forward!  Hail freedom, dammit!” shouted Milei.

Milei will be sworn in as president in December.  He has promised to end central banking and the cronyism that has characterized Argentina.  The free-market champion is said to have won the admiration of both Donald Trump and the leader of Great Britain’s Brexit movement Nigel Farage.  

Economic commentator Michael Shedlock wrote, “Congratulations Argentina for electing the world’s first libertarian president.”  

Reuters summed up the new Argentine president’s economic agenda like this:

Milei is pledging economic shock therapy. His plans include shutting the central bank, ditching the peso, and slashing spending, potentially painful reforms that resonated with voters angry at the economic malaise.

Milei’s challenges are enormous. He will have to deal with the empty coffers of the government and central bank, a creaking $44 billion debt program with the International Monetary Fund, inflation nearing 150% and a dizzying array of capital controls.

Milei’s win shakes up Argentina’s political landscape and economic roadmap, and could impact trade in grains, lithium and hydrocarbons. Milei has criticized China and Brazil, saying he won’t deal with “communists,” and favors stronger U.S. ties.

The presidential term is four years, which gives Milei time to return Argentina to the prosperity that it enjoyed a century ago.  In 1913 it was richer than Germany and France.  Military rule and socialism killed the goose that laid the golden egg after World War I.  

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, John Fund cited a remark by a worker there who said, “Imagine someone born 25 years ago in Argentina. For your entire life, you have seen nothing but misery and little chance to get ahead unless you emigrate. We simply want to be a normal country again.”   

Milei is nothing if not dramatic.  He brandished a chainsaw about as he promised to eliminate useless government ministries.  No doubt his fiery and outspoken style was indispensable in his electoral victory.  But now he will face all the forces of political cronyism and leftism arrayed against him, not just the entrenched financial interests who have profited from the inflationary central banking regime, but the useful idiots of the left in the media and education.  

Grab your popcorn!  The show is about to begin!

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RME’s Jim and Charles join friend Robert Kiyosaki to Talk Precious Metals, the Economy, and the Hunt Brothers

This past week, RME’s Jim Clark and Charles Goyette were guests on friend Robert Kiyosaki’s Rich Dad Radio Show. Below you can watch the entire interview. In addition to the topics of the U.S. going bankrupt, precious metals, and more, Jim shares the incredible story of his historic silver trades with the Hunt Brothers from October 1979 to January 1980!

The Hunt Brothers Segment

During the show (at 31:08), Jim and Charles share an incredible story about how they first met Bunker Hunt, and how they eventually aided in the historic Hunt Brothers Silver purchases in 1979 and 1980.

You can jump straight to the Hunt Brothers portion of the show by clicking here.

Who were the Hunt Brothers?

The Hunt Brothers, Nelson Bunker Hunt and William Herbert Hunt, were Texas oilmen who gained notoriety in the early 1980s for their ambitious attempt to corner the global silver market. Starting in the late 1970s, the brothers began accumulating large amounts of silver, driving up its price to unprecedented levels. By early 1980, the price of silver had surged to nearly $50 per ounce. However, their plan eventually collapsed as the Commodity Futures Trading Commission implemented new regulations, and the Hunt Brothers’ financial empire crumbled which eventually led to bankruptcy and legal troubles. Their story remains a cautionary tale of the risks associated with attempting to manipulate commodity markets on such a massive scale.

Jim Clark and Charles Goyette were right in the middle of it all as the dealers who were able to acquire and deliver over 14,000 bags of silver for the brothers between October 1979 and January 1980. With inflation adjusted, that is almost $1 billion worth in today’s money! As Jim tells in the Rich Dad Radio Show video, when the Hunt Brothers took delivery of the silver in April of 1980, they sent seven armored tractor-trailers to haul it away. You can also read more about the Hunt Brothers in Jim’s book “Real Money for Free People: The American Gold Story”

Order a complimentary signed copy of “Real Money for Free People: The American Gold Story” here.

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Central Banks all over the world are buying gold. Are you?

Because central banks around the world sold so much gold in the post-WWII era – to hold US dollars in their currency reserves instead – we believe the reversal of that practice represents the biggest monetary megatrend of our time.

In other words, these days central banks are buying gold.  They are de-dollarizing.  

The World Gold Council reports that in September global central banks were net purchasers of 77 tons of gold!

Leading the way in gold acquisitions is the People’s Bank of China. 

Asia’s hunger for gold is manifesting in other ways.   Of course, China has distinguished itself as the world’s leading gold producer.  Now Asia is emerging as a powerful and growing hub for old trading and commerce.  Russia, the world’s second largest gold producer, has recently moved its gold trading from Dubai to Hong Kong.  According to Bloomberg News, “Hong Kong imported 68 tons of Russian gold this year, four times as much as the whole of 2022.”

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End users of industrial silver will experience surging output totaling 46 percent between now and 2033.  The surge is expected to be especially rapid in the electrical and electronics industries which are forecasted to grow by 55 percent over the decade. 

That is the finding of a new study by Oxford Economics, a leading global economic forecasting and econometric analysis consultancy based in London.  The report “Fabrication Demand Drivers for Silver in the Industrial, Jewelry and Silverware Sectors Through 2033,” was commissioned by the Silver Institute.  

The study reports:

Between 2023 and 2033, we forecast the output of end users of industrial silver will increase by 46% in real terms. This partly reflects two thirds of the usage in 2022 was by the electrical and electronics applications industry, which is forecast to exhibit the fastest growth in output at 55%, rather than the slower growing smaller segments.

Our forecasts suggest that the demand for silver for jewelry manufacturing will increase by 34% between 2023 and 2033.

