Welcome to the RunToGold.com Podcast. Today’s interview comes to us via the Korelin Report, in which Al Korelin and Steve Carr talk to David Tice of the Prudent Bear Fund and Trace Mayer at the Freedom Fest which took place in Las Vegas this July, 2010. They are asked about investment in bear markets in the current economic environment.

Welcome back to the  RunToGold Podcast, today we have an interview with author Dr.Thomas Woods, discussing the topic of nullification, from his new book Nullification: How to Resist Federal Tyranny in the 21st Century.

Today’s RunToGold podcast Interview with Aaron Krowne of ML-implode.com, discussing U.S housing market’s continual plummet.

Today’s RunToGold Podcast episode is an interview with Bearing Asset Management’s Bill Laggner, discussing economic indicators and stimulus measures, and how gold is safe in turbulent conditions.

Anthem Blanchard, son of James U. Blanchard, speaks of gold as truest measure of value. Comparatively, prices of national currency become irrelevant.

This is a raw and unedited interview with Tim Barello of the Manhattan Examiner that he will use for writing an article. We discuss a wide range of topics. Although it is fairly long and not the highest quality I thought many of you would appreciate hearing this impromptu question and answer session so I requested a copy of the audio file and here it is:

With tax revenues shrinking the large and dangerous Welfare States are looking for easy prey.  England has kidnapped children and the ill conceived social services programs are stealing children from their families. With Bill Rounds of How To Vanish we discuss how to protect yourself and your children.

Discussion about the H.R.3590 – Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, Greece’s bailout, the CFTC hearings about the short position in the gold and silver markets and a few other tangents.

The Bank Privacy Report details the current state of federal US law regarding bank privacy and explore offshore options.

A reader, Alan Andersen who is a tax lawyer in Salt Lake City, and I exchanged comments via email which he has given permission to share and they were the catalyst for putting together this Bank Privacy Report.

And now it appears that the IRS is going even beyond that …  In other words, either basis triggers reporting according to the IRS.

Regarding what the actual law says, it is just another one of those extremely vague and open-ended federal statutes that can mean anything a court says it means.

But typical of most tyrannies, the vagueness is intentional.  One never knows exactly when one has crossed the line so that we are all at the mercy of federal prosecutors.  We must cower and seek to obey 110%.  Who needs trouble.  What is scary to me is that but for your website, I would never in my wildest dreams thought I would have to report this, and I am a tax lawyer. How can a layman ever avoid being a criminal?  Sad.

A wonderful speech by Dr. Edwin Vieira Jr. at the GATA conference in Washington DC.  Edwin Vieira Jr. is a lawyer, author of “Pieces of Eight: The Monetary Powers and Disabilities of the United States Constitution,” and a consultant to GATA. He lives in Virginia.

Silver and gold are not merely valuable commodities, investments, and media of exchange. More importantly, they are key “checks and balances” in America’s legal and political institutions.

The fight against the use of silver and gold as money that has been waged by bankers and rogue politicians since the 1870s as to silver and the 1930s as to gold — and will intensify as fiat currencies collapse throughout the world — is ultimately directed against America’s national independence, her constitutional government, and every common American’s individual liberty and prosperity.

The Constitution of the United States adopted a monetary system consisting of silver and gold coin, in which the standard is the “dollar,” containing 371 1/4 grains (troy) of fine silver, with the values of gold coins to be measured in “dollars” according to the free market’s rate of exchange between silver and gold. Neither the general government nor any state is authorized to emit paper currency.

These restrictions prevent rogue public officials from turning public debts into currency, as a means for redistributing wealth from society to political elitists and their clients in special-interest groups.

Furthermore, although the Constitution does not mention banks, either public or private, its only correct construction requires separation of bank and state — extirpation of all inherently fraudulent fractional-reserve banking schemes — and rigorous regulation of all other fractional-reserve arrangements that might operate fraudulently. (See Edwin Vieira Jr., “Pieces of Eight: The Monetary Powers and Disabilities of the United States Constitution,” second revised edition, 2002.)

But since the early 1800s rogue politicians and bankers have steadily subverted the Constitution by forging an increasingly tight relationship between bank and state. Through the grant of one abusive special privilege after another, politicians have immunized fractional-reserve banking against the just economic and legal consequences of its own inevitable failures, so that public officials and bankers could turn both public and private debts into currency — thus separating the supply and the purchasing power of currency from the economic discipline of the free market, and rendering those matters largely political in nature.

