No Supply of Gold

I am just going to be straight to the point. If you do not own any gold right now, then you never will.

My New York wholesaler, who saw the last financial crisis in the 1970s when we had 20% interest rates, $800 gold and gas lines, told me this morning that he had never seen such demand for physical gold combined with no supply.

He said there are some denominations of gold that he can't get at any price!

Now let's see if I can remember that formula from Econ 101? High demand + low supply = increasing price.

In short, in his opinion, gold would blow by $1000/ounce very shortly as soon as the hedge funds are done unloading their paper gold on the market, which has temporarily forced prices down.

If you have Ira money that you can't buy physical gold with, consider a mutual fund like the Franklin Gold and Precious Metals Fund.

Either way, this should be a gold lining in an otherwise ugly financial cloud that we find ourselves in.

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Why Wall Street Hates Gold and Silver??


Inside Wall Street

Wall Street is a culture, as well as a financial institution.

Most of the young brokers who are the big producers on Wall Street are human beings, subject to all the errors of habit and behavior and peer pressure that plague all of us. They are surrounded by “group-think.” They make tons of money on the status quo. I have visited firms on Wall Street with big trading rooms full of twenty-something men and women whose annual income is measured in the millions – all on commissions on stock sales.

Few big Wall Street firms sell bullion (right off hand I can’t think of any) so it is only money out of their pockets if hot-shot brokers tell their clients to sell some stock and put the money into bullion or coins. Maturity and client concern are scarce commodities on Wall Street.

They are congenitally bullish on stocks, because that’s where their bread is buttered.

Financial Shows

Many of you listen to or watch financial shows, populated with people who are typical examples of main-stream Wall Street financial thinking.

If your broker’s opinion is important to you, you may be uncomfortable here. If you aren’t a maverick, you had better become one, and be quiet about it. You will have to leave the herd, and for a while, Merrill Lynch’s herd is all on Wall Street.


Panama and the Dollar

.........one key part of Linowitz’s banker-inspired mission was that the Canal Zone would be a “Free-banking Zone,” not subject to regulations or oversight. Even before the deal was signed, bank buildings were going up all over the Zone. Every multi-national bank was there, and it appears that they moved many of their international money systems there, with no oversight or regulation. Who determines their safety or vulnerability? No one!

If terrorist hackers were to hack into those computers and infect them with a destructive virus, the entire dollar-based monetary system would disappear in a nanosecond. In that case, for all practical purposes, the only spendable money left would be gold or silver coins or barter.

And what if they were able to sneak a nuke onto a ship and detonate it in the canal? It’s already bad enough that the Chinese are in control of the ports on both ends of the canal. Imagine the chaos with the banks obliterated and commerce fatally crippled.

These and innumerable other scenarios may seem beyond the edges of credibility, but I dare you to say they are not possible.

This is not a forecast, only a speculation about a possible worst-case, we-hope-not scenario.

The Hyperinflation Scenario

What if monetary inflation rose as a result of soaring demands on government with the soaring deficits, and the subsequent inevitable consumer inflation broke out into a real hyperinflation, with the modern money machine running night and day, like Germany during the 1920s. This would make money increasingly worthless and the precious metals increasingly precious. History tells us that this has happened over and over again, and we are repeating most of the same deadly mistakes.

These are only a few of the possibilities.

Best Case Scenario

Even in this “best-case” situation, you will make a bundle on this monetary-inflation-sensitive investment, even in a still-orderly world.

If all else fails, you still can count on Social Security, Medicare and the prescription-drug program to trigger a flood of trillions of dollars of “money printing” and the subsequent monetary inflation, followed as night follows day with soaring price inflation. As it becomes obvious to the public that these programs are plummeting into insolvency, the consumer inflation rate and gold and silver will soar.

When the dire facts become obvious, Congress will start desperately searching for solutions, but which ones?

Will they raise taxes and watch FICA soar and taxpayers revolt? Very little, if any! Will they cut benefits or raise the Social Security retirement age? Maybe a little bit, but not much. Will they dig in their heels and memorialize the current dysfunctional system by simply printing money? You bet! This will lay the groundwork for more ruinous inflation, and soaring gold and silver.

In this best case (the most likely – I think, I hope?), we will at least see rising inflation and an inflationary recession (which is already written in cement), and gold and silver and the metals and their mining stocks will go up – perhaps five to ten times, perhaps a lot more.

There is no best-case – or worst-case – scenario in which I can conceive of gold and silver being losers. You can mortgage the kids and bet the farm!