Silverware fabricators’ output is forecast to increase by 30% over the next decade. Some 43% of the growth in output between 2023 and 2033 is forecast to occur in India, although this is less than the country’s 73% share of the market in 2022. • 

Combined, the output of industrial, jewelry and silverware fabricators is forecast to increase by 42% between 2023 and 2033. This is roughly double the rate of growth of their demand for silver over the previous decade.

Earlier this year the Silver Institute forecast investment demand for 2023 to reach 295 million ounces, the second highest on record.

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Newsweek reports that China is gobbling up gold on the international market.  China is already the world’s largest gold producer, but it’s buying more gold hand-over-fist.  And it has been doing so every single month for almost a year.

For thirteen years central banks have been socking away gold.

The Financial Times headlines its account of China’s aggressive gold buying this way:

China leads record central bank gold buying in first nine months of year

Central banks in emerging markets look to reduce reliance on US dollar for reserve holdings

Describing China’s appetite for gold as “voracious,” FT reports, “China has stood out as the largest purchaser of gold this year as part of an 11-month buying streak. The People’s Bank of China has reported snapping up 181 tons this year, taking gold holdings to 4 percent of its reserves.”

Are you wondering why China is so serious about gold?

It is because China is preparing for a crisis, a monetary meltdown.  

They see more bank and bond market trouble on the horizon, uncontrollable US spending, and unpayable US debt.  And maybe even more war.  A lot more war. 

When it comes to monetary affairs, China knows the Golden Rule:  He who has the gold makes the rules! 

So, China is aggressively buying more gold to protect itself from both financial and geopolitical risks.  Shouldn’t you be doing the same thing?

At Republic Monetary Exchange, we advise our friends and clients to do what people have done for thousands of years, especially when the handwriting is on the wall!  Preserve your wealth with gold and silver.

See us today.  If you don’t have a gold and silver professional at Republic Monetary Exchange, simply call or stop buying and you will be connected with an experienced consultant who will help you achieve your wealth preservation and profit objectives with precious metals!

Republic Monetary Exchange—  stop by on Camelback, just east of 40th Street.  Or call 602-955-6500 Monday-Friday anytime between 9 am-5 pm!

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Here are a Few Answers!

Someone asked us, “Why does the Federal Reserve destroy our money with inflation?  Don’t they realize what they are doing to this country?”

No answer we give will be complete.  There are too many things going on and too many different interests at work for an all-encompassing response.   But we’ll provide a couple of the leading components in our response.

Let us answer the second part of the question first.  Some of the people inside the Fed do realize what they are doing to this country.  And they keep doing it because what it is doing to the country is what they want done.  You might think of them as believers in George Soros’s new world order:  They don’t like America and they want it changed.  They want to level the world into a uniform socialist mediocrity (with a special class of rulers, to be sure:  themselves!)  These are members of the Davos crowd who want you to eat bugs and own nothing.

Others don’t know any better.  Although she seems to have a foot in both camps, both among those who intend what they are doing, as well as a leading figure among those hopelessly without a clue how things work, we give you Janet Yellen.  

Why does the Fed do it?  It destroys our money for a number of reasons.  It serves the governing classes, giving them “free” paper or digitally printed money) for vote-buying giveaways, and to win elections.  The central bank’s power to create and destroy money is the power to boom and bust the economy at will.  It is the power to support and sustain the banks and the crony classes that created the Fed in the first place.  

There can be no doubt that the orgy of “galloping central bankism” that we have seen over the last generation or so has profited the crony classes enormously.  Just take a look at the following chart.  It depicts an explosion in the net worth of the wealthy, the top one percent versus the entire 50 percent of the population at the bottom.

That chart is provided and explained by David Stockman in his newsletter Contra Corner.  He writes:

On the eve of the Greenspan money-pumping era in Q4 1989, the net worth of the top 1% was about $5 trillion, while the bottom 50% held about $800 billion of net worth. But thereafter came the great Greenspanian bubble, perpetuated with even added gusto by his successors.

Accordingly, during the last three decades the top 1% have gained an additional $40 trillion of net worth, while the bottom 50% have picked up just $2.9 trillion. So the math of central bank fueled asset bubbles is impossible to deny: To wit, the wealth of the top 1% was 6X that of the bottom 50% in 1989, representing reasonably honest capitalism at work. But since then that figure had soared to 12X— owing to the Fed’s relentless flooding of Wall Street with easy money and repeated bailouts.

Of course, the founders of this country knew that given the power over the creation of money, that power would be used to profit the few at the expense of the many.  That is why they intended to create a gold and silver-based monetary system, prohibiting the “creation” of money out of thin air.

Too bad we didn’t follow the founders.  But you can still get off the paper money and digital printing trains before they arrive at their destination: a place called The Crack-Up Boom!  

That’s when everyone realizes at once that the paper and digital money are going bad, and they all try to get off the train at once. That’s usually too late.  Better to own gold and silver, especially at today’s preferred prices.

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We say be prepared for an inflation resurgence!

Some sectors of the markets along with some analysts believe that the Federal Reserve has declared victory over inflation.

That would be like General Custer encountering one lone Sioux on his way to Little Big Horn and patting himself on the back.

Still, stocks roared higher the day after Powell’s latest press conference.  The Dow was up 564 points; the S&P rose 80 points; the Nasdaq index took off, climbing 232 points.

So is their verdict correct?  Has the inflation bogeyman been vanquished?  Did Custer vanquish the Sioux? 

Not hardly.

Of course, the Fed doesn’t want to raise rates.  It doesn’t want to be blamed for a collapsing housing market, bond market, and stock market.  But it should have thought of that when it prints the last few trillion dollars.  No, with the Fed it is never forethought.  It is always an afterthought.