Under the Federal Reserve System, Americans no longer enjoy “money” in the economic sense but are subjected to what must be denoted as “political currency,” with emphasis on the adjective. Political currency is emitted on the basis of political debts –that is, either 1) public debts or 2) private debts for the payment of which the creditors expect public bailouts if their debtors default.

Unfortunately, the Federal Reserve System is inherently unstable, and must lurch from one self-generated crisis to another, each increasing in severity, until its house of financial cards self-destructs.

Having separated society’s medium of exchange from the production of real goods and services in the free market — and instead linked the currency to creating, packaging, marketing, servicing, and eventually salvaging political debts — the Federal Reserve system encourages, facilitates, and rewards irresponsibility on the part of both lenders and borrowers, in the private as well as the public sector.

For those who benefit from the system to continue to loot society, the supply of political currency must expand. For that supply to expand, political debts must increase.

True enough, political debts can increase, even geometrically, because political currency can be created (as the saying goes) “out of nothing” to float them. But real wealth cannot be generated simply by the emission of paper promises. Neither can new paper promises pay off old ones.

So, avarice being unlimited, insatiable, and imprudent, the whole operation must cumulate and culminate in an unsustainable bubble of debts that either implodes in a depression or explodes in hyperinflation.

Although the Federal Reserve System is fatally flawed, the wealth and power of elitists in high finance, big business, and the political class depend on maintaining it — or replacing it in a timely fashion with something of equal serviceability for their ends.

As it cannot long be maintained, it must and will soon be replaced. With what remains a matter for speculation. Not open to the slightest doubt, however, is that, as crises have rocked the system, the establishment has always moved farther away from the Constitution — deeper into the sump of lawlessness — to shore up the banking cartel, and always at the expense of common Americans.

In the 1930s, in response to the collapse of the fractional-reserve racket, rather than reforming the operations of the banks, the Roosevelt administration and a pliant Congress seized the American people’s gold and outlawed almost all public and private contracts promising to pay in gold. In the 1950s and through the 1960s, until the Nixon administration terminated redemption of Federal Reserve notes in gold in 1971, the inflationary policies of the Federal Reserve System drained off more than half of America’s national stock of gold to foreign banks and the profiteers operating through them. And during the last few decades, surreptitious manipulation of the precious-metals markets has kept the price of gold (measured in Federal Reserve notes) suspiciously low, even as this country’s financial structures have become increasingly shaky.

The price of gold has been manipulated for two reasons, one being the suppression of evidence, the other the throttling of monetary evolution.

First, an ever-increasing price of gold reflects the breakdown of the Federal Reserve System — just as an ever-increasing temperature reveals that the human body is sick, and when it reaches a critical point that death is imminent.

Second, those who fatten off of political currency need to prevent ordinary people from realizing that only a return to silver and gold as common media of exchange can stabilize America’s economy, and especially from actually employing silver and gold in preference to Federal Reserve notes in their day-to-day transactions. However, as the Federal Reserve System experiences ever-more-frequent, ever-more-serious, and ever-less-tractable problems, downward manipulations of the prices of gold and silver will become impossible. And that the system is beyond repair will become apparent to all.

At that point, the question will arise — and behind the scenes doubtlessly already has arisen among bankers and politicians — as to how and with what to replace the banking cartel.

When a political currency has failed, the traditional trick of the bankers and politicians has been to introduce a new, supposedly more stable currency — often within a new, supposedly more stable banking apparatus. This was the sleight of hand that moved America from the independent state banks in operation prior to the Civil War, through the partially cartelized national banks created in the 1860s, to the fully cartelized Federal Reserve System established in 1913.

Throughout this devolution, the progression of illegality became increasingly stark.

The state banks violated Article I, Section 10, Clause 1, of the Constitution. But at least they operated only regionally. The national banks violated Article I, Section 8, Clause 2, and operated throughout the country. But at least their emission of paper currency was limited by the amount of public debt a generally thrifty Congress was willing to incur.

The Federal Reserve System, though, is a corporative-state (or fascist) structure that purports to delegate Congress’ supposed monetary powers to private interests; and the system’s bubble of both public and private debts will expand to the limit of the avarice of the cartel’s operators, their clients, and their political henchmen.

Nonetheless, as unconstitutional and economically unsound as they were and are, all these schemes operated and even now operate under color of the national sovereignty and laws of the United States, subject in principle to overarching control by the American people. Indeed, Section 30 of the Federal Reserve Act still explicitly reserves to Congress the right to repeal, alter, or amend the system at will. But with the Federal Reserve System the bankers and politicians have gone about as far as they can go within the economic and political institutions of the United States. And they have separated paper currency from the discipline of free markets about as far as possible, while still pretending to maintain some semblance of a connection to free markets.

