Lack of Value in US Dollar Means Gold Price Should Be Higher
Bill Bonner
Dollars are losing value. But that doesn’t seem to stop people from wanting more of them. In exchange for gold, you can tender 673 US dollars and get a single ounce. This is 7.80 dollars more than the rate on Tuesday. But it’s still lower than the rate at the end of January one score and seven years ago, that is to say, the day Ronald Reagan was first sworn in as President of the United States of America. But that was before the United States had a US$9 trillion public debt…and a financing gap over US$60 trillion. People still had affordable mortgages…and only half as much debt, generally speaking.
The United States was at peace…and still a net-creditor to the rest of the world. Its trade with the rest of the world was still more or less in balance. Derivatives had barely been invented. And the money supply - that is to say the number of dollars in circulation - was hardly a quarter of what it is today (we are just making an educated guess).
You’d think the price of gold ought to be a bit higher. Go figure.
And pity the poor investors in Bear’s hedge fund - all their dollars have disappeared. Yes, dear reader, The Greatest Economic Boom Ever is fuelled by dollar creation…and yuan creation…and yen creation…and euro creation. My god, this boom has seen a genesis of money everywhere. But just as the great boom giveth, it also taketh away. We are preparing an essay for tomorrow on this subject, so we don’t want to give away the whole story, but readers need to be prepared. Just as we watched the geniuses at Bear and the other financial firms create wealth, we can also watch them destroy it. In a flash, billions…no trillions…of presumed, ersatz wealth can vanish.
Money that is created “out of thin air” - courtesy of central banks and financial firms - tends to go back from whence it came. For every genesis of wealth creation…there is an exodus of wealth destruction. Watch out for it…
Bill Bonner
The Daily Reckoning
www.dailyreckoning.com
20 July 2007
Editor's Note: Bill Bonner is the founder and editor of The Daily Reckoning. He is also the author, with Addison Wiggin, of The Wall Street Journal best seller Financial Reckoning Day: Surviving the Soft Depression of the 21st Century (John Wiley & Sons).
In Bonner and Wiggin's follow-up book, Empire of Debt: The Rise of an Epic Financial Crisis, they wield their sardonic brand of humor to expose the nation for what it really is - an empire built on delusions.
Empire of Debt has just been released in paperback - and Daily Reckoning readers can buy their copy at a discount - just click on the link below:
The Most Feared Book in Washington!
www.dailyreckoning.com/empireofdebt.html
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