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This year, I reread Richard Salsman’s 1995 book Gold and Liberty, as a counterpoint to the recent The Gold Standard, Retrospect and Prospect. Both books were published by the American Institute of Economic Research, or AIER. February 27, 2022: The Gold Standard, Retrospect and Prospect #6: International Monies and Digital Gold December 22, 2019: Gold and Liberty, by Richard Salsman The book is available here: Read Gold and Liberty. In 2019, I made only a brief mention of the book. Today, I will say a little more about it. I would say that Gold and Liberty is the single best book about the gold standard maybe since about 1950, up to the publication of my own Gold: The Once and Future Money in 2007, and some other very good books that have followed since then. Actually, I don’t know of any single book from before 1950 either that I would say is better. So, it is pretty good. The approach, or background, is a little different than mine. One nice thing about the book is that it has a long list of references that I was not familiar with. It has a little different stance than me. I tend to emphasize centralized systems, such as today’s monopoly central banks. Salsman and many others argue toward “free banking” or other private-market-flavored solutions, arguing that government money monopolies are too prone to corruption. Both could work. A private-market solution (let’s say, a gold crypto stablecoin) is more likely to be successful in the West, or some other places like India, where it doesn’t seem likely that governments will ever have any interest, or expertise, to put together a functioning gold-based currency. But other countries — let’s say, Malaysia or Qatar — might be very friendly toward a gold-based domestic currency, in the

(This item appeared at Forbes.com on September 25, 2022.) James Turk has long been a friend of gold. The founder of GoldMoney in 2001, and also the author of the Free Gold Money Report over many years, summarizes some of the knowledge collected over his career in a new book, Money and Liberty: In the Pursuit of Happiness and the Theory of Natural Money (2021). I have been on the lookout for a “shelf of books” from contemporary authors, that can serve as an intellectual foundation for a new era of Sound Money (money based on gold) in the US and throughout the world. Turk’s new book contains plenty of insight and timeless wisdom, updated to our present times and current concerns, and serves as a one-stop source of much “gold lore” that is necessary for anyone interested in these topics. I imagine it as a sort of textbook especially for younger people, who instead might have to look here and there for scattered bits and pieces, and then have to sift those for error and fallacy. I have done this, so I know that very few will undertake such a task; and of that already small group, very few will successfully toss out the accumulated garbage of decades to find the pearls of wisdom within. In other words, it helps to have a guide. Turk dedicated his book to his two sons, suggesting to me that he had something like this in mind when he wrote it. My own books have tended toward a somewhat technocratic approach — the economic equivalent of “rocket science” — so I am glad to see someone express some of the broader principles of statesmanship whose purposes these technocratic methods serve. Chapter Two describes the core role that money plays in our “pursuit of happiness,”

(This item originally appeared at Forbes.com on September 17, 2022.) Over the past year, there has been a deluge of commentary about “inflation.” This has included my recent book coauthored with Steve Forbes and Elizabeth Ames, appropriately titled: Inflation. In that book, knowing the ruts that economists have found themselves trapped in for decades, we anticipated the likely course of discussion, and outlined some alternatives. Let’s see how things have been stacking up. On the book’s cover itself, we anticipated that even the word “inflation” — which I have recently been putting in quotes — is a term of some confusion. This has turned out to be the case. People seem as confused as ever. The term arises from popular speech, and tends to become a grab-bag or stew-pot of all kinds of things that could conceivably cause the Consumer Price Index to rise. In the book, we began our analysis by segregating causes and effects that are inherently nonmonetary in nature, and basically amount to some kind of supply/demand issue in real-world goods and services; and those that are inherently monetary, and basically amount to mismanagement of the currency, and do not arise from any supply/demand issue in the real economy. The study of economics itself has tended to cleave along these lines. The Keynesian-flavored economists tend to focus on the supply/demand issues, often summed up on a macro scale as “aggregate supply and aggregate demand.” Their frameworks inherently tend to assume a currency of stable value. Keynes himself was not so naive. But, after Keynes’ death in 1946, his various acolytes, hemmed in by the Bretton Woods gold standard system that mostly managed to keep currency values stable, tended to simplify their inquiries to nonmonetary factors alone. Thus, they were befuddled when their core assumptions — stable currency

I was honored to be asked to say a few words at the Newport Global Summit, a really extraordinary gathering of extraordinary people. Here is my presentation for that event. Click here for a .pdf of my presentation.

I did a nice interview with David Lin of Kitco. Watch interview with David Lin of Kitco

Of the various “monetary aggregates” (at one point, I think over thirteen were identified), “M2” is perhaps the most commonly referenced. It is supposedly important. But why? To answer that, we have to first figure out what it is. For many decades, “monetarism” has been waved in people’s faces as the proper way of understanding money. But, Monetarism has always been a floating-fiat construct of economic manipulation. Basically, it conflates “money” (the circulating medium), with “credit” (a process of financing economic activity, via contracts denominated in money), and through this, the economy as a whole. The contemporary version of Monetarism is NGDP Targeting (also known as “Market Monetarism“) which, as should be obvious to anyone, attempts an overarching total control of the economy, hitting a prescribed NGDP target, via monetary manipulation alone. All of this is anathema to the Stable Value principles that most countries have always used. In the past, before 1971, the core of this “stable value” idea was the gold standard system — linking the value of currencies to gold. Today, most countries in the world do much the same thing by linking to the USD or EUR. In doing so, they must give up all ambitions to manage the domestic economy (perhaps by aiming at a specific NGDP), via some sort of currency manipulation. The idea of a currency of Stable Value is similar to other standardized weights and measures. An ideal currency is a sort of constant of commerce. This is actually inherent in what “money” is. If this constant of commerce remains constant — of stable value — then there is no particular monetary problem, although there may be many other non-monetary problems. With a currency of stable value, an economy might crash into disaster, as the US economy did in 1929-1932, with nominal

(This item originally appeared at Forbes.com on July 27, 2022.) In our new book Inflation, we talked about the example of Henry VIII of England, who, in 1544, undertook the “Great Debasement” of the long-reliable British silver penny. The silver content of the coin was reduced from 92.5% to a mere 25%. Or, it took about 3.7x more pennies to buy an ounce of silver. Not very surprisingly, prices in Britain soon soared about three times higher. Henry didn’t invent coinage debasement. The Greeks were doing it in the fifth century BC. The Romans debased the denarius so much that, over a period of decades, the price of wheat eventually rose two million times higher. Today, central banks do the same basic thing, but it is virtual. The value of the US dollar, compared to its old $35/oz. benchmark during the Bretton Woods gold standard era, has declined by about 50:1. It now takes about fifty times as many dollars to buy an ounce of gold.  The most recent step down in the dollar vs. gold took place in 2019-2020, when, in response to extremely aggressive base money expansion by the Federal Reserve, the dollar’s value fell from about $1200/oz. to about $1800. This roughly 50% increase in the “price of gold” would imply roughly a 50% increase in the price of everything else, “all else being equal,” as markets adjusted to the apparent new lower value of the dollar. This 50% rise in general prices doesn’t happen all at once. It takes time — a number of years — for it to slowly flush through the pricing system. This process has been called “cost-push,” “wage-pull,” or a “wage-price spiral.” We are experiencing this today. In Inflation, we also mentioned the example of Mexico. In the early 1990s, it took about three Mexican