As I Approached the TSA Officer, I Got Nervous…

I am not a nervous flier.

I’ve been flying since I was about seven years old—often alone on trips between Houston and Baton Rouge to visit my grandparents.

But going through the New Orleans airport back in mid-May… well, I was nervous.

I’d flown back to the US to watch my daughter graduate from university. This was a short trip. Land on Thursday night, leave on Sunday morning.

I planned it that way so that I would have Friday for one, very specific task… a bank run.

For years, I’ve owned a safe-deposit box in Louisiana where I have stored almost all of my physical gold. These are 19th- and 20th-century gold coins that were once used in global commerce. Some, like the little Mexican dos pesos coins are not even 0.05 ounces of gold. Others, like Austrian coronas are right near an ounce of gold.

In all I was pulling 50 coins from my safety deposit box, weighing in at more than 15 ounces of pure gold. (I left others behind, including some super-rare, historical gold and silver coins.) In terms of raw metal value, that’s about $50k worth of coins! And they’re worth much more when you add the collectible value.

These are some of the coins I grabbed:

My nervousness hit on Sunday, as I approached the TSA Pre-Check line…

I’ve read stories over the years about Americans pulled aside because they were traveling with a stash of gold coins that they had not properly declared. In some tellings, the gold was taken away and owners had to fight to reclaim their coins.

Thus, my worry: Would a TSA agent pull aside my backpack? Would my gold coins be confiscated for some bizarre reason? Would I lose them or have to spend years and lots of money trying to get them back?

As I approached the agent checking boarding passes and IDs, I told her, “I have my coin collection with me. Is that OK?”

She smiled and said, “Check with the screener when you’re up there.”

I did so.

The screener smiled too and shrugged and waved me through.

My bag was not pulled aside.

My gold was safe.

I breathed easy again.

Now, the real story here is not my happy experience with the TSA.

The real story is this:

For months, I have felt that I needed to fly home and bring a lot of my gold coins back to Portugal, where I live. I have a niggling Scooby Doo sense that things are not so copasetic in the world these days.

Too many signs are just off.

Tariffs and their impacts on US business, US consumers, and the global economy are just beginning to hint at problems to come, likely over the summer and into the fall.

The dollar is in decline and recently hit a three-year low. Lower lows are coming because the Trump administration is overtly telling the world it wants a weaker dollar.

The US political system is fraying even more than I expected. I’m seeing increasing calls for Civil War across social media. We had the Minnesota lunatic assassinate a Democratic politician and try to assassinate a second. He had a long list of other Democrats to kill and authorities say he was clearly politically motivated.

We have US military troops patrolling the streets of LA. We have Democratic politicians being tackled to the ground and handcuffed for questioning the secretary of Homeland Security. We saw millions of people across the country protest against what they see as Trump’s autocratic, dictatorial tendencies.

And as I sat down to write this, headlines emerged noting that Trump is asking Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers to focus their efforts primarily on Democratic cities, a blatant sign that he has no intent to protect all Americans, but only those he thinks voted for him. (I do not say that with any political intent, but to point out that this is the kind of political divisiveness that leads to violence and, ultimately, secession movements. Do not be surprised if a California secession effort emerges with force soon.)

None of that is normal.

My worry—and it is increasing—is that we have a full-blown crisis very soon.

I’ve been saying for several years now that I suspect we’ll see a fiscal, monetary, or social crisis (or all three) land in America in the 2027/28 timeframe. I remain committed to that belief.

It could very well stem from the US dollar no longer being capable of shouldering the weight of extreme American debts and the repayment burdens that are currently taxing the budget.

It could be global investors shunning US bonds (that has already begun), leading to spiraling costs for selling as much debt as America needs to sell… and causing the dollar to crash.

Or it could grow out of an effort by Trump to delay the 2026 mid-terms or the 2028 presidential election… or an effort to jimmy with the Constitution to give Trump a third term, an effort that Newsweek recently noted has “a lot of support in the GOP.”

Again, don’t read that paragraph as political posturing. It is what it is: A simple account of what’s taking place in America right now, and how those dots could very well connect in a tomorrow that is not too far away.

Which is why I wanted the El Jefe Hoard of gold coins closer to El Jefe.

A global economy that’s slowing down because of tariffs becomes a race to the bottom as countries devalue their own currencies in an effort to keep their manufacturing competitive globally. That’s the kind of situation that breeds a global depression.

And if the US is in full-blown social/financial meltdown, well, that just worsens whatever might be going on in the world economy. And if nothing untoward is going on in the world economy, well, the US in a full-blown social/financial meltdown would send the world economy into a tailspin.

The dollar would crash.

US stocks would crash.

Gold (and likely silver to some degree) would skyrocket to prices most people think are laughably outrageous.

If that moment comes to pass, well, at least I have a lot my physical gold with me in Portugal now, safely tucked away in a local bank. And I have oodles and oodles of gold investments in various brokerage and IRA accounts in the form of specific ETFs, gold miners, and gold streamers. (To learn more about my personal gold playbook and how you can adopt it for yourself… tune in to my Gold Income Workshop next week. Click here to grab a FREE ticket.)

I don’t like that I had to fly to the US to bring my gold home. The fact that I did speaks to the precariousness of the world today.

Since moving to Europe in 2018, I’ve been perfectly fine with keeping my gold in a Louisiana bank.

Today… well, I’m just glad the TSA agent waved my gold-laden backpack through the scanner.

I feel happier now that my gold is in Portugal with me.