So as the Federal Reserve System shakes itself to pieces, the likelihood is that first, a new currency will arise outside of the United States in some regional supra-national entity such as the proposed North American Union; and, second, the value of this new currency will not be controlled by free financial markets but, instead, propping up the currency’s value will be the excuse for extensive governmental intervention in and manipulation of the markets.

This plan is so alien to the experiences and desires of most Americans that its implementation will probably require a controlled meltdown of the Federal Reserve System to bludgeon them into accepting the North American Union as the only way to obtain a new, supposedly stable currency and to return to something approaching economic normalcy. Yet even a controlled meltdown, along with the accompanying absorption of the United States into a new Northern Hemispheric political order, will unavoidably generate extensive economic, social, and political unrest that will threaten the financial establishment’s power.

Even dumbed-down Americans will not long suffer conditions of depression akin to those of the 1930s, let alone South American levels of inflation as well. Desperate people will ask questions and assign blame. Perhaps not just a few will abandon debt currency altogether and substitute silver and gold as their media of exchange. They and others will conclude that the Federal Reserve System is unconstitutional — and therefore that its operations are arguably a complex of criminal offenses. (See 18 U.S.C. §§ 241 and 242.)

Many will realize that the establishment’s scheme for replacing Federal Reserve Notes with a supra-national currency is a political crime on a more stupendous scale yet, because it depends upon destroying both the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. Then an aroused people will take political action against the institutions and individuals responsible for foisting the funny-money scheme on their country.

On the other side, the establishment will not be idle. It will do anything and everything possible to maintain its position. Obviously the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence will be expendable, because the establishment has been trying to whittle away the former on a piece-by-piece basis over the years, and intends to do away with the latter at one fell swoop in the near future. So this country, as an independent nation, will be expendable too. And if this country, why not the freedom and prosperity of common Americans as well?

Will ordinary Americans — at least 80 to 90 million of whom are armed — meekly put up with a program aimed at their own country’s assisted suicide? Why should they, when they have nothing to lose economically or politically? If they refuse to knuckle under, the establishment’s only recourse will be to attempt to lock down the whole country under a para-militarized police state, perhaps with the assistance of “peacekeepers” from Canada and Mexico (for the employment of whom negotiations are apparently already in progress).

That is why careful observers conclude that the paranoia being generated by politicians and the big media over “homeland security” — and the frenetic para-militarization of law-enforcement agencies at the national, state, and even local levels in the name of “homeland security” — are not caused by or aimed at foreign “terrorists” at all, but instead target ordinary Americans in their own home towns.

The establishment is preparing to force justifiably angry Americans into line when its financial house of cards comes tumbling down, either in a controlled demolition or otherwise.

Americans will not be the only victims of such repression. The establishment must prevent other peoples, in other parts of the world, from jumping off the financial treadmill of political currency. That will require the use not only of economic and political pressure, but also — indeed, especially — of military coercion. For the provision of which the establishment will attempt to force common Americans to pay, and to send their sons and even their daughters off to fight, die, and be maimed and sickened in foreign lands.

Little good, then, will it do for an ounce of gold to soar to $2,000, $3,000, or higher — and for silver to increase in value proportionately too — if the ultimate consequences are a police state in America, then a supra-national regime replacing the United States, accompanied by endless military conflicts throughout the world.

In the grand scheme of things, gold and silver are far less important as economic investments or hedges against hyperinflation or depression than as guarantors of individual freedom — and then to the fullest extent only when they are actually used as media of exchange throughout society. Silver and gold as currencies supply the foundation necessary for economic democracy and limited government; whereas fiat currencies inevitably function as the tools of fascism, socialism, and every other form of financial imperialism.

Thus, the fight over gold and silver as media of exchange is about more than mere money, let alone making money. For it is a fight with only two possible outcomes: either control of their own lives by the people themselves, or control of the people and their lives by political and economic elitists. To achieve the first and avoid the second no price will prove too great to pay.

Interview with John Rubino of DollarCollapse.com and author of The Collapse Of The Dollar.  We discuss the toppy stock market, potential short term dollar rise, the role of gold as currency and Dr. Ron Paul’s new bill H.R. 4248 the Free Competition In Currency Act of 2009.  So get a copy of The Collapse Of The Dollar.

