The Metal That Saves the World

I am Field Noting from South Louisiana today, where I landed just after the International Living conference in Las Vegas last week. I came here to spend a bit of time with my kids before heading back to Lisbon.

The only reason this is relevant is tied to the gold market…

My son—now in his late 20s—and his roommate (a kid he grew up with and who’s now a real estate millionaire) were ragging me about gold. They know I write about gold, they know I have a huge portion of my portfolio in gold, and they know I regularly tweet about gold.

“Dude, gold?” my son said. “You came here on a horse and buggy?”

Basically, they think I’m a goombah.

An old man. A fuddy-duddy. Probably that guy sitting on a park bench, yelling at pigeons between swigs of bourbon-spiked Maalox.

To a degree I get it.

Gold is old-school.

They’re into crypto—the new-school digital gold.

I get that too, of course, because I’m all over the crypto market.

But what these little whipper-snappers fail to account for is mass psychology.

Yes, I fundamentally believe that crypto has a big and bright future.

However…

Not everyone in the world buys into crypto as a concept. As I heard at the IL Go Overseas Bootcamp in Vegas, more than a few people remain perplexed by crypto—what it does, why it’s worth anything, or why anyone would want to own what they can’t see or touch.

I also get that.

But no one questions gold.

Sure, some bureaucrat-types and certain high-profile investors say (wrongly) that gold is just an archaic rock with nothing going for it in the modern financial world.

That… I do not get.

The history of humans is chockablock with examples of wasteful governments spending stupidly and then using gold and silver (either overtly or covertly) to repair the damage those stupid politicians caused.

No one has yet given me a logical and legitimate reason why gold won’t serve that role again in today’s world.

I just saw a report announcing that world governments have now accumulated a combined $100 trillion in debt.

Let’s wrap that in some perspective: The entire global economy is about $100 trillion. (America, for reference, is about 24% of the global economy and 35% of global debt.)

Assuming you’ve read Field Notes for more than a few weeks, you will know how I feel about this.

And it’s clear to me how others feel about this. Central banks own record amounts of gold now. Their vaults hold more than 12% of the world’s gold supply. That’s a big number for institutions that print and distribute what is essentially Monopoly money that only works because we’ve all bought into the collective delusion that fiat currency backed by nothing is worth something because governments say it is.

Equally important to me is the fact that Costco keeps selling out of the one-ounce gold bars it stocks in its warehouse-club stores. Those buyers are average Americans—me and you—prepping for the woes to come.

Getting back to my son and his roomie… They don’t care about gold because it offers all the excitement of a three-hour documentary on plant propagation.

Crypto is their drug of choice.

But I would bet that the vast majority of those folks flocking to Costco wouldn’t know a Solana from a solar flare, a bitcoin from bitterroot.

They do, however, know that gold is the metal money that always saves the world and most likely will again… before this decade is over.

I just looked and we are yet again at all-time highs in gold, approaching $2,720 per ounce. As I’ve noted recently, I thought we’d hit $2,500 by the time 2025 arrived.

I am happily wrong.

As I told several attendees in Las Vegas, “Buy gold! And keep buying gold. On any meaningful pullback, just add more.”

You might be a fuddy-duddy to the whippers-snappers around you.

But you will be protected from what’s to come.