Recently, I found myself back at a local coin shop, exchanging inflating dollars for real money. There’s something grounding about walking into a small space where the shelves are lined with tangible wealth—coins, bullion, and pieces from around the world. It’s a reminder of what money looks
Today we’re going to look more closely at two core ideas that feature here regularly. The first is that the spot price of gold is largely irrelevant, because it has little grounding in physical reality. The second is that unless you are taking physical delivery, you do not own
There are only two ways for a business to establish and maintain a monopoly within an industry. The first is by providing a superior and cheaper product or service over the long term. Building a reputation, gaining market share, consistently delivering higher quality, and maintaining competitive margins all usually take
Editor's Note from 2025: Not only are rising rates not politically correct, but the math doesn't work without lower rates. The sheer volume of principal outstanding is almost $40T now, that's $40,000,000,000,000. Add to that high levels of household, and
Editor's Note from 2025: The gold bubble in the 70s, when Nixon removed the gold standard, was not a gold bubble. It was the USD being oversold at that time. An asset being in overbought or oversold territory does not imply there is a bubble. And because we
How can anyone reasonably know how to buy low and sell high when so many markets around the world are distorted by government intervention? Judging value becomes difficult when prices are consistently pulled out of balance. While markets are never perfectly balanced—conditions are always changing—there still needs to
Despite everything central planning has thrown at them, the market continues to treat gold and silver as real money. How do we know this, and what does central planning have to do with it? Gold and silver remain money because investment demand for both continues to rise as confidence in
The flow of capital from paper assets to real assets, from debtors to savers, from soft money to hard money, from the occident (land of the setting sun) to the orient (land of the rising sun)—from West to East. Today is a big-picture day. The goal is to
If you spend time educating yourself and paying attention, certain patterns begin to stand out. Over time, recurring themes become difficult to ignore. Three ideas, in particular, tend to surface again and again: everything is connected, everything moves in cycles, and there is very little that is truly new. Consider