A fiery interview with Andy Sutton of Contrary Investors Cafe where we discuss Representative Ron Paul’s H.R. 4248 the Free Competition in Currency Act of 2009.  We follow many of the topics in the recent article and discuss free competition in the currency market, how the Founding Fathers dealt with quantitative easing, the nervousness of the Goldman Sachs vampire squids, the changing political winds and other fun topics.

Very entertaining!

I am not sure what the issue is with the sound.  I hope it is working better for this one.

Why gold confiscation is highly unlikely.

The economic lessons of the Christmas story.  From inn to inn there are plenty of economic lessons from Christ and how to view governmental interference, how to deal with immoral costumed governmental leaders and the virtue of the servant merchant.

The difference between forwards and futures contracts and how the COMEX fail if there is prolonged backwardation in the monetary metals.

The economics and futility of war and why peace is becoming more profitable.

I will be headed down to La Estancia De Cafayate to enjoy some bife de lomo.  In this episode I discuss the the tungsten gold rumors and what to do.

Sometimes whenever gold is mentioned around polite company the term ‘gold bug’ gets thrown out. This term was penned by Edgar Allen Poe in his short story ‘The Gold Bug’. Published in the early 1840’s and according to Poe it ‘made great noise’ and was his most widely circulated and read story.

In ‘The Gold Bug’ William Legrand appears to go insane after being bitten by a bug he thinks is pure gold. He confides in his closest friend, the narrator. Legrand asks the narrator to immediately visit him at his home on Sullivan’s Island in South Carolina. When the narrator arrives Legrand begins searching for lost treasure. The narrator doubts Legrand and thinks he may be insane. Do Legrand and the narrator find the mythical treasure?

Discussion of the ‘new gold monetarists’ and I suppose I am one.  The CNBC guest throws out $11,000-$50,000 per ounce which could be a little high.  This goes in-depth towards the bottom of the liquidity pyramid.  The more you begin to understand economics and monetary science the more you will realize just how much is packed into that tiny little graphic.

[CORRECTIVE NOTE:  I have been hoarding platinum not palladium.  But if I could find a cost effective way to hoard palladium, like GoldMoney with platinum, then I would also hoard palladium.  I am not a fan of a 6.8% premium.]

Jay Taylor of MiningStocks.com interviewed Trace Mayer on 10 November 2009.  We discussed HowToVanish.com, the interview on BNN, money versus currency, inflation versus deflation, my book The Great Credit Contraction and even hit on the GLD ETF.  The entire radio show is included and the interview with Trace Mayer starts around 18:00.

Interview with Ian Gordon of the Long Wave Group where we discuss the Kondratieff Winter.  You can read the transcript or listen.

A discussion of the updates to RunToGold.  Mention of Deloitte & Touche’s report that states, “If the proposed ETF tracks a commodity, it buys or borrows certificats of ownership of that commodity.”

Then I ask some questions about Dr. Nouriel Roubini statement, “I don’t believe in gold.”

Interview with Aaron Krowne of ML-Implode.com where we discuss the coming wave of residential foreclosures, the impact on the banks, the looming dollar crisis and what to do about it.

An introduction to hawala banking.  Hawala is a way to privately transfer funds and complete many other transactions. Its positive attributes far outweigh the relatively small risks that it will be misused.

Be sure to pre-order a copy of End The Fed by Ron Paul which debuts on 16 September 2009.  With enough pre-orders it will make its appearance as #1 on Amazon and perhaps be a bestseller on the New York Times list which will cause even more pain for the Federal Reserve and Tim ‘tax cheat’ Geithner.  He was extremely uncomfortable in his Digg.com interview with the Wall Street Journal.

Your article kinda reminds me of the bullfight with the matador and the bull.
Trace being the matador of course.
After sufficiently proving his prowess as a game bull, he is eventually worn down by the matador and the picadores until finally he is dispatched in a tired and weakened state with a swift but exact plunge of the sword.
This happens repeatedly to ALL the bulls as very few are ever prepared for El Matador !
Nice article and thanks for reminding the intellectually deficient that name calling is indeed a sign of confusion and defeat.No matter who you THINK you are.
Jay

Trace:

Thanks for the excellent article. I’ve recently discovered your free “runtogold” podcasts on i-tunes, and I enjoy listening to your well-spoken perspectives on economic and monetary reality. Yes, the timing of the strange phone interference was quite, er, coincidental.