So, it doesn’t want to raise rates.  However, it did not want to raise them when it began raising rates in 2022.  Consumer anger over rising prices forced their hand.

So that’s two meetings in a row that the Fed has punted, leaving rates unchanged.  And it gave no indication that another rate hike would be forthcoming at its December meeting.  “The stance of policy is restrictive,” said Powell, “meaning that tight policy is putting downward pressure on economic activity and inflation, and the full effects of our tightening have yet to be felt.”

And that was enough for some participants to conclude that the Fed’s bias is to hold rates where they are.  Until something else happens.

Something about this is uncannily familiar.  Other central banks, who know the inflation racket better than anyone since they are the inflation racker, keep buying gold. 
Central bank gold demand so far this year is 14 percent ahead of the same period last year.  But it also reminds us of when the Fed prematurely assumed inflation was under control in the 1970s.  

It wasn’t.

Here’s a chart from Jeffrey Kleintop, Jeffrey Kleintop, Chief Global Investment Strategist at Charles Schwab that we ran during the summer.

The chart shows the CPI from 1966 to 1982 in blue.  That includes the inflation decade of the 1970s.  Clearly inflation roared up in 1973 – 74, eased off, and took off again in 1978 – 79. 

The yellow line overlaying it is the CPI from 2013 until now.  It is almost uncanny how closely the patterns align.   Most economists today understand that the Federal Reserve concluded it had won the war on inflation in the mid-70s.  But they declared victory too soon and price inflation roared back even stronger than before.

Kleintop says, “It’s funny how history rhymes!”

It is funny.  Remember that four other members of his own family were killed along with General Custer at the Battle of Little Big Horn: his 18-year-old nephew, his brother-in-law, and two younger brothers.  

Protect your family and your wealth.  Take advantage of today’s gold and silver prices and be ready for inflation’s resurgence.  Speak with your Republic Monetary Exchange precious metals professional today.

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Read ‘Em and Weep! Or Buy Gold and Laugh!

At least we’re not the only ones writing about the US Treasury’s debt crisis now.  The story is starting to play far and wide now.  That’s because it is becoming impossible to ignore!

Here are three consecutive headlines from the Drudge Report on Wednesday, 11/1.  The links are all active so you can – and probably should – read the stories yourself.  Nevertheless, we will comment briefly on each.

Treasury to step up size of bond sales to manage growing debt load and higher rates…

SUMMERS: U.S. fiscal deficit more serious problem ‘than ever before’…

Druckenmiller says govt needs to stop spending like ‘drunken sailors’…

The Treasury’s borrowing needs (so that Washington can continue to spend money it doesn’t have) are exploding.  The first story reports that it needs to borrow more than Three-quarters of a trillion dollars in the current quarter.  It needs $776 billion this quarter (Oct-Nov-Dec, and even more in the following quarter, $816 billion.

In the last fiscal year ending September 30, federal red ink totaled $1.7 trillion.  Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, who in our memory has never been a meaningful advocate of Washington restraint, says that today’s deficits are probably the biggest economic challenge in US history.

Summer’s first avenue of attack on the deficit would be to step up collections, which is what that $80 billion in new IRS funding in the so-called Inflation Reduction Act is all about.   Despite Washington’s denial, you can expect the middle class to be hounded at new levels of intensity by the IRS. In other words, the taxman is coming for you!  This will result in barely concealed hostility setting the people even more in opposition to the government.  

 Hedge fund billionaire Stanley Druckenmiller has some choice words about Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen lately, as have we.  (See our recent post Head for the Safety Zone.)  Before Covid, notes Druckenmiller, Washington spent 20 percent of GDP.  Now it spends 25 percent.  How does he propose to fix things?  He has Social Security and seniors in his crosshairs.  Sure, go after old people, while the Deep State and Yellen think we can afford two and three-front wars.  

In any case, the spending will leave America a hollowed-out hulk, a shadow of what we were.  On CNBC the other day, Druckenmiller accused Washington of spending “like drunken sailors.”  His appearance was virtually an emotional plea for us to get a handle on spending.  “We’ve got to stop, guys. We’re drunk. We’re digging this deep hole. What are we doing here?”  More than forty years ago Ronald Reagan said comparing Washington to drunken sailors is a slur on drunken sailors!

What is the net-net-net of all these stories? Simple.  It’s every man and woman for him or herself.  The Washington institutions do not have your well-being at heart.  The ship of state is a ship of fools.  They have run it into the shallow reefs.  

Get off the sinking Washington monetary ship while you can.  Protect yourself with gold and silver today.

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Gold’s next stop is $3,700!  Silver to $68!

It’s time now to wake up!   And to tell your friends!

Rich Dad Poor Dad author Robert Kiyosaki doesn’t issue a wake-up call like that very often.  When he does, he means it!

We follow our friend Robert closely.   And since he says we should tell our friends to wake up now,  we are sharing his dramatic warning and gold and silver price calls from his most recent “X” (Twitter) alert:

Gold will soon break through $2,100 and then take off. You will wish you had bought gold below $2,000. Next stop gold $3,700….  Silver from $23 to $68 an ounce. Savers of fake dollars F’d. Please tell your friends to “Wake up.” Take care.

We agree.  We are at a very important monetary crossroads with spreading wars, debt spiraling into the stratosphere, and Washington as badly run as we have seen it in our lifetime.

That’s why we have advised our friends and clients to head to gold and silver – to the Maximum Safety Zone – now.  

Please review Robert Kiyosaki’s warning carefully and his target for gold to take off and hit $3,700 and his silver target of $68.

Then reach out to us and speak with a Republic Monetary Exchange gold and silver professional today!

