time|||October 2025 - Week 3 Edition;;ffr|||<h2><strong>Gold is Now Up 200-Fold (nearly 20,000%) Since FDR’s 1933 Gold Grab</strong></h2>
<p>The Federal Reserve is now over a century old and it’s hard to see any bright side in its track record. At first, the Fed fueled deflation and caused – then prolonged – the Great Depression. Then, they fell into the opposite ditch, fueling too much inflation from the 1960s onward, often due to political pressure to create an artificial sort of growth, in nominal (but not real) terms.</p>
<p>The Fed celebrated a sort of golden age in the middle of those extremes. For 20 years (1945 to 1965), America was the greatest power on earth and the American dollar reigned supreme in world trade and finance. From 1945 to 1958, the dollar was considered better than gold to most developing economies. But by 1958, it was becoming evident that the dollar was weakening.</p>
<p>The United States, at one time the repository for three-fourths of the world's central bank gold, began losing control of gold in the 1960s, even though we still held the gold. We had to change the earmarks of the gold buried in the Federal Reserve Bank in New York City (or Fort Knox, Kentucky) from “USA” to France, Germany and other rapidly recovering European powers.</p>
<p>By 1968, claims on U. S. gold were running into the millions of dollars per day. More than $12 billion (half) of U.S.-held gold was drained between 1958 and 1968, and much of that came in the last hectic months before March 1968. That is when the U.S. temporarily closed the gold window.</p>
<p><strong>Gold was flying out of the U.S. Treasury – mostly to European central banks – throughout the 1960s. It was threatening to wipe out all our gold by summer’s end, 1971. Speculation was rife. The German Mark rose to a 20-year high, so President Richard Nixon called a summit of his top economic advisors in mid-August 1971 and “closed the gold window” as of that Sunday night, August 15.</strong></p>
<p><strong>Nixon also instituted “temporary” wage and price controls – for 90 days – but price controls were still being set and enforced three years later, when Nixon resigned the Presidency. </strong></p>
<p><strong>The OPEC oil su</strong>pply shock in October 1973 sent inflation into double-digits. When Nixon was forced to resign office in 1974, the inflation rate was already registering at 12.3%.</p>
<p>From 1970 to 1995, the U.S. Dollar lost 75% of its value to some better-managed currencies, including the Swiss franc, Japanese yen and West German Mark. Gold also gained 25-fold in the 1970s (from early 1971 to early 1980) before retreating to stage its biggest “real” (after inflation) rise since 2001, up from $255 to a recent high above $4,100 (+1,500% in 24 years).</p>
<p>Today, gold is almost 120 times its pre-1971 price of $35 per ounce and about 200 times its fixed price of $20.67 per ounce before 1934, so today’s dollars are worth about a 1933 penny in terms of gold. Although the Federal Reserve hasn’t bought any new gold, it has contributed to global central banks to dump dollars to buy 1,000 tons per year of gold.</p>
<p>The Fed’s original mandate was to prevent (or intervene to end) banking panics – and to defend the value of the dollar under the gold standard. The Fed clearly struggled in both missions, first by causing the Great Depression to deepen, and then fueling 3,140% CPI inflation since 1913.</p>
<p>So, during this government shutdown, we need to ask if the 400+ PhD Fed economists are truly <strong>essential</strong> workers.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2><strong>An Easy Way to Check the Bias of a Newspaper (or Talk Show)</strong></h2>
<p>In this era of polarized political positions, many readers post “facts” which are clearly filtered through the bias of the source – whether left or right. It’s easy to tell a story one way, for one favored Party, while the other Party states the same facts from a totally different perspective.</p>
<p>One quick way to know the bias of a newspaper is to monitor their daily political cartoons, by sampling about a month’s worth, on their editorial page. If the cartoons are all in one direction, you know their bias. Don’t let them tell you that their reporters are independent and more fact-oriented than their opinion page. When you hold strong opinions, it warps your news reporting.</p>
<p>As for television talk shows, including the late-night “comics” (who have not been funny for many years now), check out their political comments. For nearly 50 years under Johnny Carson (hosting the Tonight Show 1962 to 1992) and Jay Leno (host from 1992 to 2009), you could hardly know their personal politics, since they never took sides. They wrote equal totals of jokes about both Republicans and Democrats, and they insisted that the jokes be equally balanced.</p>
<p>There is a practical reason for this: You want good ratings and a maximum audience, so why would you purposefully offend half the electorate? As Michael Jordan once quipped, when his critics said he wasn’t ‘woke’ enough, “Republicans buy sneakers, too.” Today’s late-night comics all suffer from dismal ratings, in part because they have alienated half of the nation.</p>
<p>In our region, I find the Beaumont Enterprise, a Hearst publication, balanced in who they skewer in their cartoons. The Houston Chronicle, which is also a Heart publication located 75 miles away, is not so fair and most big city newspapers (in general, with a few refreshing exceptions) tend to favor the Democrats. Another way to check for bias is to see who the newspaper has endorsed for president through the years. For example, the last time <strong>The New York Times</strong> editorial board endorsed a Republican for President was in 1956, and <strong>The Washington Post</strong> has never recommended a Republican in the general election in any year since 1976, when they first started making Presidential endorsements. Neither paper favored Reagan in 1984, when he swept 49 of 50 states in a landslide. They seem to be hopelessly out of touch with America. The Beaumont Enterprise and the Houston Chronicle have both been a little more balanced in their endorsements of candidates seeking to be President of the United States.</p>
<p><img src="https://www.web.universalcoin.com/mmr_files/images/10-15-25-chart.gif" alt="" width="100%" /></p>
<p> </p>
<p><strong>Gold soared to a new high </strong>and silver rose even more, in percentage terms. So far, in October, gold is up $330 (+8.6%) and silver is up $5.75 (+12.4%). For the year to date, silver is up 85+% vs. 58% for gold. In fact, silver has surpassed gold in our chart (see above) for performance since the start of 2020 and 2022. Long-term, gold is more than 200 times its fixed price before 1934, at $20.67 (when the Fed was formed in 1913) vs. $4,150 now. That’s far more than the 33-fold gain of the Consumer Price Index over the same 112 years, meaning the Fed has significantly failed in controlling inflation or strengthening the dollar throughout its dismal track record.</p>;;mike|||;;intro|||<h2><strong>Gold is Now Up 200-Fold (nearly 20,000%) Since FDR’s 1933 Gold Grab</strong></h2>
<p>The Federal Reserve is now over a century old and it’s hard to see any bright side in its track record. At first, the Fed fueled deflation and caused – then prolonged – the Great Depression. Then, they fell into the opposite ditch, fueling too much inflation from the 1960s onward, often due to political pressure to create an artificial sort of growth, in nominal (but not real) terms.</p>;;
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