Mish says hyperinflation is unlikely because the banks cannot be forced or coaxed into lending. But since when does fractional reserve lending (legalized counterfeiting) cause hyperinflation? It surely causes an inflation of currency supply leading to distortions, malinvestments, and the Business Cycle, but isn’t hyperinflation distinctly different from credit expansion? I thought hyperinflations were caused only by Central Banks and Government Treasuries printing money to pay for Government deficits.

Is Mish attacking a straw-man, or am I wrong about the cause of hyperinflation? Are you aware of any hyperinflations caused by banks creating credit as opposed to government printing presses?

Confused in Baraboo,

-Pete

‘Hyperinflation’, whatever that is, is a currency event; what people generally think of as hyperinflation – wheelbarrows of currency like 1923 Germany. I do not think it takes bank lending to trigger this event.

For example, if the banks decided to rapidly move their reserves down the liquidity pyramid from FRN$ illusions into physical gold then ‘hyperinflation’ would likely be the result as the FRN$ evaporates just like when banks moved capital down the liquidity pyramid from Auction-Rate Securities into T-Bills; the Auction-Rate Securities ‘hyperinflated’ or in other words rapidly evaporated. I do not see why capital has to go up the liquidity pyramid into less safe and more risky loans in order to cause the evaporation of a lower layer in the liquidity pyramid. Consequently, ‘hyperinflation’ is actually a very deflationary phenomena because it evaporates the value when measured in gold of a large layer in the liquidity pyramid. I am probably a bigger deflationist than Mish! Michael Mross, one of the leading German financial commentators on MM News (their CNBC equivalent; Google Translator does a decent job), picked up on this.

See why I think this is an ‘epic deflationary credit contraction’? Because digital commodity currencies remove two giant layers of the liquidity pyramid by allowing holdings of cash to remove two giant risks to their cash balances: payment risk and counter-party risk by using a commodity currency without fractional reserve banking.

Anyway, I already wrote a persuasive article (not even sure if I even convince myself) that the FRN$ Is In Hyperinflation. It ties in directly with this article about Dr. North and Mish.

Interviewed by Harry Douglas of CarConcerns.com.  He also operates AmericanMotoristVote.com.  We discuss ‘What is a Dollar’, the differences between money, money substitutes, illusions and currency.  Later there is a question and answer session with various callers.

THE GLOBAL ECONOMY IS BUILT ON A DERIVATIVE ILLUSION. As the great credit contraction grinds on, the importance of performing accurate mental calculations of value will become more and more important. Every major country, including the United States, uses a fiat currency illusion as its legal tender. Even more troubling is that the world’s reserve currency—the United States Federal Reserve Note Dollar (FRN$)—is a currency illusion. This system is evaporating before our very eyes. This book describes the background leading to this evaporation, which I call the Great Credit Contraction, sorts through complicated economic nomenclature, determines the root causes of the credit contraction evaporation, and suggests ways to maintain wealth during this global economic crisis.

This book opens by discussing the development of money in the market. Understanding the historical landscape will provide the reader a perspective of where we currently are and what is likely to happen to the market in the future. To date, the development and rise of fractional reserve banking has perpetuated the inflationary credit expansion. During this process, fiat currency has risen to dominance with the culmination of FRN$ as the world’s reserve currency.

In summary, this book is an autopsy of the current worldwide monetary and financial system beginning with a brief overview of financial history, the current great deflationary credit contraction, and
projecting the future environment. It concludes with suggestions on how to generate and preserve wealth in this challenging time, and the appendix contains a deeper analysis of important topics.

Get a copy today!

During the 1990’s Mr. Robert Rubin had devised the gold leasing scheme with the intent being elucidated by Dr. Greenspan’s testimony in 1998, “Nor can private counterparties restrict supplies of gold, another commodity whose derivatives are often traded over-the-counter, where central banks stand ready to lease gold in increasing quantities should the price rise.”

The money placed in the custody of a banker is, to all intents and purposes, the money of the banker, to do with as he pleases, he is guilty of no breach of trust in employing it; he is not answerable to the principal if he puts it into jeopardy, if he engages in a hazardous speculation; he is not bound to keep it or deal with it as the property of his principal; but he is of course, answerable for the amount, because he has contracted.

The dollar based monetary system is the largest bubble in the history of the world and has created a derivative illusion.  Gold has been, is and will always be the center of the financial universe. In 1971, most people were too gullible and accepted the thinking that the earth (US$) revolves around the sun (gold).

Please feel free to drop resources such as news, questions via voice mail, etc. over at drop.io/runtogold.

Thanks!