That’s why I’m going to do two things: support our military, and buy gold from Rosland Capital.” For the goldbug, the metal isn’t just an asset: It’s a way of life, nearly a religion, a rebellion against the last 50 or so years of Federal Reserve supremacy over the U.S.
On Wednesday, the federal government published its consumer price index for October, showing the highest annual rate of inflation in 30 years, with everything from gas to food to rent taking up a bigger share of every paycheck.
But an ounce of gold is still worth $40 less than it was in June, when the economy was only starting to heat up, and even farther below its peak above $2,000 last summer.
Inflation shocks in the 1970s sent the price of the metal up, cementing its status in Wall Street’s playbook — and the public imagination — as a way to keep wealth from degrading when the price of everything else was rising.
Recently, Paul — whose book End the Fed argues for abolishing the central bank and returning to the gold standard — took to a YouTube channel to suggest that a shadowy cabal of government agencies collude to keep gold prices contained in order to prevent a market panic.
Varney brought on a guest to talk about how gold has “gained ground,” even though the chart next to him showed it was up less than one percent.
Bitcoin, prized by libertarians and Occupy Wall Streeters alike for circumventing government control, has many of the same attributes as gold but without the need for vaults, jewelers, or physical mining operations.
Like the gold supply that is limited by how much of the metal can be mined in a given year, the number of bitcoin in the world is fixed into the code of the currency, making its scarcity part of what makes it so valuable.
Juan Carlos Artigas, head of research at the World Gold Council, told me there is still room for the metal to become more valuable, but also that the effects of inflation are “priced in,” meaning that they were expected.