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The gold picture is coming into view, and it is very bullish according to one of our favorite commentators, Michael “Mish” Shedlock from MishTalk.com.

We’ve known “Mish” for a very long time, dating all the way back to when he was a small, still voice warning about the housing bubble.

Gold Massive Cup and Handle

Mish points to the classic technical pattern, the “cup and handle” in the gold chart, and says that gold “is flirting with a major breakout having undergone a huge three-year consolidation.

“If the next major move is higher, as I suspect, the move rates to be explosive.”

Mish is not alone in expecting an explosive move in gold.  We have shared elsewhere Rich Dad Poor Dad author Robert Kiyosaki’s call for gold and silver.  He expects gold to break above $2,100 and then take off with its next stop at $3,700.  A move like that would be consistent with the technical picture, especially with Gold’s repeated interim tops at just over $2,000. 

Kiyosaki expects silver to share in the move, racing up from $23 to $68.  He urges you to tell your friends to wake up. 

Robert is watching the fundamentals.  Mish is looking at the technical picture.  Both are talking about an explosive move up in gold!

Make sure your portfolio is up to date.  Speak with a Republic Monetary Exchange gold and silver professional without delay!

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Gold is Much More Than Just a Metal!

Paul Tudor Jones is one of those billionaire hedge fund managers.  We caught him on CNBC the other day and wanted to share a few of his observations.

Put simply, Jones says, “I believe gold’s value will continue to rise as more people recognize its importance in the financial system.”

After all, gold is “not just a metal!”

We cited Jones a little over two years ago when he made it clear that he didn’t think inflation was transitory as the Federal Reserve insisted.  At about the same time, he charged the Fed with “the most inappropriate monetary policy that I’ve seen maybe in my lifetime.” 

 That’s easy to agree with.  

And it is not just monetary policy that has his attention.  Fiscal policy – Washington’s spending and debt – has him equally concerned.  Jones says the US today “is probably in its weakest fiscal position since certainly World War II” with our debt was 122 percent of GDP.  

At the same time, the debt-t0 GDP ratio is back in the nosebleed section where it was after World War II, higher interest rates will make funding all that debt — $33.5 trillion – much more difficult.” 

Says Jones, “As interest costs go up in the United States, you get in this vicious circle, where higher interest rates cause higher funding costs, cause higher debt issuance, which cause further bond liquidation, which cause higher rates, which put us in an untenable fiscal position.”

But our challenges are not just fiscal and monetary.  Jones describes us as living in the most threatening geopolitical environment he has ever seen.  We have geopolitical challenges that could ultimately erupt into nuclear war, he says. 

We now have possibly three theaters where we’re going to have geopolitical challenges. We’ve got the Middle East and Israel, obviously, Ukraine and Russia and then at some point down the road, Taiwan and China.

You have four nuclear powers, three of whom are led by sociopaths, and that would be China, Russia and North Korea.

It is at times like these that people begin to realize that gold is not just a metal!

Here’s a link to a portion of Jones’s CNBC interview.  It is worth a view. 

Be sure to speak with a Republic Monetary Exchange gold and silver specialist now.  Don’t wait until everyone realizes the necessity of owning gold!

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We’ve Been Talking About ‘Shrinkflation’, But This is Ridiculous!

We’ve written many times about the Federal Reserve’s destruction of the US dollar’s purchasing power.  We’ve written about shrinkflation, businesses concealing price increases with smaller package sizes. (See HERE and HERE.)  

And we have even joked about what we call “The Incredible Shrinking Candy Bar.”

But now shrinkflation has gotten completely out of hand as you will see in this clip.  

Our advice is to keep your money in real money, money that can’t be devalued by Washington.  And that means gold and silver.

Now, watch this!   It’s a sign of the times!

We’ve been following the Shrinkflation sub on Reddit- and we’ve been seeing these posts get more and more ridiculous month by month! Check out the latest of what the kids could be getting north of the border this Halloween…

https://www.reddit.com/r/shrinkflation/s/2mLc9BIr0H

Here We Go Again!

It’s been a while since we last wrote about the Stagflation Decade, the 1970s, but some of the parallels are so eerie that even one of the world’s biggest banks has started to notice!

The 1970s era was characterized by oil price shocks, the Soviet war in Afghanistan, and high inflation.

Deutsche Bank, a leading multinational investment bank, is now pointing to those and other ominous parallels.  

Deutsche analysts Henry Allen and Cassidy Ainsworth-Grace write:

Inflation remains above target across the major economies; we have witnessed severe spikes in energy prices over recent years; and there’s been growing industrial unrest.

Over the weekend, the attacks on Israel showed how geopolitical risk can return unexpectedly. And we are also seeing an El Niño event this year, which echoes a similar event in the early 1970s that put upward pressure on food prices.

It’s not time for complacency they warn:

Inflation is still above target in every G7 country, and the 1970s showed how unexpected shocks could rapidly send inflation higher once again. History also suggests that the last phase of returning inflation to target is the hardest.

And given inflation has already been above target for the last two years, a fresh inflationary spike could well lead expectations to become unanchored.

The costs of the Vietnam War played a huge role in the stagflation that plagued the American people in the 70s.  So far, the Biden gang has thrown $100 billion in taxpayer money into Ukraine.  Never forget that war leads to larger fiscal deficits, more debt monetization, and higher inflation on a persistent basis!

All the numbers are much bigger now, the amount of spending and debt, the prices of oil, and the costs of war.  A brand-new stagflation decade will mean a gold and silver bull market that will be much bigger than the one your grandparents remember.  Speak with your Republic Monetary Exchange professional advisor about stagflation.  Prepare yourself now without delay.

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“We Need Strong Fighters Like Kari” Trump Endorses Kari Lake for Senate. And So Do I!

