03/30/11 Baltimore, Maryland – On the night our documentary I.O.U.S.A. made its nationwide premiere in August 2008, the film was followed up by a live panel discussion, broadcast via satellite. Our friend David Walker, the former US comptroller general and “star” of the film, took part…along with several other luminaries.
At one point, the question was asked: Might America’s trading partners one day sell off their US Treasury holdings?
Impossible, said Warren Buffett. In fact, he insisted, they couldn’t…because they’d need to convert it into some other currency, which would be little better than the dollar. No one else chimed in to challenge the assertion.
“Buffett’s answer assumes that there is no alternative,” author, friend and local Baltimore resident Bill Baker writes in his 2009 book Endless Money: The Moral Hazards of Socialism, “because for generations, all the world’s currencies have been backed only by the promise that governments would accept them in payment of taxes.
“But that ignores a currency that has been used effectively by man for thousands of years: gold. China and other countries might exchange their US dollars for it now.”
Indeed, China is quietly building its gold reserves. They totaled 600 metric tons in 2004. Then in April 2009 came an announcement they’d grown to 1,054 metric tons. And the buzz from Beijing is that the central bankers want to grow that stash another tenfold.
Meanwhile, China has trimmed its US Treasury holdings for three months in a row. The January total was $1.15 trillion – down 1.75% from October.
These are the first steps toward what Baker sees as the “remonetization” of gold – coming soon to a country near you.
History is a pendulum.
“Once gold and silver had been written into the Constitution,” Baker says, “no one might have thought that it would be replaced by paper within 60 years.” But the pendulum swung, the Union issuing its infamous greenbacks during the Civil War.
Then the pendulum swung back, the greenbacks’ critics were “able to successfully push for an agenda of gold resumption. But before the London Economic Conference of 1933, the world would be shocked by Roosevelt’s rejection of the gold standard.” The pendulum swung again.
Now, “a series of crises such as was the case in Rome might ultimately bring the pendulum back toward gold,” Baker writes.
In other words, we’re approaching the end of the Great Dollar Standard we wrote about in The Demise of the Dollar. The only world anyone below the age of 40 has ever known – in which all the world’s currencies float freely against each other – is nearly over.
And Baker is investing accordingly.
In late 2010, he began accumulating shares of a tiny gold miner called Orezone. “Our cost basis is 78 cents, and now it’s $3.61,” Baker tells us on a wintry afternoon in his office on the outskirts of Baltimore. “I’ve sold off two-thirds of the shares that I own, and it’s still one of our largest positions. I can’t keep it down!”
It’s a good problem to have. And Baker has it because he’s willing to go further afield than your typical money manager…as far afield as Burkina Faso.
We’ll pause here to place it on a map, so you can get your bearings. (If you were a geography geek growing up, you might remember it as Upper Volta.)
“I read these other quarterlies from these hedge fund managers,” Baker tells us, surrounded by family pictures, CDs of composers like Brahms and rafts of company research. “They’ll get really absorbed in the macroeconomic picture, but they don’t really know what they’re doing, so they just buy GLD [the gold ETF].
“Or they’ll hire two all-star Canadian analysts. Then I look at what they own, and they own Gabriel Resources because John Paulson owns it. It’s safe. Or they bought some big South African company because it’s cheap based on reserves in the ground when they ran it through their stock screener.
“They don’t have a coherent philosophy about really kicking the tires and really finding these companies that people don’t know about.”
Baker does. His firm, Gaineswood Investment Management, has taken sizeable positions in tiny gold miners working well off the beaten paths of the Americas, Australia and South Africa.
Burkina Faso is smack in the middle of a geological formation called the Birimian Trend…the richest source of growth for gold miners in recent years.
Even better is how many miners in West Africa have consolidated their holdings. “In Canada, you might have a district filled up with 12 companies. One company might have each block, or half a block. But in West Africa, these guys own all of it. They’ve got a lot of time, a lot of land, and now they’ve raised a lot more money, so they can keep going after it…and we’ll keep getting these upside surprises.
