Mises Wire

A Vital Book for Our Time

[The Last Gold Rush…Ever!: 7 Reasons for the Runaway Gold Market and How You Can Profit from It, by Charles Goyette and Bill Haynes. Post Hill Press, 2020. 240 pages.]

In this magnificent book, Charles Goyette and Bill Haynes offer readers something you will get nowhere else. They expose the deep state’s awful plans for us. These plans will necessarily lead to political and economic disaster. But, Goyette and Haynes say, we can do something about it. By this, they don’t just mean overthrowing the deep state and replacing it with leaders like the great Ron Paul, to whom the book is dedicated. They mean how you can protect yourself from financial ruin. In brief, the answer lies in investments in gold and silver.

Goyette and Haynes are superbly qualified to analyze the precious metals market and the economy more generally. Goyette is an authority on geopolitics and the economy. He showed how the Fed causes depressions in his bestseller The Dollar Meltdown. He and Ron Paul broadcast the nationally syndicated radio show Ron Paul’s America in 2013 and 2014. Haynes is the founder of CMI Gold & Silver Inc., one of the leading precious metal firms in America.

They warn us that today, as throughout its history, the Fed manipulates our economy to promote the interests of a narrow elite. “For more than a hundred years, The Federal Reserve has been a serial bubble-blower, inflating the dot-com and housing bubbles. It has quietly overseen the destruction of the dollar’s purchasing power. It has stovepiped unimaginable wealth to crony banks….The Fed’s operations have enabled the continuous expansion of the State and even provided means for the prosecution of the State’s undeclared wars.”

We have a historically tested weapon against the Fed and its evil plans—gold. “No paper currency has ever come close to the monetary performance of gold. While gold’s performance has shined throughout the ages, the performance of paper money has been accompanied by chaos, collapse, and ruination….Never has there been a currency crisis in which people stormed the bank demanding to exchange their gold for paper money. While people prefer gold, governments do not. Gold imposes a discipline on governments and their spending.”

As if this wasn’t bad enough, the government keeps spending more money than it takes in through taxes. Supporters of so-called MMT—modern monetary theory—tell us that deficit spending doesn’t matter. The government, unlike private citizens, doesn’t need to worry about going bankrupt. We can spend our way into prosperity. Goyette and Haynes show that this policy ignores the lessons of history. The hyperinflation that ended the Weimar Republic and, more recently, the economic disasters in Zimbabwe and Venezuela show us what results from deficit spending and inflation. Once people lose confidence in the money supply, the economy is going to tank very quickly. The government won’t be able to put the genie of inflation back in the bottle. And the danger to us today is very real. “In 1980, federal debt amounted to 30 percent of GDP. Today, it is more than 100 percent of GDP….In other words, the federal government’s debt is more than the productive activity of all the American people each year.”

Besides manipulation of the money supply by the Fed and deficit spending, five other factors make the crisis worse and virtually guarantee that a collapse is coming soon. These are trade and currency wars, the war on cash, the new world order, banana republic economics, and the empire’s end. I’m going to discuss only two of these factors, but readers need to look at all of them to get the full picture.

One especially awful development is that the government is planning to take cash out of the economy. This will enable it to monitor all of our economic activity and is an instrument for total control. “A war on cash in the US is really a war on financial privacy. It empowers state surveillance in a way that the worst totalitarian regimes of history could only have wished. Eliminating the anonymity of cash transactions allows the tracking of nonconforming behavior.” Onerous regulations require banks to report all “large” financial transactions. “Over the years, the intrusion has wormed its way down into smaller and smaller transactions.” The ultimate aim, openly proclaimed by leading insider economists like Kenneth Rogoff, is to get rid of cash and make us conduct all our business through credit.

The end of what Goyette and Haynes call the new world order intensifies the coming crisis.  We face a blowback “fueled by years of US imperialistic and lawless behavior around the world, and finally triggered by a critical mass of resentment of the US. Among its manifestations will be a US that finds itself not just bereft of meaningful allies, but that it may find much of the world allied against it….What is certain is that this blowback will be experienced in the unwillingness of the rest of the world to continue funding US debt in any future financial crisis.”

Given these awful trends, what can we as individuals do? Goyette and Haynes have the answer. In our investments, we should avoid dependence on others in ways that can easily go wrong. “Gold and silver are the only monetary assets that are not someone else’s liability. They are not dependent on the solvency or even the integrity of an issuer or counterparty.” They don’t stop there but tell you exactly what you need to do to keep your head above water in the coming dark times. For example, they give advice on whether to buy gold and silver bars or coins, as well as gold versus silver. They also tell you what purchases to avoid.

Goyette and Haynes combine a sound grasp of the Austrian economics of Mises and Rothbard with the practical wisdom of experienced professionals in the hard money community.  The late great Burt Blumert, who exemplified this combination to the highest degree, would have liked The Last Gold Rush, and there is no higher praise than that.

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