Great News!  It’s official!  Kari Lake is running for the US Senate.  She kicked off her campaign on Tuesday, 10/10, with a blockbuster personal endorsement from President Trump.

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Some of President Trump’s remarks:

“A Republican must win and we must win very, very big…“

“I will need a majority in the House and in the Senate. We have to have a big, strong majority to help me push our America First agenda through.“

“That starts right here tonight by helping Kari Lake win in Arizona.  And she will win, too!  She’s an amazing woman respected by everybody.  Kari is one of the toughest fighters in our movement, and I am proud to give her my complete and total endorsement for the United States Senate.“

“With people like Kari fighting for Arizona in the Senate, with me in the White House, we will make America great again!“

“God bless you!   God bless Arizona!  And Kari, God bless you!“

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Are you ready to make a difference in our country?  Are you ready to send Kari to Washington?  

Many of you know something of my commitment to Kari Lake when she ran for Governor.  As a lifelong Arizonan who cares deeply for our State, I rolled up my sleeves and went to work, raising money for her campaign and spreading the message day and night, wherever I could.

Now I am delighted for this new chance to join President Trump in the fight to make America great again!  And I join him in his enthusiastic endorsement of Kari for US Senate! 

Help us make Kari Lake Arizona’s next US Senator.  Help roll back the bankruptcy of Bidenomics and the chaos and confusion in the White House.  

We will have to work harder than ever, but we can send President Trump back to the White House with an incredible Senator in his corner – Kari Lake!

Thanks to all our friends and clients for joining us in this fight!

– Jim Clark

President Trump is proud to endorse @KariLake, the next U.S. Senator from Arizona! Make America Great Again!pic.twitter.com/ZFE98mR7FW

— Team Trump (Text TRUMP to 88022) (@TeamTrump) October 11, 2023

Here is the link to Kari’s campaign if you would like to donate and get involved!

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Robert Kiyosaki warns!

We’re not alone in pointing to cracks in the US banks!  We’ve been running around like our hair is on fire warning about trouble ahead.  But if anything, we might be accused of understating the case.  Wait until you hear what Rich Dad Poor Dad author Robert Kiyosaki says!

Here is his tweet from just days ago:

The FDIC has over 725 US banks on death watch list.  What does that mean?  It means America does not need enemies. America has bankers. Our criminal bankers  start with Jerome Powell of the Fed, Janet Yellin of our Treasury and  Jamie Diamond of our banks. God help us. USA does not need criminals. We hire them as our bankers.

Robert Kiyosaki , 10/1/23 Twitter/X https://x.com/theRealKiyosaki/status/1708677114470314258?s=20

And that is why our friend Robert’s Rich Dad Poor Dad is the number one biggest-selling personal finance book of all time.  It’s because he doesn’t pussyfoot around.  He calls things straight.  

We came very close to a bank meltdown in March, as banks like Signature and Silicon Valley Bank toppled.  Higher interest rates exposed the cracks in those banks.  But as Kiyosaki points out, there are hundreds more banks in deep water, in number greater than just a visible few like Signature and Silicon Valley.  Hundreds more.  And in addition to rising interest rates decimating their bond holdings, there is the additional problem of the fast-growing commercial real estate crisis.  The Wall Street Journal reports that banks have $3.6 trillion in exposure to commercial real estate, about 20 percent of their total deposits.

How does the central bank respond to a bank crisis?  We know the answer from long experience.  It prints money to bail them out.  So you pay to bail out the banks from their own mismanagement!  You pay with inflation.  You pay because the dollars you have, the dollars you have saved, lose purchasing power.  That purchasing power is transferred to the crony banks!

That is why you need to own gold and silver.  That is why Robert Kiyosaki recommends his followers protect themselves with gold and silver.  The cracks in the banking system have already begun appearing.  Don’t wait.  Take advantage of today’s advantageous gold and silver prices!

And our thanks to Robert Kiyosaki for the straight talk!

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Those of us who follow these things carefully (a minority enthusiasm for sure!) are so totally mesmerized by the rickety position of the banks and the government, that we might be accused of ignoring a story as big, if not bigger.  So let us assure you that the prospects of war are not going unnoticed.

In fact, few things are as capable of sending precious metals prices off and running as war.  It was more than a generation ago when the Iranian revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan helped drive gold prices to what were unthinkable new highs.   

Today international tension persists at levels not seen since the Cuban Missile Crisis, a showdown with nuclear prospects 61 years ago this month.  Today we note that, seeing the US and NATO as aggressors continually encroaching on its frontiers, Russia has embarked on a nationwide – that is across eleven time zones, by the way – nuclear attack exercise.  

At the same time, President Putin is calling up 130,000 conscripts for Russian military service this fall, raising the age for conscription to 30.  For its part, British Defense Secretary Grant Shapps set off a firestorm in Russia when he talked last week about sending troops from the UK to Ukraine.  The imbecility of such an escalation was enough that Britain’s Prime Minister tried to walk it back, but the truth is that the UK already has special operations forces in Ukraine.

For his part, Biden wants to keep the escalation going, no matter how dicey things get.  But the youth of America, as well as their parents, should know that the Deep State always has the plan to restart the draft.  Here’s a single line from an Army War College journal, an article entitled, Casualties, Replacements, and Reconstitutions: “Large-scale combat operations troop requirements may well require a reconceptualization of the 1970s and 1980s volunteer force and a move toward partial conscription.”

That’s not all.  The other day this story appeared from Washington:  “The U.S. military on Thursday shot down a Turkish drone that had come in too close to U.S. troops on the ground in Hasakah, Syria, a U.S. official told The Associated Press.”

US troops in Syria?  

