For many years now I feel like I’ve been the voice of a man “crying in the wilderness” by advising people to buy gold.  If you’d bought gold back when I wrote that article, you’d be up about 50% right now: not bad, but not great, either, considering you could have done slightly better in the stock market.  

But now, I’m writing to you not as an investment analyst but rather as a Cassandra.  if you have no gold, you need to get some, and not just to make money on paper but, perhaps, in order to survive.  The world is becoming a more dangerous place, and the USA is descending into (planned) chaos, with a world reserve currency that is already being challenged and almost certainly will not last into the next decade.

What does that mean to you?  It means higher prices for everything, and not just the typical inflation we’ve come to expect.  No, what I mean is first monthly, then weekly, and then finally daily price increases that will strip you of your wealth faster than a casino and with even less chance of winning.  It means your pension and 401K will be wiped out because it will no longer buy you even basic necessities.  It means a dangerous world in which you will no longer be safe living inside of even a moderately large city.  It means, in short, the end of the world as you know it.

Now, I have been saying this for a long time, and while I have not been wrong about gold-it has indeed gone up-I have been wrong about the timing, and as the old proverb goes, “even a stopped clock is right twice a day?”  I have begged friends and family for decades to buy precious metals and mostly their response has been a huge yawn.  So, you may ask, why am I right this time?  

Here is a list of reasons but I will say that anecdotally many smart people that I personally know and who have a large amount of accumulated wealth are now talking openly about the need for gold in their portfolios.  This was once a taboo investment.  In fact, John Maynard Keynes, the famous fiat money advocate, once remarked that gold was, financially speaking, a “barbarous relic”.  Now, Warren Buffet, the “oracle of Omaha”, heretofore the ultimate USA bull, is selling banks and buying gold miners.  So, the first reason is this:

• Follow the smart money.  The whales are buying gold.
• Wall Street has once again been blessed with trillions of $ printed from out of thin air.
• Open violence is sweeping the nation.
• The Covid crisis has proven that the American people are alarmingly easy to dupe and will surrender their liberty to the authorities at the least sign of danger.
• The dollar is doomed
• The lockdown has ensured that the economic recovery will take years and that hundreds of thousands of small businesses will never recover
• The Fed has painted itself into a low interest rate corner.

All of these reasons are bullish for gold.  Gold shines most when things are darkest in the world.  The world is getting very dark indeed right now.  Get some shiny stuff before I have to tell you “I told you so”.  Again.And BTW, if you buy stocks like GLD that’s OK, too, but understand that doesn’t mean you own gold.  No, what that means is you own a proxy for gold…paper gold.  It’s good for speculation but not much else.  If you don’t have physical gold, you don’t have any gold at all.  SO go down to your local PM store and stock up.  Pay cash, and don’t introduce yourself.  Hide it somewhere close by (not in a bank).  And sleep well.

But if you want to really diversify out of the dollar you should buy some cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum. They are portable and private, and that may come in handy some day when you’re trying to cross a border. Best to be ready for that eventuality right now.