Confessions of a ‘Gold Bug’

In this autobiographical piece, I show how my inflation work-arounds backfired spectacularly. All my Life Maxims were right ... I just figured them out too late.

I say I’m a “gold bug” but I never could afford gold. I bought the “poor man’s gold” - silver.

Since I started my Substack newsletter, I’ve identified several maxims. For example, “Public health and government officials never investigate that which they don’t want to confirm.” Also: “Every important truth-seeking organization is completely captured.”

But there’s another maxim I’m going to add to my New Normal library of knowledge: “All of life’s now a work-around.”

As I wrote in this article, I define work-arounds as, basically, anything a person, family or business has to do to keep paying the light bill or mortgage.

Unless you’re in the Top 5 percent of wage earners, you have to keep coming up with ever-more work-arounds to deal with real inflation.

It occurs to me that my life has been negatively altered by various events that were really caused by some kind of work-around. 

When these detrimental events happened, I had to adjust by calling an audible (an impromptu work-around). As this autobiographical essay reveals, I did not choose wisely with some of my personal work-arounds.

How I became a Substack author …

For example, I’m now a “freelance journalist” because my previous employer, the publisher of The Montgomery Independent weekly newspaper, laid me off - no doubt as a “work-around” so he could stay in the newspaper business.

What happened is that my boss, who owned two weekly newspapers, decided to close one of his newspapers because it wasn’t making money. 

He then brought the managing editor from the closed newspaper (who he’d known longer and probably liked more) over to serve the same job in the paper he kept open.

That was it for my seven-year gig as managing editor at that paper.

This news hit me out of the blue and I had to scramble and come up with a work-around to have a job.

My work-around was to become a “freelance” journalist and write the (taboo) stories that interested me.

From a micro-economics perspective, this was a stupid choice as the same economic forces that caused my previous boss to eliminate my salary were also affecting every news organization I was trying to sell freelance stories to.

As it turns out, hardly any news organizations were paying for freelance articles, especially the contrarian stories I was submitting. 

Eventually, because I wasn’t making nearly enough income as a freelance journalist, I became a Substack author. So Substack actually offered me, and thousands of other writers, a work-around. 

Facebook helped convince me to take the Substack plunge …

For me, this work-around was prompted largely by Facebook censoring all my Covid posts. (Since few news organizations were paying me for articles, the only place I could publish my writing was via Facebook posts.)

One might ask why Facebook went “all-in” on Orwellian Censorship. In my opinion, this was also the result of a work-around, one that traces back to how everything changed - seemingly overnight - when a “deadly” new pandemic was declared.

The government - and/or the world’s Shadow Rulers who tell the government what to do - clearly wanted everyone in the world to panic over Covid. Among other desired results, mass fear of death would make almost everyone rush out to get a new mandated or coerced “vaccine.”

However, the government wouldn’t get the mass panic it needed - and thus its new mRNA vaccines - if people like me were making copious posts on Facebook saying, “The Pandemic is a scam! Don’t trust the experts!”

The government’s work-around was to create a massive Censorship Industrial Complex which would silence potentially influential dissenters like myself. Facebook bought into this program since its CEO, Mr. Zuckerberg, was smart enough to know he should stay on the good side of the world’s 900-pound gorilla.

So the government’s Covid work-around (We have to censor people so we can get our vaccines) sent me scurrying to the sanctuary of Substack as my own micro work-around.

My Gold Bug Back Story …

About 12 years ago, I also went all-in on another brilliant (sarcasm) work-around. From my personal studies, I knew that inflation was, at some point, going to become one of the most powerful and scary forces in the world.

My “work-around” for the endless creation of “fiat” currency (via the government’s Magic Printing Press) was to start buying silver - aka “real money” - that the government couldn’t print out of thin air. 

(I would have bought gold, but I couldn’t afford it so I invested in the “poor man’s gold” - silver.  I also sold some blue-chip stocks I’d inherited and bought mining company stocks).

As it turns out,  I was 100-percent correct about coming rampant inflation. It remains to be seen, but I’m still confident that endless money printing will eventually implode the economy. In theory, my “work-around” to protect some of my wealth with precious metals was prescient and sound. 

In practice, though, this was another personal disaster and produced nothing but pain. Today, I would be rich (or at least “more comfortable”) if I’d just kept all the stocks I inherited and forgot about them.

In retrospect, I should have probably given up on my dream of being an “important writer” and taken a job at Dollar General (a business I predicted to my wife would make a mint as more consumers seeking to save money became customers - as a money-saving work-around).

We think Covid data is rigged …

What I didn’t know at the time, but quickly learned, is that the gold and silver “markets” are rigged to high heavens (or to low Hades).

I belatedly learned what “the most important thing” is/was to the world’s real rulers. That thing is the Government/Central Bankers “Magic Printing Press.” 

As real journalists once knew, one should “always follow the money.” 

And where does 40 percent of the “money” in the world really come from? It comes from that Magic Printing Press. People I now call call “they” control - and will always protect - this vital “printing press.”

The last thing “they” want is for the Man on the Street and (their worst nightmare) big institutional investors to start abandoning the world’s reserve currency and begin acquiring “real money” like gold and silver. 

If this were to happen, it would would send a blaring “canary-in-a-coal-mine” signal that the fiat money system is A) a giant Ponzi scheme and B) the ruse is up.

The work-around for our Shadow Rulers was to simply manipulate gold and silver markets so everyone saw that investing in “history’s money” was only something “wackos” would do. 