Sure.  Troops are everywhere,  just enough to act like a tripwire and ensure we get drawn into future conflicts everywhere.

Two other notes.

First, Goldman Sachs points out that the US strategic petroleum reserves are at a 40-year low.  Open warfare would scream for the reserves to be replenished quickly at any cost.  Unfortunately, “any cost” is today a much higher cost.  Too bad Biden didn’t think about that when he was milking the reserves for political advantage.

And secondly, this observation from David Stockman puts our burgeoning war spending into perspective:

“In 1980 the comprehensive national security budget for DOD, international operations, and veterans cost $175 billion per year, which figure now stands at $1.304 trillion. But even that is deemed woefully deficient by the Uniparty war caucus and is therefore heading dramatically higher as Washington’s warhawks and neocons push America ever closer to a needless but cataclysmic war with Russia and China.”

Gold is the world’s unparalleled wealth protection in times of chaos and war.

At today’s prices, it is clear the geopolitical risk is being almost completely ignored.  That is an advantage for our friends and clients that will not last. 

Word to the wise.

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Where Does the U.S. Rank Among Other Nations?

Most of the gold that has been produced throughout history remains in human hands.  As much as 86 percent of it has been produced in the last 200 years.  Our thanks to Visual Capitalist for the below chart illustrating the history of gold production.

The World Gold Council believes that 2023 gold production could surpass the production record set in 2018.   We note, however, that inflation has not just struck consumers.  It has substantially increased the costs of mine production.  Gold production is energy-intensive, which means higher costs, while higher interest rates mean higher costs of equipment leasing and so on.  These cost increases with eventually translate into higher gold prices.

China surpassed South Africa in gold production in 2007.  It remains the world’s largest producer today, followed by Russia and Australia.  The U.S. comes in at #5, lagging behind its northern neighbor Canada.

Get Gold Before They Hit!

No one knows exactly how close we came to a US bank holiday last spring, but it was too close for comfort.  None of the problems banks faced then have been solved. In fact, both have gotten worse.

Here’s what’s in the mix.

The banks are up to their eyeballs in the deeply troubled US commercial real estate market.  They are on the hook for as much as 40 percent of commercial real estate loans.  The Wall Street Journal reports that banks have $3.6 trillion in exposure to commercial real estate, about 20 percent of their total deposits.

But higher interest rates have tanked commercial real estate, especially office properties, and vacancy rates are hitting all-time highs.  Economist Mohamed El-erian points out that commercial real estate has massive refinancing needs next year.  “There are things that have to be refinanced in this economy that cannot be refinanced in an orderly fashion at these rates,” says El-Erian.  “So that’s the point of pain which starts to happen.” 

Commercial real estate is one problem.  Higher interest rates that are decimating the value of the banks’ bond portfolios is another problem.  It is the one that brought down Silicon Valley and Signature banks earlier this year.  As long as the bank isn’t hit with withdrawals, they can continue to hold those low-interest-rate bonds, holding out for their maturation down the road when they can be redeemed at full value.  But if they are forced to sell lower-rate bonds before maturity, they get pounded.  

No one wants to pay much for bonds that yield two or three percent when newer bonds pay five and six percent and maybe soon more.  The Federal Reserve suggested last week that it could keep interest rates ”higher for longer” than anticipated.  That’s why one of America’s leading bankers is advising clients to “batten down the hatches.”  

Jaime Dimon is the CEO of America’s biggest bank, JPMorgan.  He says we’ve all been on a sugar high from artificially low rates, and now we’re unprepared for rates to climb another two percent.  A move to seven percent interest rates will be much more painful than the prior two percent rate increase.

Dimon also points to the obvious incapacity of Washington to show any fiscal responsibility.    Increasing deficits cannot go on forever and mean that no one knows where America is headed.

 So there you have it:  commercial real estate stresses on banks as well as the stress of their collapsed bond portfolios.  Both are problems that will grow as interest rates rise further.

And for good measure, we’ve even tossed in yet another reference to Washington’s deficits.  

If you would like to be out of the line of fire from these crises, we suggest you reach out to us at the Republic Monetary Exchange at once and begin to develop a sensible plan to tuck assets away in real money, gold, and silver.

It is the sensible thing to do.

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$33 Trillion Federal Debt!  How did that happen?

US Federal debt has now roared above $33 trillion.  It has rocketed up by $2.16 trillion in just the past year.  This is an increase of an unthinkable $1.58 trillion just since the debt ceiling was lifted in June!

How did this happen?  

A new Heritage Foundation article, “The Road to Inflation: How an Unprecedented Federal Spending Spree Created Economic Turmoil,” has some specific details.  It explains that a “politically opportunistic spending spree has left the U.S. with a weakened economy, an inflation crisis, and a looming debt crisis. The volume and nature of the spending spree helped to create skyrocketing inflation and interest rates and created a labor shortage, reducing real household incomes and leaving store shelves bare and supply chains broken. A looming fiscal crisis has shifted from a long-term concern to a current event.”

It details spending initiatives between March 2020 and December 2022, roughly $7.5 trillion in new spending, which comes out to $57,400 per household.

So Washington has given us more debt in a 27-month blow-off than it did in the first 200 years of America’s existence.

Let that figure sink in.

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(…For Unpayable US Debt!)

Joe Biden is proving himself a master participant of one of the world’s oldest disastrous routines.

It’s always the same cycle.  Governments spend money they don’t have.  They then have to resort to borrowing or printing or a combination of the two.  The more they borrow and the more they print, the higher they drive interest rates to offset the loss in the currency’s real or constant value.  

The higher the interest rates, the faster the debt compounds.

Until one day…

Disaster.