“That’s our philosophy, to find opportunity where, for example, this one outfit has found 1.2 million ounces of gold. But with all the new discoveries they’re making, they’ll probably come out and say we have 2, 2.5, and next year they’ll say, well, we have 3, 3.5, 4… and it isn’t over yet, because of this whole giant region that’s been unexplored.”
Before we go any further, we’d better make something clear: Bill Baker isn’t your typical gold bug. Nor is he your typical stock market bear.
“The timing or eventuality of financial calamity is unable to be forecast,” Baker writes in Endless Money. “At best, it might be like a hurricane warning: The tempest may strike here, it may hit there, it may be downgraded to a tropical storm or it may go elsewhere entirely.”
But that doesn’t mean investors should fail to prepare for financial calamities…or the demise of paper currencies. Financial calamities are becoming increasingly likely in this overly indebted world of ours…and the death of paper currencies is becoming increasingly certain. The best time to prepare is ahead of time.
Regards,
Addison Wiggin
for The Daily Reckoning
Addison Wiggin
Addison Wiggin is the executive publisher of Agora Financial, LLC, a fiercely independent economic forecasting and financial research firm. He’s the creator and editorial director of Agora Financial’s daily 5 Min. Forecast and editorial director of The Daily Reckoning. Wiggin is the founder of Agora Entertainment, executive producer and co-writer of I.O.U.S.A., which was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival, the 2009 Critics Choice Award for Best Documentary Feature, and was also shortlisted for a 2009 Academy Award. He is the author of the companion book of the film I.O.U.S.A.and his second edition of The Demise of the Dollar… and Why it’s Even Better for Your Investments was just fully revised and updated. Wiggin is a three-time New York Times best-selling author whose work has been recognized by The New York Times Magazine, The Economist, Worth, The New York Times, The Washington Post as well as major network news programs. He also co-authored international bestsellers Financial Reckoning Day and Empire of Debt with Bill Bonner.
The Daily Reckoning is your premier source for making sense of the news Washington and Wall Street generate. Each business day, The Daily Reckoning calls on its stable of world-class writers and thinkers to show you how to get ahead.
Start your 100% FREE subscription to The Daily Reckoning today and you’ll get a free research report, “How to Survive the Fall of Social Security.” Simply enter your email address below to get your free report and join over 495,000 worldwide Daily Reckoning subscribers!
We Respect Your Privacy and We will
Never Share or Sell Your Email Address
“China is quietly building its gold reserves … And the buzz from Beijing is that the central bankers want to grow that stash another tenfold.”
if wishes were fishes. can they? and even if they did, so what? the “chinese miracle” is based on healthy u.s. and european consumer markets. they’ve raised 200 million peasants to the middle class thereby but the western markets are expended and there are 600 million more poor landless peasants who want their share of glorious wealth. no amount of gold or gold-standard will make up for declining western consumer demand.
“China is quietly building its gold reserves … And the buzz from Beijing is that the central bankers want to grow that stash another tenfold.”
if wishes were fishes. can they?
The world will never stop buying US debt. The dollar can be produced infinitely, so the US will never run out of money and thus will never default. As long as there is stuff to buy, workers who want to work for pay and investments to make, there will be a need for more and more dollars, so print away! Use gold to make rings, statues, necklaces, bracelets, etc etc.
Hey Jason, can I get a hit of whatever you’re smoking? In a universe of continual change, almost any phrase which contains the words, “always” or “never” will be proven wrong. I’ll stick with gold over paper for now. Thanks for the input though.
Jason is a good example of our current educational system.
Hey Jason,
Have you ever seen a movie back in the 1930′s about Pancho Villa when he took Mexico city and he was told the country is broke and he ordered a printing company to print currency with his picture in it? The printers didn’t want the money they printed as payment because they said it’s worthless. So in parallel to what you’re saying, if the FED continue to print then it becomes worthless.
Jason is mostly right. The rest of you guys should learn more about how a fiat currency works. A good place to start is http://www.moslereconomics.com . The money in your wallet is part of the debt. Do you really want the government to take it all away come tax time? Government debt = government expendatures – tax revenues. Government spending limits are reached at the point where too many dollars chase too few goods and services. With unemployment at 8% or higher, we are far away from that point now.