gold standard

Gold news has not received much media coverage lately. That’s not because what’s been happening is unimportant.

For more than two hundred years, practically all of even the most free market advocates have assumed that money and banking were different from other types of goods and markets.

In my opinion, this book ranks among those written by Adam Smith, Frederick Bastiat, and Ludwig Von Mises. Understanding Contoski’s message will make a reader a more effective participant in the fight to fix our country’s flawed economic policies.

Whether the price of gold is seen as a measurement of the value of a precious metal or as a report card on the economic, monetary, and fiscal policies that go into determining the value of the dollar, it’s interesting to think about what the trends, short-term and long-term, may mean.

The federal government has been expanding for decades.  More laws, more spending, more regulations.  More executive actions and judicial decisions that enlarge the role of government. Everybody knows this, but…

Alexander Hamilton was America’s first Secretary of Treasury under President George Washington. When he first entered office in 1789, America was an agricultural nation of just 4 million still broke…

This year marks one hundred years since the beginning of the First World War in the summer of 1914. The Great War, as it used to be called, brought great devastation in its wake. Millions of human lives were lost on the battlefields of Europe; vast amounts of accumulated wealth were consumed to cover the costs of combat; and battles and bombs left a large amount of physical capital in ruins. But the “war to end war,” as it was called, also resulted in another weapon of economic mass destruction – an orgy of paper-money inflations.

In 2013 the price of gold bullion lost 28 percent and closed near its low for the year. It was the first annual decline since 2000 and the worst since 1981. Gold ETFs experienced record redemptions, shrinking the funds 33 percent by year end, but they were the exception. Marcus Grubb, Managing Director of the World Gold Council, reported, “2013 has been a strong year for gold demand across sectors and geographies, with the exception of western ETF markets.” While investors were leaving ETFs, demand for gold jewelry, bars and coins was increasing, as were purchases by central banks. Globally, consumer demand increased 17 percent for gold jewelry and 28 percent for bars and coins.

“Gold is money. Everything else is credit.” — John Pierpont Morgan

Are you among the sad folks whose life is not quite fulfilled because you don’t  yet subscribe to the Heartland Daily Podcast on iTunes? Are you still missing out on the…