Although he has been in public office since 1972, Biden seems quite unacquainted with the vicious cycle, although it has been on display over and over again around the world during the past half-century.   Indeed, Biden has set a new world indoor record for debt accumulation.   It has become quite serious, although the mainstream news media doesn’t seem to have taken much notice.  

Here are the facts:

Federal debt has spiked under Bidenomics.  It is now over $33 trillion dollars.  That is an increase of $2.16 trillion in the past year.  It is an increase of $1.58 trillion since the debt ceiling was lifted in June.

Wolf Richter, WolfStreet.com, famously calls it “Debt Out the Wazoo!”

As portions of the debt mature, it is rolled over at ever higher interest rates, which worsens the debt load without any new spending at all.  That’s why it’s a vicious cycle.  Bidenistas and other Washington wizards added debt upon debt while rates were at historic lows.  It apparently never occurred to them that rates would eventually rise.  As of the end of August, most of it is still being serviced at low rates, an average of 2.92 percent.  However, the Federal Reserve has been raising interest rates since March 2022.  Rates are now 5 percent higher than they were then.  The cost of servicing the federal debt will therefore keep climbing.

The outlook for the dollar is not good, but for now, the mainstream media is taking no notice, while government economists and Fed officials are whistling past the graveyard.  But the rest of the world does notice.  That’s why gold is running up in foreign currencies and why other countries, especially China, are grabbing all the gold they can get their hands on.

Make sure you have enough to see you and your family through the monetary disaster now in development by the Biden gang.

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We’re talking about the breakdown of American prosperity!

We do things no normal person would want to do, all as part of our pledge to keep you up to speed on the dollar, the Fed, the economy, gold, and silver.

We follow money supply and Fed asset numbers closely and listen carefully to Fed officials as they lurch from one misshapen policy to another.  We dive deep into reports about bank solvency and watch the frightening congressional budget process…

As we say, things no normal would want to do.   

But sometimes there’s no need to go looking.  The story just smacks you in the face.  Like this one.

The Drudge Report (9/12/23) ran the following stories in a row on its front page: 

Incomes Fall For Third Straight Year…

Average household now has $10,170 credit card debt…

More Baby Boomers Sliding Into Homelessness…

Adults ordering from kids’ menus to save money…

Incomes keep falling, credit card debt keeps rising, baby boomers are finding themselves homeless, and adults desperate to save are forced by rising costs to order kids’ meals.  The links above are all live if you would like to know more about any of those stories.

We don’t even have to look to find more stories like this.  We just got this new one that says pet owners are trading down from expensive gourmet brands to less expensive brands of pet food.

Nothing is too good for Fido and Fifi, except when the currency begins to go bad, These thing are bellwethers for those of us who track the breakdown of the unbacked, irredeemable paper money currency scheme.  They are provided by us, Republic Monetary Exchange, as a free public service for our friends and clients who want a sense of how critical things are getting.

They are getting pretty damn critical.  More soon.  Watch this space. 

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None of our clients or friends will be surprised to learn that price inflation in August took its biggest jump in over a year.  

The Wall Street Journal:

The consumer-price index rose 0.6% in August from the prior month, the Labor Department said Wednesday. More than half of the increase was due to higher gasoline prices. So-called core prices, which exclude volatile food and energy items, rose by 0.3% last month after even lower readings in June and July.  

We warned that inflation was about to tick up, writing last month: 

Gasoline prices have been climbing in August.  That will show up in the next CPI report next month with higher prices factored in.  

Furthermore, low inflation months (July ‘22 – 0.0 percent; August ’22 – 0.2 percent) that have been holding the 12-month numbers lower the last couple of months, will be dropping out of the 12-month average, with mostly higher monthly numbers replacing them.  

So, there are still higher inflation numbers headed our way.   And now the problem is compounded.  After all, Biden took a break from stumbling up the stairs of Air Force 1 to drain America’s strategic petroleum reserves.

So those emergency reserves will have to be replenished at higher prices.

It should go without saying that rising energy prices are exactly like a tax on American households and businesses.  

Crude oil is about $90 a barrel.  Some observers, among them JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, think we may be headed to $150 a barrel.  It all calls to mind the Stagflation Decade.  Oil prices quadrupled in 1973 and nearly tripled in 1980.  

The Keynesian and Modern Monetary Theory economists who have been in charge of monetary policy in this country for most of a century have tried to blame rising oil prices for the Stagflation Decade.  The truth is quite the opposite.  OPEC producers clearly warned in advance that selling their appreciating oil, recovered from the earth at great effort and expense, for US dollars that were depreciating and could be reproduced endlessly at no meaningful cost, made little sense.  If the US dollar kept losing purchasing power, they warned, it would certainly lead to higher oil prices.  

Indeed, it did.  Then the vicious cycle got underway in which the Treasury tried to cushion the effect of higher energy prices by printing money to make the OPEC price increases illusory in real terms.

Of course, you know what also performed profitably in the Stagflation Decade?  Gold and silver.

We’ll leave you with two thoughts.  First, a suggestion is that you update your gold and silver holdings for what is headed our way.  And secondly, a line from comedian Steven Wright:

“Right now I’m having amnesia and déjà vu at the same time. I think I’ve forgotten this before.”

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It’s bad.  Very bad.  When it hits the fan, gold will be there, as it always has!

We know what happened to a handful of big banks earlier this year.  Banks like Signature and Silicon Valley suddenly were forced to realize their unrealized losses.  And that was the end of the road for them.

As you know the value of bonds goes down when interest rates go up, so those banks with their reserves all parked in bonds suddenly found themselves in deep trouble as the Federal Reserve raised interest rates.

But the rest of the banking industry is just fine, right?

Wrong.  Double wrong!