This is why people like myself were given the label of “gold bugs.” What do most people do to a bug that’s threatening them? They squash it. Nobody likes an icky bug.

(The bottom-line is our Narrative Controllers “changed the narrative” on gold and silver. Instead of a smart or common-sense investment strategy to hedge against coming inflation, the new narrative was that it was a ridiculous strategy utilized only by kooks.)

Language and labels matter and I quickly learned I was one of these bugs. A couple of years later, when Covid hit, I also became a “science denier” and an “anti-vaxxer.” 

Of course, I can’t prove that gold and silver “markets” are rigged - just like all the Covid data and just like all the faux CPI-produced inflation data are rigged. 

The only people who could prove this are the “watchdog” press or some “truth-seeking” agencies and officials in government.

But have I mentioned that all the important “truth-seeking” organizations are completely captured?

If this maxim is true are and if these important organizations are fond of that fiat printing press -and actually depend on it for their continued existence, who’s going to prove these markets are rigged and suppressed?

A day I’ll never forget …

As long as I live, I’ll never forget when the Covid lockdowns were ordered. Even Sesame Street’s Elmo must have known that global inflation was going to sky-rocket once governments ramped up their printing presses to 11 (on a scale of 0 to 10).

“Ah, now my ‘insurance policy’ of buying silver coins, bars and mining stocks will pay off for me and my family,” I thought.

Ha!

Another one of my maxims is we should all “expect the unexpected.” Or my trademarked Law of Opposite Effects, which tells us that “Everything that should happen, won’t happen.” In fact, the opposite will happen,

Sure enough, the price of silver, for about a day or two went up fairly significantly. Then - Bam!  - The Mother of all Precious Metals melt-downs happened.

I’ll never forget the helpless feeling I had when I watched on my computer screen as the price of an ounce of silver plummeted from, I think $25/ounce to $22 … $20 …$18, finally settling, I think, at $12.75/ounce.

Everyone in the world knew inflation was going to set records and everyone (I thought) knew that gold and silver were the best inflation hedges … and silver plummets by 50 percent in 36 hours.

I guess I should have known.

The thing is everyone (who mattered in the financial press) acted like this was a perfectly normal economic response.

For my part, I think the Powers that Be were terrified of everyone scurrying for the wealth-preserving life boats of physical gold and silver. They must have figured that if they could send the right “shock-and-awe” message nobody with a brain would want to become a crazy “gold bug.”

Of course, today, silver and gold have rallied from that crater, but for reasons I’m too embarrassed to fully disclose, I was pretty much wiped out.

(In a non-rigged market, I think silver would be over $100/ounce and gold probably $10,000 ounce right now.)

Venting doesn’t help (but I do it anyway) …

Since I’d become a freelance writer, I vented by writing dozens of articles for “Gold Bug” websites, but - somehow - these articles didn’t make a difference. If The Wall Street Journal and New York Times says there’s no rigging of gold and silver markets … then there’s no rigging of these markets (just like today, there’s no vaccine-caused deaths).

Anyway, The Powers that Be succeeded in keeping 99.5 percent of the world population from converting their fiat “Monopoly money” into gold or silver. 

In my opinion, what our Shadow Rulers did is kick the can down down the road a little longer. Financial calamity will happen at some point, but maybe it won’t happen while Bill Gates or Jamie Dimon are still alive.

The ultimate work-around - digital currency

I actually think the next work-around for our Shadow Rulers is centralized digital currency.

My theory is that someone knows that even the Magic Printing Press isn’t going to be able to continue to print enough money to pay for all the entitlements and unfunded liabilities that are already cooked into the system.

I think the plan is to switch the world over to digital currency and eventually ban all or most cash transactions. Per the new narrative (which is already being spun), this will fight drug laundering and be more convenient to Wal-Mart managers who won’t have to worry about employee theft or reconciling that day’s receipts.

As a transition carrot, my guess is that at about the same time “they” effectively ban cash, citizens will be told we’re going to receive, say, $4,000/month deposited into our convenient digital accounts (probably to alleviate the inflation fears they caused).

Once everyone has digital accounts, our enlightened and compassionate rulers will come up with laws, regulations or “emergency orders” to make it much more easier for them to confiscate “our money.”

All digital currency will do is allow our rulers to keep kicking the can down the road a decade or two more and allow the Chosen People to always remain in control.

Alas, this “reform” will also kill freedom as we’ve known it and make it much easier for the State to monitor our purchases and activities.  

For example, it will be much easier to make sure we buy only “Green” or “Planet-friendly” products and that we can’t buy things we actually want to buy (meat, gas-powered cars, light bulbs that put out light, etc.).

Just like Santa Claus, Big Brother will know if we’ve been bad or good by knowing where we use our digital currency.

If we drive too many miles in our “15-minute Cities,” State Troopers won’t have to send us a ticket in the mail; they can just deduct our fine from our digital account directly.

If we break quarantine in the next pandemic, they’ll know immediately. They’ll also know from our mandatory digital devices if we are meeting with 10 other people who are “gold bugs” or “science deniers” or even MAGA Republicans.

I don’t know how I ended up here …

… This column did NOT end up where I thought it would end up. My first thought was just to list a series of work-arounds people have to employ to deal with real inflation and mention, in passing, how my previous work-arounds all backfired.

I ended up talking about how work-arounds, directly and indirectly, sabotaged a few of my Life Plans and with me identifying what I think is the ultimate work-around - digital currency and digital social monitoring.

I still think I was right on the Big-Picture issues and predictions, but my timing was way off … or I didn’t know how captured and corrupt our Shadow Rulers really are. But I do now.