Renowned gold expert James Turk says prolonged gold backwardation like we are seeing now, where the spot price is higher than the future price, has never happened before. Turk contends,“No, never, and I am a student of monetary history as well, and I have never seen it happen like this in monetary history. Typically, when a backwardation would occur under the classic gold standard, for example, the banks that would have fractional reserve banking would go under. There would be a banking collapse. So, typically, if there was a backwardation, it would only last for a few days as it did in 1999 and in 2008. So, we have an unusual situation where we have heavy government involvement where they are trying to keep the gold price under wraps so they can maintain this policy of zero interest rates. They are thinking they are going to jumpstart the economy, but the economy is not being jumpstarted. All it’s doing is deferring the ultimate collapse and the governments’ ability to repay all the debt that they owe.”
Turk, a best-selling author who co-wrote a book called “The Money Bubble,” says what is happening now is nothing short of an historic bubble getting ready to pop. Turk explains, “In other words, just as we look back to the South Sea bubble and the Mississippi bubble, people are going to look back to today and say this is the money bubble. People are using what they think is money, but what they are using is really a money substitute. That’s the theme of the book that John Rubino and I wrote. We have lost sight as to what money truly is. It is a physical asset without counter-party risk and that is gold and silver.”
Turk thinks this bubble will end like all bubbles. Turk predicts, “This money bubble is going to pop. It has to because there is just too much debt in the world. That debt has to be reconciled and, ultimately, when you are reconciling debt, it gets back to the point about collateral on the balance sheets. There is just not enough good collateral to support all of this paper money circulating out there.”
It comes as no surprise that Turk thinks the premier collateral is gold. Turk goes on to say, “That’s what you are going to want, and that is ultimately what’s going to reemerge in global commerce. . . . It’s ultimately going to go back to gold.”
Turk also says there is way too many paper promises for the actual physical gold that can be delivered. So, in the future, Turk says, “I see a lot of these promises to deliver gold being broken and, ultimately, the only way you are going to see this being resolved is with a much higher gold price.” How high? Turk estimates, “You’ve got to be looking back to the all-time highs of $1,900 or $2,000 per ounce. We are eventually going to take those out. It’s just a question of when we do it. It’s obvious it is going to happen because gold has been money for 5,000 years and, ultimately, people will come back to gold when they realize that all these promises of bankers and central bankers really cannot be fulfilled. So, it is just a question of when that reconciliation comes. In March of 1968, the dam broke and the gold price was released, and the gold price climbed for another 12 years. When the gold price finally gets released this time around, it’s going to climb for many, many more years. It’s hard to say how high it can go, but relative to the amount of paper that’s out there . . . a price several times higher than what we have today seems very, very reasonable in the long run.”
Gold expert James Turk thinks the biggest bubble of all is long past its expiration date. Turk thinks this bubble will end like all bubbles. Turk predicts, “This money bubble is going to pop. It has to because there is just too much debt in the world. That debt has to be reconciled and, ultimately, when you are reconciling debt, it gets back to the point about collateral on the balance sheets. There is just not enough good collateral to support all of this paper money circulating out there.”
James Turk of Gold Money joined us today to discuss the ever deteriorating European/Euro debacle. Greece is having its Grapes of Wrath-Steinbeck moment and as you would expect, their government is absolutely clueless about what can be done about it. But in emergencies, one thing we can all count on is that government will fail, and they will attempt to convince the populace they're in control and solving the problem. Which is why James has started the GoldMoney Foundation: he wants to educate people about sound money and limited government. Right now, the audience for such ideas is narrow. However, with each progression on the road to economic collapse, the number of awakened individuals increases and the demand for gold and silver goes up as well. The problem is that most people will not get it until paper money has ceased to function. Hopefully, through all of our efforts, many people will be able to avoid this fate.
Jeff interviews James Turk, topics include: Bitgold acquires GoldMoney.com, creates Gold Money Group, international precious metal vaults, digital gold for payments, cryptocurrencies, bypassing capital control, getting assets out before financial collapse, the situation in Greece, gold as sound money, the demise of fiat currency, gold and silver price, huge demand for silver bullion, gold and silver in backwardation, Citigroup derivatives exposure, Bitcoin and the Greek situation, un-safe deposit boxes, GoldMoney.com, Chinese stock market crash presaged the crash of 2008, Government intervention in markets, financial moves made for political reasons often unsound, Greece vs the Eurozone, financial contagion, staggering un-payable debt globally, the collapse of socialism, the trouble with socialism is you eventually run out of other people's money, the issue of debt is not solved by issuing more debt, total government debt has more than doubled worldwide since 2008, hang on to your gold and silver!
Inflation is much higher than the government reports it. I follow the numbers of John Williams at ShadowStats. I also look at prices of goods and services that aren't counted in the CPI, but they're things that we have to live with day in and day out. Things like the rise in medical expenses, the rise in college tuitions, the rise in a lot of other everyday living expenses that aren't captured in the CPI.
There's no doubt we’re in a situation where, even though inflation is reportedly tame, there is inflation, and it’s constantly eroding the purchasing power of all currencies. And because interest rates are lower than the inflation rate, that erosion of purchasing power means you're losing wealth with bank deposits. If you put $100 in a bank today, at the end of the year, you maybe have a $100.50 because of the interest that you're earning, but your purchasing power might be $98 or $97. In other words, you're losing wealth by holding fiat currencies.
There has also been some impact limiting inflation, to a certain extent, from declining oil prices. Oil went all the way down to $43 a barrel. Oil is now back up to $60 a barrel. Gasoline has risen five weeks in a row. Inflation is probably going to come back with a vengeance as crude oil prices go back to a more normal level, which, in my mind, is something over $80 a barrel. So my view on inflation is that it will worsen.
Remember that Greece has 320 billion euros of debt. The European Central Bank has about 112 billion euros of that debt. The ECB is not going to take a loss on that debt. They're going to follow the Cyprus script. They're going to take the money deposited in Greek banks to repay themselves, and bank depositors are the ones that are going to be hurt as a consequence. Depositors in Greek banks are going to lose money just like happened to the people in Cyprus who had deposited their money into Cypriot banks.
It’s basically meaningless in the sense that nothing fundamental has changed for the better for the dollar. The federal government is still running huge deficits. There's still too much debt. There are still a lot of problems in the banking system. There's just too much money-printing going on around the world.
What's happened is that for six months or so the dollar rallied because of all of the problems that were emerging in Japan and in the Eurozone. The dollar jumped all the way up to 100 on the Dollar Index, but it was an emotional knee-jerk reaction. People were moving their money into the dollar to avoid the problems plaguing other currencies. They were also drawn to the dollar to try generating a rate of return, or if that was not possible, to at least avoid the negative interest rates in the euro, yen and Swiss franc.
The money bubble has not yet burst, although we’re getting close to that moment in time. We’re seeing some unusual events that have occurred over the past 12 months.
For example, although interest rates have moved back up recently, a couple of weeks ago, people were paying money to have the German government take their money for 10 years. That's a sign something is amiss. Capitalism doesn’t work that way. If you pay to have your money decrease over 10 years, you're destroying capital.
Still, we haven't had the pop of the bubble yet, but we’re on a clear trend toward the bubble popping, which it will if we don’t go back to sound money policies. The popping of the bubble means that fiat currencies will no longer be used and trusted in commerce the way they are now because people will have lost confidence in them.