Here’s a link to a Wall Street on Parade article that pulls the curtain bank on the banking industry.  It reports that at the end of the first quarter, banks were sitting on more than a half trillion dollars in unrealized losses!

That’s deep kimchi!

The academic study the story draws on describes the banks shamelessly gambling on being bailed out by us:

Banks with the most fragile funding… sold or reduced their hedges during the monetary tightening. This allowed them to record accounting profits but exposed them to further rate increases. These actions are reminiscent of classic gambling for resurrection: if interest rates had decreased, equity would have reaped the profits, but if rates increased, then debtors and the FDIC would absorb the losses.

Only 6 percent of the total bank assets were protected from rising rates with interest rate swaps.  At the end of the first quarter, March 31, 2023, the banks had unrealized securities losses of $515.5 billion.  And the Fed has raised rates two times since then!

Wall Street on Parade:

The use of the phrase “classic gambling” to describe 75 percent of the U.S. banking system by highly credentialed academics might be something that the U.S. Senate Banking Committee might want to hold a hearing about with some sense of urgency.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but this is the year in which banking regulators were left scratching their heads at the dizzying speed at which multiple banks collapsed. In the span of seven weeks this spring, running from March 10 to May 1, the second, third, and fourth largest bank failures in U.S. history occurred. In order of size, those were: First Republic Bank (May 1), Silicon Valley Bank (March 10) and Signature Bank (March 12). The largest bank failure in U.S. history, Washington Mutual, occurred in 2008 during the financial crisis.

With all due respect, we don’t think the suggested Senate Banking Committee hearings are worth the bother.  For two reasons.  First, it is too late to fix anything.  The cows are already out of the barn.  And secondly, the Senate will inevitably make the taxpayers fork out to paper this over.

The other day Bill Bonner summed up our present predicament this way: “Oblivious to the rising tide of debt, deficits and defaults, mankind stumbles toward disaster…”

If you are still trusting the government and its institutions, the Fed, the FDIC, Congress to look out for your welfare, you are putting your trust in the wrong place.

Gold and silver are not dependent on trust some unknown party.  Unlike banks, securities, bonds, and paper money, they have no counterparty risk.  That means that there is no risk that some party to the transaction will fail to perform and leave you with the loss.

In times of trouble, it is imperative that you protect yourself, your family, and your money with gold and silver.  We’re Republic Monetary Exchange.  We’re here to help.

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Buy gold before the next gusher of Fed funny money!

The US government deficit has exploded!

What’s up?  The Wall Street Journal cites a deadly conjunction of two things at once: “: a steep drop in tax revenue related to capital gains” and at the same time “an increase in interest payments on old debt.”

Wolf Richter describes it this way:  

“The gigantic US government debt is now approaching $33 trillion, amid a tsunami of issuance of Treasury securities to fund the mind-blowing government deficits and roll over maturing securities.” 

None of this stuff is very complicated.  As long as Washington keeps spending money it doesn’t have, it will have two choices for funding its deficit spending:

A. It will have to borrow the money.  But interest rates are screaming higher thanks to massive government borrowing.  And funding that borrowing at ever higher rates is already a fact of life as the following chart illustrates.

B. Or it will have to print the money to fund the deficit.  That is by definition inflationary.

Meanwhile, the cost of energy is soaring.  That will show up in the price indices in no time.  It is the equivalent of a tax on American households and businesses.  

Let’s look at this like adults.  The spending game should have been brought under control many years ago.  Instead, the political classes learned to buy votes by making promises to people and to reward its cronies for their campaign funding by letting them feast at the Capitol Hill hog trough.  Now we suffer the consequences of generations of irresponsible governments.

The Bidenistas and the left are hiding behind something called Modern Monetary Theory, which holds that the government can spend whatever it wants because it owns the printing press.   Any country that will believe such nonsense probably deserves its fate  —  bankruptcy! 

We can’t tell you the exact day and hour of the next massive Fed money printing spree, but the trajectory is clear.  It is very soon.  Possible triggers include the snowballing financial stress in China and a global economic downturn, a stock market breakdown, a disastrous US Treasury debt auction, more energy price hikes, and advancing trade wars.  

That is why foreign dollar holders are de-dollarizing their reserves.  That is why you would be wise to de-dollarize as well with the enduring money of the ages worldwide:  gold and silver.

We’re here to help.   Republic Monetary Exchange is a market leader in gold and silver, real money you hold in your hands.  Real money for free people.  Contact us today.

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Take a look at this!  You’ll want to own more gold!

Larry Summers, Former Director of the National Economic Council, tweeted (or X’ed) this chart the other day, noting the similarity between price inflation’s rise and slowdown and rise again in the 1970s and today’s chart.

“It is sobering,” he says, “to recall that the shape of the past decade’s inflation curve almost perfectly shadows its path from 1966 to 1976 before it accelerated in the late 1970s.”

Sobering indeed!

If the next leg of today’s movement, the yellow line, tracks what happened after 1976, we could reexperience what was one of the greatest gold and silver bull markets in history.   

Stephen Moore comments on the chart, “Twelve years of inflation was finally smothered by the Reagan-Volcker era of tight money, falling tax rates, and deregulation. 

“Past isn’t always a prelude. But if the 1970s and early 1980s taught us anything, it is that the solution to Bidenflation (just as was the case with Carter inflation) isn’t just higher interest rates. It’s growth policies that expand the supply side of goods and services.”

Resistance to the Fed’s interest rate policies is growing.  Already some are arguing for the Federal Reserve to abandon or raise its two percent interest rate target.  As funding US and corporate debt grows more difficult, that resistance to higher interest rates will grow as well.  

The digital money printing presses haven’t been disabled.  They are just idling.

For now.

Be prepared!

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